Whew! Done digging for a bit. Hope folks were able to learn some new things this morning.

Ok one more:

The Army's killer drones: How a secretive special ops unit decimated ISIS

Sean D. Naylor 5 hours ago

As the Islamic State’s physical caliphate shrinks to nothing after an almost five-year campaign led by U.S. special operations forces, military insiders say one small unit has killed more of the extremists than any other: the company of Gray Eagle drones in the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

Although the military has thrown a cloak of secrecy over its operations, the unit — officially called E (or “Echo”) Company of the regiment’s Second Battalion and established less than a decade ago — is increasingly being lauded in special operations and Army aviation circles.

“They are doing the most killing of anyone in the national mission force,” said a former 160th officer, referring to Joint Special Operations Command, which runs counterterrorism task forces in Afghanistan, and does battle against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and the Horn of Africa. “They’re out there doing the nation’s bidding in a ferocious way.”

Echo Company is credited with “well over 340 enemy killed in action” in Afghanistan and the Iraq-Syria theater between August 2014 and July 2015, according to a November 2015 Army write-up of an award for the unit. The company has also played a key role in a special operations task force established in Iraq in 2014 to roll back the Islamic State’s physical caliphate and hunt its leaders. Flying from a base in Iraq to attack targets in Syria, the drone company has launched “more than a thousand” Hellfire missiles in the last two to three years, the former 160th officer told Yahoo News. “That means to me they’ve been very busy in Syria.”

Echo Company’s achievements are remarkable, in part, because unlike the Air Force, whose drones are operated from air-conditioned trailers in Nevada and flown by officers, the pilots in this Army aviation company are mainly enlisted soldiers who are deployed in combat theaters.

The destroyed vehicle in which Taliban leader Mohammad Akhtar Mansour was traveling in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border

The destroyed vehicle in which Taliban leader Mohammad Akhtar Mansour was traveling in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border, May 22, 2016. (Photo: Abdul Salam Khan/AP)

The U.S. drone campaign against Islamist militants has been enmeshed in controversy since it began in 2001, with accusations that some attacks caused needless civilian casualties or hit the wrong target altogether. On Wednesday, President Trump rescinded an executive order that required the intelligence community to disclose information about U.S. drone strikes outside of declared war zones, including civilian casualties. The White House last year had already ignored the requirement, put in place by President Barack Obama. Trump’s order does not affect a law that requires the Defense Department to send Congress an annual report detailing civilian casualties.

“U.S. armed drones have played a key role in the fight against ISIS, with its Reapers and Predators contributing up to 7 percent of all strikes, according to official data released back in 2017,” Chris Woods, the director of Airwars, a United Kingdom-based nonprofit that tracks airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Libya, wrote in an email. “Thousands of civilians have locally been alleged killed in Coalition actions — with our own minimum estimate at more than 7,500 deaths. However, what proportion of these deaths resulted solely from drones we can’t say.”

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It is even less clear if any of Echo Company’s strikes resulted in civilian casualties; no allegations have been directed at its operations, which have been kept under tight wrap by the Defense Department.

John Evans

Former head of U.S. Army Special Operations Aviation Command Brig. Gen. John Evans. (Photo via YouTube)

Citing the classified nature of Echo Company’s missions, U.S. Special Operations Command declined to provide any information about the unit, which, like its parent battalion and regiment, is based at Fort Campbell, Ky. But insights into the unit’s history can be found on the website of the Army Aviation Association of America, a nonprofit organization that supports the Army’s aviation branch. The association has awarded Echo Company its “Unmanned Aerial Systems Unit of the Year” award four times since 2011.

“Echo Company [is] the most lethal company in the Army, and it may very well be the most lethal company-size element in all of [the Defense Department],” Brig. Gen. John Evans, at the time the head of U.S. Army Special Operations Aviation Command, told attendees at the aviation association’s conference in April 2017.

The record still holds today, according to a retired senior Army aviation officer. “This is the most lethal Army unit this year,” he said. “The whole Army, including artillery, including everything.”

One of the few Army units that fly fixed-wing aircraft, the company apparently has been more lethal than its Army helicopter counterparts and all Air Force fixed-wing outfits, manned and unmanned. Even in Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that includes special mission units like Delta Force and SEAL Team 6, Echo Company’s performance stands out, according to those familiar with its operations.

A U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter patrols Mogadishu, Somalia

A U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter patrols Mogadishu, Somalia, in the wake of gun battles between militants and U.N. peacekeepers, June 8, 1993. (Photo: Kathy Willens/AP)

When it was created in 2009, Echo Company represented something new for the 160th, an elite special operations helicopter unit established in the wake of the failed effort in 1980 to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. The regiment’s distinctive black helicopters have featured in virtually every high-profile special operations mission since then, including the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia.

Since 2001, the 160th has been heavily engaged as part of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC, pronounced “jay-sock”) task forces in Afghanistan and, since 2003, in Iraq. The unit’s most prominent members have always been the warrant officers and commissioned officers who fly the regiment’s helicopters, from the small, nimble AH-6 “Little Bird” gunships to the twin-rotor MH-47 Chinook assault aircraft.

But unlike those Army pilots, or the pilots of the Air Force’s better-known Predator and Reaper drones, the soldiers who fly the Gray Eagles are mainly enlisted service members, according to the retired senior Army aviation officer. “They are lethal as all get-out,” he said.

More at Link! https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-a-secretive-special-ops-unit-of-killer-drones-decimated-isis-100000657.html

Court weighs unsealing records that could reveal new details of Jeffrey Epstein sex abuse

By Julie K. Brown

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article227184299.html

March 06, 2019 09:03 PM,

Updated 3 hours 17 minutes ago

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article227184299.html#storylink=cpy

NEW YORK

Privacy rights versus press freedoms took center stage Wednesday at an explosive federal appeals court hearing in New York, where lawyers argued to unseal confidential court files that could reveal evidence of an underage sex trafficking operation allegedly run by New York multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his partner, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reserved judgment in the case, but the panel suggested it was leaning toward the release to the public of vast portions of the court record. The file on the case, which was settled in 2017, contains more than 1,000 documents, lawyers said during oral arguments led by the Miami Herald, which seeks to open the entire file.

Most of the documents, including court orders and motions, were filed under seal or heavily redacted, similar to other cases in New York and Florida involving the wealthy, politically connected money manager. Epstein, now 66, was not a party to the lawsuit, which was filed against Maxwell in 2015 by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claimed she was recruited by the pair to perform massages on them when she was 16 and known as Virginia Roberts. Giuffre claims she and other girls were sexually abused and pimped out to a number of wealthy influential people from 1999 to 2002.

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Virginia Roberts says she was 16 and working as a locker room attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when she was approached by Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s associate, about becoming a masseuse for Epstein.

Courtesy of Virginia Roberts

The Herald said that while some redactions of personal information, including the names of other possible underage victims, are appropriate, the blanket sealing of the case violated the First Amendment, which grants citizens a presumptive right of access to court records, except in the rarest of circumstances.

The Herald’s lawyer, Sanford Bohrer, told the three-judge appeals court panel that the case should be unsealed in its entirety because the law provides the public with access in order to hold legal institutions accountable and to maintain confidence that they will protect the most vulnerable in society.

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Sanford Bohrer, attorney for the Miami Herald, argued in the Manhattan courtroom that the court records should be released.

Two other parties to the appeal, attorneys for Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz and conservative social media blogger Michael Cernovich, also argued to unseal the entire case file. Dershowitz’s lawyer, Andrew G. Celli Jr., wanted the court to release three documents immediately, saying they were necessary to exonerate his client, who has been accused of being involved in Epstein’s crimes.

Dershowitz, 81, was among a team of lawyers who represented Epstein when he came under criminal investigation in Palm Beach in 2005. Epstein was accused by more than three dozen girls, most of them 13 to 16, of luring them to his mansion to give him massages that turned into sex acts. He then used those same girls to recruit more girls over a period of several years, court and police records show.

In 2008, Epstein received an unusually lenient plea deal that gave him and an untold number of others who were not cited by name immunity from federal prosecution. That plea deal was brokered under former Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, who is currently President Donald Trump’s secretary of labor. Acosta’s handling of the case is now under investigation by the Justice Department.

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Last week, a federal judge ruled that the agreement was illegal because Acosta and other prosecutors failed to inform Epstein’s victims about the deal in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.

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United States Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta has faced harsh scrutiny since a series of articles in the Miami Herald examined the non-prosecution agreement he arranged with serial sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein while U.S. attorney for Southern Florida.

Alan Diaz AP

Maxwell, the daughter of the late British publishing baron Robert Maxwell, has never been charged and has denied that she was involved in any crimes.

Dershowitz has disputed allegations that he was involved. He maintains the court record in the case contains evidence that Giuffre was writing a book manuscript at the time she publicly accused him of having sex with her when she was underage.

Prior to the hearing, Dershowitz’s attorney had suggested that the appeals panel might want to allow him to present part of his argument outside the presence of opposing lawyers, the news media and the public. The judges did not grant or even address that suggestion, made in a letter to the court.

After the hearing, Dershowitz held a news conference, calling for a federal criminal investigation into Giuffre and her lawyers, calling them liars. The spectacle continued outside the Manhattan courthouse, with Dershowitz claiming that Giuffre and her lawyer, David Boies, conspired to lie about him for financial gain.

The case at the heart of Wednesday’s appeal is a defamation claim. Giuffre’s lawyer, Sigrid McCawley, told the Herald that the case was settled in her client’s favor in 2017. The amount of the settlement was confidential.

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Ghislaine Maxwell was sued for slander after calling Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers, a liar. Maxwell, a close associate of Epstein, sought to have documents from the court case remain sealed.

Cernovich’s lawyer, Marc Randazza, pointed out that the file contains “pages and pages’’ of blacked-out paragraphs.

“I’d expect this from a [Freedom of Information Act] request to the CIA,’’ he quipped to the judges during the hearing.

Ty Gee, a Denver lawyer representing Ghislaine Maxwell, however, argued that nothing in the case should be made public, since several witnesses provided statements during the litigation under the presumption that they would be kept confidential. He explained that the district court judge who presided over the case, Robert W. Sweet, was “overwhelmed’’ because he was bombarded by attorneys with requests to seal document after document, to the point where all the parties simply agreed to seal nearly everything to move the case along.

Bohrer, however, said that isn’t the way the court system should work.

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Famed First Amendment attorney Alan Dershowitz speaks outside the courtroom in New York after a hearing on a sealed lawsuit involving his friend and former client, Jeffrey Epstein.

Julie K. Brown jbrown@MiamiHerald.com

“The judge abdicated his role as a judge,’’ Bohrer said, adding that each request should have been considered individually, given that transparency is generally in the public’s interest.

Bohrer suggested that the appeals court assign a district court judge to oversee a process to consider the release of documents, a suggestion that the panel seemed to agree on.

Circuit Court Judge Jose A. Cabranes asked Gee whether he would agree to release any documents now that the case is settled. Gee said nothing should be made public.

“You can’t possibly be serious,’’ Cabranes responded in disbelief.

Part of the record contains details about Maxwell’s sex life, and it would be a violation of her privacy to unseal those documents since they involve consenting adults, Gee said.

Lawyer Paul Cassell, who represents Giuffre, said his client wants the entire record unsealed so that the public knows the full extent of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sex trafficking operation.

In one of the more unusual arguments in the case, Cassell said Cernovich was a self-described “slut shamer’‘ who was working in concert with Dershowitz to discredit his client, who now lives in Australia.

That description later prompted Judge Rosemary S. Pooler to jokingly ask Dershowitz’s lawyer whether his client was part of a “slut shaming cabal.’‘

Celli said Dershowitz has endured more than two years of ridicule over the allegations by Giuffre, which were largely made in court documents that are privileged — that is, shielded from a defamation claim.

Dershowitz has publicly baited her to accuse him in public so that he can sue her for slander.