National Freedom project

The  Freedom Project is a professional association of attorneys throughout the country with the common goal of providing affordable legal services to individuals that are charged with a crime or who have been convicted of one. National Freedom Project members are attorneys in your area or state that operate their own practice but share a common belief that justice can only be achieved if everyone is equal before the law.

Obama lambasts Putin: you're wrecking Russia to recreate Soviet empire

Barack Obama has used the close of the G7 summit in Germany to deliver his strongest criticism yet of Vladimir Putin, lambasting the Russian president’s isolationist approach as the seven leaders signalled their readiness to tighten sanctions against Russia if the conflict in Ukraine escalates. “Does he continue to wreck his country’s economy and continue Russia’s isolation in pursuit of a wrong-headed desire to recreate the glories of the Soviet empire?See Freedom project Or does he recognise that Russia’s greatness does not depend on violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of other countries?” the US president said at the close of the intensive discussions in Bavaria as world leaders, including the summit’s host, Angela Merkel, presented a united front against Putin. The German chancellor stressed that while she hoped the situation in Ukraine would not worsen, the G7 leaders were prepared to implement tougher sanctions if it did. We are “ready, should the situation escalate – which we don’t want – to strengthen sanctions if the situation makes that necessary but we believe we should do everything to move forward the political process of Minsk”, Merkel said. Obama warned that if Russia were to “double down” on what he called its “aggressive behaviour” in Ukraine, “additional steps” could be taken. Merkel, who maintained a sporadic line of communication with Putin through the early stages of the conflict, stressed that current sanctions would remain in place until Russia cooperated with implementing a peace plan agreed in Minsk in February. The European members of the G7 – Britain, Italy and France – said they would support the extension of the main EU sanctions when they meet later this month. Obama had come to Bavaria on Sunday with the intention of pushing for a tougher approach to Russia. And while Merkel was keen to stress that the Ukraine crisis had not dominated the two days of talks, it was certainly the uppermost topic in the coverage. See Freedom Project

Obama says US 'underestimated' rise of ISIS, admits 'contradictory' Syria policy

 Obama acknowledged Sunday that U.S. intelligence officials "underestimated" the threat posed by the Islamic State and overestimated the Iraqi army’s capacity to defeat the militant group.

 The president said in an wide-ranging interview on CBS' “60 Minutes” that the Islamic State militants went "underground" after being squashed in Iraq and regrouped under the cover of the Syrian civil war. "During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos," Obama said. The president said his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has acknowledged that the U.S. "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.” He also said it was "absolutely true" that the U.S. overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi army.

 However, Obama also acknowledged that the U.S. is dealing with a conundrum in Syria, as the U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State is helping Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom the U.N. has accused of war crimes. "I recognize the contradiction in a contradictory land and a contradictory circumstance," Obama said. "We are not going to stabilize Syria under the rule of Assad," whose government has committed "terrible atrocities." However, Obama called the threat from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and other terror groups a more "immediate concern that has to be dealt with." "On the other hand, in terms of immediate threats to the United States, ISIL, Khorasan Group -- those folks could kill Americans," he said.

 The Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has taken control of large sections of Iraq and Syria. The Khorasan Group is a cell of militants that the U.S. says is plotting attacks against the West in cooperation with the Nusra front, Syria's Al Qaeda affiliate. Both groups have been targeted by U.S. airstrikes in recent days; together they constitute the most significant military opposition to Assad. Obama said his first priority is degrading the extremists who are threatening Iraq and the West. To defeat them, he acknowledged, would require a competent local ground force, something no analyst predicts will surface any time soon in Syria, despite U.S. plans to arm and train "moderate" rebels. "Right now, we've got a campaign plan that has a strong chance for success in Iraq," the president said. "Syria is a more challenging situation."

 In discussing Iraq, Obama said the U.S. left the country after the war with “a democracy that was intact, a military that was well-equipped and the ability then (for Iraqis) to chart their own course.” However, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki “squandered” that opportunity over roughly five years because he was “much more interested in consolidating his Shia base and very suspicious of the Sunnis and the Kurds, who make up the other two thirds of the country,” the president said.

 Obama said military force is necessary to shrink the Islamic State’s capacity, cut off financing and eliminate the flow of foreign fighters. He said political solutions are also needed that accommodate both Sunnis and Shiites, adding that conflicts between the two sects are the biggest cause of conflict throughout the world.

 Earlier Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner questioned Obama's strategy to destroy the Islamic State group. Boehner said on ABC's "This Week" that the U.S. may have "no choice" but to send in American troops if the mix of U.S.-led airstrikes and a ground campaign reliant on Iraqi forces, Kurdish fighters and moderate Syrian rebels fails to achieve that goal. "These are barbarians. They intend to kill us," Boehner said. "And if we don't destroy them first, we're going to pay the price."

 However, Obama again made clear he has no interest in a major U.S. ground presence beyond the 1,600 American advisers and special operations troops he already has ordered to Iraq. When asked if the current conflict was not really a war, Obama said there are clear distinctions between this campaign and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We are assisting Iraq in a very real battle that's taking place on their soil, with their troops," the president said. "This is not America against ISIL. This is America leading the international community to assist a country with whom we have a security partnership." "That's always the case," Obama added. "We are the indispensable nation. We have capacity no one else has. Our military is the best in the history of the world. And when trouble comes up anywhere in the world, they don't call Beijing. They don't call Moscow. They call us."

 The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/29/us-misjudged-iraqi-army-isis-threat-obama-says/

Israel increasingly anxious over world's flexibility to nuclear Iran

As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu departed to address the UN General Assembly in New York on Sunday, and to meet with US President Barack Obama, the fear in Israel was mounting with regard to the warming ties between Iran and the United States. Amid the struggle against Islamic State, there were more and more indications that the US and the Western powers were willing to relax their position regarding Iran's nuclear program. This impression became stronger following the reports that the US is coordinating with Iran in its aerial assaults on Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

 Israel is worried that the offers made to Iran in the negotiations over its nuclear program, which Iran has rejected as unsatisfactory, demonstrate the world powers' willingness to accept the Islamic Republic as a "threshold nuclear power" just a screws-turn away from possessing a nuclear bomb. Israel's anxiety was apparent on Wednesday when Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz revealed classified information with the permission of a military censor that is friendly to the government and more strict to the media. Steinitz revealed that Iran has used its Parchin military base as the site for secret tests of technology that could be used only for detonating a nuclear weapon. The reason why Steinitz came out with the information was to influence the world powers in the nuclear talks to delay the signing of an agreement with Iran that will leave Iran with significant capabilities to enrich uranium.

 The negotiations with the powers – the US, France, Britain, Russia, Germany and China- are supposed to end with a permanent agreement in around two months. Over the last week, senior officials in the Obama administration have leaked some ideas that could form the basis of an agreement with Iran. One idea is that Iranian centrifuges will not be dismantled but will rather be disconnected from the system that fuels them and connects them together. Another idea under consideration is to allow Iran to keep some 5000 centrifuges, which would put Tehran in a good position to enrich high level weapons-grade uranium in the future if it chose to do so.

These offers that are unsatisfactory to Iran have infuriated Jerusalem. Israel's position was that in any agreement Iran would have to dismantle all its centrifuges or only be able to keep around 1000 which would prevent it from enriching uranium to a high level. The latest developments in the Middle East have hardened Iran's bargaining positions in the nuclear talks. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the moderates around him are interested in a permanent agreement on the nuclear issue that will remove the painful sanctions against their economy. On the other hand, as the masters of "bazaar-style" negotiating, Tehran senses that it can reach a better deal for Iran if it stands firm.

 Iran feels that the West wants to see it a de facto partner in the coalition that is forming against ISIS. Even the accomplishments of the Shi'ites in Yemen, who currently control large parts of the capital Sana'a, encourage the Iranians and give them hope that regional events and time are in their favor. And because for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu relations between Iran and Israel are a zero sum game, any Iranian achievement and any Western concession to Iran is a loss for Israel. In Netanyahu's speech at the General Assembly on Monday and in his meeting with Obama, the prime minister will try to minimize the negative fallout for Israel. It is doubtful that he will succeed. The world knows that the military threats that Israel wielded successfully from 2011-2013 are no longer realistic.

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Analysis-Israel-increasingly-anxious-over-worlds-flexibility-to-nuclear-Iran-376477

Iran used military base to secretly test nuclear detonation technology, Israel says

REUTERS – Israel said on Wednesday that Iran has used its Parchin military base as the site for secret tests of technology that could be used only for detonating a nuclear weapon. The Jewish state has been a severe critic of six big powers' negotiations with Iran on restraining its nuclear program, suspecting Tehran is only trying to buy time to master sensitive nuclear know-how and would evade the terms of any final deal. The Islamic Republic says allegations that it is seeking a nuclear weapons capability are false and baseless. Tehran says it is Israel's assumed atomic arsenal that is a destabilizing threat to the Middle East. A statement from Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, issued a day before Iranian President Hassan Rohani – the architect of Tehran's diplomacy with the big powers - was to address the UN General Assembly, said internal neutron sources such as uranium were used in nuclear implosion tests at Parchin. Israel, his statement said, based its information on "highly reliable information", without elaborating. It gave no specific dates for such testing, saying only that it occurred during what it called the 2000-2001 construction of a nuclear weaponization test site in Parchin. An annex to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report in 2011, which included information received from member states, indicated that Iran may have conducted such alleged experiments but did not specify where they had taken place.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel-s-eye-on-iran/1.617664

CDC: Ebola could infect 1.4 million in Liberia and Sierra Leone by end of January

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa, already ghastly, could get worse by orders of magnitude, killing hundreds of thousands of people and embedding itself in the human population for years to come, according to two worst-case scenarios from scientists studying the historic outbreak. The virus could potentially infect 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone by the end of January, according to a statistical forecast by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Tuesday. That number came just hours after a report in the New England Journal of Medicine warned that the epidemic might never be fully controlled and that the virus could become endemic, crippling civic life in the affected countries and presenting an ongoing threat of spreading elsewhere. These dire scenarios from highly respected medical sources were framed, however, by optimism from U.S. officials that an accelerated response can and will contain the outbreak in the weeks and months ahead.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-ebola-could-infect-14-million-in-west-africa-by-end-of-january-if-trends-continue/2014/09/23/fc260920-4317-11e4-9a15-137aa0153527_story.html

US Strikes IS Group in Syria, Iraq

U.S. warplanes bombed Islamic State militant positions on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border on Wednesday as hard-line Syrian rebels who have been battling the extremist group sought cover, fearing a wider aerial campaign against all fighters seen as a potential threat to the United States. The airstrikes come a day after the U.S. and five Arab allies opened their military operation against the Islamic State group in Syria with more than 200 strikes on some two dozen targets. That campaign, which President Barack Obama has warned could last years, expands upon the aerial assault the U.S. has already been waging for more than a month against the extremists in Iraq. "There's definitely a second day and there'll be a third and a fourth" in Syria, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN in an interview on Wednesday. "This will go on for some time in several forms." Along with its Arab partners, the Obama administration aims to destroy the Islamic State group, the extremist faction that has through brute force carved out a proto-state in the heart of the Middle East, effectively erasing the border between Iraq and Syria. The United Nations has accused the group of committing war crimes. The latest U.S. strikes, conducted by bombers and fighter jets, damaged eight Islamic State vehicles in Syria near the Iraqi border town of Qaim, the U.S. Central Command said in a statement. It also reported hitting two Islamic State armed vehicles west of Baghdad, as well as two militant fighting positions in northern Iraq. In a separate statement, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said the strikes in eastern Syria hit a staging area used by the militants to move equipment across the border into Iraq. He did not specify exactly where the air raids took place, but the Iraqi town of Qaim is across the border from the Syrian town of Boukamal, where Syrian activists reported at least 13 airstrikes on suspected Islamic State positions on Wednesday.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/syrian-opposition-hit-assad-group-25719189