An AFP report earlier today reveals that the Stuxnet malware has been found at Iran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr. (All the blockquotes below are from the AFP report.)
Iranian officials confirm that 30,000 industrial computers in Iran have been hit by Stuxnet yet deny that Bushehr was among those infected.
That might be what Iranian officials believe, but whether it’s a belief based on fact is another matter.
As we get further into this report, it becomes apparent there is a high probability both that Bushehr has been penetrated and that the malware may still be active.
Siemens said its software has not been installed at the plant, and an Iranian official denied the malware may have infected nuclear facilities.
Siemens might not know that its software was installed at the plant, but thanks to a UPI photograph, we know that Bushehr control systems do indeed run on Siemens’ WinCC SCADA system. The warning shown below says: “WinCC Runtime License: Your software license has expired. Please obtain a valid license.”
This is what Ralph Langner, a German industrial security expert, saw as a red flag indicating that the plant is vulnerable to a cyber attack.
“This virus has not caused any damage to the main systems of the Bushehr power plant,” Bushehr project manager Mahmoud Jafari said on Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam television network.
“All computer programmes in the plant are working normally and have not crashed due to Stuxnet,” said Jafari, adding there was no problem with the plant’s fuel supply.
The official IRNA news agency meanwhile quoted him as saying the worm had infected some “personal computers of the plant’s personnel.”
And no infected personal computers have been hooked into the plants control system?
As indicated in this photograph showing Russian contractors inside Bushehr, the path from a personal computer to the plant’s control system is short and direct.
As for the fact that Bushehr’s control system has not crashed, the fact that the project manager cites this as evidence that the system is malware-free suggests that he does not understand how Stuxnet is designed. Stuxnet monitors process conditions and until those conditions have been met, everything should work fine. This is not like a virus that slows down an operating system.
Given the inside knowledge that Stuxnet’s creators required, it seems quite likely that the moment they would want it to kick into action — assuming that Bushehr was the intended target — would be a moment at which a catastrophic system failure could be attributed to a flaw in the facility’s construction, design or operation. A failure, for instance, as the plant approaches its intended full operational generation capacity. The 1000 megawatt plant is expected to have reached only 40% capacity by the end of December.
Telecommunications minister Reza Taqipour said “the worm has not been able to penetrate or cause serious damage to government systems.”
Again, this statement suggests a lack of understanding about Stuxnet’s highly targeted design and the fact that it is designed not to cause damage elsewhere.
Mahmoud Liayi, head of the information technology council at the ministry of industries said:
…industries were currently receiving systems to combat Stuxnet, while stressing Iran had decided not to use anti-virus software developed by Siemens because “they could be carrying a new version of the malware.”
“When Stuxnet is activated, the industrial automation systems start transmitting data about production lines to a main designated destination by the virus,” Liayi said.
“There, the data is processed by the worm’s architects and then engineer plots to attack the country.”
If this is the official consensus, Iranian facilities such as Bushehr are as vulnerable now as they were before anyone knew about Stuxnet. Liayi’s statement suggests that Stuxnet is being viewed as a tool of espionage designed to facilitate rather than execute sabotage.
In an interview on Bloomberg TV, Richard Falkenrath suggested that Israel is the most likely source of the Stuxnet malware which seems designed to cripple industrial facilities in Iran.
Falkenrath is currently the Deputy Commissioner of Counter-Terrorism for the NYPD and held several positions in the George W Bush White House including Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Homeland Security Advisor.
The Associated Press says that experts from Iran’s nuclear agency met this week to discuss how to combat the Stuxnet attack on Iranian facilities, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency.
The director of the Information Technology Council of the Industries and Mines Ministry has announced that the IP addresses of 30,000 industrial computer systems infected by this malware have been detected, the Mehr New Agency reported on Saturday.
“An electronic war has been launched against Iran,” Mahmoud Liaii added.
“This computer worm is designed to transfer data about production lines from our industrial plants to (locations) outside of the country,” he said.
He also announced that a working group composed of representatives from the Communications and Information Technology Ministry, the Industries and Mines Ministry, and the Passive Defense Organization has been set up to find ways to combat the spyware.
Graph shows concentration of Stuxnet-infected computers in Iran as of August. Source: Symantec
Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kaspersky Lab, says that the creation of Stuxnet marks the beginning of the new age of cyber-warfare.
Speaking at the Kaspersky Security Symposium with international journalists in Munich, Germany, Kaspersky described Stuxnet as the opening of “Pandora’s Box.”
“This malicious program was not designed to steal money, send spam, grab personal data, no, this piece of malware was designed to sabotage plants, to damage industrial systems,” he said.
“I am afraid this is the beginning of a new world. [The] 90’s were a decade of cyber-vandals, 2000’s were a decade of cybercriminals, I am afraid now it is a new era of cyber-wars and cyber-terrorism,” Kaspersky added.
Among industrial security experts who are convinced that Iran is the target of the Stuxnet attack, a debate has opened up around which facility the malware was designed to strike.
Frank Rieger, a German researcher with GSMK, a Berlin encryption firm, suggests that the Natanz enrichment facility looks like the most likely target. He laid out his reasoning to the Christian Science Monitor.
• Stuxnet had a halt date. Internal time signatures in Stuxnet appear to prevent it from spreading across computer systems after July 2009. That probably means the attack had to be conducted by then – though such time signatures are not certain.
• Stuxnet appears designed to take over centrifuges’ programmable logic controllers. Natanz has thousands of identical centrifuges and identical programmable logic controllers (PLCs), tiny computers for each centrifuge that oversee the centrifuge’s temperature, control valves, operating speed, and flow of cooling water. Stuxnet’s internal design would allow the malware to take over PLCs one after another, in a cookie-cutter fashion.
“It seems like the parts of Stuxnet dealing with PLCs have been designed to work on multiple nodes at once – which makes it fit well with a centrifuge plant like Natanz,” Rieger says. By contrast, Bushehr is a big central facility with many disparate PLCs performing many different functions. Stuxnet seems focused on replicating its intrusion across a lot of identical units in a single plant, he says.
Natanz also may have been hit by Stuxnet in mid-2009, Rieger says. He notes that “a serious, recent, nuclear accident” was reported at that time on WikiLeaks, the same organization that recently revealed US Afghanistan-war documents. About the same time, the BBC reported that the head of Iran’s nuclear agency had resigned.
Lending some credence to the notion that Stuxnet attacked more than a year ago, he says, is the International Atomic Energy Agency’s finding of a sudden 15 percent drop in the number of working centrifuges at the Natanz site.
Even though Natanz would seem like a logical target to choose if the objective of the attackers was to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, Rieger’s inference — that the halt date preventing Stuxnet spreading means the attack had to take place before July 2009 — is questionable, for at least two reasons.
Firstly, given that the designers had a very specific target, their aim is likely to have been to penetrate that target while trying to limit the proliferation of the malware and thus reduce the risks of the operation’s exposure.
As previously reported, another German industrial security expert, Ralph Langner, has speculated that the Bushehr nuclear reactor is the most likely target. He bases this theory on various pieces of circumstantial evidence.
Firstly, it is known that Bushehr uses the Siemens SCADA systems that Stuxnet targets and that access to these systems available to Russian contractors working on the facility would allow the malware to be installed through USB memory sticks.
Secondly, photographic evidence shows that the facility had very weak cyber security.
A journalist’s photo from inside the Bushehr plant in early 2009, which Langner found on a public news website, shows a computer-screen schematic diagram of a process control system – but also a small dialog box on the screen with a red warning symbol. Langner says the image on the computer screen is of a Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) industrial software control system called Simatic WinCC – and the little warning box reveals that the software was not installed or configured correctly, and was not licensed. That photo was a red flag that the nuclear plant was vulnerable to a cyberattack, he says.
“Bushehr has all kinds of missiles around it to protect it from an airstrike,” Langner says. “But this little screen showed anyone that understood what that picture meant … that these guys were just simply begging to be [cyber]attacked.”
The picture was reportedly taken on Feb. 25, 2009, by which time the reactor should have had its cybersystems up and running and bulletproof, Langner says. The photo strongly suggests that they were not, he says. That increases the likelihood that Russian contractors unwittingly spread Stuxnet via their USB drives to Bushehr, he says.
“The attackers realized they could not get to the target simply through the Internet – a nuclear plant is not reachable that way,” he says. “But the engineers who commission such plants work very much with USBs like those Stuxnet exploited to spread itself. They’re using notebook computers and using the USBs to connect to one machine, then maybe going 20 yards away to another machine.”
Langner also cites international concern about the Bushehr reactor becoming operational.
This is a somewhat weaker strand of his argument. After all, the existence of this Russian-fueled reactor was widely seen as a demonstration of the fact that Iran could, it it chooses, have a civilian nuclear energy program without any need for a uranium enrichment program.
There is however another argument that can be made in which Bushehr becomes the target of cyberwarfare, even if it might not be a vital node in Iran’s nuclear program. In this scenario, Stuxnet would not be designed to perform its function until the reactor becomes fully operational. At that point, the malware would not simply stop the reactor working — it would trigger a Chernobyl-type nuclear meltdown.
Why would the attackers want to precipitate such a catastrophic event?
In the hope that such an “accident” would make the Iranian government look unfit to safely operate any kind of nuclear program.
To undermine Iranian domestic support for the program.
To alienate Iran from its Gulf neighbors who would be exposed to the fallout.
When John Bolton was last month melodramatically counting the days left for Israel to launch a missile strike on Bushehr, it was ostensibly because once the plant was fueled the Israelis would no longer be willing to risk the lives of so many in the region. With Gulf shipping lanes also closed down for an indeterminate period after an Israeli strike, the global economic impact would be severe.
On the other hand, in the event that Israel struck but did not fire a single missile and could not be shown to be responsible, the results of its own cost-benefit analysis — vastly different from that of the US — might make a devastating cyber attack on Bushehr seem well worth the risk.
In an analysis of Israel’s expanding cyberwarfare capabilities, Scott Borg, director of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, which advises various Washington agencies on cyber security, told Reuters last year that an Israeli attack on an Iranian nuclear facility could employ “malware loitering unseen and awaiting an external trigger, or pre-set to strike automatically when the infected facility reaches a more critical level of activity.”
The decision by Iranian authorities to announce that they have an ongoing investigation on how to thwart Stuxnet, suggests that they may now also be reassessing the risks of bringing Bushehr online as a fully operational facility.
Postscript: Even though discussion on the whole subject of Stuxnet’s purpose and origin is at this point highly speculative, some readers may view my suggestion that the goal is to cause a Chernobyl-type disaster to be a particularly wild conjecture. Maybe it is, but here’s a little more of my thinking on why that would be a plausible objective.
There is little reason to doubt that Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum are serious in their stated objections to Iran’s nuclear program. (Whether those objections correspond with Iran’s genuine nuclear ambitions is another question, as is the question of whether a nuclear-armed Iran would actually pose an existential threat to Israel.)
Among analysts inside and outside Israel there is a broad consensus that military action aimed at crippling Iran’s nuclear facilities would accomplish no more than cause a setback of a few years in the program. The same applies to sabotage.
Given the broad national support the nuclear program has, there is also reason to doubt that regime change would necessarily result in Iran’s enrichment program being scrapped.
What those who fear a nuclear-armed Iran hope to see is a credible political shift as a result of which Iran’s nuclear intentions are no longer in doubt and are demonstrably peaceful. (Which is to say, an ideal end-state similar to the one adopted by South Africa when it chose to abandon nuclear weapons — an ironic comparison of course, given that it was Israel that helped South Africa become a nuclear-armed state.)
For that reason, coercion (through sanctions) and military force are both potentially counterproductive in that pressure generally produces resistance.
On the other hand, the desired outcome might be reached if the Iranians through their own volition came to the conclusion that the costs of nuclear development outweighed the benefits. A catastrophic “accident” might be instrumental in bringing about a change of perspective through which for Iran as a nation, nuclear power lost most of its appeal.
Needless to say, if such an accident was exposed to be the result of an Israeli cyber attack, the plan would dangerously backfire.
Do intelligence agencies come up with such reckless plans? All the time.
Inveterate gamers will no doubt see another possibility here — that Stuxnet is part of a psy-ops plan designed to provoke a greater fear of catastrophic damage than it can actually cause. Possibly, but to identify and then exploit four Windows vulnerabilities suggests that the creators of this malware were willing to employ every possible resource at their disposal. In other words, they were seriously intent on doing damage — not just provoking fear.
The details of a bizarre incident at an Afghan National Police facility in Ghazni, eastern Afghanistan, on July 18, 2008, are still in dispute. Even so, the woman at the center of the story will probably spend the rest of her life in jail.
Without any evidence being produced that she had fired a shot from a gun she reportedly grabbed while being held under arrest, Dr Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-educated Pakistani neuroscientist, was convicted of attempted murder in February. On Thursday, District Court Judge Richard Berman sentenced the 38-year-old to 86 years in prison. In response, protesters took to the streets in Pakistan.
The jury found that Siddiqui acted without premeditation. But in a four-hour sentencing hearing, Judge Richard Berman repeatedly termed her acts premeditated. Her defense lawyers argued for a minimum sentence of 12 years, saying that Siddiqui is severely mentally ill.
Needless to say, the case now goes to appeal.
Defense attorney Charles Swift said that government authorities never made available the U.S. military reports on the incident. He said the report, which was declassified by the government after it was published this year on the WikiLeaks website, does not mention Siddiqui as having fired the gun. It said only that she pointed a weapon. He said he believes there was a further in-depth investigation of the incident by the military that has also been withheld from the defense.
“I think there’s real concern over the government’s obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence,” he told reporters. “And I don’t blame the prosecution in this case. What I’ve found in national security cases like this is they have as big a battle trying to get evidence as anyone does. But the United States, to do justice, has to do it credibly and has to produce all the documents. And that’s one of three or four huge ongoing appellate issues.”
If Charles Swift sounds like a familiar name it’s because he has the rare distinction of having stood up and successfully defended his country while its Constitution faced attack from the Bush administration. In Hamdan vs Rumsfeld, Swift won a major victory for the rule of law.
The case of Dr Siddiqui exposes a moral fallacy that has haunted America throughout the war on terrorism. It is this: that injustice is something that can only be done to the innocent.
We have abandoned what used to be the universally recognized foundation of a just legal system: that it treats the guilty and the innocent with fairness and impartiality.
—
(For fascinating background on the Siddiqui case, read Declan Walsh’s November 2009 report in The Guardian.)
Johann Hari interviews Gideon Levy: “the most hated man in Israel — and perhaps the most heroic.”
Any conversation about the region is now dominated by a string of propaganda myths, [Levy] says, and perhaps the most basic is the belief that Israel is a democracy. “Today we have three kinds of people living under Israeli rule,” he explains. “We have Jewish Israelis, who have full democracy and have full civil rights. We have the Israeli Arabs, who have Israeli citizenship but are severely discriminated against. And we have the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, who live without any civil rights, and without any human rights. Is that a democracy?”
He sits back and asks in a low tone, as if talking about a terminally ill friend: “How can you say it is a democracy when, in 62 years, there was not one single Arab village established? I don’t have to tell you how many Jewish towns and villages were established. Not one Arab village. How can you say it’s a democracy when research has shown repeatedly that Jews and Arabs get different punishments for the same crime? How can you say it’s a democracy when a Palestinian student can hardly rent an apartment in Tel Aviv, because when they hear his accent or his name almost nobody will rent to him? How can you say Israel is a democracy when? Jerusalem invests 577 shekels a year in a pupil in [Palestinian] East Jerusalem and 2372 shekels a year in a pupil from [Jewish] West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of the child’s ethnicity! Every part of our society is racist.”
“I want to be proud of my country,” he says. “I am an Israeli patriot. I want us to do the right thing.” So this requires him to point out that Palestinian violence is – in truth – much more limited than Israeli violence, and usually a reaction to it. “The first twenty years of the occupation passed quietly, and we did not lift a finger to end it. Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise,” where Palestinian land is seized by Jewish religious fundamentalists who claim it was given to them by God. Only then – after a long period of theft, and after their attempts at peaceful resistance were met with brutal violence – did the Palestinians become violent themselves. “What would happen if the Palestinians had not fired Qassams [the rockets shot at Southern Israel, including civilian towns]? Would Israel have lifted the economic siege? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda. Nobody would give any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they had not behaved violently.”
He unequivocally condemns the firing of rockets at Israeli civilians, but adds: “The Qassams have a context. They are almost always fired after an IDF assassination operation, and there have been many of these.” Yet the Israeli attitude is that “we are allowed to bomb anything we want but they are not allowed to launch Qassams.” It is a view summarised by Haim Ramon, the justice minister at time of Second Lebanon War: “We are allowed to destroy everything.”
After coming away from a dinner hosted by American Jewish leaders for Mahmoud Abbas, Roger Cohen comes away “convinced the United States is on the brink of a diplomatic fiasco.”
Less than a month after President Obama put the imprimatur of a White House ceremony on renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks, the negotiations are close to breakdown. If that happens, as Netanyahu and Abbas know, Obama would look amateurish.
The two leaders need the United States, an incentive to avoid humiliating Obama. But with just a couple of days to the expiration Sunday of an Israeli freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank, both sides are digging in. Despite Obama’s public plea to Netanyahu — “It makes sense to extend that moratorium” — the Israeli government seems to have rejected a formal extension.
That would be a terrible mistake. Obama should fight it until the last minute. His international credibility is on the line.
Cohen regards Netanyahu’s decision on whether he will call for a three-month extension of the settlement “freeze,” “a test case of Israeli seriousness about peace.”
Really?
This is how serious the settlement freeze has been so far.
In the third quarter of 2009, before the restrictions were imposed last November, there were 2,790 settlement homes in various stages of construction, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. The number rose to 2,955 in the last quarter of 2009, reflecting a last-minute surge of housing starts in the days leading up to the freeze.
In the first quarter of 2010, with the freeze in full effect, the number stood at 2,517.
That means that even months into the halt, the number of homes under construction had declined by only about 10 percent.
So, the continuation of a modest slow down in settlement expansion for three months will prove Netanyahu’s serious about peace?
Who knew peace could come be promised that easily?
At that point it was already understood that the Stuxnet computer worm was almost certainly targeting Iran since that was the location of 60% of the computer systems affected. Moreover, since the worm targets Siemens SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) management systems that control energy utilities, and since its design strongly suggested that it had been created for sabotage, it seemed likely that the specific target was Iran’s nuclear program.
A German team of industrial cyber security experts who have analyzed the way the worm operates now claim that it may have been designed to attack the newly operational Bushehr nuclear reactor.
Ralph Langner envisages that the highly sophisticated attack would have required a preparation team that included “intel, covert ops, exploit writers, process engineers, control system engineers, product specialists, military liaison.”
Since reverse engineering chunks of Stuxnet’s massive code, senior US cyber security experts confirm what Mr. Langner, the German researcher, told the Monitor: Stuxnet is essentially a precision, military-grade cyber missile deployed early last year to seek out and destroy one real-world target of high importance — a target still unknown.
“Stuxnet is a 100-percent-directed cyber attack aimed at destroying an industrial process in the physical world,” says Langner, who last week became the first to publicly detail Stuxnet’s destructive purpose and its authors’ malicious intent. “This is not about espionage, as some have said. This is a 100 percent sabotage attack.”
On his website, Langner lays out the Stuxnet code he has dissected. He shows step by step how Stuxnet operates as a guided cyber missile. Three top US industrial control system security experts, each of whom has also independently reverse-engineered portions of Stuxnet, confirmed his findings to the Monitor.
“His technical analysis is good,” says a senior US researcher who has analyzed Stuxnet, who asked for anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the press. “We’re also tearing [Stuxnet] apart and are seeing some of the same things.”
Other experts who have not themselves reverse-engineered Stuxnet but are familiar with the findings of those who have concur with Langner’s analysis.
“What we’re seeing with Stuxnet is the first view of something new that doesn’t need outside guidance by a human – but can still take control of your infrastructure,” says Michael Assante, former chief of industrial control systems cyber security research at the US Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory. “This is the first direct example of weaponized software, highly customized and designed to find a particular target.”
“I’d agree with the classification of this as a weapon,” Jonathan Pollet, CEO of Red Tiger Security and an industrial control system security expert, says in an e-mail.
Langner’s research, outlined on his website Monday, reveals a key step in the Stuxnet attack that other researchers agree illustrates its destructive purpose. That step, which Langner calls “fingerprinting,” qualifies Stuxnet as a targeted weapon, he says.
Langner zeroes in on Stuxnet’s ability to “fingerprint” the computer system it infiltrates to determine whether it is the precise machine the attack-ware is looking to destroy. If not, it leaves the industrial computer alone. It is this digital fingerprinting of the control systems that shows Stuxnet to be not spyware, but rather attackware meant to destroy, Langner says.
Langer speculates that Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant may have been the Stuxnet target. He also writes: “The forensics that we are getting will ultimately point clearly to the attacked process — and to the attackers. The attackers must know this. My conclusion is, they don’t care. They don’t fear going to jail.”
If Bushehr was indeed the target, it may have presented itself first and foremost as a target of opportunity. From the point of view of governments with an interest in sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program, Bushehr would not be the most attractive target, but access provided to Russian contractors may have made it the easiest target.
Last September, Reuters reported: “Israel has been developing ‘cyber-war’ capabilities that could disrupt Iranian industrial and military control systems.”
So let’s assume that using Stuxnet, Israel has indeed launched the world’s first precision, military-grade cyber missile. What are the implications?
1. Iran has been served notice that not only its nuclear facilities but its whole industrial infrastructure is vulnerable to attack. As Trevor Butterworth noted: “By demonstrating how Iran could so very easily experience a Chernobyl-like catastrophe, or the entire destruction of its conventional energy grid, the first round of the ‘war’ may have already been won.”
2. The perception that it has both developed capabilities and shown its willingness to engage in cyberwarfare, will serve Israel as a strategic asset even if it never admits to having launched Stuxnet.
3. When it comes to cyberwarfare, Israel ranks as a major global power. It’s own tiny infrastructure makes it much less vulnerable to attack than is the sprawling infrastructure of the United States. It’s highly developed military IT industry means that it not only has great domestic human resources but that Israeli IT specialists, through research and employment, have the best possible access to most of the leading development facilities and vendors around the world.
4. As a cyber arms race takes off, we should not imagine that it will be like other arms races where power resides more in capabilities than in the use of those capabilities. “Whereas nuclear weapons have been used twice in human history, cyber weapons are employed daily and there is therefore an existential need to create some form of regulatory system that allows more than implicit deterrence,” says Robert Fry.
5. If AQ Khan demonstrated the ease with which a nuclear proliferation network can operate, the fact that the raw material upon which cyberwarfare is based is arguably the most easily transferable object on the planet — computer code — means that in certain ways the era of cyberwarfare may prove to be more dangerous than the nuclear era.
6. In the strategic landscape of cyberwarfare the most dangerous player may turn out to be a small but highly developed fortress-state that feels threatened by much of the rest of the world; that neither trusts nor is trusted by any of its allies; that sees its own stability enhanced by regional instability; that has seen its own economic fortunes rise while the global economy suffers; and that views with contempt the notion of an international community.
Many commentators expect the direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians to fail. But there is a much worse scenario: What if they “succeed?” The United States appears determined to push for a framework agreement within a year and both Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA), are aiming for that goal. Such an agreement, U.S. peace envoy George Mitchell explained in a September 2 press conference, would be more than a declaration of principles but less than a peace treaty. In it, the two sides would reach the “fundamental compromises” necessary for a peace accord. Like its predecessor, the Obama administration has already indicated that the accord would still have to be fleshed out and then implemented over the course of several years – which virtually ensures that it will be delayed if not derailed as happened to past peace accords.
If the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and PA were unable to secure a sovereign state and rights through U.S.-brokered negotiations with Israel between 1993 and 2000, when they were in a much stronger position, they are highly unlikely to do so today with such a badly skewed Israeli-Palestinian power dynamic. Instead, next year is likely to see a grand ceremony where Palestinian leaders will sign away the right of return and other Palestinian rights in an agreement that would change little on the ground. The plan of the PA’s appointed prime minister, Salam Fayyad, to declare a Palestinian state in 2011 could unwittingly contribute to this outcome by providing the appearance of an “end of conflict” while the reality remains unchanged. If the rest of the world sees that the government of “Palestine” is satisfied with international recognition and a U.N. seat, they will be happy to move on to other problems leaving the Palestinians at Israel’s mercy.
Such a scenario could sound a death-knell for Palestinian human rights. The Palestinian people have shown a remarkable capacity to regenerate resistance and evolve new strategies after suffering harsh setbacks over the past century. But there may be no recovery this time around. A “peace agreement” would end the applicability of international law to the resolution of the conflict; permanently fragment the Palestinian people; and demobilize Arab and international solidarity.
It’s been over two months since the toughest Iran sanctions ever approved by Congress were signed into law, three months since the UN’s latest resolution, and 15 months since Iran’s post-election demonstrations began. Despite all of this, Iran’s clerical government is not crumbling, nor has Iran shown any sign of giving in to the West on its nuclear program.
Recent weeks have seen a renewed discussion of military options for stopping Iran’s nuclear program – kicked off by Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover article in the Atlantic. But there is also a campaign underway to promote a different option on Iran: regime change, via Iranian dissidents in exile.
Members of Congress led by Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) have introduced a resolution calling on the Secretary of State and the President to throw the support of the United States behind an exiled Iranian terrorist group seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime and install themselves in power. Calling the exiled organization “Iran’s main opposition,” Filner is urging the State Department to end the blacklisting of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — a group listed by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). The resolution currently has 83 cosponsors and is gaining significant ground.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Monday that the United States must be prepared to use military force to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — and added that the last-resort step should be taken with the goal of overthrowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Graham, a military lawyer and a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, became the first senator to support direct U.S. military intervention in Iran, saying it should not involve ground troops but be launched by U.S. warplanes and ships.
“If you use military force against Iran, you’ve opened up Pandora’s box,” Graham told the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “If you allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon, you’ve emptied Pandora’s box. I’d rather open up Pandora’s box than empty it.”
Graham’s unusual public support for overturning Ahmadinejad and the ruling council of Shiite Muslim clerics that he nominally heads recalled President George W. Bush’s controversial policy of regime change to invade Iraq in 2003 and overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein.
The strange saga of a Toronto-based blogger jailed in Iran on propaganda charges took an alarming twist Tuesday after his supporters said prosecutors requested the death penalty.
Hossein Derakhshan is known as the Iranian “blogfather” for launching the dissident Persian blogosphere — an act of defiance he committed from Toronto, where he lived for eight years after becoming a Canadian citizen.
Toronto was the launching pad for his most daring cyber-caper, when he visited Israel on his Canadian passport and blogged from inside Iran for a massive Persian-speaking web following.
“Hoder,” as Derakhshan calls himself online, was arrested after returning to Iran in the fall of 2008 and jailed for almost two years before facing trial this June. Family and supporters learned Monday night he could face execution.
Candor cost Gen Stanley McChrystal his job as US commander in Afghanistan, while President Obama was credited with a political masterstroke — replacing the general with a loose tongue with a general with a golden tongue.
But maybe Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, would not be treated as a source of revelations if more attention had been paid to what McChrystal said than the way he said it.
The renegade general’s portrayal of a president who “didn’t seem very engaged,” suggests that Obama’s claim as both candidate and president — that Afghanistan was a war of necessity — was a political posture that would eventually prove to be untenable.
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”
Bob Woodward (no relation to me) now portrays a commander in chief intensely focused on getting out of Afghanistan and surrounded by advisers who fought with each other.
The president concluded from the start that “I have two years with the public on this” and pressed advisers for ways to avoid a big escalation, the book says. “I want an exit strategy,” he implored at one meeting. Privately, he told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to push his alternative strategy opposing a big troop buildup in meetings, and while Mr. Obama ultimately rejected it, he set a withdrawal timetable because, “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”
But Mr. Biden is not the only one who harbors doubts about the strategy’s chances for success. Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the president’s Afghanistan adviser, is described as believing that the president’s review did not “add up” to the decision he made. Richard C. Holbrooke, the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is quoted saying of the strategy that “it can’t work.”
Obama’s problem: either an exit strategy was a necessity or the war was a necessity but he couldn’t argue for both.
Besides, whatever he might actually believe, he had already boxed himself in by pursuing a political strategy that hinged on his ability to portray himself as an opponent to the war in Iraq who was not an opponent of war per se.
The war in Afghanistan was Obama’s shield against Republican attacks. “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars,” he said in 2002 when laying out his credentials as an un-antiwar Illinois State Senator.
If Obama as a candidate and as president was to have been more candid, he might have expanded on a theme he touched on only briefly — his affinity with Ronald Reagan but more specifically their apparent shared belief that American wars are best fought in secret using mercenaries.
While the reporting on Woodward’s book is likely to focus on the infighting surrounding a president who appears to lack conviction, the New York Times report also has new details on a covert war in which it seems likely that the Durand Line (dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan) means as little to the US government as it does to the Pashtun people.
[Obama’s Wars] reports that the CIA has a 3,000-man “covert army” in Afghanistan called the Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, or CTPT, mostly Afghans who capture and kill Taliban fighters and seek support in tribal areas. Past news accounts have reported that the CIA has a number of militias, including one trained on one of its compounds, but not the size of the covert army.
I guess they couldn’t call them the neo-mujahadeen — or what might be even more fitting: the Afghan Contras.
As a Journeyman TV report revealed earlier this year and as has been demonstrated many times before, US-backed militias often end up becoming death squads.
Update: Justin Elliott at Salon picks up the same theme and includes a paragraph that appeared in an earlier version of the New York Times report:
Mr. Woodward reveals the code name for the CIA.’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, Sylvan Magnolia, and writes that the White House was so enamored of the program that Mr. Emanuel would regularly call the CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, asking, “Who did we get today?”
The White House chief of staff sounds just like former President Bush with his adolescent, comic-book conception of push-button warfare. Hellfire missiles don’t indiscriminately shred human bodies and destroy homes — they “get” targets and the targets can be chalked up on a scoreboard.
Did an editor at the New York Times decide that the man who might be hoping to become the next mayor of Chicago should be saved some embarrassment?
Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, in a report released last week, breathlessly warned that: “real progress [is] being made by the Muslim Brotherhood in insinuating shariah into the very heartland of America through stealthy means.”
Nathan J Brown knows a lot more about the Islamist organization than do the anti-shariah crusaders, and he says the international Muslim Brotherhood is “a group of loosely linked, ideologically similar movements that recognize each other, swap stories and experiences in occasional meetings, and happily subscribe to a formally international ideology without giving it much priority.”
[A]wareness of Islamist movements in the West has lead to some dark talk of an international Brotherhood that serves as a cover for all sorts of missionary, political, and even violent activity. From a solid core in the Arab world, the Brotherhood’s tentacles are said to be reaching out from Oslo to Oklahoma City.
I have conducted little research on the Brotherhood in Europe and the United States, but I have studied it in various Arab countries where the movement is the strongest and most active. Is there such a thing as an international Muslim Brotherhood uniting these branches? Yes. But the odd truth is that the international Brotherhood does not matter much. And perhaps the odder truth is that it does not seem to matter that the international Muslim Brotherhood does not matter.
[…]
Why does this international organization not matter? Because it has not (and probably cannot) do very much. First, it is sluggish and unresponsive. On the few occasions it has been called in to settle difficult organizational questions, it has not responded with efficiency or alacrity. For instance, in 1989 a dispute among Jordanian Brotherhood members about whether to accept an invitation to join the cabinet proved so contentious the disputants tried to kick the question upstairs to the international organization. The answer came far too late and contained too much ambiguity to resolve the issue. In 2007, Khalid Mish’al sought to have Hamas recognized as a distinct member of the international organization, setting off a complex organizational tussle inside the Jordanian organization. (Hamas has largely subsumed the Palestinian Brotherhood, which in turn was formally attached in the eyes of the international organization to the Jordanian branch — and some vestigial links survive between Hamas and the Jordanian Brotherhood as a result). One chief bone of contention focused on what would happen to Palestinian and Jordanian members in the Gulf (an important source of funds but also a group that sent representatives to the leadership bodies of the Jordanian organization, tilting it in a Palestinian direction). Three years later, the issues are still not fully resolved.
Second, the international organization is not only sluggish, it is also Egyptian dominated. Its leader is always an Egyptian and Egyptian Brotherhood members have scoffed at the idea that a non-Egyptian might be selected. Badi’s election was approved by the international organization, but there was some grumbling about the rubber-stamp nature of the process. Most members do accept that the “mother organization” will inevitably have a leading role, but many also find the Egyptian leaders far more interested in Egyptian than international affairs. Egypt’s harsh security climate also hampers its leaders from becoming more active internationally — many Egyptian leaders cannot travel outside their country.
Finally, various chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood have developed an ethos of mutual deference: they increasingly hold fast to the idea that each chapter should be free to react as it sees fit to local conditions. The various chapters do consult each other, but they are free to reject the advice they receive. The Iraqi Islamic Party participated in a political process sponsored by the United States at a time when Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood refused contact with American officials because of the country’s occupation of Iraq. Aware of the conflicting stances, leaders of both organizations simply agreed to disagree. Hamas was advised by both Jordanian and Egyptian leaders not to try too hard in the 2006 parliamentary elections. “Participation, not domination” (that is, run but do not win) was the formula suggested to them. They listened to the first half of the message (they ran), but not the second (they won). Unlike their Jordanian and Egyptian comrades who only contest a minority of seats, they submitted a complete slate of candidates for parliamentary seats, enabling their surprising (and in the eyes of some Brotherhood leaders elsewhere) ill-advised victory.
Ever since — with much fanfare in Washington — Israel entered into direct talks with the Palestinian team led by acting president Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinians have insisted that the continuation of the talks would hinge on a continuation of a nominal settlement freeze due to expire on Sunday. Thus far, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has yet to agree to extend the so-called freeze. (With East Jerusalem excluded and work continuing on 3,000 housing units, it was never an actual freeze.)
The New York Times now reports that the Israelis want to cut a deal: that the US should release the infamous Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in exchange for a three-month extension of the freeze. An Israel Army Radio report is cited which “said a private individual had been asked to try to gauge the potential of such an offer ‘discreetly and informally’ with American officials.”
Why are the Israelis being so coy as to require the use of an intermediary at a time when Israeli and US officials are in constant direct communication?
Since 1987, Pollard, a US citizen who became an Israeli citizen in 1995, has been serving life in prison for spying on behalf of Israel. Israeli leaders and the Israel lobby in the US have subsequently engaged in a long-running campaign for his release. In 2007 Benjamin Netanyahu made a campaign pledge that if he became prime minister he would seek Pollard’s release.
At the end of the nineties there were hints, Israelis claimed, that Bill Clinton, at a critical juncture during Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, might be willing to yield to their requests. The US intelligence community immediately voiced strong objections.
The President’s willingness to consider clemency for Pollard so upset the intelligence community that its leaders took an unusual step: they began to go public. In early December, four retired admirals who had served as director of Naval Intelligence circulated an article, eventually published in the Washington Post, in which they argued that Pollard’s release would be “irresponsible” and a victory for what they depicted as a “clever public relations campaign.” Since then, sensitive details about the secrets Pollard gave away have been made public by CBS and NBC.
In the course of my own interviews for this account, the officials who knew the most about Jonathan Pollard made it clear that they were talking because they no longer had confidence that President Clinton would do what they believed was the right thing — keep Pollard locked up. Pollard, these officials told me, had done far more damage to American national security than was ever made known to the public; for example, he betrayed elements of four major American intelligence systems. In their eyes, there is no distinction between betraying secrets to an enemy, such as the Soviet Union, and betraying secrets to an ally.
Officials are loath to talk publicly about it, but spying on allies is a fact of life: the United States invests billions annually to monitor the communications of its friends. Many American embassies around the world contain a clandestine intercept facility that targets diplomatic communications. The goal is not only to know the military and diplomatic plans of our friends but also to learn what intelligence they may be receiving and with whom they share information. “If a friendly state has friends that we don’t see as friends,” one senior official explained, sensitive intelligence that it should not possess — such as that supplied by Pollard — “can spread to others.” Many officials said they were convinced that information Pollard sold to the Israelis had ultimately wound up in the hands of the Soviet Union.
Pollard has now served 23 years in jail. Let’s suppose President Flexibility likes the chiropractic manipulation the Israelis now want to give him. What does the US get in return?
The charade of Israeli-Palestinian talks gets dragged on until after the mid-term elections. Maybe during that time the administration can get a marginally useful story about how it’s advancing the peace process.
But let’s be even sunnier in our outlook. Let’s suppose that after an extension, the US then wins an unimaginable victory: an Israeli agreement to a permanent settlement freeze.
Big deal.
As a new map produced by Americans For Peace Now makes clear, Israelis already have their feet firmly planted throughout the occupied West Bank. Freezing settlement growth really does nothing to end the occupation.
Phil Weiss caught this remark from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she headed for a meeting with Israel’s President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem last week:
[Peres] understands better than most the fundamental reality facing the State of Israel, that the status quo is unsustainable — now, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be sustained for a year or a decade, or two or three, but fundamentally, the status quo is unsustainable — and that the only path to ensure Israel’s future as a secure and democratic Jewish state is through a negotiated two-state solution, and a comprehensive regional peace.
As Jesus is reported to have said, fundamentally “the meek shall inherit the earth.” He declined to say when.
And as Dr Martin Luther King Jr said: “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” It might bend in that direction, but will it actually get there? Or is it more like a rainbow bending towards a pot of gold?
Israelis — and anyone else who lives outside the US — probably balk at the idea that Americans can teach them lessons on the principle of sustainability. As a nation that is home to more cars than people and whose 5% of the global population consume 25% of the world’s energy resources, we’re hardly in a position to say we understand much about sustainability.
Still, when it comes to this assertion — that the status quo is unsustainable, what might at this point be called the signature of Obama’s approach to the Middle East conflict — what is worse is that a deceptive catch phrase has been received as though it carries real diplomatic weight.
Firstly, to say that the status quo is unsustainable obscures the fact that the Israel has always rejected the status quo. Expansionism views the status quo as something that can be perpetually modified to ones advantage.
Secondly, this image of unsustainability hints at some kind of moral universe bending towards a two-state solution. The unsustainable must give way to the sustainable in accordance with a natural ordering process, right?
Maybe in a cosmic sense — maybe with the same inevitability with which the meek shall inherit the earth.
Meanwhile, the struggle for justice in this world, is a struggle against deeply entrenched injustice — injustice largely deaf to the appeals and concerns of its critics.
The arc of history bends more easily towards acquiescence than justice. Grievances are less often rectified than they are soothed. Thus Israel has less interest in peace with the Palestinians than it has in the pacification of a restless and sometimes violent population.
Justice, won rather than found, has less to do with the status quo being unsustainable than it has with the defiance of those unwilling to tolerate injustice.
AFP reports that Israel’s foreign minister hopes to complete the process of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 and push Israel’s remaining Palestinian population out of the Jewish state:
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday proposed that in a future peace deal the Palestinians should take his country’s 1.3 million Arabs and let Israel keep its West Bank settlements.
“Our guiding principle in negotiations with the Palestinians must not be ‘land for peace’ but an exchange of territories and populations,” Lieberman told reporters as he arrived for Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting.
Meanwhile, Associated Press reports on Jews emigrating from Israel to Germany.
Nirit Bialer, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, welcomes listeners in Hebrew to a one-hour radio show of music, talk and interviews. The setting isn’t her native Israel but a radio station in the heart of the German capital — and hundreds of Israeli Berliners are tuning in.
The city from which Hitler unleashed the genocide of 6 million Jews is now attracting a small but growing community of Jews from Israel for whom it embodies freedom, tolerance, and an anything-goes spirit.
“Berlin has become a real magnet for Israelis — everybody wants to move here,” said Bialer, 32, whose Friday noon “Kol Berlin,” Hebrew for “the voice of Berlin,” started three years ago and is something of an institution for young Israelis in Berlin.
[…]
The Israelis who come to stay are looking to work, study, party and make art, and don’t seem to care much about the Nazi past. They arrive on student visas, overstay tourist permits or have German or other European ancestry that entitles them to citizenship. Many start families with German partners, far from the tensions of the Middle East.
“I love Israel, but I just couldn’t live there anymore — it’s like a small village and so militaristic,” explained Lea Fabrikant, a photography student who arrived two years ago.
“Most of all, I needed freedom and space, and I found it here.”
Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael B. Oren, argues in his Sept. 15 Times Op-Ed article that Israelis want peace, and I believe him. They’ve said so often enough. But the Israelis want lots of other things too.
For instance, they want the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In addition, they want the Palestinian aquifers situated beneath the West Bank, and they want to preserve their racial privilege in the Jewish state. They also want to shear the Gaza Strip from Palestine.
Most of all, the Israelis want Palestinian quiescence in the face of Israeli wants. Those wants have made the two-state solution impossible to implement.
For decades, the Israelis have taken what they want from the Palestinians. Consequently, there are about 500,000 settlers in Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Today, the Israelis are discovering that what one wants and what one can afford sometimes diverge.
Some Israelis — but apparently not Oren — are beginning to realize that the deep, irreversible colonization of territory comes with a price: the end of the Jewish state as it is. It’s a painful lesson to learn, especially after decades of superpower indulgence. America’s obsequious coddling turns out to have been a curse for the Jewish state. Serious cost-benefit analyses around occupation policies — collectively, apartheid — were evidently never conducted.
There is no question that the United States has a relationship with Israel that has no parallel in modern history. Washington gives Israel consistent, almost unconditional diplomatic backing and more foreign aid than any other country. In other words, Israel gets this aid even when it does things that the United States opposes, like building settlements. Furthermore, Israel is rarely criticized by American officials and certainly not by anyone who aspires to high office. Recall what happened last year to Charles Freeman, who was forced to withdraw as head of the National Intelligence Council because he had criticized certain Israeli policies and questioned the merits of the special relationship.
Steve Walt and I argue that there is no good strategic or moral rationale for this special relationship, and that it is largely due to the enormous influence of the Israel lobby. Critics of our claim maintain that the extremely tight bond between the two countries is the result of the fact that most Americans feel a special attachment to Israel. The American people, so the argument goes, are so deeply committed to supporting Israel generously and unreservedly that politicians of all persuasions have no choice but to support the special relationship.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has just released a major study of how the American public thinks about foreign policy. It is based on a survey of 2500 Americans, who were asked a wide variety of questions, some of which have bearing on Israel. Their answers make clear that most Americans are not deeply committed to Israel in any meaningful way. There is no love affair between the American people and Israel.
At the New York Times, Scott Shane divulges a national security secret: the National Security Agency (shown in the Google Earth image above) is known by the nickname the Fort. I guess you’d call that the definition of hiding in plain sight since the NSA is located in Fort Meade.
Apparently anyone in the locality could tell you the NSA headquarters is known as the Fort and Shane would not know that that’s supposed to be a secret had he not obtained a copy of a banned book available on eBay.
[T]hat nickname is one of hundreds of supposed secrets Pentagon reviewers blacked out in the new, censored edition of an intelligence officer’s Afghan war memoir. The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security.
Another supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.”
Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.”
The redactions offer a rare glimpse behind the bureaucratic veil that cloaks information the government considers too important for public airing.
The New York Times is generous enough to provide a kind of Wikileaks teaser — a single page of the redacted and unredacted book.
Was it out of deference to St Martin’s Press or the Pentagon that the Times refrained from divulging more of the redactions?
And was the NSA so “liberal” in its use of redaction because they want to keep secret the criteria they use for defining secrecy, or because when it comes to secrecy, government officials in the post 9/11 era know that no one ever gets fired for over-classification?
As if everyday life in Pakistan weren’t dispiriting enough, last month the swift and turbulent Indus burst its banks and swathes of the country disappeared under water. Divine punishment, the poor said, but they were the ones who suffered. Allah rarely targets the rich. As the floods came and the country panicked, its president fled the bunker and went on a tour of inspection to France and Britain.
The floodwaters have now receded in many parts of the country, leaving 20 million people homeless. The province of Sindh, however, is still under threat and 800,000 people are marooned without food. Aid agencies estimate the bail-out costs for the country at between seven and ten billion dollars, but only $800 million has been pledged by foreign donors, in total contrast to the support given after the devastating earthquake of 2005. The rebuilt towns and villages are proof that not all the money was stolen that time. But despite this, little help has been forthcoming from abroad, the result of a combination of Islamophobia and distrust of the Zardari government on financial matters.
Did the rulers of Pakistan treat the worst natural disaster to hit their country as an emergency, and pull out all the stops without thinking of themselves or drooling at the prospects of foreign aid pouring in? Like hell they did. For the whole of August the plutocracy floundered hopelessly as the catastrophe grew. The army did its best, but was hindered by the war on terror. As nearly a million people came under threat from the floodwater in Jacobabad, the local authorities were informed that the nearby Shahbaz airbase could not be used for rescue operations. In response to a parliamentary question from the opposition, the health secretary, Khushnood Lashari, explained: ‘Health relief operations are not possible in the flood-affected areas of Jacobabad because the airbase is controlled by the United States.’ It was not necessary to add that those on the base were busy arming and dispatching drones to hit villages in northern Pakistan. In Swat, closer to the AfPak war zones, a detachment of marines was made available to airlift tribal elders to safety, in an attempt presumably to win hearts and minds. Some hope.
President Obama has essentially continued almost every major Bush security policy, either by default or design. State secrets, targeted killings, renditions and indefinite detention, opposing the right of habeas corpus, preventing victims of admitted torture from seeking judicial redress, expanding the Afghan war while moving – however gingerly – to secure a long-term presence in Iraq; all these must surely be making Bush, and especially Cheney, happy and wealthier men.
As Michael Hayden, Bush’s last CIA Director, put it in a recent interview, “Obama has been as aggressive as Bush” in defending executive prerogatives and powers that have enabled and sustained the ‘war on terror.’
But just how close to the dark side Obama has moved became evident in the last couple of weeks, specifically from two angles.
In the first, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court decision allowing former CIA prisoners to sue companies that participated in their rendition and torture in overseas prisons. In deciding that the plaintiffs could not sue despite an ample public (rather than classified) record supporting their claims, Judge Raymond C. Fisher supported the Obama Administration’s contention that, in his words, sometimes there is a “painful conflict between human rights and national security” in which the former must be sacrificed to preserve the latter.
But this is an utterly ludicrous concept, since a core reason for so much of the frustration, nihilistic anger, radicalisation and ultimately violence involved in Islamist terrorism and insurgencies lies precisely in the long term, structural denial of the most basic human rights by governments in the region, the lion’s share of whom continue to be supported by the United States despite their behaviour on the grounds of ‘national security’.
What neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor the President seems to understand is that there can be no contradiction between human rights and national security, since the absence of human rights can never but lead to a lack of security.
What’s more, the very idea in the globalised era that one country’s “national” security (especially that of the global “hyper-power,” the United States) can be defined apart from and in contrast to the security of other nations is so ridiculous. One wonders how supposedly intelligent people, like former law school professors – turned presidents, can in good faith imagine and declare it.
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An AFP report earlier today reveals that the Stuxnet malware has been found at Iran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr. (All the blockquotes below are from the AFP report.)
The jury found that Siddiqui acted 
A German team of industrial cyber security experts who have analyzed the way the worm operates now claim that it may have been designed to attack the newly operational Bushehr nuclear reactor.
Candor cost Gen Stanley McChrystal his job as US commander in Afghanistan, while President Obama was credited with a political masterstroke — replacing the general with a loose tongue with a general with a golden tongue.
