Daily Archives: October 9, 2007

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The administration that hides the truth and gives away the secrets

Qaeda goes dark after a U.S. slip
By Eli Lake, New York Sun, October 9, 2007

Al Qaeda’s Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden’s September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy’s system.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden’s first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda’s production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.
[…]
One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”
[…]
The founder of a Web site known as clandestineradio.com, Nick Grace, tracked the shutdown of Qaeda’s Obelisk system in real time. “It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes,” Mr. Grace said yesterday. [complete article]

See also, Leak severed a link to al-Qaeda’s secrets (WP) and In a new video, bin Laden predicts U.S. failure in Iraq (WP, 9/7/07)

Editor’s Comment — When news about this video first appeared, there was something strangely juvenile about the way in which it was being billed as a sneak preview. It seemed like a taunt: na-na-na-na-na – al Qaeda can’t control its communications. And President Bush himself gave the clearest indication of the administration’s motive for giving bin Laden’s message some extra time in the news cycle during the run up to the 9/11 anniversary. “I found it interesting that on the tape Iraq was mentioned, which is a reminder that Iraq is a part of this war against extremists,” Bush said while speaking to reporters in Sydney. “If al-Qaeda bothers to mention Iraq, it is because they want to achieve their objectives in Iraq, which is to drive us out and to develop a safe haven.” It was another opportunity to revive the spurious 9/11-Iraq narrative.

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NEWS: War in Pakistan

Pakistan fighting kills 250, civilians flee
AFP, October 9, 2007

Pakistani jets pounded militant hideouts in a troubled tribal region Tuesday, taking the death toll to 250 from three of the heaviest days of fighting in the region since 2001.

The clashes have forced thousands to flee from Mir Ali, a town in lawless North Waziristan district that President Pervez Musharraf has previously pinpointed as a den of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.

Residents said dozens of people including women and children were killed in the latest air strikes in the rugged region bordering Afghanistan, but security officials insisted the dead were all Islamist fighters. [complete article]

Pakistan army’s tribal quagmire
By M Ilyas Khan, BBC News, October 9, 2007

At 11,000 feet, with the temperature dipping 10 degrees below freezing, an army pilot recalls how he was sweating from head to toe.

There was a fault in the engine and he might crash at any moment.

And while he could eject to safety, he would then be floating straight into the jaws of a death more dreadful than being charred inside a crashed jet.

“This is a country where soldiers are slaughtered,” he told me after his dramatic flight. “Their bodies may be found, but not their heads.”

He was over-flying North Waziristan, a Pakistani tribal district on the border with Afghanistan where the army is fighting a difficult war against Islamic militants. [complete article]

See also, Pakistan’s paradoxical and chaotic stability (Jason Burke) and New political deal angers Pakistanis (CSM).

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NEWS: Supreme Court cover-up

Supreme Court won’t hear torture appeal
By David Stout, New York Times, October 9, 2007

A German citizen who said he was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and tortured in a prison in Afghanistan lost his last chance to seek redress in court today when the Supreme Court declined to consider his case.

The justices’ refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri’s lawsuit on the grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets. [complete article]

See also, Lost opportunity to review government’s abuse of “state secrets” (ACLU).

Editor’s Comment — Just when it would be most inconvenient for the administration to be forced to answer questions about its use of torture, the Supreme Court steps in and saves the day – a good day for Bush and another blow to democracy.

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NEWS: Foreign guards in another drive-by killing

Foreign guards kill two women in Baghdad
By , , October , 2007

Foreign security guards killed two women on Tuesday, opening fire on their car in the centre of the Iraqi capital and then speeding off “like gangsters,” witnesses and Iraqi security officials said.

The shooting in Karrada came two days after Iraq vowed to punish US security firm Blackwater after a probe found that its guards were not provoked when they opened “deliberate” fire in Baghdad three weeks ago, killing 17 Iraqis.

Shopkeeper Ammar Fallah, a witness to the Tuesday’s shooting, told AFP the guards, who were escorting a civilian convoy through the streets, signalled for a woman driving a white Oldsmobile car to pull over as they passed.

“When she failed to do so they opened fire, killing her and the woman next to her,” he said. “There were two children in the back seat but they were not harmed. The women were both shot in the head.” [complete article]

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OPINION: Talking about torture

‘We do not torture’
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, October 8, 2007

This last week, the nation’s leading newspaper established that the Bush Administration continues to use torture techniques as a matter of formal policy, crafted at its highest levels. This comes more than three years following the exposure of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and more than two years after the Administration’s lies about the use of torture, unconvincing to start with, were finally exploded by the issuance of a series of internal reports. We face now a leadership stained with deceit and criminality. More importantly, it is a leadership which can never recognize nor admit its failings and moral errors. Hence, consistent with a tyrannical disposition, it acts to force all to accept its crimes as lawful, and thus to pervert the law and the institutions charged to enforce it. [complete article]

Defusing the “ticking time bomb” excuse
By Karen J. Greenberg, The American Prospect, October 8, 2007

The most recent Democratic presidential candidate debate made it clear that America has traversed considerable ground of late in the discussion of torture. Notably, at the Hanover debate, Hillary Clinton took a giant step forward when she declared that she was opposed to torture on any grounds, in any circumstance. “As a matter of policy,” she said, torture “cannot be American policy. Period.”

Moderator Tim Russert then laid out the typical ticking time bomb scenario — describing a suspect who has information about an imminent terrorist attack, and torture might be the only way to retrieve that information fast enough to save lives. Even after Russert pointed out her husband had defended the use of torture in such an extreme case, she refused to backtrack. [complete article]

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ANALYSIS: Suicide bombings

Evolution of the suicide attacker
By Jalal Ghazi, New America Media, October 9, 2007

The war in Iraq has enabled insurgent groups to develop the relatively modern innovation of suicide bombs into a strategic weapon.

Suicide operations, the signature weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, have evolved into a tactical method of warfare used by insurgents around the world. These “moving and thinking bombs” are more effective, numerous, adaptable and sophisticated — able to carry out both mass killings and targeted political assassinations — and are harder to counter since women and children are being used to carry them.

A study by the Gulf Research Center, a Middle East think tank, analyzes these operations from a technical perspective. The report, “Security and Terrorism: Suicide Bombing Operations,” published in Arabic and English, focuses on suicide operations in Iraq, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Israel.

Although the study does not provide evidence of direct relations between insurgent groups operating in different countries, their similar tactics strongly suggest that they are learning from each other. The Iraq war has served as a suicide operations school for insurgent groups around the world, Dr. Mustafa Alani, director of Security and Terrorism Studies at the Gulf Research Center, told the Dubai-based Al Arabiya television network. [complete article]

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NEWS: Swiss xenophobia

Swiss fury at foreigners boiling over
By Molly Moore, Washington Post, October 9, 2007

At 1:30 a.m., Antonio da Costa heard a knock at the back entrance of the McDonald’s restaurant where he worked as a janitor after-hours.

He opened the door, he recalled in an interview. There stood two men, each gripping a chain saw. One yanked the cord on his saw, stepped toward da Costa and shouted above the roaring machine: “We don’t need Africans in our country. We’re here to kill you!”

The two masked assailants cornered da Costa and began raking him with the whirring chain-saw blades. They slashed one arm to the bone, nearly sliced off his left thumb and hacked his face, neck and chest, the 37-year-old Angolan said, his voice quavering as he recounted the May 1 attack.

The gruesome assault in a suburb of Zurich — consistently ranked in international surveys as one of the world’s most livable cities — dramatized the surge in racism and xenophobia as Switzerland confronts its most difficult social transformation in modern times. Today, more than one in five people living in Switzerland are foreign-born, the second-highest percentage among countries in Europe. [complete article]

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OPINION: Bridging the cultural divide between progressives and evangelicals

A culture war treaty
By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, October 9, 2007

You know the religious right is in trouble when some of its leaders threaten to bolt the Republican Party if it nominates a candidate who supports abortion rights.

But the well-publicized warning directed against Rudy Giuliani this month is decidedly not the most important sign that religious conservatives are facing the disintegration of their movement.

What matters more is that a new generation of evangelical leaders, tired of the rancid partisanship, is breaking away from the culture wars. The reach of this new evangelical politics will be tested with the release tomorrow of a statement under the very biblical title “Come Let Us Reason Together.” The question for the future is how many in the evangelical ranks will embrace this call. [complete article]

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NEWS: Another step towards a Turkish incursion into Iraq

Turkey says its troops can cross Iraq border
By Sebnem Arsu, New York Times, October 9, 2007

Turkey took a step toward a military operation in Iraq on Tuesday, as its top political and military leaders issued a statement allowing troops to cross the border Iraq to eliminate separatist Kurdish rebel camps in the northern region.

Turkey moved toward military action in the face of strong opposition by the United States, which is anxious to maintain peace in the region, one of the rare areas of stability in conflict-torn Iraq. But more than two dozen Turkish soldiers have been killed in recent days, and the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed far more determined than before to act decisively.

A government official, who asked not to be named, said preparations were under way to seek parliamentary approval for a cross-border military operation, a request that would be the first formal step toward an offensive. [complete article]

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ANALYSIS: The Sadr-Hakim alliance

At last, some good news from Iraq
By Sami Moubayed, Asia Times, October 10, 2007

Good news came from Iraq this weekend – the best news for the US, probably, since Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the prince of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by a US air strike in June 2006.

The two rival clerics, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr, who control the Iraqi Shi’ite community, have decided to lay down their arms and unite their efforts to bring stability and security to Iraq.

Hakim leads the powerful Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), which controls the Badr Brigade. Sadr leads the Mahdi Army, a massive militia that controls the slums and poorer districts of Baghdad. Hakim is popular among the educated Shi’ite elite, the middle-class, and affluent business community. He is backed by both Iran and the United States. Sadr reigns among the young and the poor and is backed by grassroot Iraqis.

The two men, who control two very powerful militias, have been sniping at each other since the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. This single reconciliation development – if carried out as planned – can truly help end the violence, more so than all the conferences, debates, and proposals laid out since 2003. If united, the two militias can help eradicate al-Qaeda in Iraq. All they have been doing for the past 4 years, however, is fight one another for control of the Shi’ite street. [complete article]

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