Author Archives: News Sources

In Iraq, whatever the officials say, the U.S. is providing air support for Iran

Nancy A. Youssef writes: Forces loyal to Iran are threatening to break ISIS’s grip on the key Iraqi city of Tikrit. Officially, the American military isn’t helping these Shiite militias and Iranian advisers as they team up with Iraqi forces to hit the self-proclaimed Islamic State. But U.S. officials admit that American airstrikes are a major reason Iran’s proxies are advancing on Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown.

The U.S.-led air campaign has not only crippled ISIS’s ability to move freely. It’s also providing air cover for Iraqi troops and the Iranian forces fighting alongside of them. It is a perilous, yet unspoken, military alliance between the U.S. and its top regional foe that some said could lead to an ISIS defeat in the short term and ethnic cleansing of Sunni Iraqis in the long run.

“Like it or not, right now [the U.S. and Iran] are on the same side,” said Vali Nasr, dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and longtime Iranian expert.

U.S. officials have repeatedly stated their concerns about the sectarianism that could emerge even as the strategy now decisively helps one side, the Shiite, in the push to defeat ISIS.

But two U.S. officials concede that the effect of the airstrikes helps Shiite forces — while swearing that there is no strategy to help Iran. Rather, as one explained, “the goal is to provide Iraqi forces the operational space to take back territory.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s expanding influence in Iraq

Joyce Karam writes: While the invasion in 2003 and the shortsighted policies by the U.S. disbanding the Iraqi army and propping up the sectarian rule of Nouri al-Maliki, opened the door for Iranian meddling and militia-building in Iraq, ISIS has invited a more aggressive role for Iran along the Euphrates.

“Iran has taken full advantage of the collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosul” says Phillip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland and author of a policy paper on Shiite Jihad. The rise of ISIS as an existential threat to Shiites whom it considers heretics and apostates, drove many in that community to carry arms and defend themselves while the Iraqi state continued to crumble. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s Fatwa last summer “to defend the country, its people, the honor of its citizens, and its sacred places” was exploited to set the stage for the formation of the Popular Mobilization Forces, made up of disciplined Shiite recruits and a much smaller component of Sunni tribal and Kurdish forces.

Smyth sees Iranian influence in funding, training and equipping Shiite militias at an all time high. He estimates the number of Shiite militia fighters in Iraq today between 70,000 [to] 100,000, a volume that “is both astounding and strategic to the way that Iran has constructed them.” The expert sees Iran as player whose influence is only rising in Iraq, “they run ministries in Iraq today with their own security apparatus.” This new dynamic was front and center in appointing Mohammad Ghabban from the Iranian funded militia Badr as the new Iraqi interior minister. [Continue reading…]

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The smugglers who take foreign would-be ISIS jihadis into Syria

The Guardian reports: On small dirt tracks, several minibuses and cars are waiting, each of them going to different points on the border, but all accessing Isis-controlled territory. Little by little, the minibus empties, and when it arrives in a nearby border town, which the Guardian is not naming to protect those quoted in this piece, only two passengers are left.

At the bus station, two teenage boys immediately approach, offering to take the remaining two passengers to the wire.

“Only 10 [Turkish] lira [£2.60],” offers Ahmed*, a boy in ill-fitting, mud-stained trousers, his bare feet barely filling his worn-out shoes.

Syrian smugglers such as Ali and his friend Ahmed take both goods and people across into Isis territory. They witness horror, routinely, and shrug it off.

“Just yesterday Isis beheaded three FSA [Free Syrian Army] fighters,” Ahmed says, laughing. He drops to his knees and bows his head, re-enacting the scene he says he witnessed, making a gesture imitating a sword coming down on his neck with one hand. “They chopped their heads off like this!”

Another Syrian Turkomen who had just crossed back into Turkey nods. “We saw a crucified man on the way to the border. You have no idea what we see in Syria every day now. Our lives are like a horror movie.”

Ali says he has helped to carry the luggage of countless foreigners crossing the border to reach the self-declared Islamic State. “There were French men who took their entire families with them to Syria,” he recalls. “Once I carried a bag full of dollar notes across. The guy I helped was going to give it to Isis.”

Hundreds of foreigners are believed to have used crossing points like this, though the most high-profile recent cases – the three British schoolgirls who absconded to Syria last month – are thought to have crossed farther east.

Business is thriving, the smugglers say. “We carry weapons and ammunition across as well,” says Ali. “The drivers [of the minibuses] get 500 lira per bag.”

Neither of them are Isis supporters. “No, I don’t like them. But what can I do?” asks Ahmed, grinning. “It’s a job, and I need the money.” [Continue reading…]

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Fighting ISIS: Impasse with Congress stalls the authorization the Obama administration says it doesn’t need

The New York Times reports: President Obama’s formal request for congressional authorization to fight the Islamic State — once framed by lawmakers as a matter of great constitutional import — is now seriously imperiled because Republicans think it does too little and Democrats think it does too much.

And neither the White House nor many members of Congress seemed in any rush to bridge the divide.

Secretary of State John Kerry and other top administration officials urged members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday to approve Mr. Obama’s request, but it was clear during the contentious three-hour session that lawmakers were far from reaching any agreement.

When Mr. Obama, in his news conference after the midterm elections in November, announced he would seek specific authorization from Congress, he said, “The world needs to know we are united behind this effort.” But after the proposal went to Congress, there is little evidence that the administration has lobbied members to win support for its request, and few suggestions that Democratic and Republican lawmakers are successfully working toward an alternative.

Despite urging Congress to pass the authorization for military action, Mr. Kerry, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all made clear that they believed the administration already had the legal authority to pursue its military campaign against the Islamic State under two previous authorizations: one in 2001 allowing the president to fight a global war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and one in 2002 that enabled President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq.

“The president already has statutory authority to act against ISIL,” Mr. Kerry said, referring to the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS. “But a clear and formal expression of this Congress’s backing at this moment in time would dispel doubts that might exist anywhere that Americans are united in this effort.”

Mr. Kerry also called on Congress to speak “with a single powerful voice at this pivotal hour.”

But given that military operations have been underway for months, the White House views the resolution as symbolically important but not required. [Continue reading…]

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Unsettled at home, veterans volunteer to fight ISIS

The New York Times reports: In the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya, [Patrick] Maxwell [a 29-year-old Iraq war veteran from Austin, Texas] was greeted at the airport by the Kurdish lieutenant. Soon after, he befriended one of the few foreign volunteers there, a Canadian veteran named Dillon Hillier, who had served in Afghanistan.

“We both thought it was important to help, to not sit back and watch it happen,” Mr. Hillier said in a phone interview from his home in Ontario.

The pair ended up in a ragtag infantry battalion on the front lines near Kirkuk, eating meals of rice and flatbread, traveling in beat-up, sometimes bullet-pocked trucks and sleeping on the floors of shipping containers.

“This is just like back in Al Anbar Province,” Mr. Maxwell said with a laugh in a video he made while speeding to the front lines in the back of a Ford pickup, holding a belt-fed machine gun. “Except we have no safety gear, no medical support and no air support.”

Much of the time he was kept away from the fighting, providing security for pesh merga generals, while occasionally manning sniper positions on the front line.

Mr. Maxwell said fighting was rare during his time on the Kurdish lines. “It was more like a World War I standoff,” he said.

In the seven weeks he was in Iraq, he became disenchanted as he watched a procession of American outcasts come to volunteer, including a man kicked out of the Marines who had arrest warrants in the United States and a biker with lip piercings, implanted fangs and “necromancer” written across his black leather jacket.

“Guys who had nothing to live for and just wanted to lay down bodies,” Mr. Maxwell said.

His time with the pesh merga abruptly ended in mid-January, he said, when American Special Operations forces advising the Kurds spotted him at a base near Kirkuk and State Department officials told pesh merga leaders that American civilians should not be in combat.

Mr. Maxwell said that he was removed from the front and that a few days later he and Mr. Hillier flew home in frustration.

“There was no point being there,” he said. “Politics had gotten in the way.”

In January when Mr. Maxwell arrived at Kennedy International Airport in New York with more than 100 pounds of military gear, he assumed he might be detained and possibly charged for fighting with the pesh merga, but no one stopped him. [Continue reading..]

The Daily Beast spoke to another American volunteer, referred to as “Patrick” — not his real name: Patrick’s journey to Syria started when he contacted a recruiter affiliated with the Lions of Rojava Facebook page, which specializes in recruiting foreigners for the YPG. The YPG is an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and is perhaps best known in the West for its defense of Kobani and the use of its all-female YPJ units. Though both are Kurdish and have at times fought together, the YPG and YPJ are not the Peshmerga of neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan.

“I decided to join the fight against ISIS because…at a certain point in my life I made a promise to defend my nation against enemies foreign and domestic, and I decided that ISIS presents a clear threat not only to the people of Kurdistan, not only to the people of the Middle East, but eventually will threaten our national security at home,” Patrick said.

He added that some of the foreign fighters he met had previous military experience, though he wouldn’t say whether he did. He said he doesn’t have an exact count of just how many foreigners are with the YPG but that it could be as many as 100-plus — now. When he initially arrived in Syria, the YPG was seeking to form all-Western units, but Patrick said these units were later broken apart to allow the YPG command to structure message control, and some of the foreigners even had their passports and phones taken away. Patrick said the YPG told the fighters this was because they feared ISIS might gain a propaganda victory if they killed or captured a foreigner and discovered their passport. He said he believed, however, it might have had just as much to do with ensuring the fighters couldn’t leave at will or speak to anyone on the outside without a YPG minder present.

From there, Patrick said, the foreigners were trained on the YPG’s aging weapons systems and occasionally manned checkpoints and went on patrols, but they never participated in any real battles.

“The Western fighters who spend time with YPG soon realize they’re not going to fight. I did not meet one single person, one single Westerner, that didn’t catch on to the fact that they were never intended to fight and they were being used as propaganda,” he said.

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The enigma of survival

Sally Satel writes: The evil hour descended on David Morris in the summer of 2009. The former marine and war reporter was in a theater watching a movie with his then girlfriend and suddenly found himself pacing the lobby with no memory of having left his seat. Later, his girlfriend explained that Morris had fled after an explosion occurred onscreen.

He began having dreams of his buddies being ripped apart. When awake, he would imagine innocent items—an apple or a container of Chinese takeout—blowing up. Pathological vigilance took root: “Preparing for bed was like getting ready for a night patrol.” The dreams persisted. “Part of me,” he admits, “was ashamed of the dreams, of the realization that I was trapped inside a cliché: the veteran so obsessed with his own past that even his unconscious made love to it every night.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder is the subject of two new books, one by Morris and another by war reporter Mac McClelland. The symptoms are crippling: relentless nightmares, unbidden waking images, hyperarousal, sleeplessness, and phobias. As a diagnosis, it has existed colloquially for generations—“shell shock” is one name that survives in the modern idiom—and it has particular resonance because of this generation’s wars. (Most soldiers are spared it, though the public tends to think they are not. A 2012 poll found that most people believe that most post-9/11 veterans suffer from PTSD. The actual rate has been estimated at between two and 17 percent.)

Morris thinks the symptoms—a body and mind reacting in fear long after the threat to life and limb is gone—hardly encompass the experience of PTSD. Historically, we might have sought out not only shrinks but also “poetry, our families, or the clergy for solace post horror.” Profitably, Morris turns to everyone: the Greeks, the great poets of World War I, historians, anthropologists, and yes, psychiatrists and psychologists.

From such wide consultation comes a masterful synthesis. The Evil Hours interweaves memoir with a cultural history of war’s psychic aftermath. Morris chronicles the development of PTSD as an official diagnosis and its earlier incarnations in other wars. From Homer’s Odyssey to the venerated war poets, from the crusade for recognition by organized psychiatry to the modern science of fear and resilience, Morris gives a sweeping view of the condition, illuminated by meditation on sacrifice and danger and, in his words, “the enigma of survival.” [Continue reading…]

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America needs its Latinos

The Economist:A satirical film in 2004, called “A Day Without a Mexican”, imagined Californians running scared after their cooks, nannies and gardeners had vanished. Set it in today’s America and it would be a more sobering drama. If 57m Hispanics were to disappear, public-school playgrounds would lose one child in four and employers from Alaska to Alabama would struggle to stay open. Imagine the scene by mid-century, when the Latino population is set to have doubled again.

Listen to some, and foreign scroungers threaten America, a soft-hearted country with a wide-open border. For almost two centuries after America was founded, more than 80% of its citizens were whites of European descent. Today, non-Hispanic whites have dropped below two-thirds of the population. They are on course to become a minority by 2044. At a recent gathering of Republicans with presidential ambitions, a former governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, growled about “illegal people” rushing in “because they’ve heard that there is a bowl of food just across the border.”

Politicians are right that a demographic revolution is under way. But, as our special report this week shows, their panic about immigration and the national interest is misguided. America needs its Latinos. To prosper, it must not exclude them, but help them realise their potential.

Those who whip up border fever are wrong on the facts. The southern frontier has never been harder to cross. Recent Hispanic population growth has mostly been driven by births, not fresh immigration. Even if the borders could somehow be sealed and every unauthorised migrant deported — which would be cruel and impossible — some 48m legally resident Hispanics would remain. Latino growth will not be stopped.

They are also wrong about demography. From Europe to north-east Asia, the 21st century risks being an age of old people, slow growth and sour, timid politics. Swelling armies of the elderly will fight to defend their pensions and other public services. Between now and mid-century, Germany’s median age will rise to 52. China’s population growth will flatten and then fall; its labour force is already shrinking. Not America’s. By 2050 its median age will be a sprightly 41 and its population will still be growing. Latinos will be a big part of that story. [Continue reading…]

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Behind the Supreme Court’s Obamacare case, the Federalist Society’s hidden hand

By Nina Martin, ProPublica, March 3, 2015

The Supreme Court has no shortage of potentially precedent-shattering cases on its docket this term. But the one the justices are hearing tomorrow, King v. Burwell, could be the most consequential.

King focuses on the issue of whether low-income people who get insurance under the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchanges are entitled to tax subsidies. Much has been said (and written) about what could happen if the justices rule “no”: Millions of people in as many as 37 states could lose their health coverage. The political earthquake could be cataclysmic.

Yet, few reports have highlighted the role of the Federalist Society, the conservative law group whose ideas are at the intellectual heart of the King v. Burwell challenge. That’s not surprising, given that the group’s members have played a mostly behind-the-scenes part in King 2014 and in many of the most significant conservative legal victories of the last 30 years.

In a new book, “Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution,” Pomona College political scientist Amanda Hollis-Brusky channels her inner investigative journalist to trace the group’s influence on the courts, and especially, the Supreme Court.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q. What is the Federalist Society? What did it grow out of?

A. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by a small group of conservative and libertarian law students at Yale and the University of Chicago. Many of the founders had worked on the Reagan presidential campaign, and when they arrived in their elite law schools, they noticed a profound mismatch between the ideas that were achieving political ascendancy 2014 about limited government and free markets and states’ rights 2014 and a liberal orthodoxy that was embedded in almost all major legal institutions of the time.

Flash forward 30 years: The Federalist Society has matured into a self-professed “society of ideas” that claims 40,000 to 60,000 members. These include every Republican-appointed attorney general and solicitor general since the 1980s, dozens of federal judges, and four sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices: Antonin Scalia, who was one of the organization’s original mentors at the University of Chicago; Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts.

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U.S.-trained Iraqi forces investigated for war crimes

ABC News reports: U.S.-trained and armed Iraqi military units, the key to the American strategy against ISIS, are under investigation for committing some of the same atrocities as the terror group, American and Iraqi officials told ABC News. Some Iraqi units have already been cut off from U.S. assistance over “credible” human rights violations, according to a senior military official on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.

The investigation, being conducted by the Iraqi government, was launched after officials were confronted with numerous allegations of “war crimes,” based in part on dozens of ghastly videos and still photos that appear to show uniformed soldiers from some of Iraq’s most elite units and militia members massacring civilians, torturing and executing prisoners, and displaying severed heads.

The videos and photos are part of a trove of disturbing images that ABC News discovered has been circulating within the dark corners of Iraqi social media since last summer. In some U.S. military and Iraqi circles, the Iraqi units and militias under scrutiny are referred to as the “dirty brigades.”

“As the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] and militias reclaim territory, their behavior must be above reproach or they risk being painted with the same brush as ISIL [ISIS] fighters,” said a statement to ABC News from the U.S. government. “If these allegations are confirmed, those found responsible must be held accountable.” [Continue reading…]

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IRGC official: Iran indoctrinating Syria youth

NOW reports: A top Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer boasted about Tehran’s role in Syria and revealed that his country has been indoctrinating youths in the war-torn country to fight under the IRGC.

“The IRGC has begun to establish new religious groups in Syria called ‘Kashab’ among young Alawites, Sunnis, Christians and Ismailis,” Al-Arabiya on Tuesday cited Hussein Hamdani as saying.

These groups aim to carry out what Hamdani called “ideological education” for the “recruitment of teenagers in Syria to fight in militias under [the command] of the IRGC.”

The advisor to the Revolutionary Guards commander-general did not elaborate further on the youth groups, but did boast that Iran had formed 42 brigades and 138 battalions fighting for the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.

Hamdani added that the “establishment of the Basij in Syria was one of Iran’s most important achievements in recent years.” [Continue reading…]

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Syrians describe the impact of four years of war

Faris Shihab, 35, former Free Syrian Army officer, now in Turkey, tells The Guardian: I was an officer in a huge FSA brigade in Damascus. I fought in the Mouadamiya district of west Ghouta for a year with more than 3,500 armed fighters. We were only three kilometres away from the presidential palace in July 2012. The regime was on the verge of collapse.

But when the planes struck the centre of Damascus, we had to flee to Daraya, south-west of the capital, where we hid among the groves, laboriously digging trenches, waiting for the soldiers to advance forward.

My friend Ahmed Nadeem was with me in the trench when he got a bullet in his head from a sniper. He died in my arms, aged 22 years old. For nine hours, I was in the trench with his body during airstrikes and tank shelling. I kept looking at him while he was dead: the same guy who had been sharing food with me a few minutes earlier. We had been together since first demo in Damascus. The last words he said to me were: “Please remember me as a Syrian man who died for his country.” Only after midnight, when the shelling eased, could we bury him near an olive tree.

Later, the Syrian people began to turn against the FSA. When Isis began decapitations, people started to curse those who had revolted against the regime. They thought we were the reason that these radical fighters had come to our country. But we wanted to freedom, not Isis.

Some people now think that life was better before the revolution – but these are people who did not lose a sibling, or whose car was not blown up, or whose house was not levelled. When my relatives and friends sit together or watch the news, they say: “What a pity, we were really having a great life. It is true that we did not have dignity but we had enough food.”

Now, should I keep the revolution going for the sake of the martyrs and allow more people to die from starvation under the regime’s bombing? Should I compound the number of the dead? Or conciliate with the regime in hope that one day a child among these people will lead another Syrian revolution, because our revolution is cursed by God. [Continue reading…]

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Why a ‘bad’ deal with Iran is better than no deal at all

Jeffrey Lewis writes: I am old enough to remember when, back in 2006, I argued that the United States should let Iran keep 164 centrifuges in standby mode during talks. Do you know what people said? “164 centrifuges? Are you mad? You are giving away the store to the Iranians!” Well, now Iran has more than 15,000 centrifuges (that we know about) in at least two sites.

One of the most frustrating things about following the past decade of negotiations is watching the West make one concession after another — but only after the Iranians had moved so far forward that the concession had no value. The people arguing now for a “better” deal at some later date are the same people who in 2006 said 164 centrifuges was way too many and, that if we just held out long enough, we’d haggle the Iranians down to zero. Look what that got us.

This is a fantasy, a unicorn, the futile pursuit of which ends with a half-assed airstrike against Iran, a region in flames, and eventually an Iranian nuclear weapon. And let’s be clear: If negotiations collapse, the United States will take the blame from Europe and the sanctions regime will unravel. And here’s the best-case scenario:

Any military action against Iran will set its nuclear program back, at best, a couple of years. But the anger will last generations. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia: Three more executions add to unprecedented spike in death penalty

Amnesty: Saudi Arabia is well on track to far surpass its previous annual execution records, Amnesty International warned after three more men were put to death this morning, bringing the total number of executions in the country to 44 so far this year.

That is fully four times the number of people executed in the Gulf Kingdom during the same period last year – 11. Public beheading is the most common method of execution.

“This unprecedented spike in executions constitutes a chilling race to the bottom for a country that is already among the most prolific executioners on the planet,” said Said Boumedouha, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

“If this alarming execution rate continues, Saudi Arabia is well on track to surpass its previous records, putting it out of step with the vast majority of countries around the world that have now rejected the death penalty in law or practice.”

The three men executed this morning include a Saudi Arabian, a Yemeni and a Syrian national, all for drug-related offences.

“The fact that around half of the executions carried out so far this year were for drug-related offences contradicts the Saudi Arabian authorities’ claims at the United Nations Human Rights Council that the death penalty is imposed for only the most serious crimes and because it is sanctioned by Shari’a law. In the case of drug-related offences, both of these claims are far from the truth,” said Said Boumedouha. [Continue reading…]

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B’Tselem’s battle to be Israel’s conscience

Eve Fairbanks writes: On 15 August last year, five weeks into the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Hagai El-Ad, the director of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, appeared on a morning radio show to discuss the conflict. Throughout the fighting, B’Tselem did what it has done for 25 years since it was founded during the first Palestinian intifada: document human rights violations by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. It compiled film and testimony gathered by volunteer field researchers on the ground, tallied daily casualty figures that were used by the local and international press, and released names of individual Palestinians killed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

B’Tselem’s founders intended it to serve a purpose unlike any other organisation in Israel’s fractious political atmosphere: to provide pure information about the Israeli military’s treatment of Palestinians, without commentary or political agenda. But by last summer, this stance had become a source of controversy. For many Israelis, identifying human-rights violations by the Israeli military, but not its enemies, was tantamount to treason. When B’Tselem tried to run radio ads listing the names and ages of 20 Palestinian children killed in Gaza, Israel’s national broadcasting authority banned them on the grounds that they constituted a political message masquerading as neutral information. A group called Mothers of Soldiers Against B’Tselem was formed; Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, endorsed one of their protests.

That morning on the radio, the host, a journalist named Sharon Gal, pressed El-Ad over and over to agree that he believed Hamas is a “terrorist organisation”. El-Ad reminded Gal that B’Tselem, by its very core principles, declined to make that kind of characterisation because it believed doing so would be a political act. “We’re talking about armed Palestinian organisations; that is the professional term, and we criticise their activities when they are illegal,” he said. Gal responded that Israel was locked in a battle for its survival; at such a moment, he argued, refusing to call Hamas a terrorist group was a political – and disloyal – act. Newspaper columnists were still talking about it a month later. “Hagai El-Ad has essentially become a Hamas apologist,” one declared.

Three and a half months after the end of the Gaza war, in early December, I met El-Ad at Talbia, a wine bar beneath the Jerusalem Theatre. Forty-five years old, he looks barely over 30. He has a soft, almost hushed voice, glasses that press down on the tops of his ears, making them flop over like wings, and a frequent, mirthful smile. “Don’t sneeze,” he laughed, as a waitress propped a cork under a wobbly leg of our table, creating a fragile balance. El-Ad arrived at B’Tselem last May after spells as the director of Jerusalem Open House, Jerusalem’s premier gay-advocacy group, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

B’Tselem, in Hebrew, means “in His image,” from the line in the Book of Genesis: “And God made man in His image.” El-Ad possesses a fierce belief in Israelis’ ability – and duty – to live up to their human godliness by being just and manifesting an expansive empathy. “I self-identify as a Jew who cares deeply about the Jewish future and the Jewish identity,” he told me. “To be Jewish is to treat people with dignity.” He grew up in Haifa, on the Israeli coast, and takes as the basis for his personal creed an anecdote from a visit Golda Meir paid to the city during the 1948 Israeli war for independence, when she noted that scenes of Palestinians fleeing their homes reminded her of images of Jews fleeing Poland before the second world war. “If Golda Meir could notice the similarities,” he said, smiling, “then anybody can recognise Palestinians as human beings who ought to be treated with equal rights.” [Continue reading…]

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Second ex-Mossad chief joins chorus criticizing Netanyahu

Times of Israel: In a widening offensive against the six-year rule of Benjamin Netanyahu, a group of former security commanders criticized the prime minister Wednesday for allegedly ruining ties with the US, mishandling the summer’s war against Hamas, and bungling the country’s approach to the international negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

“You and only you turned the United States from an ally to an enemy,” former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit said of Netanyahu at a Tel Aviv press conference organized by Commanders for Israel’s Security, a group of former officers campaigning against the prime minister.

Shavit was the second former Mossad chief to express strong opposition to Netanyahu’s policies in recent days, coming close on the heels of Meir Dagan’s scathing media campaign this past week against the Likud prime minister. The pair joined a growing chorus of former defense officials who have criticized the prime minister’s policies, particularly on Iran.

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Politics intrude as cybersecurity firms hunt foreign spies

Reuters reports: The $71 billion cybersecurity industry is fragmenting along geopolitical lines as firms chase after government contracts, share information with spy agencies, and market themselves as protectors against attacks by other nations.

Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has become a leading authority on American computer espionage campaigns, but sources within the company say it has hesitated at least twice before exposing hacking activities attributed to mother Russia.

Meanwhile, U.S. cybersecurity firms CrowdStrike Inc and FireEye Inc (FEYE.O) have won fame by uncovering sophisticated spying by Russia and China – but have yet to point a finger at any American espionage.

The balkanization of the security industry reflects broader rifts in the technology markets that have been exacerbated by disclosures about government-sponsored cyberattacks and surveillance programs, especially those leaked by former U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden.

“Some companies think we should be stopping all hackers. Others think we should stop only the other guy’s hackers – they think we can win the war,” said Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist at security firm White Ops Inc, putting himself in the former camp.

Kaspersky Lab has faced questions about its connections to Russian intelligence before: Chief Executive Eugene Kaspersky had attended a KGB school, Chief Operating Officer Andrey Tikhonov was a lieutenant colonel in the military, and Chief Legal Officer Igor Chekunov had served in the KGB’s border service.

Eugene Kaspersky said the firm has never been asked by a government agency to back away from investigating a cyberattack, and said that its international team of researchers would not be swayed by any one country’s national interests.

Still, several current and former Kaspersky Lab employees said the firm has dithered over whether to publish research on at least two Russian hacking strikes.

Last year, Kaspersky Lab officials privately gave some paying customers a report about a sophisticated computer spying campaign that it had uncovered. But the company did not publish the report more widely until five months after British defense contractor BAE Systems Plc (BAES.L) exposed the campaign, linking it to another suspected Russian government operation and noting that most infected computers were found were in Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

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Substance used to poison Litvinenko could only have come from Russia — inquiry

The Guardian reports: The rare radioactive substance used to poison Alexander Litvinenko in London could only have come from Russia, a world-leading expert has told the inquiry into the former spy’s murder.

Norman Dombey, emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, said the polonium was produced at a closed nuclear facility in the city of Sarov, 450 miles south-east of Moscow. Its Soviet-era Avangard plant was the only place in the world with a polonium “production line”, he said.

“In my opinion, the Russian state, or its agents, was responsible for the poisoning,” Dombey said.

Litvinenko died after drinking a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium-210, during a meeting in November 2006 at a Mayfair hotel. Two Russians – Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun – have been charged with his murder. The Kremlin has insisted that the polonium involved did not come from Russia. [Continue reading…]

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Celebrity status of General Soleimani coincides with rise in Iranian nationalism

Qassem-SuleimaniMahan Abedin writes: His photos are everywhere in the Iranian media and his name is mentioned on a daily basis by the national broadcaster. Major General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), is officially a national hero.

This extreme publicity is all the more surprising in view of Soleimai’s command of the most secretive and sensitive branch of the IRGC. The Quds force is the expeditionary wing of the Revolutionary Guards and spearheads Iran’s engagement with pro-Iranian armies, militias and political factions across the region.

To the outside world, in particular to Iran’s enemies and opponents in the region and beyond, Soleimani is the potent face of Iran’s political and ideological offensive in the Middle East.

This portrait of Soleimani is being increasingly adopted at home as well, fed by a daily diet of the Quds force commander’s exploits on the Iraqi battlefield, most recently in the offensive to re-take Tirkrit from the so-called Islamic State.

Whilst Soleimani’s leading role in Iran’s counter-insurgency efforts in Iraq and Syria is undoubtedly pivotal to the Islamic Republic’s regional policy, there are huge questions marks regarding the extreme publicity that now surrounds him.

One plausible explanation is that Soleimani’s adoption as a national hero heralds a change of political culture in Iran with significant long-term ramifications for the country’s domestic and foreign policy.

Qasem Soleimani’s transformation from a secretive commander to national celebrity is unprecedented in modern Iranian culture, and his enormous popularity notwithstanding, it is not entirely without controversy. [Continue reading…]

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