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US cop arrested for murder after video shows him shoot unarmed black man in back

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Video of the incident shows 50-year-old victim running away from South Carolina officer when he was shot.

Screenshot from the by-stander's video footage which shows Officer Michael Slager in the process of shooting a fleeing Walter Scott in the back.

Screenshot from the by-stander’s video footage which shows Officer Michael Slager in the process of shooting a fleeing Walter Scott in the back.

by Al Jazeera

A white police officer from the US state of South Carolina has been charged with murder after a video showed him shooting eight times at the back of a 50-year-old black man who was running away.

North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey said on Tuesday that state investigators decided to charge officer Michael Slager, 33, with the murder of Walter Scott after they viewed the video of the incident, which followed a traffic stop on Saturday morning.

The FBI and US Justice Department have begun a separate investigation.

“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Summey told reporters. “If you make a bad decision, I don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”

The incident began after Scott was pulled over for a broken brake light, police said.

A video of the encounter published by the New York Times appears to show a brief scuffle between Slager and Scott before the latter begins running away.

Eight shots fired

The video, apparently recorded by a bystander, shows the officer firing eight shots at Scott as he runs away. Scott then slumps face down onto the grass.

A police incident report says that Slager, who joined the department in 2009, told other officers Scott had taken his stun gun. In the video, Scott does not appear to be armed while fleeing from Slager.

With the victim lying face down on the ground, Slager approaches him and puts him in handcuffs, the video shows. The officer then walks several paces back to where he opened fire, before returning to Scott and appearing to drop an object next to him on the ground, it shows.

Chris Stewart, an attorney for Scott’s family, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The incident comes at a time of heightened tension over the deadly use of force by US police, particularly by white police officers against black men – including 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by a white police officer last year in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking nationwide protests.

Iran and world powers strike initial nuclear deal

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Agreement will curb Iran’s nuclear programme and end most sanctions imposed on country.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said a "decisive step" has been achieved [Reuters]

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said a “decisive step” has been achieved [Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

The United States, Iran and five other world powers have sealed a breakthrough framework agreement outlining limits on Iran’s nuclear programme to keep it from being able to produce atomic weapons.

Reading out a joint statement on Thursday evening, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said a “decisive step” has been achieved.

“This is a crucial decision laying the agreed basis for the final text of joint comprehensive plan of action. We can now start drafting the text and annexes,” said Mogherini, who has acted as a coordinator for the six powers – Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.

The US and Iran each hailed the efforts of their diplomats over eight days of marathon talks in Swiss city of Lausanne.

Speaking at the White House, US President Barack Obama called it a “good deal” that would address concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The US president said that the US and its allies had “reached a historic understanding with Iran”.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called it a “win-win outcome”.

The Islamic Republic has been promised an end to years of crippling economic sanctions, but only if negotiators transform the plan into a comprehensive pact by June 30.

‘Solid foundation’

US Secretary of State John Kerry said the agreement in Lausanne was a “solid foundation for a good deal”.

Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from Lausanne, said that US diplomats still faced the challenge of convincing opposition Republican dissenters in Congress, and its strongest ally, Israel, that the deal was sufficient.

“There are a lot of places where this deal will not be accepted and one of those is Israel,” Bays said.

Obama said his security officials would be working with Israel and Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, to make sure their concerns are addressed.

Iranians celebrate on a street in northern Tehran the nuclear agreement with world powers in Lausanne [The Associated Press]

Israel voiced its “strong opposition” to the deal. In a phone conversation with Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a final deal based on this agreement “would threaten the survival of Israel”.

House Speaker John Boehner said it would be “naive to suggest the Iranian regime will not continue to use its nuclear programme, and any economic relief, to further destabilize the region.”

But Obama said that the issues at stake are “bigger than politics”.

“These are matters of war and peace,” he said, and if Congress kills the agreement “international unity will collapse, and the path to conflict will widen.”

The deal will limit Iran’s nuclear activity to the Natanz plant and reduce the number of centrifuges it operates from 19,000 today to just over 6,104.

Iran has also agreed to not build any new facilities for the purpose of enriching uranium for 15 years.

Zarif said the countries had agreed an elaborate mechanism if any of the parties to the agreement “returned to old practices” and reneged on their obligations.

“We will not allow excuses that will allow a return to the old system,” Zarif said.

Mogherini said the seven nations would now start writing the text of a final accord.

She cited several agreed-upon restrictions on Iran’s enrichment of material that can be used either for energy production or in nuclear warheads. She said Iran will not produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear programmes would be suspended by the US, the United Nations and the European Union after the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Iran’s compliance.

 

Former US cop indicted on federal charge for assaulting Indian

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57-year-old Sureshbhai Patel was partially paralysed in the US when a police officer forced him on ground. Photo: Al.com

57-year-old Sureshbhai Patel was partially paralysed in the US when a police officer forced him on ground. Photo: Al.com

Washington: A US police officer, accused of using excessive force against a 57-year-old Indian leaving him partially paralysed, has been indicted on federal civil rights violation charges that carries imprisonment up to 10 years.

“A federal grand jury indicted Eric Parker, the police officer who threw Sureshbhai Patel to the ground resulting in him getting partially paralyzed, for deprivation of rights under color of law,” said Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta and US Attorney in the Northern District of Alabama Joyce Vance in a two-page indictment.

Parker’s actions deprived the victim of his right under the US Constitution to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, which includes the right to be free from unreasonable force by someone acting under color of law, the indictment said.

“Police officers are sworn to uphold the law and protect the public. The public must be able to trust the police. Law enforcement officers who violate their oath to protect and use excessive force must be brought to justice,” Vance said.

Patel was brutally assaulted by Parker, who was in the company of two other police officers, on February 6 while he was on a walk in his neighborhood. He had arrived from India only a few days back to help his son and daughter in law with their is newly born baby.

The case was investigated by the FBI. Parker was suspended by the Madison Police days after the brutal assault on Patel. The Madison Police last month recommended that he be sacked.

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley had apologized to the Indian government for the treatment of Patel, calling it a case of excessive use of force.

Patel’s attorney Hank Sherrod said Patel and his family were very pleased by the “prompt and decisive action”.

“For the public to trust police officers, it needs to know officers will be held accountable and the felony civil rights charges filed against Parker, unlike the misdemeanor assault charge being pursued in state court, more accurately reflect the seriousness of Parker’s conduct,” he said.

However, Parker’s attorney Robert Tuten expressed his surprise at the federal indictment.

“Normally these thing take a little longer than that… He feels like he’s being whaled on from all sides,” Tuten said.

Parker is also facing a third-degree assault charges. He has pleaded not guilty. The bench trial is scheduled for April 29.

“Most police officers we work with…are people who care deeply about their community,” Vance told reporters at a news conference in Alabama.

“I like to think that we’ve always been sensitive…this case is like every other case,” she said when asked if the indictment was filed because of the intense interest in India.

The indictment was welcomed by eminent Indian American attorney, Ravi Batra.

“Federal Grand Jury, made up of the good and decent citizens of Alabama, by voting a True Bill and indicting Eric Parker for his deprivation of Sureshbhai Patel’s federal civil rights have vindicated society’s right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, especially by one acting under color of law and using unreasonable force,” he said.

Batra said the indictment enhanced public confidence in Department of Justice’s continuing role to protect vital civil rights of all Americans, “especially, when states’ prosecutorial offices fail to do so, as in this case with a mere misdemeanor charge coupled with a civil liability-evasion tactic: termination”.

“Its worthy of note, that Madison Police Department was not indicted, and unfortunately the pending amended civil suit does not seek to hold the Police Department or the City of Madison liable for such federal civil rights deprivation,” he said.

(PTI)

Body Count Report reveals at least 1.3 million lives lost to US-led war on terror

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Although a conservative estimate, physicians’ groups say the figure ‘is approximately 10 times greater’ than typically reported

The rubble of a home reportedly hit by a U.S.-led coalition airstrike in Kafar Daryan in Syria. (Photo: Sami Ali / AFP/Getty Images)

The rubble of a home reportedly hit by a U.S.-led coalition airstrike in Kafar Daryan in Syria. (Photo: Sami Ali / AFP/Getty Images)

by Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams

How do you calculate the human costs of the U.S.-led War on Terror?

On the 12th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, groups of physicians attempted to arrive at a partial answer to this question by counting the dead.

In their joint report— Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the ‘War on Terror—Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that this number is staggering, with at least 1.3 million lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone since the onset of the war following September 11, 2001.

However, the report notes, this is a conservative estimate, and the total number killed in the three countries “could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.”

Furthermore, the researchers do not look at other countries targeted by U.S.-led war, including Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and beyond.

Even still, the report states the figure “is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs.

In Iraq, at least 1 million lives have been lost during and since 2003, a figure that accounts for five percent of the nation’s total population. This does not include deaths among the estimated 3 million Iraqi refugees, many of whom were subject to dangerous conditions during this past winter.

Furthermore, an estimated 220,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, note the researchers. The findings follow a United Nations report which finds that civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2014 were at their highest levels since the global body began making reports in 2009.

The researchers identified direct and indirect deaths based on UN, government, and NGO data, as well as individual studies. While the specific number is difficult to peg, researchers say they hope to convey the large-scale of death and loss.

Speaking with Democracy Now! on Thursday, Dr. Robert Gould, president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility and co-author of the forward to the report, said:

“[A]t a time when we’re contemplating at this point cutting off our removal of troops from Afghanistan and contemplating new military authorization for increasing our operations in Syria and Iraq, this insulation from the real impacts serves our government in being able to continue to conduct these wars in the name of the war on terror, with not only horrendous cost to the people in the region, but we in the United States suffer from what the budgetary costs of unending war are.”

According to Gould’s forward, co-authored with Dr. Tim Takaro, the public is purposefully kept in the dark about this toll.

“A politically useful option for U.S. political elites has been to attribute the on-going violence to internecine conflicts of various types, including historical religious animosities, as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization cause by decades of outside military intervention,” they write. “As such, under-reporting of the human toll attributed to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate of through self-censorship, has been key to removing the ‘fingerprints’ of responsibility.”

US airstrikes, coupled with Iran-backed militias and Iraqi forces, target ISIS in Tikrit

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‘US military now involved in two air wars in the Middle East, not to mention more widespread drone actions.’

U.S. fighter jets in this file photo. U.S. Central Command has confirmed that airstrikes against targets in the Iraqi city of Tikrit were exectued following a request by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. (Photo: US Military)

U.S. fighter jets in this file photo. U.S. Central Command has confirmed that airstrikes against targets in the Iraqi city of Tikrit were exectued following a request by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. (Photo: US Military)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

Following earlier indications that such attacks were likely, the U.S. military bombarded targets in the Iraqi city of Tikrit overnight as it took a commanding role in an ongoing offensive against Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) militants that has so far been spearheaded by Iraqi forces and Shi’ite militias which receive direct backing and guidance from the Iranian military.

“These strikes are intended to destroy ISIL strongholds with precision, thereby saving innocent Iraqi lives while minimizing collateral damage to infrastructure,” said Lt. Gen. James L. Terry of U.S. Central Command as he confirmed the bombing effort late on Wednesday. “This will further enable Iraqi forces under Iraqi command to maneuver and defeat ISIL in the vicinity of Tikrit.”

The Washington Post reports:

Pentagon officials said that the Iraqi government had requested the assistance as the fight for Tikrit stalled as it moved into its fourth week. They said initial targeting for the strikes will be aided by U.S.-led coalition surveillance aircraft that recently began flying over the city, 110 miles northwest of Baghdad.

The fight for Tikrit is considered a crucial test for larger future objectives, including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which has been the symbol and center of Islamic State power in Iraq since the militants took it last summer.

According to Reuters:

The decision to give air support to the Tikrit campaign pulls the United States into a messy battle that puts the U.S.-led coalition, however reluctantly, on the same side of a fight as Iranian-backed militia in a bid to support Iraqi forces and opens a new chapter in the war.

It also appeared to represent at least a tacit acknowledgement by Baghdad that such airpower was necessary to wrest control of the hometown of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Islamic State fighters, after its attempts to go it alone stalled.

With ongoing and escalating fighting in Yemen in recent days, including a wave of airstrikes led by Saudi Arabia, the greater Middle East region is now awash in a complex web of violence in which proxy battles, influxes of weapons and soldiers, and cross-border sectarian divisions are feeding violence in myriad ways.

As Middle East historian Juan Cole points out, the U.S. military on Wednesday into Thursday was assisting the Saudi bombing of the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, while simultaneously collaborating (at least indirectly) with Iranian military advisors from the Iranian Republican Guard Corp in the operation against ISIS in Tikrit. “The US support for the Saudi air strikes and the new coalition makes the Yemen war now the second major air campaign supported by the US in the region,” he writes. “But the one in Iraq is in alliance with Iran. The one in Yemen is against a group supported in some measure by Iran.” According to Cole:

US air intervention on behalf of the Jerusalem Brigades of the IRGC is ironic in the extreme, since the two have been at daggers drawn for decades. Likewise, militias like Muqtada al-Sadr’s “Peace Brigades” (formerly Mahdi Army) and League of the Righteous (Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq) targeted US troops during Washington’s occupation of Iraq. But the fight against the so-called “Islamic State group” or Daesh has made for very strange bedfellows. Another irony is that apparently the US doesn’t mind essentially tactically allying with Iran this way – the reluctance came from the Shiite militias.

The takeaway, according to Cole, is that the U.S. military is “now involved in two air wars in the Middle East, not to mention more widespread drone actions” elsewhere. Amid all this violence, the prospect for peaceful resolutions anytime soon has dropped to nearly zero.

And the Washington Post adds:

…the Tikrit operation is fraught with potential political and strategic complications for the Obama administration. The overwhelming presence of Shiite militias and volunteers armed and advised by Iran has given rise to fears that their victory would promote sectarian divisions and bloodletting in the majority-Sunni city. U.S. officials have estimated that these Shiite fighters outnumber official Iraqi security forces and Sunni tribal forces by about 5 to 1 in the battle. […]

Human rights groups in recent days have documented the Shiite pursuit of a scorched earth policy in areas already liberated from the Islamic State. After U.S. airstrikes drove the militants out of the town of Amerli, in northeastern Iraq, late last summer, the militias went on a sectarian rampage, burning and bulldozing thousands of homes and other buildings in dozens of Sunni villages.

White House says Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands 'must end'

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In striking choice of words, Obama’s chief of staff elevates public rhetoric against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

The White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, told the lobby group J Street that the US would never support unilateral Israeli annexation of the West Bank. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

The White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, told the lobby group J Street that the US would never support unilateral Israeli annexation of the West Bank. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

President Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough on Monday made a striking announcement on behalf of the administration by telling a crowd of Jewish-American political activists that Israel’s military “occupation” of the West Bank must end as he pushed back against comments made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both before and after his recent reelection victory.

“An occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end,” said McDonough at the annual J Street conference in Washington, DC. “Israel cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely.”

J Street is billed as the more liberal, pro-Israel lobby group which in recent years has tried to offset the more hawkish American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC.

Though Israel’s domination of the West Bank and its continued building of settlements on captured Palestinian lands has long been considered a violation of international law and is the basis for some much of the ongoing conflict, the U.S. government—including the Obama administration—has widely supported Israel’s activities, defended it from international sanctions at the United Nations, provided the Israeli military with a constant flow of aid, and rarely, if ever, employed the term “occupation” despite its commonplace use elsewhere in the world when describing the situation.

McDonough’s stronger use of language was widely seen as a public declaration of continued frustration by the administration regarding statements made by Netanyahu ahead of Israel elections that took place last week. Not only did the Prime Minister foreswear publicly his support for the two-state solution—a commitment to the so-called “peace process” that has been the basis for international efforts to end the conflict—but he also employed racially-charged language against Israeli-Arabs during the elections as he used fear-mongering to warn Jewish voters in Israel that their Arab neighbors were “voting in droves” to destroy Israel. Though Netanyahu has made efforts to walk back both comments, McDonough expressed the White House’s reluctance to accept these new assurances.

“We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made, or that they don’t raise questions about the prime minister’s commitment to achieving peace through direct negotiations,” McDonough told the crowd.

Reasserting the White House commitment to the two-state solution, he added, “Palestinian children deserve the same right to be free in their own land as Israeli children in their land. A two-state solution will finally bring Israelis the security and normalcy to which they are entitled, and Palestinians the sovereignty and dignity they deserve.”

In response, speaking with the Palestinian News Network, PLO central committee member, Wassel Abu Yousef, indicated McDonough’s statements may be an improvement in rhetoric but said they were “late” in terms of serving the right of the Palestinian people. According to Yousef, words from the Obama administration “should be joint to actions to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, in order to give the Palestinian people their right to self-determination.”

Ali Abunimah, author and Palestinian rights activist, was even more dismissive of McDonough’s comments, declaring on Twitter: “Don’t be impressed by Obama chief of staff’s empty words on Israeli ‘occupation,'”adding that it is an “Occupation paid for by U.S..”

As Jessica Schulberg at the Huffington Post noted:

Despite his harsher-than-usual words for the Israeli leadership, McDonough stressed that the U.S. will continue to ensure that Israel has a stronger military than any of its neighbors. He reminded his audience that the U.S. delivered immediate emergency funding of $225 million for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system during last summer’s Gaza War, in addition to nearly $1 billion in funding already in place for the system.

Next year, McDonough added, Israel will receive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, making it the only country in the Middle East that will be armed with the highly advanced aircraft.

US to delay troop pullout from Afghanistan

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President Barack Obama decides to maintain force of 9,800 through end of 2015 and stick to 2017 exit plan.

Obama said the US force would be kept at its current strength to train and assist Afghan forces [AP]

Obama said the US force would be kept at its current strength to train and assist Afghan forces [AP]

by Al Jazeera

US President Barack Obama has granted Afghan requests to slow the withdrawal of US troops from the country and said he would maintain a force of 9,800 through the end of 2015 while sticking to a 2017 exit plan.

“It was my assessment as commander in chief that it made sense for us to provide a few extra months for us to be able to help on things like logistics,” Obama said on Tuesday during a joint news conference with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani at the White House.

“The date for us to have completed our drawdown will not change,” he said. “Providing this additional timeframe during this fighting season for us to be able to help the Afghan security forces succeed is well worth it.”

Obama said that the US force would be kept at its current strength to train and assist Afghan forces, who took over responsibility for the fight against Taliban and other rebels at the start of the year.

The US president said that the pace of the US troop reduction in 2016 would be established later this year and the goal remained to consolidate US forces in the country in a presence at the Kabul embassy at the end of 2016.

Under a previous plan US forces were to have been cut to about half of the current level of just under 10,000 by the end of 2015, but US officials said improved relations with Afghan leaders contributed to a revision of the plan.

Plan welcomed

Since arriving on Sunday, Ghani has been feted by the Obama administration and is due to address Congress on Wednesday.

The welcome contrasts sharply with frosty relations that developed between Washington and Ghani’s predecessor Hamid Karzai.

Some US lawmakers had also called for a slower pullout of troop levels. US Representative Mac Thornberry, a Republican who leads the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, said the decision announced on Tuesday was “appropriate.”

“Iraq has shown us the consequences of leaving a fragile ally too early,” he said in a statement. “The bottom line is that our own security is at stake.”

Ghani and Afghanistan’s Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah met at the presidential retreat at Camp David on Monday with top US officials including Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, who said Washington would fund Afghan security forces at least into 2017.

US to oppose plea to declare RSS a terror group

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Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

New York: The US has told a court here that it intends to move for dismissal of a lawsuit for declaring India’s RSS as a “terror group” while seeking time till April 14 to do so.

In a motion filed Tuesday before judge Laura Taylor Swain of the Southern District of New York, US attorney Preet Bharara said the “government requires additional time to finalize its motion and supporting papers”.

The US based rights group Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) has filed a lawsuit in the US court to label the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as a foreign terrorist organization, according to SFJ attorney Gurpatwant S Pannun. It has sought such a declaration for RSS for allegedly “believing in and practicing a fascist ideology and for running a passionate, vicious and violent campaign to turn India into a ‘Hindu’ nation with a homogeneous religious and cultural identity”.

In its response filed on behalf of Secretary of State John Kerry, Bharara’s office acknowledged that the government’s deadline to respond to the complaint was Tuesday.

But “in lieu of an answer, the Government intends to move to dismiss the complaint, and requires additional time to finalise its motion and supporting papers,” it said.

“In the event this request is granted, the Government would consent to any reasonable deadline for the filing of opposition papers that plaintiff’s counsel would propose,” it added.

(IANS)

Israel spied on Iran talks, gave intel to US lawmakers to kill deal: Report

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US officials angered, reports Wall Street Journal, that Israelis used captured information from high-level negotiations to thwart chances of nuclear agreement

U.S. President Barack Obama listens to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 3, 2014. (Photo by AFP)

U.S. President Barack Obama listens to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 3, 2014. (Photo by AFP)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

The Israeli government secretly spied on high-level talks between the U.S., Iran, and other countries and attempted to sabotage the ongoing nuclear negotiations by serving captured information back to U.S. lawmakers opposed to a deal, the Wall Street Journal is reporting on Tuesday.

According to the WSJ:

Soon after the U.S. and other major powers entered negotiations last year to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, senior White House officials learned Israel was spying on the closed-door talks.

The spying operation was part of a broader campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to penetrate the negotiations and then help build a case against the emerging terms of the deal, current and former U.S. officials said. In addition to eavesdropping, Israel acquired information from confidential U.S. briefings, informants and diplomatic contacts in Europe, the officials said.

The espionage didn’t upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with U.S. lawmakers and others to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said.

“It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter.

Israeli officials on Tuesday quickly denied specific aspects of the reporting. “These allegations are utterly false,” a senior official in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office told CNN. “The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel’s other allies.”

Officials made similar claims to the WSJ, but the newspaper stood by its reporting which it said was based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. and Israeli diplomats, intelligence officials, policy makers, and lawmakers.

That the U.S. and Israel routinely spy on one another is no secret. As theWSJ notes, citing remarks from U.S. officials, the “U.S. expends more counterintelligence resources fending off Israeli spy operations than any other close ally.”

But in this case, as noted, it was the act of supplying U.S. lawmakers with Israeli captured intelligence on the talks that appears to have most irked the White House and other officials.

According to the WSJ, “Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer met with U.S. lawmakers and shared details on the Iran negotiations to warn about the terms of the deal” as a way to undermine the talks.

Mr. Dermer started lobbying U.S. lawmakers just before the U.S. and other powers signed an interim agreement with Iran in November 2013. Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Dermer went to Congress after seeing they had little influence on the White House.

Before the interim deal was made public, Mr. Dermer gave lawmakers Israel’s analysis: The U.S. offer would dramatically undermine economic sanctions on Iran, according to congressional officials who took part.

After learning about the briefings, the White House dispatched senior officials to counter Mr. Dermer. The officials told lawmakers that Israel’s analysis exaggerated the sanctions relief by as much as 10 times, meeting participants said.

Despite repeated attempts by the Israeli government and their allies in the U.S. Congress to derail nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 nations, those talks continue to make progress as foreign ministers remain under active negotiations in Switzerland this week.

US soldier admits killing unarmed Afghans for sport

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Jeremy Morlock, 23, tells US military court he was part of a ‘kill team’ that faked combat situations to murder Afghan civilians

US Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, who admitted being part of the 'kill team' that murdered unarmed Afghans. Photograph: Reuters

US Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, who admitted being part of the ‘kill team’ that murdered unarmed Afghans. Photograph: Reuters

by Paul Harris, The Guardian

An American soldier has pleaded guilty to being part of a “kill team” who deliberately murdered Afghan civilians for sport last year.

Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 23, told a military court he had helped to kill three unarmed Afghans. “The plan was to kill people, sir,” he told an army judge in Fort Lea, near Seattle, after his plea.

The case has caused outraged headlines around the world. In a series of videotaped confessions to investigators, some of which have been broadcast on American television, Morlock detailed how he and other members of his Stryker brigade set up and faked combat situations so that they could kill civilians who posed no threat to them. Four other soldiers are still to come to trial over the incidents.

The case is a PR disaster for America’s military and has been compared to the notorious incidents of torture that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This week the German magazine Der Spiegel published three pictures that showed American soldiers, including Morlock, posing with the corpse of a young Afghan boy as if it were a hunting trophy.

Some soldiers apparently kept body parts of their victims, including a skull, as souvenirs. In a statement issued in response to the publication of the photos the US army apologised to the families of the dead. “[The photos are] repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States army,” the statement said.

Morlock has told investigators that the murders took place between January and May last year and were instigated by an officer in his unit, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs. He described how elaborate plans were made to pick out civilian targets, kill them and then make their deaths look like they were insurgents. In his confession Morlock described shooting a victim as Gibbs tossed a grenade at him. “We identify a guy. Gibbs makes a comment, like, you know, you guys wanna wax this guy or not,” Morlock said in the confession.

Morlock now stands to be sentenced to at least 24 years in jail but with eligibility for parole after seven years. That has come about because Morlock struck a plea bargain that will see a lighter sentence in return for testifying against his fellow soldiers.

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