The disclosure of the details of a letter reportedly sent by President Barack Obama last week to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will cause Palestinians to be even more skeptical about U.S. and Israeli roles in the current peace talks.
According to the leak, Obama made a series of extraordinarily generous offers to Israel, many of them at the expense of the Palestinians, in return for a single minor concession from Netanyahu: a two-month extension of the partial freeze on settlement growth.
A previous 10-month freeze, which ended a week ago, has not so far been renewed by Netanyahu, threatening to bring the negotiations to an abrupt halt. The Palestinians are expected to decide whether to quit the talks over the coming days.
Netanyahu was reported last week to have declined the U.S. offer.
The White House has denied that a letter was sent, but, according to the Israeli media, officials in Washington are privately incensed by Netanyahu’s rejection.
The disclosures were made by an informed source: David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a close associate of Dennis Ross, Obama’s chief adviser on the Middle East, who is said to have initiated the offer.
The letter’s contents have also been partly confirmed by Jewish U.S. senators who attended a briefing last week from Ross.
According to Makovsky, in return for the 60-day settlement moratorium, the U.S. promised to veto any UN Security Council proposal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the next year, and committed to not seek any further extensions of the freeze. The future of the settlements would be addressed only in a final agreement.
The White House would also allow Israel to keep a military presence in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley, even after the creation of a Palestinian state; continue controlling the borders of the Palestinian territories to prevent smuggling; provide Israel with enhanced weapons systems and security guarantees and increase its billions of dollars in annual aid; and create a regional security pact against Iran.
After three Frontier Corps soldiers were killed in a NATO helicopter attack on a Pakistani border post last week, the Pakistani government cut off supplies to Afghanistan by closing the Torkham border crossing. It was the easiest way of sending a message to Washington that killing Pakistani soldiers is unacceptable.
The Washington Post‘s editorial page now shoots back: “[Pakistan’s] resistance to a more muscular U.S. campaign in North Waziristan, where the Haqqani faction is based, is unacceptable.”
So what’s the Obama administration going to do? Show the Pakistanis who’s the boss and threaten to cut off aid to a country currently dealing with an environmental catastrophe worse than the 2004 Asian Tsunami?
For those with an imperial mindset (like the editors of the Washington Post) the issue here is about who has the right and the power to exercise their will. America, land of the righteous, savior of the world, must prevail.
But America’s real military problem is not it’s inability to restore a global consensus about the supremacy of its military might. America’s problem is topography.
It’s because of topography that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a contrivance that the Taliban can freely use to their advantage.
Though thanks to Vietnam’s jungles, quagmire remains the metaphor of choice when we talk about unwinnable wars, a more appropriate metaphor for what is now glibly referred to as Af-Pak is The Labyrinth.
When the Pentagon saw it’s opportunity to vanquish the ghost of Vietnam, it knew what it was looking for: a great big cumbersome army in a wide open space.
Victory against Saddam in Kuwait was a foregone conclusion — even if it’s debatable exactly what the US proved when it demonstrated its ability to slaughter thousands.
The Washington Post now sees itself as a valiant bugler leading the charge in the next phase of what it swiftly, justifiably but also cynically dubbed “Obama’s war”. But like all the war’s proponent, it is a victim of an irresistible illusion: that will-power can move mountains. Others have tried — and the mountains are still there.
What will be accomplished by the latest call for what is euphemistically described as a more “muscular” approach in Waziristan is the further reinforcement of a view of America already widely held in Pakistan.
There is no ideological commitment or religious fervor that fuels the Pakistani public’s anti-Americanism. Nor is there a particularly civilizational flavor to it. Pakistani anti-Americanism comes from a sustained narrative in which Pakistan is the undignified and humiliated recipient of U.S. financial support — provided at the expense of Pakistani blood.
As narratives go, this comes closer to the truth than its comic-book counterpart: the war of necessity (in which Obama heads in deeper on his search for the way out).
Is the word “terrorism” a secret terrorist weapon?
It appears that when US government officials try to think about terrorism their brains stop working. It’s a word that has become a piece of neural malware and everywhere it spreads, rational minds sputter and then cease to function. Who could have dreamed that a simple word could be so potent and destructive.
Yesterday we were told this: “The State Department alerts U.S. citizens to the potential for terrorist attacks in Europe.”
Why were they so specific, limiting the warning to just one continent?
The State website usefully provides a map, just in case anyone isn’t sure where Europe is. Should Americans already there jump on the first plane to head home? Apparently not.
“U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.”
This might prevent a few road fatalities. Drivers in Europe do expect pedestrians to exercise caution in the vicinity of fast-moving traffic. It’s always a good idea not to step off the curb with your eyes shut.
The New York Times thought it would be good to get some expert opinion on the significance of the State travel alert. Georgetown University’s Bruce Hoffman said: “I’m not sure what it says, beyond the fact that the world’s a dangerous place, and we already knew that.” Indeed.
As to who prompted this response to the latest al Qaeda threat:
A White House spokesman, Nicholas S. Shapiro, said that while the State Department had decided to issue the alert, it came in response to Mr. Obama’s insistence that “we need to do everything possible to disrupt this plot and protect the American people.”
Now here’s the serious point.
In terms of being able to identify where the next major act of terrorism may strike, the US government can’t be any more precise than to specify a continent — and with that level of precision who’s to say whether they identified the right continent.
At the same time, when it comes to identifying from where the next major act of terrorism will emanate, the US government claims it can identify targets with pinpoint accuracy as it escalates drone warfare in Pakistan.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that those who see danger everywhere also claim they have a talent for shooting straight.
There was a time — and it’s really not that long ago — that terrorism provoked a sturdier response from politicians who recognized that it was not their job to become agents of mass hysteria.
On October 12, 1984, Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, survived an assassination attempt by the IRA. Five were killed and 31 injured in the blast which occurred at 2.54AM. Just over an hour later, having dusted herself off and changed her clothes, Thatcher spoke to the press.
“Life must go on as usual,” she said and went on to speak at the Conservative Party Conference which continued on schedule.
The event was recalled in Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain*:
The IRA responded with equal clarity:
Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.
The Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign continued until 1997.
Thatcher may have lacked the political flexibility and imagination required for the peace process, but she and the people of Northern Ireland and Britain demonstrated that life can indeed go on as usual even during a decades-long bombing campaign.
President Obama on the other hand seems willing to try and perpetuate the illusion that rests as the foundation of the war on terrorism: the idea that terrorism can be thwarted. It cannot.
The opportunities for individuals or small groups of individuals to cause carnage are infinite. The means to prevent such acts of violence are limited.
Political courage demands the articulation of this truth: the issue is not how you stop the unstoppable, but what you do afterwards.
Terrorism can provoke either intelligent or stupid responses and nothing is more stupid than an approach to counterterrorism which ends up fueling further acts of random violence.
Is the world safer now than it was on September 12, 2001? Obviously not.
The fact that 9/11 was followed by a decade of war with no end in sight is the grossest act of stupidity in modern history. Through its misconceived approach to counterterrorism America has rewarded al Qaeda more generously than Osama bin Laden could have ever dreamed.
*Marr’s entertaining BBC documentary series covers British history from the end of the Second World War onwards. The context for the clip above was Thatcher’s ruthless campaign against the National Union of Miners led by Arthur Scargill, but more broadly an effort to destroy the trade union movement and dismantle the welfare state. In the process, she deservedly became the most despised woman in Britain.
Ben D, a commenter at this site and Arms Control Wonk is skeptical about my assertion that Siemens SCADA software is being used at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility. I based that claim on a UPI photograph that led the German industrial security expert, Ralph Langner, to speculate that Bushehr was the intended target of the Stuxnet malware.
These are Ben’s qualms:
Concerning the UPI image of a control panel with a MS look window superimposed that says.. “WinCC Runtime License: Your software license has expired. Please obtain a valid license”, well it doesn’t prove a thing.
First of all, the WinCC window could so easily be a photo- shopped overlay on the image of a process control panel.
Secondly, the Control Panel image is typical of process control panels everywhere and even if the WinCC window was not photo-shopped, what has that got to do with Bushehr. There is nothing else in the image to provide any information whatsoever about the local environment to provide any context as to its locality or purpose.
Thirdly, UPI does not provide a source for anyone claiming that the UPI Photo by Mohammad Kheirkhah is actually Bushehr, they just provide a narrative to imply that it is.
Fourthly, Ralph Lagner is not claiming the UPI image is actually genuine or that it is of Bushehr, he merely prefaces his speculative theory with ” If the picture is authentic, which I have no means of verifying,….”.
Has the image been doctored? I’m not in a position to determine that, but the Hacker Factor Blog did some image analysis and concluded that it was not doctored. He has other reasons for questioning whether it was taken at Bushehr but found no evidence that it had been manipulated with Photoshop.
This image apparently confirms that the photograph is of a computer monitor and the continuity in the ripple pattern across the part of the screen where the WinCC message appears seems to confirm that this was not inserted from a different screen image. (This ripple pattern can be seen both in the blue image and the close-up image.)
So, assuming that the WinCC expired-licence message was actually appearing on that monitor screen, is there any evidence that the monitor and the control system it depicts is in Bushehr?
Frankly, I was willing to accept that UPI was not misrepresenting or incorrectly labeling its photos, but still, some additional analysis was both in order and turned out to be fruitful. There is indeed evidence that this image depicts a Bushehr control system.
The elements in the schematic have a uniform numbering system — UA04B001, UA04B002 etc.
Another UPI photograph appears to show the physical components depicted on the system control monitor. This vessel shown on the right is numbered UA06B002. That particular number doesn’t appear on the monitor image but it’s hard to believe that this is not part of the same system.
OK. But maybe the screen image and the image of an Iranian technician turning a valve were taken some place other than Bushehr.
Well, UPI’s photographer was one among a group of international journalists who were shown around Bushehr in February 2009. They included Jon Leyne, a reporter for the BBC, and a video in his report shows the same assembly of pale gray vessels that appear in the UPI photo. Indeed, an AFP image in the same report shows the same technician, from a different angle, doing his valve-turning performance for the assembled press.
With the evidence that I’ve laid out I will assert with even more confidence that the Bushehr nuclear plant uses Siemens WinCC SCADA software. I also see little reason to doubt that Iranian officials were telling the truth when they said that Stuxnet had been found on personal computers used by the facility’s operators. What I remain skeptical about is their claim that the malware did not penetrate the system. How confident the Iranians are on that question may become evident in the coming months when the plant begins or fails to begin generating electricity.
A USB memory stick carrying the Stuxnet malware is believed to have provided intruders with access to Iran’s nuclear program. The same technique was used in November 2008 to break into CENTCOM, providing a foreign government with unfiltered access to the Pentagon’s command of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Did both attacks come from the same source?
Cyber warfare has quietly grown into a central pillar of Israel’s strategic planning, with a new military intelligence unit set up to incorporate high-tech hacking tactics, Israeli security sources said on Tuesday.
Israel’s pursuit of options for sabotaging the core computers of foes like Iran, along with mechanisms to protect its own sensitive systems, were unveiled last year by the military intelligence chief, Major-General Amos Yadlin.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since set cyber warfare as a national priority, “up there with missile shields and preparing the homefront to withstand a future missile war”, a senior source said on condition of anonymity.
Back in 1997, when the US did not overtly support political assassinations, President Clinton intervened to save the life of Khalid Meshaal. The Hamas political bureau chief had been poisoned by Mossad operatives (carrying stolen Canadian passports) on the streets of Jordan’s capital, Amman.
Clinton wasn’t trying to help Hamas but knew that a peace treaty he had helped broker between Israel and Jordan would be in jeopardy if Prime Minister Netanyahu thought he could disregard the sovereignty of Jordan and carry out assassinations with impunity. Likewise, neither King Hussein nor the Canadian government believed that Israeli actions showing a flagrant disregard for the authority of their respective governments could go unanswered.
Netanyahu would probably have found Clinton’s pressure unpersuasive were it not for the fact that the Israeli operatives had already been arrested. In exchange for their release, the Israelis supplied the antidote that saved Meshaal’s life while also releasing the Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Then came 9/11.
Before long, Yassin had been assassinated, the US was using Israeli methods of torture in its campaign against an amorphous Islamic threat, Israel’s own war crimes were sanctioned by the US in the name of the war on terrorism, and the use of stolen foreign passports by Mossad agents committing murder on foreign soil provoked nothing more than a diplomatic slap on the wrists.
The willingness of this and the previous administration to allow Israel to disregard international law shows that even if the Israel lobby can no longer flourish like a night flower, its power is barely diminished. Even so, the appearance of the Stuxnet malware should be a wake-up call to every government around the world that refuses to place Israel’s national interests above its own.
In its conception, Stuxnet can be viewed very much like a targeted killing — but one designed to attack silently and leave no trace of its origin.
It’s creators understood that they had designed an exceedingly dangerous weapon and so they made sure its damage could be contained. But it seems not to have worked according to plan and so caution got tossed out of the window. Apparently, Israel did what it has done so many times before: pursued what it regarded as its own interests with an utter disregard for the international consequences.
The original infection method, which relied on infected USB drives, included a counter that limited the spread to just three PCs, said [Liam] O Murchu [operations manager with Symantec’s security response]. “It’s clear that the attackers did not want Stuxnet to spread very far,” he said. “They wanted it to remain close to the original infection point.”
O Murchu’s research also found a 21-day propagation window; in other words, the worm would migrate to other machines in a network only for three weeks before calling it quits.
Those anti-propagation measures notwithstanding, Stuxnet has spread widely. Why?
Kaspersky’s [Roel] Schouwenberg [a senior antivirus researcher] believes it’s because the initial attack, which relied on infected USB drives, failed to do what Stuxnet’s makers wanted.
“My guess is that the first variant didn’t achieve its target,” said Schouwenberg, referring to the worm’s 2009 version that lacked the more aggressive propagation mechanisms, including multiple Windows zero-day vulnerabilities. “So they went on to create a more sophisticated version to reach their target.”
That more complex edition, which O Murchu said was developed in March of this year, was the one that “got all the attention,” according to Schouwenberg. But the earlier edition had already been at work for months by then — and even longer before a little-known antivirus vendor from Belarus first found it in June. “The first version didn’t spread enough, and so Stuxnet’s creators took a gamble, and abandoned the idea of making it stealthy,” said Schouwenberg.
In Schouwenberg’s theory, Stuxnet’s developers realized their first attempt had failed to penetrate the intended target or targets, and rather than simply repeat the attack, decided to raise the ante.
“They spent a lot of time and money on Stuxnet,” Schouwenberg said. “They could try again [with the USB-only vector] and maybe fail again, or they could take the risk of it spreading by adding more functionality to the worm.”
O Murchu agreed that it was possible the worm’s creators had failed to infect, and thus gain control, of the industrial systems running at their objective(s), but said the code itself didn’t provide clear clues.
What is clear, O Murchu said in a news conference Friday morning, is that Stuxnet evolved over time, adding new ways to spread on networks in the hope of finding specific PLCs (programming logic control) hardware to hijack. “It’s possible that [the attackers] didn’t manage to get to all of their targets [with the earlier version],” O Murchu said. “The increased sophistication of Stuxnet in 2010 may indicate that they had not reached their target.”
With the proliferation of Stuxnet, Schouwenberg said that the country or countries that created the worm may have themselves been impacted by its spread. But that was likely a calculated risk the worm’s developers gladly took.
And that risk may have been quite small. “Perhaps they knew that their own critical infrastructure wouldn’t be affected by Stuxnet because it’s not using Siemens PLCs,” Schouwenberg said.
The danger now posed by Stuxnet is not simply through its direct proliferation but by virtue of the fact that it provides a blueprint that can be adapted by other parties who would otherwise lack the resources to create malware this sophisticated from scratch.
What might have been conceived as a tool to prevent the creation of a weapon of mass destruction could itself be turned into a WMD.
“Stuxnet opened Pandora’s box,” said Ralph Langner, a German researcher whose early analysis of the worm’s ability to target control systems raised public awareness of the threat. “We don’t need to be concerned about Stuxnet, but about the next-generation malware we will see after Stuxnet.”
Sean McGurk, director of the U.S. National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the department posted its first report to industry recommending steps to mitigate the effects of Stuxnet on July 15. But “not even two days later,” he said, a hacker Web site posted the code so that others could use it to exploit the vulnerabilities in Microsoft.
“So we know that once the information is out in the wild, people are taking it and they’re modifying it,” he said.
In other words, what started as an Israeli cyber attack on nuclear installations in Iran could end up crashing the US powergrid or causing havoc anywhere else on the globe.
Even before Stuxnet loomed over the horizon, serious warnings were being issued about the United States’ vulnerability to a crippling cyber attack, yet thus far none of those raising the alarm have pointed to the ways in which Israel’s cyber warfare capabilities may now indirectly or directly threaten the United States and its interests.
– – –
Late last year, 60 Minutes reported on America’s vulnerability to a major cyber attack.
Ever since speculation began, suggesting that Israel is the source of the Stuxnet malware, there has been a buzz of excitement in the Zionist corner of the blogosphere. The DEBKAfile — trusted source for pro-Israel fantasists all over the world — declared that if it turns out that millions of Iranian industrial units have been hit, “this cyber weapon attack on Iran would be the greatest ever.”
Glee at such a prospect is not shared by observers who lack the Zionist pathological obsession with Iran.
Stephen Spoonamore, a veteran cybersecurity consultant interviewed by NPR said: “I can think of very few stupider blowback decisions” than to release code that controls most of the worlds’ hydroelectric dams or many of the world’s nuclear plants or many of the world’s electrical switching stations.
The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc in China, infecting millions of computers around the country, state media reported this week.
Stuxnet is feared by experts around the globe as it can break into computers that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves.
It could, technically, make factory boilers explode, destroy gas pipelines or even cause a nuclear plant to malfunction.
The virus targets control systems made by German industrial giant Siemens commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities.
“This malware is specially designed to sabotage plants and damage industrial systems, instead of stealing personal data,” an engineer surnamed Wang at antivirus service provider Rising International Software told the Global Times.
“Once Stuxnet successfully penetrates factory computers in China, those industries may collapse, which would damage China’s national security,” he added.
Another unnamed expert at Rising International said the attacks had so far infected more than six million individual accounts and nearly 1,000 corporate accounts around the country, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Jeffrey Carr, author of “Inside Cyber Warfare,” describes what he believes is the first example of Stuxnet’s destructive power: the loss of India’s INSAT-4B communications satellite which shut down in July. The satellite’s control systems use Siemens S7-400 PLC and SIMATIC WinCC software, both of which are targeted by Stuxnet.
If speculation that Stuxnet was created by Israel has been driven by the circumstantial evidence that Israel’s nemesis Iran appears to have been the primary target, there is now some subtle but concrete evidence again pointing in Israel’s direction.
Buried in Stuxnet’s code is a marker with the digits “19790509” that the researchers believe is a “do-not infect” indicator. If the marker equals that value, Stuxnet stops in its tracks, and does not infect the targeted PC.
The researchers — Nicolas Falliere, Liam O Murchu and Eric Chen — speculated that the marker represents a date: May 9, 1979.
“While on May 9, 1979, a variety of historical events occurred, according to Wikipedia “Habib Elghanian was executed by a firing squad in Tehran sending shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community,” the researchers wrote.
Elghanian, a prominent Jewish-Iranian businessman, was charged with spying for Israel by the then-new revolutionary government of Iran, and executed May 9, 1979.
Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.
That use of the word “Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.
Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel’s intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. In interviews in several countries, experts in both cyberwar and nuclear enrichment technology say the Stuxnet mystery may never be solved.
There are many competing explanations for myrtus, which could simply signify myrtle, a plant important to many cultures in the region. But some security experts see the reference as a signature allusion to Esther, a clear warning in a mounting technological and psychological battle as Israel and its allies try to breach Tehran’s most heavily guarded project. Others doubt the Israelis were involved and say the word could have been inserted as deliberate misinformation, to implicate Israel.
The same report cites Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, who said he was “convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.”
“We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level,” he said. “We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment.”
Did Blitzblau present his findings at this week’s VB Conference in Vancouver where Stuxnet was the focus of attention? No — which is not surprising given his vacuous claim to have studied the code at its deepest level while other experts say it will take months to penetrate the thousands of lines of code contained in a 500kB piece of software.
As for why Israeli programmers would have inserted clues about about authorship deep inside the malware, the most obvious explanation would be the most prosaic: pride.
Even when the utmost secrecy is called for, there are those who cannot resist the temptation to leave their mark.
As for the significance of another finding — June 24, 2012 is the “kill date” after which the worm will refuse to execute — again, we can only speculate.
Is this the cut-off point for Israel’s campaign of cyber warfare against Iran after which will come the time for real war? Right in the run up to the 2012 US presidential election.
For weeks now, as missiles from American drones have snuffed out their leaders and terrorized their recruits in the remote mountains of Pakistan’s North Waziristan area, Al Qaeda fighters have kept their spirits up by telling each other they were about to have their revenge. “It’s like they’ve just been waiting for news, as if they were all excited about something big about to happen in the West,” says an Afghan Taliban intelligence officer known to Newsweek who operates as a liaison between his organization and Al Qaeda. For security reasons he would not allow his name to be published. The source said one senior Qaeda activist told him that Europeans and Americans think “our minds and bodies are in the mountains of the [Pakistan] tribal areas, but soon we will carry out a visible offensive with long-term consequences in their own Western homes and cities.”
Reports out of Britain overnight suggest that more than bravado may be at work here: according to anonymous sources cited by Sky News foreign-affairs editor Tim Marshall, intelligence agencies have uncovered terrorist plans to launch simultaneous commando-style attacks in Germany, France, and Britain that would be reminiscent of the slaughter in Mumbai almost two years ago. Such attacks have been a major concern of Western police forces because they require no special weaponry — just guns, training, and a will to die fighting.
Marshall says that the dramatic increase in drone attacks over the last few weeks is intended to disrupt the plot against European targets. One drone strike reportedly killed the head of Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, known as Shaikh Fateh, just last Saturday. Marshall quoted his sources telling him the Qaeda plot was in an “advanced but not imminent stage” and that intelligence agencies had been tracking the operatives “for some time.” The implication is that the onslaught of drone attacks, especially in the last month, has succeeded in thwarting the plot.
If the plot is not at an imminent stage, one wonders why the Eiffel Tower has been evacuated twice this month. But whether imminent or advanced, the logic behind the response to the threat — escalating drone attacks in Pakistan — ought to hinge on where these Qaeda commando teams are now located.
ABC News reports on intelligence gathered from a suspected German terrorist who is now being held at Bagram airbase near Kabul. “The captured German reportedly said several teams of attackers, all with European passports, had been trained and dispatched from training camps in Waziristan and Pakistan.”
If they’ve already been dispatched, what’s the point of launching drone attacks on these training camps now? Is this about thwarting terrorism or about adopting a combative posture? A way of saying: we’re not doing nothing; we’re doing something. It might not work, but we sure as hell won’t take this lying down.
Or maybe it’s what might be called preemptive retribution — a foretaste of what will happen after a major al Qaeda attack.
As Bob Woodward’s new book reveals, “if a Pakistani-based terrorist ever managed to strike inside the United States, the CIA had a ‘retribution plan’ to strike at least 150 camps in Pakistan.”
Retribution is another name for revenge and the inchoate rationale that drives revenge is the desire to eliminate the enemy.
“Who did we get today,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would ask, as though a finite list of drone targets could be whittled down to zero — even while the director of the CIA warned him that this could go on forever.
Almost a decade after 9/11, the mere fact that a retribution plan with 150 targets could be drawn up, is a clear indication of a failed strategy.
Of course this elimination strategy is doomed because it confuses human bodies with the ideas and sentiments that animate them. The bodies can be destroyed but the spirit moves on to animate another combatant. Indeed, the drone can best be seen as the worst kind of force multiplier — one that invigorates the enemy and boosts support among the local population.
As Stephen Farrell astutely noted after being able to observe the Taliban while he was held captive last year, as much as anything else the significance of the drone is not its destructive power but what it signals: the absence of foreign soldiers.
The US commands the sky over Waziristan because it dare not occupy the land.
As for whether a terrorist attack in France is actually imminent, the raised level of alertness prompted by official warnings has been matched by a raised level of suspicion.
Opposition figures and pundits alike have loudly speculated that the troubling pronouncements are actually a ruse to turn attention away from scandals that have implicated government members and from growing protest against pension reform. French media have even suggested that President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose approval ratings are in the doldrums, has borrowed the tactic of the well-timed terrorism scare from the playbook of former U.S. President George W. Bush.
“The French people aren’t duped,” says Socialist Party official and former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in a remark typical of the skeptics. “The fight against terrorism is a serious and discreet effort, incompatible with sudden alert announcements — made, by chance, as protests surge. There’s an element of stagecraft in this that’s out of line and even dangerous.”
The lesson of the last decade should be that what governments do to prevent terrorism matter less than what they do afterwards.
Thus far, local horror has been a reliable catalyst for global folly.
There’s always something seductive about a third way — the way between extremes; the way free of dogma traversed by pragmatists with flexible minds.
Wright’s third way breaks the impasse on the road to a two-state solution by co-opting the one-state solution as a means to mobilize Israeli centrists — Jewish moderates whose worst nightmare would be to live in a state where they shared equal rights with Palestinians.
It’s a strange political landscape where a revulsion for the dismantling of an ethnocracy makes someone a centrist, but I suppose that’s because all “center” really means is the portion of the political spectrum where the largest numbers can be found.
Even so, the center usually has an understated vanity which is that it sees itself as the wellspring of moderation. It’s where people don’t stay up late at night, pay most of their taxes, don’t take illegal drugs and don’t take too much interest in politics.
This is the silent majority whose voice doesn’t get heard because they’re too civil — or, truth be told, too comfortable.
“For a peace deal to happen, Israel’s centrists need to get jarred out of their indifference. Someone needs to scare these people,” Wright says.
And what’s the scariest thing they could face? A one-state solution.
Of course a one-state solution isn’t particularly scary if it’s unlikely to happen and so Wright envisages the Palestinians — as usual the Palestinians are merely supporting actors in this Middle East drama — mobilizing to form an internationally supported non-violent movement demanding just one thing: the right to vote.
The more successful this movement becomes, the more eager Israel’s “centrists” will become in pursuing the only means that could thwart the dreaded prospect of equality.
And so, just in the nick of time, the two-state solution would ride to the rescue and save the Jewish state.
As for the mass movement that coalesced around the compelling idea of equality in a pluralistic secular democracy — they’ll happily give up that idea, knowing it was just a pipe dream, and settle for a Palestinian state which, who knows, could even include East Jerusalem.
Lowkey, a 24-year-old British musician, poet, playwright and political activist of English and Iraqi descent, in an interview on RT News, describes “Obamanation” by saying:
It was an examination of America’s role in the world. The main purpose of the song was to draw the American people’s attention to the way in which they are perceived by the rest of the world. Because I think they very much live in a bubble — I’m somebody that has travelled the United States quite thoroughly, and the media in the United States, by and large, does not actually show what is really going on and people have genuine grievances with United States foreign policy. Whether a person thinks those military bases should exist or not [earlier in the interview, Lowkey referred to the 1,000 US military bases located around the world], I think it would be very hard to disagree that those military bases represent the building of empire and the expansion of empire. And I am not anti-American, I am anti-empire.
For anyone blogging in the US or most other democratic countries, it’s easy to take freedom of speech for granted. The case of Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger who was just sentenced to 19 years in prison, is a salutary reminder of the dangers individuals face when simply voicing their thoughts in a country like Iran. Earlier reports that he might get a death sentence are believed to have been a way to make his actual sentence appear in some way lenient.
Arrested in October 2008, Derakhshan had been charged with “cooperation with hostile states” and “propagating against the regime”, among other counts, the site said. In addition to the lengthy prison term, he was fined and banned from membership in political parties and work in the media for a period of five years.
“We are shocked,” one of Derakhshan’s relatives told IPS on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case and fears of a backlash by security forces. “We never expected this to happen. Even according to Iranian laws, he has not done anything to deserve such a harsh sentence.”
Neither the family nor Derakhshan’s lawyer was aware of the sentence until it appeared on Mashreq’s website. His relative told IPS that Derakhshan did say that after two years in prison, “My state of uncertainty has finally ended,” referring to his long detention without any progress in his case.
Mohammad Ali Mahdavi, Derakhshan’s lawyer, told IPS that the verdict still has not been announced even to him. “I’m waiting for the official announcement to start working on the defence bill for the appeals court,” he said, adding, “I prefer to defend my client rather than bringing the case to the media as it might endanger the fate of the case at this phase.”
Judge Abolqasem Salavati is amongst three judges who are well-known for issuing long and harsh sentences for political prisoners, particularly the post-election detainees. His rulings have included the death sentence and numerous long-term prison sentences.
“I believe that first of all, the charges are totally unfounded, and the verdict demonstrates the injustice that many people have been talking about all these years,” Nikahang Kowsar, an award-winning Iranian cartoonist and blogger based in Toronto, where Derakhshan used to live, told IPS.
“Hossein wasn’t a very nice guy to many of us,” Kowsar said. “He criticised many journalists, bloggers and activists for being critical of the Iranian regime and ridiculing Iran’s leaders. He called us ‘agents of neo-liberalism’ or ‘enemies of Iran’ and tried to portray us as the ones willing to sell our nation to the West, but he was absolutely entitled to express his mind.”
Derakhshan, also known as Hoder, has been dubbed Iran’s “Blogfather” for his role in promoting blogging among Iranians via his popular website, hoder.com.
Immediately following the reform era in 1999, Derakhshan was a technology and internet columnist for one of the reformist newspapers in Tehran. In 2000, he moved to Canada and continued his work as a full-time blogger in Toronto.
In 2006, Derakhshan traveled to Israel as a Canadian citizen, a trip that caused a huge controversy in Iran and abroad, as Iranian law forbids Iranian citizens from traveling to Israel.
“We have a saying in Iran: ‘There is freedom of speech in Iran, but there is no freedom after speech in Iran’,” said Kowsar. “His captors are willing to make an example of him for others,” he added.
Derakhshan’s former wife, Marjan Alema was interviewed on Canadian television earlier today:
Did the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius really travel all the way to Pir Sabak, west of Islamabad in flood-devastated Pakistan, just to ask the villagers there what they think of America?
When I arrived, villagers were erecting a big tent to serve as a mosque — even before they had built a school for their kids. When I asked what they thought about America, they had no criticisms. “We are in a time of need, and we are looking for help from anywhere,” said Mohammed Ali, a white-bearded man who was helping raise the canvas mosque.
The U.S. military has been working hard to provide flood assistance, but most of that is invisible to Pakistanis. They read about American drone attacks but not about helicopters bringing food supplies. That lack of recognition upsets U.S. officials, but they haven’t been able to change it.
On a day’s tour of the northern flood zone, I saw posters for Turkish, British and other European relief groups, but not one sign of American help. That’s a missed opportunity. These people still need help desperately, and they will remember those who visibly provided it.
I guess if USAID takes Ignatius’ message to heart, they might start producing multi-lingual labeling for aid packaging. But as the Post columnist learned, those in desperate need don’t care too much about where the help comes from.
As for what changes perceptions, it’s a shame Ignatius wasn’t in Pir Shabak a month ago during the visit by Baroness Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim minister and Chairwoman of the Conservative Party.
Just imagine if the US government could send a Muslim woman cabinet level official on a diplomatic mission to a Muslim country — or for that matter, on a trip to Florida or Tennessee!
While men like Imam Feisal Rauf are struggling to win acceptance for Muslims within American society, Sayeeda Hussain Warsi can speak confidently as a Muslim feminist and British political leader who exemplifies what it means to create a modern pluralistic society.
If many Israelis thought the approach of the Mavi Marmara flotilla looked like an imminent attack by a Turkish armada, a British-flagged catamaran carrying nine Jewish activists on their way to Gaza surely posed no threat to the Jewish state — or did it?
The IDF couldn’t take any chances and so as the Irene approached Gaza early today, Israeli commandos intercepted the latest waterborne menace and took over the boat, thankfully without killing anyone.
“The boarding of the yacht was without incident, and no violence of any kind was used by neither the passengers on board nor the Israel naval forces,” the IDF Spokesperson blog declared.
Israeli activist and former Israel Air Force pilot Yonatan Shapira saying that there were “no words to describe what we went through during the takeover.”
Shapira said the activists, who he said displayed no violence, were met with extreme IDF brutality, adding that the soldiers “just jumped us, and hit us. I was hit with a taser gun.”
“Some of the soldiers treated us atrociously,” Shapira said, adding that he felt there was a “huge gap between what the IDF spokesman is saying happened and what really happened.”
Meanwhile, Yossi Levy, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman who has been carefully trained in the Avigdor Lieberman school of diplomacy encapsulated the government’s position in a string of insults.
The Foreign Ministry expressed its anger against the Israelis and Jews who took part in the sail. According to a ministry official, “They poured fuel into the bonfire of hatred against Israel worldwide. We don’t expect Israelis to be patriotic, but they should definitely not act as Hamas followers.”
The official criticized former pilot Yonatan Shapira and the Holocaust survivor who took part in the flotilla.
“This former pilot, who has joined the ranks of Hamas and sprays hateful graffiti [“FreePalestine“] on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, is not a pilot but an astronaut. A Holocaust survivor who sanctifies the name of the Jews’ murderers and takes time to justify those who don’t accept Israel’s right for sovereignty has probably not learned anything from the terrible past.”
Reuben Moscowitz begged to differ as he expressed disbelief that “Israeli soldiers would treat nine Jews this way. They just hit people.”
“I as a Holocaust survivor cannot live with the fact that the State of Israel is imprisoning an entire people behind fences,” Moscowitz said, adding that “it’s just immoral.”
“What happened to me in the Holocaust wakes me up every night and I hope we don’t do the same thing to our neighbors,” Moscowitz said, adding that he was comparing “what I went through during the Holocaust to what the besieged Palestinian children are going through.”
Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, reveals that the White House was so enamored with the CIA’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, that chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would regularly call the CIA director, Leon Panetta, asking, “Who did we get today?”
Emanuel may have been posing the question because, like President Obama, he shares a perverse thrill in remote killing. Or, he might have asked because Predator warfare turns out to be far less accurate than it proponents would like us to believe.
A legal dispute that was being hammered out in a Boston court this summer, revealed that in its haste to deploy drones, the CIA was willing to use location analysis software that could result in strikes that would be as much as 42 feet off target!
That’s the difference between aiming at one house and destroying the house next door.
Leaving aside the question about how accurate ones intelligence might be about who is inhabiting either house, or the legal issues of what constitutes the battlefield and what can justify extrajudicial killing, or the moral issue of defining innocent bystanders as “collateral damage” — this looks like a case of not being able to shoot straight.
The CIA is implicated in a court case in which it’s claimed it used an illegal, inaccurate software “hack” to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia.
The target of the court action is Netezza, the data warehousing firm that IBM bid $1.7bn for on Monday [Sept 20]. The case raises serious questions about the conduct of Netezza executives, and the conduct of CIA’s clandestine war against senior jihadis in Afganistan and Pakistan.
The dispute surrounds a location analysis software package – “Geospatial” – developed by a small company called Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), which like Netezza is based in Massachusetts. IISi alleges that Netezza misled the CIA by saying that it could deliver the software on its new hardware, to a tight deadline.
When the software firm then refused to rush the job, it’s claimed, Netezza illegally and hastily reverse-engineered IISi’s code to deliver a version that produced locations inaccurate by up to 13 metres [42 feet]. Despite knowing about the miscalculations, the CIA accepted the software, court submissions indicate.
This report comes on the heals of an earlier report which revealed that the military’s use of unencrypted communications channels in Iraq allowed militants to view live video images being transmitted by drones. As the Wall Street Journal reported in December:
Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
Given that President Obama has authorized as many drone attacks since the end of March as his predecessor did in the previous four years, and given that in Pakistan there is a widespread belief that these attacks indiscriminately kill innocent people, and given that this perception is fueling a deepening hatred of America, one might imagine that revelations about the weaknesses of the drone program would result in a serious reexamination of its value.
Sharmine Narwani interviews Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled Meshaal (part two):
Palestinian resistance group Hamas has beaten some unusual odds to survive today: Israel’s unlawful siege of Gaza has crippled the coastal strip’s economy and left Hamas scrambling to govern a restless population living under increasingly desperate conditions. Its officials and members are targeted by Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) for detention, torture and extrajudicial killings. Pro-US Arab leaders undermine it at every turn, partly to satisfy American demands, partly because they fear the widespread popularity of any moderate Islamist resistance group among their own populations.
Classified by the US as a “terrorist” organization, Hamas has spent the past year battling armed Salafist extremists who want to enforce Islamic law in the Gaza Strip and who view the Hamas leadership as too weak-willed to challenge Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
It is ironic that Hamas today is criticized for being hardline — and liberal too. Militant — and not militant enough. Islamist — and not Islamist enough. Iranian stooges — and US pawns, both.
I expected to see some of these contradictions in Khaled Meshaal, head of Hamas’ political bureau, when I interviewed him in Damascus recently. What I discovered instead is that, like a select crop of leaders we are seeing in the Middle East today, Meshaal refuses to be seen through one lens only. A real challenge for US policymakers with their unidimensional approach to regional politics.
The former high school physics teacher convincingly argues that the New Middle East is one where nations need to keep their “options open.” He rejects a regional status-quo where countries stay in “blocs” unthinkingly, and vehemently argues against the notion that Mideast democracy and reform cannot advance unless foreign intervention ends.
Khaled Meshaal: Look at a country like Qatar – it has good relations with the United States, used to have a degree of relations with Israel until the Gaza War, and is considered to be a moderate and liberal state. Qatar’s foreign policy is being formed by the views of its leader, the Emir. The situation in the region created a belief, for a country like Qatar, that if it wants to have a role in the region, it has to open up its options in all directions. The one who keeps himself away from the relevant elements in the region, he won’t be relevant himself. In Qatar you have this leadership – someone who is smart and courageous like the Emir. He understands and realizes full well the aspirations and the mood of his own people and the people of the region. So he adopts those issues and causes which are popular among his constituencies, among those nations – which works well if those issues are already close to his own beliefs and his own interests.
Keeping in mind that other Arab countries have for decades been unable to present a successful model that is attractive for others to adopt, this new regional state model has thrived in recent years. These countries – Qatar, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Turkey – share some common elements, but they are not identical to each other. They each have their own modus operandi and interests. Something these nations do share, however, is the self-desire to develop this new trend, but at the same time to remain open – not closed or bound – to enjoying options.
Sharmine Narwani: Not dogmatic, as in the past…
KM: …ah yes, not like that. Why should we be dividing ourselves into two blocs – either being against America and the West, or acquiescing 100% to them?
The people in the region, they are looking for leadership to match their own aspirations and ambitions. In a way we need a model where democracy is there, internal reform, successful economy, justice at the social level – and at the same time, there is independence in their political decisions, away from acquiescing to the threats of Israel – and not being a proxy to foreign, American and Western policies. We do not want to wage a war against the world. Or to sever relations with countries. So the nations and the people of the region want a state model based on self respect – without any enmity with the world. [Read the rest of the interview here.]
The first part of this interview can be read here.
On Monday, Meshaal called on the Palestinian acting president Mahmoud Abbas to end talks with Israel after Prime Minister Netanyahu failed to extend the settlement slowdown which expired on Sunday. Early Monday morning, bulldozers were clearing ground to construct new homes for Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
America’s decade long “war on terror” has been deployment heavy, with little time at home in between.
That experience is translating into some worrying figures at America’s largest military base, Fort Hood, in Texas – home to 60,000 troops, one tenth of the US army. Channel 4 News was given exclusive access to the base, to look at their new arrangements for dealing with soldiers bearing the psychological and physical scars of war.
In the past six months at Fort Hood, soldiers have had 10,000 counselling sessions. Some 6,000 servicemen and women there are on anti-depressants, 1,400 on anti-psychotics.
It is a battle on the home front the US military never planned for. And it is scrambled to come up with the right kind of help for those soldiers who so desperately need it. There are now 36 of these so called “Warrior Transition Units” on bases across the US, currently caring for 9,000 soldiers.
The army says there are centres of excellence, designed to offer appropriate care within a military structure, to soldiers with complex, serious, physical and mental health problems. But the units have also been called warehouses for despair, where soldiers are overmedicated, and roughly treated.
The US government might not have enough evidence to issue an arrest warrant for a US citizen but it claims the right to kill such a person and to keep secret its reasons for doing so.
The U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi is now on the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command capture-or-kill list of suspected terrorists. He is not however on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist list and has not been indicted. It is believed that he is being hunted down and that he will be killed, if his exact whereabouts become known, but even if that is the case, this “does not foreclose Anwar al-Aulaqi’s access to the courts,” claim Barack H Obama, Robert M Gates and Leon E Panetta, the defendants in a federal case brought by Aulaqi’s father.
Nasser al-Aulaqi has an old-fashioned conception of justice and believes his son has a right to due process and not be subject to a summary execution.
[W]hat’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.
At the very same time that this administration is pushing to expand the boundaries of state secrecy and extra-judicial power it also wants to restrict citizens’ rights to privacy as it seeks sweeping new regulations for the internet that would provide the government with the means to access all electronic communications.
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.
In the post 9/11 national security culture, arguments in favor of the expansion of government power are invariably framed in terms of enhancing the security services’ ability to track down “bad guys.” But as the article notes, enhanced surveillance capabilities will also create opportunities of others.
Several privacy and technology advocates argued that requiring interception capabilities would create holes that would inevitably be exploited by hackers.
Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.
“I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he said. “If they start building in all these back doors, they will be exploited.”
The Greek case — sometimes referred to as the Greek Watergate — is interesting for several reasons. As the Times in another report today on the Stuxnet attack notes, “The level of skill needed to pull off the [Greek] operation and the targets strongly indicated that the culprit was a government.”
Indeed, the list of targets alone makes it hard to imagine that this was anything other than an intelligence agency-run operation. The phones bugged included not only those of the Greek prime minister and his wife but also, IEEE Spectrum reported, those of:
…the ministers of national defense, foreign affairs, and justice, the mayor of Athens, and the Greek European Union commissioner… Others belonged to members of civil rights organizations, peace activists, and antiglobalization groups; senior staff at the ministries of National Defense, Public Order, Merchant Marine, and Foreign Affairs; the New Democracy ruling party; the Hellenic Navy general staff; and a Greek-American employee at the United States Embassy in Athens.
Given the context of the then-upcoming 2004 Athens Olympics which were widely regarded as a potential target for a major act of terrorism, it seems quite likely that this was a CIA-run operation.
Since we live in what is still widely regarded as the “freest” nation on earth, as the Obama administration quietly moves to expand its powers, we should have no doubt that the national security culture that is being established here as a new normal, will also serve as a model for other nations that will justify even more extreme restrictions on civil liberties by virtue of the similarities these measures bear to the American way.
The architecture of world government is not being crafted at the United Nations but behind closed doors at the NSA and the CIA. The people we should be most afraid of are the people who promise to make us feel safe.
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The disclosure of the details of a letter reportedly sent by President Barack Obama last week to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will cause Palestinians to be even more skeptical about U.S. and Israeli roles in the current peace talks.
After three Frontier Corps soldiers were killed in a NATO helicopter attack on a Pakistani border post last week, the Pakistani government cut off supplies to Afghanistan by closing the Torkham border crossing. It was the easiest way of sending a message to Washington that killing Pakistani soldiers is unacceptable.
The State website usefully provides a map, just in case anyone isn’t sure where Europe is. Should Americans already there jump on the first plane to head home? Apparently not.
Arrested in October 2008, Derakhshan had been charged with “cooperation with hostile states” and “propagating against the regime”, among other counts, the site said. In addition to the lengthy prison term, he was fined and banned from membership in political parties and work in the media for a period of five years. 
Bob Woodward’s new book, 
Classified by the US as a “terrorist” organization, Hamas has spent the past year battling armed Salafist extremists who want to enforce Islamic law in the Gaza Strip and who view the Hamas leadership as too weak-willed to challenge Israel’s occupation of Palestine.