CLG: London terror attack: Five dead after Westminster targeted

 News Updates from CLG
22 March 2017

http://www.legitgov.org/
All links are here:http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news

 

Previous editions: Electronic devices banned on flights to US from 13 countries after intel threat

 

London terror attack: Five dead after Westminster targeted | 23 March 2017 | At least five people have been killed and 40 injured in a terror attack in the heart of London during the afternoon when a man crashed into pedestrians on a bridge, then killed a police officer outside parliament before being shot dead. What we know so far: Police are treating the deadly attack at Westminster as a terror attack. Five dead, including the attacker and a London police officer. Police officer victim named as 48-year-old father of two PC Keith Palmer. Attacker ran down numerous pedestrians on Westminster Bridge at around 1.40pm , injuring at least 40, some "catastrophically". The attacker then ran through gates of Palace of Westminster just and stabbed the officer. He was then shot dead by police.

 

Parliament attack: man shot after police officer stabbed at House of Commons --Major security alert at Westminster after at least one person was shot after police officer was stabbed outside House of Commons --Alleged assailant shot by police in attack --'Several injured' in related incident on Westminster Bridge --Police confirm incident is being treated as terrorist attack --House of Commons suspended | 22 March 2017 | (Live updates.)

 

Parliament in lockdown: Police open fire outside Westminster and shoot knife-wielding man amid reports of explosion and 'at least 12 pedestrians mowed down on bridge' | 22 March 2017 | A knife-wielding attacker was shot by armed police in the grounds of Parliament today after pedestrians were mowed down on Westminster Bridge. More than 10 people are said to have been hit by a car on Westminster Bridge after a vehicle described as a '4x4' reportedly drove into pedestrians and cyclists. A 'middle-aged' armed intruder then managed to break into the grounds of the Houses of Parliament and stabbed a police officer before he was shot, reports suggest. Three injured people were seen on the floor outside Parliament and the Palace was placed on an immediate lock down. Prime Minister Theresa May is said to have been bundled into a car by a plain-clothes police officer and driven quickly from the scene.

 

TERROR LIVE: Officer stabbed, attacker shot | 22 March 2017 | Car mowed people down on Westminster Bridge in terror attack. One woman dead and others with "catastrophic" injuries. Police officer stabbed inside Parliament ground. Assailant shot by police.

 

NYPD: More security at 'sensitive British locations' after London attack | 22 March 2017 | The NYPD is increasing security at some British sites in the city after a suspected terror attack Wednesday in London. The department is "deploying additional resources to sensitive British locations in New York City until we understand what’s going on in London," a spokeswoman said.

 

U.K. joins U.S. in banning carry-on lap-tops and tablets for direct flights from Middle East and North African countries 'after Al Qaeda threat' | 21 March 2017 | The British government joined the U.S. on Tuesday in banning large electronics in carry-on baggage for direct flights from certain Middle Eastern and North African nations. America's Department of Homeland Security was the first to announce the decision this morning, saying that passengers on airlines flying directly to the U.S. from 10 airports in eight countries will soon only be allowed to bring cellphones on board with them...The new restrictions are based on 'evaluated intelligence' that terrorist groups are working on 'innovative methods' for attacks. Officials didn't elaborate on the intelligence but CNN reports that Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) is specifically the cause for the changes. The British government added legitimacy to the concerns by following through with their similar ban.

 

More than 30 dead after US-led coalition air strike hits school sheltering families near Raqqa | 22 March 2017 | A suspected US air strike on a school being used as a shelter by families displaced from the Isil-held Syrian city of Raqqa killed at least 33 people on Tuesday, in the latest high civilian casualty raid by the coalition. A school being used by some 50 families in Mansoura, 15 miles from the capital of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil)'s so-called caliphate, was levelled by airstrikes on Tuesday morning. The death toll is expected to rise, according to local activists, who said bodies were still being pulled from the rubble and many families were unaccounted for.

 

Baghdad car bomb kills at least 21 | 21 March 2017 | A car bomb exploded in the Iraqi capital on Monday, killing at least 21 people and wounding 43 others in a mainly Shia district in southwestern Baghdad. The attack - as Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi met US President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. - targeted a busy commercial district of the Hay al-Amel suburb, according to police and hospital officials. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the explosion, which bore all the hallmarks of a suicide attack by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS [also known as I-CIA-SIS]) group.

 

'Everything went wrong': Surveillance footage of White House fence jumper shows he 'lingered' for 17 minutes as Secret Service agents were 'lackadaisical' in tracking him down --US lawmaker aghast after seeing CCTV footage of White House fence jumper | 21 March 2017 | Shocking surveillance footage of the man who jumped the White House fence shows that he lingered on the ground for 17 minutes, tied his shoes, and peered into windows as alarms were blaring -- all in plain view of the public and without the knowledge of the Secret Service, it was reported on Tuesday. Jonathan Tuan-Anh Tran, 26, was carrying a backpack with two cans of mace when he scaled the fence of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because he said he had an appointment with his ‘friend,’ President Donald Trump, on the night of March 10. Tran faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for trespassing.

 

House Intel chairman: Trump's personal communications may have been collected [aka Trump correctly asserted he was under surveillance] --'I'm actually alarmed by it,' Nunes said. | 22 March 2017 | House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes said Wednesday that President Donald Trump's personal communications may have been picked up by investigators through "incidental collection." Nunes said at a news conference he discovered the potential surveillance of Trump himself while reviewing intelligence reports, but said it was not related to Russia. "This is a normal, incidental collection, based on what I could collect," Nunes said. "This appears to be all legally collected foreign intelligence under" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

 

White House: 'No evidence' of Trump-Russia collusion | 20 March 2017 | The White House on Monday asserted there is "no evidence" that President Trump's associates colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election after FBI Director James Comey confirmed a bureau investigation. "Nothing has changed," a White House official wrote in an email. "Senior Obama intelligence officials have gone on record to confirm there is NO EVIDENCE of Trump-Russia collusion and there is NO EVIDENCE of a Trump-Russia scandal."

 

Crowd tells nuclear agency to shut down Plymouth plant | 22 March 2017 | State legislators representing the region called on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop the refueling of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station's reactor planned for this spring and instead order the plant to begin shutting down -- a demand that drew a roar of approval from the 200 plant opponents attending a public forum Tuesday in Plymouth. On Tuesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cited a long list of failures found at Pilgrim, including the failure to properly identify and resolve problems and a safety culture that allows such problems to persist. "Pilgrim leadership has not held themselves and their subordinates accountable to high standards of performance," said Donald Jackson, leader of a special inspection team sent to Pilgrim for three weeks in December and January.

 

Congress Votes to Kill Protections for Wolves, Bears on Alaska Refuges | 22 March 2017 | With the stroke of his pen, President Donald Trump could allow for bears, wolves and other predators to once again be hunted in Alaska's national wildlife refuges. Following in the footsteps of their House colleagues, Senate lawmakers on Tuesday approved a measure to repeal an Obama-era rule that largely banned hunting of Alaska's most iconic predators on more than 76 million federal acres. 

 

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KILLING CIVILIANS after creating ISIS?

What kind of morally bankrupt nation have we become when we have armed, trained and funded terrorists?
There are numerous reports of allies, including Turkey, funding ISIS.

It's time to consider how our actions have created TERRORISTS and the sensible solutions to stop them, not by killing civilians.


US Officials Consider Allowing More Civilian Casualties in Airstrikes on ISIS 
Karen DeYoung and Missy Ryan, The Washington Post 
Excerpt: "President Obama's order to intensify air attacks in Syria has led to new internal debate over whether to loosen tight restrictions on strikes against Islamic State targets that risk civilian casualties, according to senior administration officials." 
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resident Obama’s order to intensify air attacks in Syria has led to new internal debate over whether to loosen tight restrictions on strikes against Islamic State targets that risk civilian casualties, according to senior administration officials.

But so far, at least, the White House has resisted proposals to change the rules of engagement for the bombing. Each strike, whether against a pre-planned target or one chosen on a “dynamic” basis by patrolling aircraft, is weighed against likely collateral damage and must be individually approved by top officers at the coalition operations center in Baghdad.

“We are trying to develop intelligence to get targets, to leverage opportunities . . . to create strikes that have a strategic effect,” a U.S. military official said. “But we’re going to keep doing those the same way we have done. We will not willy-nilly go after a target because it’s right there, right now.”

That caution has drawn sharp criticism from some Republican opponents of Obama’s strategy, with calls to “carpet-bomb” the Islamic State and place a lower priority on avoiding civilian deaths.

France and Britain, both newcomers to the Syrian air campaign after last month’s Islamic State attacks in Paris, have chafed at the tight guidelines, officials acknowledged. “War is a messy business; you cannot eliminate all risk,” British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon warned in a Sunday Times interview this month.

In Iraq, local commanders have publicly complained about U.S. reluctance to strike targets in populated areas.

According to new figures released by the military Tuesday, about 56 percent of all coalition aircraft return from “strike missions” without having used their weapons, either because of bad weather or a judgment that the risk of civilian casualties is too high.

That compares with estimates as high as 75 percent just a few months ago. But officials attribute the change to improved intelligence that has revealed more targets and allows more precise aim, not any change in the rules. But success in striking the militants has also worked in the opposite direction; they respond by positioning themselves behind and among civilians in urban areas and are less exposed.

Complaints from allies and inside the government, the military official said, are in part “a misperception that . . . the number of targets is so abundant that we’re saying no” to opportunities.

Obama has said he makes “no apologies for us wanting to do this appropriately and in a way that is consistent with American values.”

“If the suggestion is that we kill tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians and Iraqis,” he saidin an NPR interview broadcast Monday, “that is not who we are, and that would be a strategy that would have an enormous backlash against the United States,” including potentially creating more militants than it eliminates.

What is at issue, however, is not the difference between no civilian casualties or tens or hundreds of thousands, but drawing a line somewhere in between. While much of the push for increased flexibility has come from the State Department rather than the military, a senior administration official said, “nobody’s advocating for completely loose rules.”

“There has been a careful discussion about whether or not there is any room in the rules of engagement to relax certain provisions, to put more pressure on ISIL while still drawing an appropriate line,” the official said, using one of several alternative names for the Islamic State.

“The question is, where is that line?” said the official, who like some other officials spoke about internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity. “This is not a new debate. Anytime you’re in an armed conflict, at some point or another, usually at many points, there is going to be a renewed discussion about rules of engagement.”

Air Force Gen. Paul J. Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress this month that “I haven’t met a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine who wouldn’t ask for looser [rules] in any active fight.” But after consulting with commanders at all levels in the fight against the Islamic State, he said, “I know of no rules-of-engagement restrictions that have prevented us from striking targets and that prevented our forces from being as effective as they can be.”

According to widespread independent accounts, at least 250,000 people have been killed since Syria’s civil war began in earnest in early 2012, with widely varying numbers dividing them between combatants and civilians. Most assessments attribute the majority of civilian deaths to President Bashar al-Assad’s military air and ground forces. Russian airstrikes on Assad’s behalf, which began in late September, have killed more than 400 civilians, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported last month.

This week, Human Rights Watch accused Russia and the Syrian government of using cluster bombs — indiscriminate scattershot munitions — that it said have killed dozens of Syrian civilians in recent attacks.

The independent organization Airwars, which compiles and vets reports from other groups and public sources, lists between 405 and 553 civilians killed by the U.S.-led coalition in 76 separate incidents for which there was “a reasonable level of public reporting . . . from two or more generally credible forces.”

The Pentagon has acknowledged at least two incidents in which it says some civilians were killed by coalition airstrikes, which began in Syria more than 15 months ago. It says about a dozen allegations are still being examined, including an early-December bombing raid in the northeastern Syrian village of al-Khan in which between 26 and 39 civilians were reportedly killed.

Before every proposed strike, military officials said, they calculate the “civilian engagement value,” or CEV. Assessments can be based on where the target is located — in an unpopulated area, or in a city next to a mosque or a playground — and how important it is.

“If it’s one ISIL troop, an ISIL rifleman, and he is surrounded by several civilians, then it would stand to reason that it’s not worth the life of those civilians to kill a single rifleman,” said Col. Steve Warren, the Baghdad-based coalition spokesman. “If it were [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi,” the Islamic State leader, “standing next to one or two civilians, it might perhaps get looked at differently.”

International law allows for civilian casualties, even intentional ones, providing an action is within the bounds of distinction and proportionality, a somewhat subjective judgment that the military importance of the target is worth it.

“If the target is high enough that there’s a no-kidding strategic effect, then our calculus is different,” the military official said.

Most targeting decisions are made by the general on duty at the Joint Operations Center in Baghdad. Approval for a target with a potentially high CEV beyond the guidelines can get bucked up to a more senior officer or to the Tampa-based Central Command, where teams including officials responsible for legal, operational or engineering issues can weigh in, or even to Washington in extreme cases.

CEV calculations also include the type of munition used. Each weapon has a “blast radius” — a circle within which death or injury is likely to be caused.

An urban target might be struck at night, rather than in the daytime when more civilians are present; the calculation would be the reverse in a residential area. Prevailing winds and the direction in which an aircraft is traveling can send a blast in a predictable direction. These are called “mitigation” measures to avoid civilian casualties.

 http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34262-us-officials-consider-allowing-more-civilian-casualties-in-airstrikes-on-isis

RSN: Five Prerequisites for War Against ISIS, The Native American Community Faces Dangerously High Rates of Food Insecurity, Exclusive: US Accused of Covering Up Death of Six Children in Syria Air Strike

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Robert Reich | Five Prerequisites for War Against ISIS 
 
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog 
Reich writes: "We appear to be moving ever closer toward a world war against the Islamic State." 
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The Other Laquan McDonalds: More Questionable Killings by Chicago Police 
Justin Glawe, The Daily Beast 
Glawe writes: "Chicago cops killed 19 males last year. Autopsies, police statements, and media reports for several of those killings do not add up." 
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Sanders Claims More Women Donors Than Clinton 
Bradford Richardson, The Hill 
Richardson writes: "Roughly 301,000 women have donated to Sanders's campaign compared to 240,000 for Clinton, a more than 60,00 edge as of the last reporting period." 
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Blame the West's Interventions for Today's Terrorism
Stephen Kinzer, The Boston Globe 
Kinzer writes: "Interventions multiply our enemies. Every village raid, every drone strike, and every shot fired in anger on foreign soil produces anti-Western passion. Some are shocked when that passion leads to violent reaction. They should not be." 
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The Native American Community Faces Dangerously High Rates of Food Insecurity 
Alex Zielinski, ThinkProgress 
Zielinski writes: "New studies find that 60 percent of counties with a native majority face dangerously high food insecurity rates. And 23 percent of the small U.S. Indigenous population has terrible access to 'adequate food' - almost twice the national average." 
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Exclusive: US Accused of Covering Up Death of Six Children in Syria Air Strike 
Simon Hooper and Bilal Abdul Kareem, Middle East Eye 
Excerpt: "A Syrian father has accused the American military of attempting to cover up the deaths of six of his children and the serious injury of two others in a US-led coalition air strike." 
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Here's How the Airline Industry Could Cut Its Emissions in Half 
Nick Stockton, Grist 
Stockton writes: "Saving fuel, by reducing carbon emissions, can help save the planet. And those cuts could come at little to no cost to airline companies." 
READ MORE

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RSN: The Profitable Theatrics of Riot Control, Shell's Arctic Drilling Is Far More Risky Than the Company Is Telling Shareholders, Say Conservationists, Sanders Calls Minimum Wage a 'Starvation Wage'

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Juan Cole | US Airstrike in Syria Kills 53 Civilians, 6 Children

Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "The US air strike on Friday that inadvertently hit a village of non-combatants, killing members of six families, raises new questions about the Obama administration's approach to fighting Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) in Syria."
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Freddie Gray: Legal Volunteers Arrested After Defying Baltimore Curfew
Raya Jalabi, Guardian UK
Jalabi writes: "Legal observers and medical volunteers were among the roughly 50 people arrested in Baltimore on Saturday night, as another evening of protests ended in yet more clashes as protesters attempted to defy curfew restrictions."
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Sanders Calls Minimum Wage a 'Starvation Wage'
Mark Hensch, The Hill
Hensch writes: "Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday argued that the annual income provided by the minimum wage could not sustain most American families."
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The Profitable Theatrics of Riot Control
Anna Feigenbaum, Al Jazeera America
Feigenbaum writes: "Riot control is - and always has been - about criminalizing acts of disobedience by controlling people, public space and even the air we breathe."
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Charles Pierce | Judgement Day in Jersey: How Things Went From Bad to Worse for Chris Christie
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Chris Christie is still running around the country pretending to run for president. (And I think his only real shot is to get his Agnew on regarding the events in Baltimore.)"
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Islamic State Group Executes Hundreds of Yazidis in Iraq
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The Islamic State group executed as many as 600 Yazidis in northern Iraq Friday, according to the ARA news agency."
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Shell's Arctic Drilling Is Far More Risky Than the Company Is Telling Shareholders, Say Conservationists
Darren Ankrom, VICE News
Ankrom writes: "A new petition filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission accuses Royal Dutch Shell of misleading investors about the risks of drilling in the Arctic Ocean and alleges the company is unprepared to handle a major oil spill."
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