In a landmark case, the first trial of a former Guantánamo detainee, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan made a ruling that presents a major setback for the Department of Justice. He barred the key witness from testifying because he had been identified and located through torturing the accused, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was being held in a secret prison by the CIA.
Kaplan explained his decision in this way:
The Court has not reached this conclusion lightly. It is acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world in which we live. But the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand.
At face value, this sounds like one of those rare feel-good moments in the post 9/11 era when someone who has sworn to uphold the Constitution took that responsibility very seriously.
“… the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests.” I imagine Judge Kaplan took satisfaction in crafting that sentence. It’s good.
But just in case anyone might be alarmed that the innocent-until-proven-guilty Ghailani might end up being acquited, the judge was eager to pacify such fears.
[H]is status as an “enemy combatant” probably would permit his detention as something akin to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end even if he were found not guilty in this case.
So is Ghailani on trial to determine his innocence or guilt, or simply to decide on the location of his prison cell?
Isn’t that the direction in which fear and danger beckon?
Anyone who carefully read the Washington Post‘s report on talks between the Karzai government and the Taliban should have been struck by this detail: “discussions with the Quetta Shura [Taliban leadership] do not include representatives of the Haqqani group.”
The Waziristan-based Haqqani network has for some time been described as the most formidable element in the Afghan insurgency, so how would the war end if the group that is most vigorously fighting it is left out of a reconciliation process?
Hamid Karzai’s government held direct talks with senior members of the Haqqani clan over the summer, according to well-placed Pakistani and Arab sources. The US contacts have been indirect, through a western intermediary, but have continued for more than a year.
The report said:
The indirect contacts with the Americans have been made through a non-governmental western intermediary, who has met Haqqani representatives in Pakistan several times in the past 18 months, and who has conveyed messages to and fro.
Different diplomatic sources gave different accounts of the Haqqanis’ readiness to take part in a preliminary dialogue.
One said the relentless targeting of the Haqqani network fighters and leaders by US drones had devastated morale. “There is war-weariness on both sides. Not just in the west,” the diplomat said.
Another said the announcement by the US president, Barack Obama, that the troop drawdown would begin next July, had in turn encouraged the Haqqanis to come forward. “That conveyed a message that the Americans would not be there for ever, and they definitely were in the market for talks, and that opened a door,” the source said.
He predicted that talks with both the Haqqanis and the Quetta Shura would begin in earnest in December, after the winter snows cut the passes between Pakistan and Afghanistan and effectively end the fighting season.
In any future talks the critical demand from both Kabul and Washington would be for the Haqqanis to sever their ties to al-Qaida, whose leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are believed to be sheltering in the caves of North Waziristan.
A Pakistani official said yesterday that he believed the group was ready to make that step. “This is the end of the road for al-Qaida in Waziristan,” the official said.
Just over a year ago, the intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad went to meet Haqqani fighters in their stronghold.
“We are Afghans fighting the jihad and defending our country under the leadership of Jalaluddin Haqqani,” the commander said. He spoke in a schoolmasterly tone. As well as being a commander, Mawlawi Jalali is a teacher in Haqqani’s madrasa.
“The Americans toppled the emirate [of the Taliban] and we are fighting to bring it back. When the Taliban were here the jihad was only in Afghanistan. Now, thanks to the Americans, the jihad has spread to many other countries.”
How did he plan to pursue his holy war? “We use different tactics: mining the streets, fighting and direct attacks. Here in this camp we make all the preparations and have all the men we need for these different tactics.”
What about the new American surge, I asked. Did it concern him?
“We attack the towns, like in Wazi Zadran, where there is a strong American and Afghan garrison, and mine the streets every day. We average two or three attacks a day against the Americans and their allies. The more troops they send, the more targets we have, so it’s good.”
One Western military official said there was an unspoken agreement between Pakistani and American officials that United States Predator drones would generally be used in the tribal areas against foreign Qaeda members, rather than Pakistani or Afghan targets, like the Haqqanis.
If such an agreement existed, it clearly doesn’t any more.
Tom Gregg points out that the opportunity to draw the Haqqani network into a peace process will pass as soon as its leader, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, transfers power to his son.
It is well known that for almost a decade he has suffered from health problems and requires regular medical attention rendering him relatively inactive in the day-to-day workings of the insurgency. Furthermore, as a senior insurgent commander (and former Taliban Minister), Maulavi Haqqani’s profile as a “most wanted” does not permit travel to the Afghan battle space. Consequently, his 36-year-old son Sirajuddin (aka “Khalifa”) has increasingly taken over, with gusto, operational command of his father’s network.
However, these limitations speak nothing of the influence Maulavi Haqqani continues to enjoy as a tribal leader, religious scholar, ISI associate and close ally of Gulf Arab financiers. Indeed, the success of the Haqqani network rests with these social/religious/political connections that Maulavi Haqqani has carefully nurtured over the past 30-plus years; indeed, it was these very factors that also made him so popular with the CIA during the anti-Soviet jihad). It can be assumed that these networks, particularly with Arab financiers and the ISI, have been “inherited” by Sirajuddin. However, the same cannot be said about Maulavi Haqqani’s tribal, religious and mujahideen credentials. Sirajuddin is in his early 30’s, grew up in Miram Shah, Pakistan and, prior to 2001, only occasionally traveled to his native village of Garde Serai, nestled in the rugged mountains of Paktia province. In Miram Shah he was involved in Islamic Studies but, unlike his father, did not graduate from a prestigious madrassah and is too young to have been a well-known fighter during the anti-Soviet jihad.
Hence, the very elements that have contributed to the success of Maulavi Haqqani’s activities in eastern Afghanistan (and that could be used to assist in a peace process) — his personal influence as a tribal leader, mujahideen commander and religious elder — will be lost after he dies or passes control to Siraj.
“You have the watches, but we have the time,” the Taliban like to say.
But now the Washington Post reports that the Taliban’s top commanders are “very serious” about finding a way to end the war. Their eagerness is driven by fear that their power will be usurped.
The leadership knows “that they are going to be sidelined,” the source said. “They know that more radical elements are being promoted within their rank and file outside their control. . . . All these things are making them absolutely sure that, regardless of [their success in] the war, they are not in a winning position.”
In this narrative, when it comes the issue of negotiating peace, it’s Washington that has been dragging its feet, waiting for an advantageous position.
The United States’ European partners in Afghanistan, with different histories and under far stronger domestic pressure to withdraw their troops, have always been more amenable to a negotiated settlement. “What it really boils down to is the Americans both supporting and in some cases maybe even participating in talking with the enemy,” the first European official said. “If you strip everything away, that’s the deal here. For so long, politically, it’s been a deal breaker in the United States, and with some people it still is.”
Whatever domestic political difficulties the administration may fear would result from a negotiated deal with the Taliban, this official said, would be resolved by ending the war earlier rather than later. “A successful policy solves the political problem,” he said.
U.S. officials depicted a somewhat different progression leading to the same conclusion, insisting that the time for real negotiations has only now arrived. Although last fall’s strategy review concluded that defeat of the Taliban was an unrealistic goal, it was followed this year by “a period of time where we’ve been focused on getting our inputs in place, moving resources into Afghanistan,” a senior administration official said. The Afghan government has also been positioning itself for serious talks, he said, through international conferences in January and July, the convening of a “peace jirga,” or council, in Kabul and last week’s naming of the members of an official government reconciliation team.
“Now, yeah, there’s a sense that we mean what we say” when voicing support for a political process, the official said. “The president’s view is that we have to do these things at the same time. We can’t take the approach that we’re just going to be putting our foot on the gas on the military side of things and will get around to the political,” he said.
Last month, Obama pressed his national security team to be more specific about what it meant by a political solution, and “reinforced” the need to be working simultaneously on the military and political sides of the equation, the official said.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, told reporters last week that high-level Taliban leaders had “sought to reach out” to the top level of the Karzai government. “This is how you end these kinds of insurgencies,” he said.
So, even as NATO convoys are getting blown up in Pakistan, things are moving into alignment in Afghanistan just in time for a favorable policy review in December and the beginning of troop withdrawals in July. What a stroke of luck!
What makes me skeptical that Mullah Omar is ready for retirement in Saudi Arabia?
U.S. officials in Pakistan have spent much of the past year toiling to bolster the country’s elected government and perhaps improve the United States’ image along the way. But much of the progress made toward those goals may have been swept away with the firing of two NATO missiles last week, officials and politicians here said.
The helicopter strike, which Pakistan says killed three of its soldiers, is widely seen here as proof that the U.S. alliance with Pakistan is based solely on self-serving security interests. And it may have put the United States in the position of destabilizing the weak government it wants to fortify, by giving President Asif Ali Zardari’s many critics another reason to say he is allowing Pakistan to be an American pawn.
It did not help that the airstrike came at the end of a month in which the CIA targeted Pakistan’s militant-riddled tribal areas with a record number of drone strikes, which are secretly sanctioned by Pakistan but deeply unpopular. It also followed reports, confirmed by Pakistani officials, depicting the powerful army chief and U.S. officials as trying to play puppet master by presenting Zardari with lists of incompetent ministers and aides they think should be dismissed to improve governance.
A joint investigation into the airstrike is underway, with results expected to be released sometime Wednesday. U.S. and Pakistani officials said the incident had strained but not fractured the nations’ relationship. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said the allies are “working energetically” to resolve the issues.
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell struck an upbeat tone with reporters earlier this week, saying that the relationship between the Pentagon and the Pakistani military is “stronger than it has ever been.”
Privately, though, the Obama administration and U.S. military have appeared exasperated by Pakistan’s response to last week’s missile strike. Senior military officials eschewed the effusive apologies and compensation that normally follow inadvertent coalition killings of civilians, noting that the three killed were not civilians and that the United States is not in the habit of compensating the families of soldiers who fire on U.S. forces. The officials said no substantive move will be taken until the probe is completed.
Farahnaz Ispahani, a spokeswoman for Zardari, said Tuesday that Pakistan is satisfied with the U.S. response. In the public’s eyes, though, she said, the incident “only bolsters the arguments and popularity of the terrorists.” The Taliban has asserted responsibility for a string of retaliatory attacks on NATO supply convoys.
On Wednesday, the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Peterson, apologized for last week’s attack and said in a statement that a joint investigation has established that U.S. helicopters mistook the Frontier Corps soldiers for insurgents they had been pursuing.
When it comes to respect for sovereignty, America’s double standards are glaringly obvious to Rafia Zakaria writing in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper.
On Oct 1, just days after the Nato incident in Pakistan, US forces engaged in an armed standoff with Mexican forces that had crossed the international bridge in pursuit of a vehicle related to a drugs case. US forces at the Texas border at Progresso shut down the international crossing when the Mexican military was reported to have crossed the border.
While no shots were fired, the US customs and border police refused to admit that the Mexican military had the right to cross into the US while in pursuit of criminals. This despite the fact that drug-related crimes caused nearly 5,500 deaths in Mexico in 2008 and the US supplies 90 per cent of the weapons used by drug cartels in Mexico to carry out these murders. All these would seem good reason to allow the doctrine of hot pursuit to apply when Mexican police or military are engaged in an operation against the deadly cartels and cross into the US.
Of course, such is not the case. Mexico is not permitted to fly drones into US territory, searching for intelligence on the drug trade or to thwart arms deals that cause deaths of their citizens. Similarly, Pakistan has to look the other way when the US chooses to ignore the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in search of terrorists. Crudely stated, the rules of the game in the current case are being dictated not by any existing legal doctrine in international law but rather at the will and whims of the most powerful player.
Pakistanis scoff at the argument often heard in Washington that the U.S. needs to remain at war in Afghanistan partly in order to stabilize Pakistan — instead, they see the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the load that it has placed on Islamabad as being the major cause of the instability in their country. In other words, they have a very different idea of what another 10 years of war in Afghanistan or a full-fledged bombing campaign against the tribal areas will do for Pakistan’s security.
After three Frontier Corps soldiers were killed in a NATO helicopter attack on a Pakistani border post last week, the Pakistani government cut off supplies to Afghanistan by closing the Torkham border crossing. It was the easiest way of sending a message to Washington that killing Pakistani soldiers is unacceptable.
The Washington Post‘s editorial page now shoots back: “[Pakistan’s] resistance to a more muscular U.S. campaign in North Waziristan, where the Haqqani faction is based, is unacceptable.”
So what’s the Obama administration going to do? Show the Pakistanis who’s the boss and threaten to cut off aid to a country currently dealing with an environmental catastrophe worse than the 2004 Asian Tsunami?
For those with an imperial mindset (like the editors of the Washington Post) the issue here is about who has the right and the power to exercise their will. America, land of the righteous, savior of the world, must prevail.
But America’s real military problem is not it’s inability to restore a global consensus about the supremacy of its military might. America’s problem is topography.
It’s because of topography that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a contrivance that the Taliban can freely use to their advantage.
Though thanks to Vietnam’s jungles, quagmire remains the metaphor of choice when we talk about unwinnable wars, a more appropriate metaphor for what is now glibly referred to as Af-Pak is The Labyrinth.
When the Pentagon saw it’s opportunity to vanquish the ghost of Vietnam, it knew what it was looking for: a great big cumbersome army in a wide open space.
Victory against Saddam in Kuwait was a foregone conclusion — even if it’s debatable exactly what the US proved when it demonstrated its ability to slaughter thousands.
The Washington Post now sees itself as a valiant bugler leading the charge in the next phase of what it swiftly, justifiably but also cynically dubbed “Obama’s war”. But like all the war’s proponent, it is a victim of an irresistible illusion: that will-power can move mountains. Others have tried — and the mountains are still there.
What will be accomplished by the latest call for what is euphemistically described as a more “muscular” approach in Waziristan is the further reinforcement of a view of America already widely held in Pakistan.
There is no ideological commitment or religious fervor that fuels the Pakistani public’s anti-Americanism. Nor is there a particularly civilizational flavor to it. Pakistani anti-Americanism comes from a sustained narrative in which Pakistan is the undignified and humiliated recipient of U.S. financial support — provided at the expense of Pakistani blood.
As narratives go, this comes closer to the truth than its comic-book counterpart: the war of necessity (in which Obama heads in deeper on his search for the way out).
Is the word “terrorism” a secret terrorist weapon?
It appears that when US government officials try to think about terrorism their brains stop working. It’s a word that has become a piece of neural malware and everywhere it spreads, rational minds sputter and then cease to function. Who could have dreamed that a simple word could be so potent and destructive.
Yesterday we were told this: “The State Department alerts U.S. citizens to the potential for terrorist attacks in Europe.”
Why were they so specific, limiting the warning to just one continent?
The State website usefully provides a map, just in case anyone isn’t sure where Europe is. Should Americans already there jump on the first plane to head home? Apparently not.
“U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.”
This might prevent a few road fatalities. Drivers in Europe do expect pedestrians to exercise caution in the vicinity of fast-moving traffic. It’s always a good idea not to step off the curb with your eyes shut.
The New York Times thought it would be good to get some expert opinion on the significance of the State travel alert. Georgetown University’s Bruce Hoffman said: “I’m not sure what it says, beyond the fact that the world’s a dangerous place, and we already knew that.” Indeed.
As to who prompted this response to the latest al Qaeda threat:
A White House spokesman, Nicholas S. Shapiro, said that while the State Department had decided to issue the alert, it came in response to Mr. Obama’s insistence that “we need to do everything possible to disrupt this plot and protect the American people.”
Now here’s the serious point.
In terms of being able to identify where the next major act of terrorism may strike, the US government can’t be any more precise than to specify a continent — and with that level of precision who’s to say whether they identified the right continent.
At the same time, when it comes to identifying from where the next major act of terrorism will emanate, the US government claims it can identify targets with pinpoint accuracy as it escalates drone warfare in Pakistan.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that those who see danger everywhere also claim they have a talent for shooting straight.
There was a time — and it’s really not that long ago — that terrorism provoked a sturdier response from politicians who recognized that it was not their job to become agents of mass hysteria.
On October 12, 1984, Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, survived an assassination attempt by the IRA. Five were killed and 31 injured in the blast which occurred at 2.54AM. Just over an hour later, having dusted herself off and changed her clothes, Thatcher spoke to the press.
“Life must go on as usual,” she said and went on to speak at the Conservative Party Conference which continued on schedule.
The event was recalled in Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain*:
The IRA responded with equal clarity:
Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.
The Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign continued until 1997.
Thatcher may have lacked the political flexibility and imagination required for the peace process, but she and the people of Northern Ireland and Britain demonstrated that life can indeed go on as usual even during a decades-long bombing campaign.
President Obama on the other hand seems willing to try and perpetuate the illusion that rests as the foundation of the war on terrorism: the idea that terrorism can be thwarted. It cannot.
The opportunities for individuals or small groups of individuals to cause carnage are infinite. The means to prevent such acts of violence are limited.
Political courage demands the articulation of this truth: the issue is not how you stop the unstoppable, but what you do afterwards.
Terrorism can provoke either intelligent or stupid responses and nothing is more stupid than an approach to counterterrorism which ends up fueling further acts of random violence.
Is the world safer now than it was on September 12, 2001? Obviously not.
The fact that 9/11 was followed by a decade of war with no end in sight is the grossest act of stupidity in modern history. Through its misconceived approach to counterterrorism America has rewarded al Qaeda more generously than Osama bin Laden could have ever dreamed.
*Marr’s entertaining BBC documentary series covers British history from the end of the Second World War onwards. The context for the clip above was Thatcher’s ruthless campaign against the National Union of Miners led by Arthur Scargill, but more broadly an effort to destroy the trade union movement and dismantle the welfare state. In the process, she deservedly became the most despised woman in Britain.
Ben D, a commenter at this site and Arms Control Wonk is skeptical about my assertion that Siemens SCADA software is being used at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility. I based that claim on a UPI photograph that led the German industrial security expert, Ralph Langner, to speculate that Bushehr was the intended target of the Stuxnet malware.
These are Ben’s qualms:
Concerning the UPI image of a control panel with a MS look window superimposed that says.. “WinCC Runtime License: Your software license has expired. Please obtain a valid license”, well it doesn’t prove a thing.
First of all, the WinCC window could so easily be a photo- shopped overlay on the image of a process control panel.
Secondly, the Control Panel image is typical of process control panels everywhere and even if the WinCC window was not photo-shopped, what has that got to do with Bushehr. There is nothing else in the image to provide any information whatsoever about the local environment to provide any context as to its locality or purpose.
Thirdly, UPI does not provide a source for anyone claiming that the UPI Photo by Mohammad Kheirkhah is actually Bushehr, they just provide a narrative to imply that it is.
Fourthly, Ralph Lagner is not claiming the UPI image is actually genuine or that it is of Bushehr, he merely prefaces his speculative theory with ” If the picture is authentic, which I have no means of verifying,….”.
Has the image been doctored? I’m not in a position to determine that, but the Hacker Factor Blog did some image analysis and concluded that it was not doctored. He has other reasons for questioning whether it was taken at Bushehr but found no evidence that it had been manipulated with Photoshop.
This image apparently confirms that the photograph is of a computer monitor and the continuity in the ripple pattern across the part of the screen where the WinCC message appears seems to confirm that this was not inserted from a different screen image. (This ripple pattern can be seen both in the blue image and the close-up image.)
So, assuming that the WinCC expired-licence message was actually appearing on that monitor screen, is there any evidence that the monitor and the control system it depicts is in Bushehr?
Frankly, I was willing to accept that UPI was not misrepresenting or incorrectly labeling its photos, but still, some additional analysis was both in order and turned out to be fruitful. There is indeed evidence that this image depicts a Bushehr control system.
The elements in the schematic have a uniform numbering system — UA04B001, UA04B002 etc.
Another UPI photograph appears to show the physical components depicted on the system control monitor. This vessel shown on the right is numbered UA06B002. That particular number doesn’t appear on the monitor image but it’s hard to believe that this is not part of the same system.
OK. But maybe the screen image and the image of an Iranian technician turning a valve were taken some place other than Bushehr.
Well, UPI’s photographer was one among a group of international journalists who were shown around Bushehr in February 2009. They included Jon Leyne, a reporter for the BBC, and a video in his report shows the same assembly of pale gray vessels that appear in the UPI photo. Indeed, an AFP image in the same report shows the same technician, from a different angle, doing his valve-turning performance for the assembled press.
With the evidence that I’ve laid out I will assert with even more confidence that the Bushehr nuclear plant uses Siemens WinCC SCADA software. I also see little reason to doubt that Iranian officials were telling the truth when they said that Stuxnet had been found on personal computers used by the facility’s operators. What I remain skeptical about is their claim that the malware did not penetrate the system. How confident the Iranians are on that question may become evident in the coming months when the plant begins or fails to begin generating electricity.
A USB memory stick carrying the Stuxnet malware is believed to have provided intruders with access to Iran’s nuclear program. The same technique was used in November 2008 to break into CENTCOM, providing a foreign government with unfiltered access to the Pentagon’s command of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Did both attacks come from the same source?
Cyber warfare has quietly grown into a central pillar of Israel’s strategic planning, with a new military intelligence unit set up to incorporate high-tech hacking tactics, Israeli security sources said on Tuesday.
Israel’s pursuit of options for sabotaging the core computers of foes like Iran, along with mechanisms to protect its own sensitive systems, were unveiled last year by the military intelligence chief, Major-General Amos Yadlin.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since set cyber warfare as a national priority, “up there with missile shields and preparing the homefront to withstand a future missile war”, a senior source said on condition of anonymity.
Back in 1997, when the US did not overtly support political assassinations, President Clinton intervened to save the life of Khalid Meshaal. The Hamas political bureau chief had been poisoned by Mossad operatives (carrying stolen Canadian passports) on the streets of Jordan’s capital, Amman.
Clinton wasn’t trying to help Hamas but knew that a peace treaty he had helped broker between Israel and Jordan would be in jeopardy if Prime Minister Netanyahu thought he could disregard the sovereignty of Jordan and carry out assassinations with impunity. Likewise, neither King Hussein nor the Canadian government believed that Israeli actions showing a flagrant disregard for the authority of their respective governments could go unanswered.
Netanyahu would probably have found Clinton’s pressure unpersuasive were it not for the fact that the Israeli operatives had already been arrested. In exchange for their release, the Israelis supplied the antidote that saved Meshaal’s life while also releasing the Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Then came 9/11.
Before long, Yassin had been assassinated, the US was using Israeli methods of torture in its campaign against an amorphous Islamic threat, Israel’s own war crimes were sanctioned by the US in the name of the war on terrorism, and the use of stolen foreign passports by Mossad agents committing murder on foreign soil provoked nothing more than a diplomatic slap on the wrists.
The willingness of this and the previous administration to allow Israel to disregard international law shows that even if the Israel lobby can no longer flourish like a night flower, its power is barely diminished. Even so, the appearance of the Stuxnet malware should be a wake-up call to every government around the world that refuses to place Israel’s national interests above its own.
In its conception, Stuxnet can be viewed very much like a targeted killing — but one designed to attack silently and leave no trace of its origin.
It’s creators understood that they had designed an exceedingly dangerous weapon and so they made sure its damage could be contained. But it seems not to have worked according to plan and so caution got tossed out of the window. Apparently, Israel did what it has done so many times before: pursued what it regarded as its own interests with an utter disregard for the international consequences.
The original infection method, which relied on infected USB drives, included a counter that limited the spread to just three PCs, said [Liam] O Murchu [operations manager with Symantec’s security response]. “It’s clear that the attackers did not want Stuxnet to spread very far,” he said. “They wanted it to remain close to the original infection point.”
O Murchu’s research also found a 21-day propagation window; in other words, the worm would migrate to other machines in a network only for three weeks before calling it quits.
Those anti-propagation measures notwithstanding, Stuxnet has spread widely. Why?
Kaspersky’s [Roel] Schouwenberg [a senior antivirus researcher] believes it’s because the initial attack, which relied on infected USB drives, failed to do what Stuxnet’s makers wanted.
“My guess is that the first variant didn’t achieve its target,” said Schouwenberg, referring to the worm’s 2009 version that lacked the more aggressive propagation mechanisms, including multiple Windows zero-day vulnerabilities. “So they went on to create a more sophisticated version to reach their target.”
That more complex edition, which O Murchu said was developed in March of this year, was the one that “got all the attention,” according to Schouwenberg. But the earlier edition had already been at work for months by then — and even longer before a little-known antivirus vendor from Belarus first found it in June. “The first version didn’t spread enough, and so Stuxnet’s creators took a gamble, and abandoned the idea of making it stealthy,” said Schouwenberg.
In Schouwenberg’s theory, Stuxnet’s developers realized their first attempt had failed to penetrate the intended target or targets, and rather than simply repeat the attack, decided to raise the ante.
“They spent a lot of time and money on Stuxnet,” Schouwenberg said. “They could try again [with the USB-only vector] and maybe fail again, or they could take the risk of it spreading by adding more functionality to the worm.”
O Murchu agreed that it was possible the worm’s creators had failed to infect, and thus gain control, of the industrial systems running at their objective(s), but said the code itself didn’t provide clear clues.
What is clear, O Murchu said in a news conference Friday morning, is that Stuxnet evolved over time, adding new ways to spread on networks in the hope of finding specific PLCs (programming logic control) hardware to hijack. “It’s possible that [the attackers] didn’t manage to get to all of their targets [with the earlier version],” O Murchu said. “The increased sophistication of Stuxnet in 2010 may indicate that they had not reached their target.”
With the proliferation of Stuxnet, Schouwenberg said that the country or countries that created the worm may have themselves been impacted by its spread. But that was likely a calculated risk the worm’s developers gladly took.
And that risk may have been quite small. “Perhaps they knew that their own critical infrastructure wouldn’t be affected by Stuxnet because it’s not using Siemens PLCs,” Schouwenberg said.
The danger now posed by Stuxnet is not simply through its direct proliferation but by virtue of the fact that it provides a blueprint that can be adapted by other parties who would otherwise lack the resources to create malware this sophisticated from scratch.
What might have been conceived as a tool to prevent the creation of a weapon of mass destruction could itself be turned into a WMD.
“Stuxnet opened Pandora’s box,” said Ralph Langner, a German researcher whose early analysis of the worm’s ability to target control systems raised public awareness of the threat. “We don’t need to be concerned about Stuxnet, but about the next-generation malware we will see after Stuxnet.”
Sean McGurk, director of the U.S. National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the department posted its first report to industry recommending steps to mitigate the effects of Stuxnet on July 15. But “not even two days later,” he said, a hacker Web site posted the code so that others could use it to exploit the vulnerabilities in Microsoft.
“So we know that once the information is out in the wild, people are taking it and they’re modifying it,” he said.
In other words, what started as an Israeli cyber attack on nuclear installations in Iran could end up crashing the US powergrid or causing havoc anywhere else on the globe.
Even before Stuxnet loomed over the horizon, serious warnings were being issued about the United States’ vulnerability to a crippling cyber attack, yet thus far none of those raising the alarm have pointed to the ways in which Israel’s cyber warfare capabilities may now indirectly or directly threaten the United States and its interests.
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Late last year, 60 Minutes reported on America’s vulnerability to a major cyber attack.
Ever since speculation began, suggesting that Israel is the source of the Stuxnet malware, there has been a buzz of excitement in the Zionist corner of the blogosphere. The DEBKAfile — trusted source for pro-Israel fantasists all over the world — declared that if it turns out that millions of Iranian industrial units have been hit, “this cyber weapon attack on Iran would be the greatest ever.”
Glee at such a prospect is not shared by observers who lack the Zionist pathological obsession with Iran.
Stephen Spoonamore, a veteran cybersecurity consultant interviewed by NPR said: “I can think of very few stupider blowback decisions” than to release code that controls most of the worlds’ hydroelectric dams or many of the world’s nuclear plants or many of the world’s electrical switching stations.
The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc in China, infecting millions of computers around the country, state media reported this week.
Stuxnet is feared by experts around the globe as it can break into computers that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves.
It could, technically, make factory boilers explode, destroy gas pipelines or even cause a nuclear plant to malfunction.
The virus targets control systems made by German industrial giant Siemens commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities.
“This malware is specially designed to sabotage plants and damage industrial systems, instead of stealing personal data,” an engineer surnamed Wang at antivirus service provider Rising International Software told the Global Times.
“Once Stuxnet successfully penetrates factory computers in China, those industries may collapse, which would damage China’s national security,” he added.
Another unnamed expert at Rising International said the attacks had so far infected more than six million individual accounts and nearly 1,000 corporate accounts around the country, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Jeffrey Carr, author of “Inside Cyber Warfare,” describes what he believes is the first example of Stuxnet’s destructive power: the loss of India’s INSAT-4B communications satellite which shut down in July. The satellite’s control systems use Siemens S7-400 PLC and SIMATIC WinCC software, both of which are targeted by Stuxnet.
If speculation that Stuxnet was created by Israel has been driven by the circumstantial evidence that Israel’s nemesis Iran appears to have been the primary target, there is now some subtle but concrete evidence again pointing in Israel’s direction.
Buried in Stuxnet’s code is a marker with the digits “19790509” that the researchers believe is a “do-not infect” indicator. If the marker equals that value, Stuxnet stops in its tracks, and does not infect the targeted PC.
The researchers — Nicolas Falliere, Liam O Murchu and Eric Chen — speculated that the marker represents a date: May 9, 1979.
“While on May 9, 1979, a variety of historical events occurred, according to Wikipedia “Habib Elghanian was executed by a firing squad in Tehran sending shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community,” the researchers wrote.
Elghanian, a prominent Jewish-Iranian businessman, was charged with spying for Israel by the then-new revolutionary government of Iran, and executed May 9, 1979.
Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.
That use of the word “Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.
Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel’s intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. In interviews in several countries, experts in both cyberwar and nuclear enrichment technology say the Stuxnet mystery may never be solved.
There are many competing explanations for myrtus, which could simply signify myrtle, a plant important to many cultures in the region. But some security experts see the reference as a signature allusion to Esther, a clear warning in a mounting technological and psychological battle as Israel and its allies try to breach Tehran’s most heavily guarded project. Others doubt the Israelis were involved and say the word could have been inserted as deliberate misinformation, to implicate Israel.
The same report cites Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, who said he was “convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.”
“We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level,” he said. “We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment.”
Did Blitzblau present his findings at this week’s VB Conference in Vancouver where Stuxnet was the focus of attention? No — which is not surprising given his vacuous claim to have studied the code at its deepest level while other experts say it will take months to penetrate the thousands of lines of code contained in a 500kB piece of software.
As for why Israeli programmers would have inserted clues about about authorship deep inside the malware, the most obvious explanation would be the most prosaic: pride.
Even when the utmost secrecy is called for, there are those who cannot resist the temptation to leave their mark.
As for the significance of another finding — June 24, 2012 is the “kill date” after which the worm will refuse to execute — again, we can only speculate.
Is this the cut-off point for Israel’s campaign of cyber warfare against Iran after which will come the time for real war? Right in the run up to the 2012 US presidential election.
For weeks now, as missiles from American drones have snuffed out their leaders and terrorized their recruits in the remote mountains of Pakistan’s North Waziristan area, Al Qaeda fighters have kept their spirits up by telling each other they were about to have their revenge. “It’s like they’ve just been waiting for news, as if they were all excited about something big about to happen in the West,” says an Afghan Taliban intelligence officer known to Newsweek who operates as a liaison between his organization and Al Qaeda. For security reasons he would not allow his name to be published. The source said one senior Qaeda activist told him that Europeans and Americans think “our minds and bodies are in the mountains of the [Pakistan] tribal areas, but soon we will carry out a visible offensive with long-term consequences in their own Western homes and cities.”
Reports out of Britain overnight suggest that more than bravado may be at work here: according to anonymous sources cited by Sky News foreign-affairs editor Tim Marshall, intelligence agencies have uncovered terrorist plans to launch simultaneous commando-style attacks in Germany, France, and Britain that would be reminiscent of the slaughter in Mumbai almost two years ago. Such attacks have been a major concern of Western police forces because they require no special weaponry — just guns, training, and a will to die fighting.
Marshall says that the dramatic increase in drone attacks over the last few weeks is intended to disrupt the plot against European targets. One drone strike reportedly killed the head of Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, known as Shaikh Fateh, just last Saturday. Marshall quoted his sources telling him the Qaeda plot was in an “advanced but not imminent stage” and that intelligence agencies had been tracking the operatives “for some time.” The implication is that the onslaught of drone attacks, especially in the last month, has succeeded in thwarting the plot.
If the plot is not at an imminent stage, one wonders why the Eiffel Tower has been evacuated twice this month. But whether imminent or advanced, the logic behind the response to the threat — escalating drone attacks in Pakistan — ought to hinge on where these Qaeda commando teams are now located.
ABC News reports on intelligence gathered from a suspected German terrorist who is now being held at Bagram airbase near Kabul. “The captured German reportedly said several teams of attackers, all with European passports, had been trained and dispatched from training camps in Waziristan and Pakistan.”
If they’ve already been dispatched, what’s the point of launching drone attacks on these training camps now? Is this about thwarting terrorism or about adopting a combative posture? A way of saying: we’re not doing nothing; we’re doing something. It might not work, but we sure as hell won’t take this lying down.
Or maybe it’s what might be called preemptive retribution — a foretaste of what will happen after a major al Qaeda attack.
As Bob Woodward’s new book reveals, “if a Pakistani-based terrorist ever managed to strike inside the United States, the CIA had a ‘retribution plan’ to strike at least 150 camps in Pakistan.”
Retribution is another name for revenge and the inchoate rationale that drives revenge is the desire to eliminate the enemy.
“Who did we get today,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would ask, as though a finite list of drone targets could be whittled down to zero — even while the director of the CIA warned him that this could go on forever.
Almost a decade after 9/11, the mere fact that a retribution plan with 150 targets could be drawn up, is a clear indication of a failed strategy.
Of course this elimination strategy is doomed because it confuses human bodies with the ideas and sentiments that animate them. The bodies can be destroyed but the spirit moves on to animate another combatant. Indeed, the drone can best be seen as the worst kind of force multiplier — one that invigorates the enemy and boosts support among the local population.
As Stephen Farrell astutely noted after being able to observe the Taliban while he was held captive last year, as much as anything else the significance of the drone is not its destructive power but what it signals: the absence of foreign soldiers.
The US commands the sky over Waziristan because it dare not occupy the land.
As for whether a terrorist attack in France is actually imminent, the raised level of alertness prompted by official warnings has been matched by a raised level of suspicion.
Opposition figures and pundits alike have loudly speculated that the troubling pronouncements are actually a ruse to turn attention away from scandals that have implicated government members and from growing protest against pension reform. French media have even suggested that President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose approval ratings are in the doldrums, has borrowed the tactic of the well-timed terrorism scare from the playbook of former U.S. President George W. Bush.
“The French people aren’t duped,” says Socialist Party official and former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in a remark typical of the skeptics. “The fight against terrorism is a serious and discreet effort, incompatible with sudden alert announcements — made, by chance, as protests surge. There’s an element of stagecraft in this that’s out of line and even dangerous.”
The lesson of the last decade should be that what governments do to prevent terrorism matter less than what they do afterwards.
Thus far, local horror has been a reliable catalyst for global folly.
There’s always something seductive about a third way — the way between extremes; the way free of dogma traversed by pragmatists with flexible minds.
Wright’s third way breaks the impasse on the road to a two-state solution by co-opting the one-state solution as a means to mobilize Israeli centrists — Jewish moderates whose worst nightmare would be to live in a state where they shared equal rights with Palestinians.
It’s a strange political landscape where a revulsion for the dismantling of an ethnocracy makes someone a centrist, but I suppose that’s because all “center” really means is the portion of the political spectrum where the largest numbers can be found.
Even so, the center usually has an understated vanity which is that it sees itself as the wellspring of moderation. It’s where people don’t stay up late at night, pay most of their taxes, don’t take illegal drugs and don’t take too much interest in politics.
This is the silent majority whose voice doesn’t get heard because they’re too civil — or, truth be told, too comfortable.
“For a peace deal to happen, Israel’s centrists need to get jarred out of their indifference. Someone needs to scare these people,” Wright says.
And what’s the scariest thing they could face? A one-state solution.
Of course a one-state solution isn’t particularly scary if it’s unlikely to happen and so Wright envisages the Palestinians — as usual the Palestinians are merely supporting actors in this Middle East drama — mobilizing to form an internationally supported non-violent movement demanding just one thing: the right to vote.
The more successful this movement becomes, the more eager Israel’s “centrists” will become in pursuing the only means that could thwart the dreaded prospect of equality.
And so, just in the nick of time, the two-state solution would ride to the rescue and save the Jewish state.
As for the mass movement that coalesced around the compelling idea of equality in a pluralistic secular democracy — they’ll happily give up that idea, knowing it was just a pipe dream, and settle for a Palestinian state which, who knows, could even include East Jerusalem.
For anyone blogging in the US or most other democratic countries, it’s easy to take freedom of speech for granted. The case of Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger who was just sentenced to 19 years in prison, is a salutary reminder of the dangers individuals face when simply voicing their thoughts in a country like Iran. Earlier reports that he might get a death sentence are believed to have been a way to make his actual sentence appear in some way lenient.
Arrested in October 2008, Derakhshan had been charged with “cooperation with hostile states” and “propagating against the regime”, among other counts, the site said. In addition to the lengthy prison term, he was fined and banned from membership in political parties and work in the media for a period of five years.
“We are shocked,” one of Derakhshan’s relatives told IPS on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case and fears of a backlash by security forces. “We never expected this to happen. Even according to Iranian laws, he has not done anything to deserve such a harsh sentence.”
Neither the family nor Derakhshan’s lawyer was aware of the sentence until it appeared on Mashreq’s website. His relative told IPS that Derakhshan did say that after two years in prison, “My state of uncertainty has finally ended,” referring to his long detention without any progress in his case.
Mohammad Ali Mahdavi, Derakhshan’s lawyer, told IPS that the verdict still has not been announced even to him. “I’m waiting for the official announcement to start working on the defence bill for the appeals court,” he said, adding, “I prefer to defend my client rather than bringing the case to the media as it might endanger the fate of the case at this phase.”
Judge Abolqasem Salavati is amongst three judges who are well-known for issuing long and harsh sentences for political prisoners, particularly the post-election detainees. His rulings have included the death sentence and numerous long-term prison sentences.
“I believe that first of all, the charges are totally unfounded, and the verdict demonstrates the injustice that many people have been talking about all these years,” Nikahang Kowsar, an award-winning Iranian cartoonist and blogger based in Toronto, where Derakhshan used to live, told IPS.
“Hossein wasn’t a very nice guy to many of us,” Kowsar said. “He criticised many journalists, bloggers and activists for being critical of the Iranian regime and ridiculing Iran’s leaders. He called us ‘agents of neo-liberalism’ or ‘enemies of Iran’ and tried to portray us as the ones willing to sell our nation to the West, but he was absolutely entitled to express his mind.”
Derakhshan, also known as Hoder, has been dubbed Iran’s “Blogfather” for his role in promoting blogging among Iranians via his popular website, hoder.com.
Immediately following the reform era in 1999, Derakhshan was a technology and internet columnist for one of the reformist newspapers in Tehran. In 2000, he moved to Canada and continued his work as a full-time blogger in Toronto.
In 2006, Derakhshan traveled to Israel as a Canadian citizen, a trip that caused a huge controversy in Iran and abroad, as Iranian law forbids Iranian citizens from traveling to Israel.
“We have a saying in Iran: ‘There is freedom of speech in Iran, but there is no freedom after speech in Iran’,” said Kowsar. “His captors are willing to make an example of him for others,” he added.
Derakhshan’s former wife, Marjan Alema was interviewed on Canadian television earlier today:
Did the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius really travel all the way to Pir Sabak, west of Islamabad in flood-devastated Pakistan, just to ask the villagers there what they think of America?
When I arrived, villagers were erecting a big tent to serve as a mosque — even before they had built a school for their kids. When I asked what they thought about America, they had no criticisms. “We are in a time of need, and we are looking for help from anywhere,” said Mohammed Ali, a white-bearded man who was helping raise the canvas mosque.
The U.S. military has been working hard to provide flood assistance, but most of that is invisible to Pakistanis. They read about American drone attacks but not about helicopters bringing food supplies. That lack of recognition upsets U.S. officials, but they haven’t been able to change it.
On a day’s tour of the northern flood zone, I saw posters for Turkish, British and other European relief groups, but not one sign of American help. That’s a missed opportunity. These people still need help desperately, and they will remember those who visibly provided it.
I guess if USAID takes Ignatius’ message to heart, they might start producing multi-lingual labeling for aid packaging. But as the Post columnist learned, those in desperate need don’t care too much about where the help comes from.
As for what changes perceptions, it’s a shame Ignatius wasn’t in Pir Shabak a month ago during the visit by Baroness Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim minister and Chairwoman of the Conservative Party.
Just imagine if the US government could send a Muslim woman cabinet level official on a diplomatic mission to a Muslim country — or for that matter, on a trip to Florida or Tennessee!
While men like Imam Feisal Rauf are struggling to win acceptance for Muslims within American society, Sayeeda Hussain Warsi can speak confidently as a Muslim feminist and British political leader who exemplifies what it means to create a modern pluralistic society.
If many Israelis thought the approach of the Mavi Marmara flotilla looked like an imminent attack by a Turkish armada, a British-flagged catamaran carrying nine Jewish activists on their way to Gaza surely posed no threat to the Jewish state — or did it?
The IDF couldn’t take any chances and so as the Irene approached Gaza early today, Israeli commandos intercepted the latest waterborne menace and took over the boat, thankfully without killing anyone.
“The boarding of the yacht was without incident, and no violence of any kind was used by neither the passengers on board nor the Israel naval forces,” the IDF Spokesperson blog declared.
Israeli activist and former Israel Air Force pilot Yonatan Shapira saying that there were “no words to describe what we went through during the takeover.”
Shapira said the activists, who he said displayed no violence, were met with extreme IDF brutality, adding that the soldiers “just jumped us, and hit us. I was hit with a taser gun.”
“Some of the soldiers treated us atrociously,” Shapira said, adding that he felt there was a “huge gap between what the IDF spokesman is saying happened and what really happened.”
Meanwhile, Yossi Levy, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman who has been carefully trained in the Avigdor Lieberman school of diplomacy encapsulated the government’s position in a string of insults.
The Foreign Ministry expressed its anger against the Israelis and Jews who took part in the sail. According to a ministry official, “They poured fuel into the bonfire of hatred against Israel worldwide. We don’t expect Israelis to be patriotic, but they should definitely not act as Hamas followers.”
The official criticized former pilot Yonatan Shapira and the Holocaust survivor who took part in the flotilla.
“This former pilot, who has joined the ranks of Hamas and sprays hateful graffiti [“FreePalestine“] on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, is not a pilot but an astronaut. A Holocaust survivor who sanctifies the name of the Jews’ murderers and takes time to justify those who don’t accept Israel’s right for sovereignty has probably not learned anything from the terrible past.”
Reuben Moscowitz begged to differ as he expressed disbelief that “Israeli soldiers would treat nine Jews this way. They just hit people.”
“I as a Holocaust survivor cannot live with the fact that the State of Israel is imprisoning an entire people behind fences,” Moscowitz said, adding that “it’s just immoral.”
“What happened to me in the Holocaust wakes me up every night and I hope we don’t do the same thing to our neighbors,” Moscowitz said, adding that he was comparing “what I went through during the Holocaust to what the besieged Palestinian children are going through.”
Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, reveals that the White House was so enamored with the CIA’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, that chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would regularly call the CIA director, Leon Panetta, asking, “Who did we get today?”
Emanuel may have been posing the question because, like President Obama, he shares a perverse thrill in remote killing. Or, he might have asked because Predator warfare turns out to be far less accurate than it proponents would like us to believe.
A legal dispute that was being hammered out in a Boston court this summer, revealed that in its haste to deploy drones, the CIA was willing to use location analysis software that could result in strikes that would be as much as 42 feet off target!
That’s the difference between aiming at one house and destroying the house next door.
Leaving aside the question about how accurate ones intelligence might be about who is inhabiting either house, or the legal issues of what constitutes the battlefield and what can justify extrajudicial killing, or the moral issue of defining innocent bystanders as “collateral damage” — this looks like a case of not being able to shoot straight.
The CIA is implicated in a court case in which it’s claimed it used an illegal, inaccurate software “hack” to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia.
The target of the court action is Netezza, the data warehousing firm that IBM bid $1.7bn for on Monday [Sept 20]. The case raises serious questions about the conduct of Netezza executives, and the conduct of CIA’s clandestine war against senior jihadis in Afganistan and Pakistan.
The dispute surrounds a location analysis software package – “Geospatial” – developed by a small company called Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), which like Netezza is based in Massachusetts. IISi alleges that Netezza misled the CIA by saying that it could deliver the software on its new hardware, to a tight deadline.
When the software firm then refused to rush the job, it’s claimed, Netezza illegally and hastily reverse-engineered IISi’s code to deliver a version that produced locations inaccurate by up to 13 metres [42 feet]. Despite knowing about the miscalculations, the CIA accepted the software, court submissions indicate.
This report comes on the heals of an earlier report which revealed that the military’s use of unencrypted communications channels in Iraq allowed militants to view live video images being transmitted by drones. As the Wall Street Journal reported in December:
Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
Given that President Obama has authorized as many drone attacks since the end of March as his predecessor did in the previous four years, and given that in Pakistan there is a widespread belief that these attacks indiscriminately kill innocent people, and given that this perception is fueling a deepening hatred of America, one might imagine that revelations about the weaknesses of the drone program would result in a serious reexamination of its value.
The US government might not have enough evidence to issue an arrest warrant for a US citizen but it claims the right to kill such a person and to keep secret its reasons for doing so.
The U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi is now on the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command capture-or-kill list of suspected terrorists. He is not however on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist list and has not been indicted. It is believed that he is being hunted down and that he will be killed, if his exact whereabouts become known, but even if that is the case, this “does not foreclose Anwar al-Aulaqi’s access to the courts,” claim Barack H Obama, Robert M Gates and Leon E Panetta, the defendants in a federal case brought by Aulaqi’s father.
Nasser al-Aulaqi has an old-fashioned conception of justice and believes his son has a right to due process and not be subject to a summary execution.
[W]hat’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.
At the very same time that this administration is pushing to expand the boundaries of state secrecy and extra-judicial power it also wants to restrict citizens’ rights to privacy as it seeks sweeping new regulations for the internet that would provide the government with the means to access all electronic communications.
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.
In the post 9/11 national security culture, arguments in favor of the expansion of government power are invariably framed in terms of enhancing the security services’ ability to track down “bad guys.” But as the article notes, enhanced surveillance capabilities will also create opportunities of others.
Several privacy and technology advocates argued that requiring interception capabilities would create holes that would inevitably be exploited by hackers.
Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.
“I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he said. “If they start building in all these back doors, they will be exploited.”
The Greek case — sometimes referred to as the Greek Watergate — is interesting for several reasons. As the Times in another report today on the Stuxnet attack notes, “The level of skill needed to pull off the [Greek] operation and the targets strongly indicated that the culprit was a government.”
Indeed, the list of targets alone makes it hard to imagine that this was anything other than an intelligence agency-run operation. The phones bugged included not only those of the Greek prime minister and his wife but also, IEEE Spectrum reported, those of:
…the ministers of national defense, foreign affairs, and justice, the mayor of Athens, and the Greek European Union commissioner… Others belonged to members of civil rights organizations, peace activists, and antiglobalization groups; senior staff at the ministries of National Defense, Public Order, Merchant Marine, and Foreign Affairs; the New Democracy ruling party; the Hellenic Navy general staff; and a Greek-American employee at the United States Embassy in Athens.
Given the context of the then-upcoming 2004 Athens Olympics which were widely regarded as a potential target for a major act of terrorism, it seems quite likely that this was a CIA-run operation.
Since we live in what is still widely regarded as the “freest” nation on earth, as the Obama administration quietly moves to expand its powers, we should have no doubt that the national security culture that is being established here as a new normal, will also serve as a model for other nations that will justify even more extreme restrictions on civil liberties by virtue of the similarities these measures bear to the American way.
The architecture of world government is not being crafted at the United Nations but behind closed doors at the NSA and the CIA. The people we should be most afraid of are the people who promise to make us feel safe.
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.
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In a landmark case, the first trial of a former Guantánamo detainee, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan made a ruling that presents a major setback for the Department of Justice. He barred the key witness from testifying because he had been identified and located through torturing the accused, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was being held in a secret prison by the CIA.
It is well known that for almost a decade he has suffered from health problems and requires regular medical attention rendering him relatively inactive in the day-to-day workings of the insurgency. Furthermore, as a senior insurgent commander (and former Taliban Minister), Maulavi Haqqani’s profile as a “most wanted” does not permit travel to the Afghan battle space. Consequently, his 36-year-old son Sirajuddin (aka “Khalifa”) has increasingly taken over, with gusto, operational command of his father’s network.
After three Frontier Corps soldiers were killed in a NATO helicopter attack on a Pakistani border post last week, the Pakistani government cut off supplies to Afghanistan by closing the Torkham border crossing. It was the easiest way of sending a message to Washington that killing Pakistani soldiers is unacceptable.
The State website usefully provides a map, just in case anyone isn’t sure where Europe is. Should Americans already there jump on the first plane to head home? Apparently not.
Arrested in October 2008, Derakhshan had been charged with “cooperation with hostile states” and “propagating against the regime”, among other counts, the site said. In addition to the lengthy prison term, he was fined and banned from membership in political parties and work in the media for a period of five years. 
Bob Woodward’s new book, 
An 
