Category Archives: Analysis

Pentagon, CIA instructed to re-investigate whistleblower cases

McClatchy reports: A government watchdog has ordered the CIA and the Pentagon to re-investigate retaliation allegations brought by two intelligence employees who accused their agencies of major institutional failings.

The action by the intelligence community inspector general is the first public indication that a new intelligence appeals system is underway. The panel was set up by President Barack Obama as an independent forum that can evaluate whether whistleblowers were improperly fired or otherwise punished for disclosures after their agencies rejected their claims.
The humvee in which Mike Helms was traveling and serving as a gunner in Iraq on June 16, 2004 hit a roadside bomb that shredded the left front side of the vehicle while it was traveling about 60 miles per hour. Helms was later denied treatment at military hospitals for his injuries. He alerted Congress to the inadequate medical care he and others received. However, he still struggles to find a job in his field after the Army revoked his clearance in what he says was illegal retaliation for his disclosures to Congress.

The cases, nonetheless, demonstrate that the whistleblower system continues to be beset with problems and bureaucratic delays despite being overhauled by Congress and the Obama administration.

“Navigating the system as an intelligence employee is still very burdensome and overwhelming,” said Michael Helms, a former Army intelligence officer whose case is one of the two being kicked back. “A decade after I blew the whistle on inadequate care for military civilians, I’m still waiting for justice.”

Obama pointed to the reforms when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed he had decided to go to the media with classified documents about the spy agency’s data collection programs instead of relying on the whistleblower system. Snowden asserted that intelligence agencies couldn’t be trusted to look into serious malfeasance or to protect high-profile whistleblowers. [Continue reading…]

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O’Malley is right: Climate change helped create conditions for rise Of ISIS

Joe Romm writes: Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley linked climate change to the rise of ISIS earlier this week. Conservatives pounced. Score this round for O’Malley.

For three years now, leading security and climate experts — and Syrians themselves — have made the connection between climate change and the Syrian civil war. Indeed, when a major peer-reviewed study came out on in March making this very case, Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley said it identifies “a pretty convincing climate fingerprint” for the Syrian drought.

Titley, a meteorologist who led the U.S. Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change when he was at the Pentagon, also said, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”

Compare the words of Admiral Titley — former Deputy Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Information Dominance (!) and currently Director of Penn State’s Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risks. — with O’Malley’s (video here): [Continue reading…]

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Turkey bombing risks further unrest in a country already living on the edge

By Cengiz Gunes, The Open University

Islamic State appears to have stepped up its war with the Kurds by bombing a meeting of socialist activists as they gathered in the town of Suruç. The incident is not only a terrible blow to the Kurds, but threatens further unrest in Turkey, where a failure to act over Islamic State has already caused significant tension.

The activists belonged to the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations. Most were university students en route to Kobanê. There, they planned to deliver books to local children and help rebuilding efforts. The explosion killed 32 activists and injured another 100.

Although IS has not yet officially claimed responsibility for the massacre, the Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu stated that there was a “high probability” that it was carried out by the group. With this attack, Islamic State was identifying a new target – the nationwide Turkish network that supports the Kurdish resistance in Syria.

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Israeli think tank with GOP ties at center of Iran deal opposition

McClatchy reports: With the U.S. Congress beginning hearings on the nuclear accord with Iran, Israeli opponents of the agreement are readying a full-court press to persuade that the deal has too many loopholes that would allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

“We will make our voice heard,” Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon told McClatchy. “We will not miss an opportunity to tell our side of the story because it is our moral duty.”

One Israeli think tank at the center of the campaign is the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, whose largest donor is U.S. casino magnate and Republican benefactor Sheldon Adelson.

Adelson and his wife, Miriam, gave $465,000 to political candidates and parties in 2014 – all to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Recipients in recent years included Republican presidential candidates Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and both House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. [Continue reading…]

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Iran deal: A possible game-changer for Afghanistan

Davood Moradian writes: Iran’s nuclear agreement has created a political and geostrategic earthquake in the Middle East and beyond, including accelerating the reform movement within Iran and empowering democratic constituencies in the Islamic world.

Liberated from external containment and internal suppression, Iran could now help itself, the region and the wider Islamic world towards greater prosperity, stability, and a pluralistic future. And Afghanistan will immensely benefit from the restoration of Iran’s role as a responsible and secure neighbour and power.

Afghanistan’s landlocked geography has been compounded by its political isolation in the region. Among its seven neighbours, only its borders with Tajikistan remain relatively free of political tension. [Continue reading…]

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Arab Gulf states have a massive lead over Iran in virtually every aspect of conventional arms

Anthony H. Cordesman writes: Much of the criticism of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran has focused on the fact that it would allow conventional arms transfers to Iran in five years if Iran fully complies with all other aspects of the agreement. In practice, this does not obligate any country to sell arms to Iran, nor does it affect U.S. and European constraints on arms sales.

It could, however, lead to significant arms sales on the part of Russia and China, and potentially other states. Iran badly needs to modernize its aging air force, surface-to-air missile defenses, and many other elements of its weapons systems – as well as acquire the technology for a wide range of new sensors, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and other improvement in its war fighting capabilities.

It is important, however, to keep such risks in perspective. Iran is already able to exploit a large network of purchasing offices and cover organizations to buy critical technology, parts, and other military equipment. It takes time to absorb arms transfers even when they come, and Iran faces a massive backlog of obsolescence, worn systems, patchwork improvements, and awkward efforts at systems integration.

In the real world, Iran is anything but the hegemon of the region – as a new CSIS study of the Gulf military balance shows. This study is entitled The Arab-U.S. Strategic Partnership and the Changing Security Balance in the Gulf.

Chapters II and III of this study compare the size of Iranian and Arab Gulf military expenditures and arms transfers. The following chapters analyze the limits to Iran’s conventional forces and the growing strength of Gulf Arab forces. Chapter XII analyzes the scope of the U.S. strategic partnership with the individual Gulf states and the Gulf Arab states as a whole.

The report shows that the Arab Gulf states already have a massive lead over Iran in virtually every aspect of conventional arms, except total military manpower. It also shows that the U.S. strategic partnership has delivered some of the most modern weapons in the world to the Arab Gulf states, and that equally massive new transfers are underway. [Continue reading…]

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John Kerry and Ernest Moniz: The case for the nuclear deal with Iran

John F. Kerry and Ernest Moniz write: When President Obama took office, he faced an Iran that had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle, had constructed a covert uranium enrichment facility inside a mountain, was on its way to installing nearly 20,000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment, was developing advanced centrifuges and was building a heavy-water reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. If Iran wanted to develop a nuclear weapon, it was already well down that road and the international community had little insight into its program. Against this backdrop the president vowed never to let Iran obtain a nuclear weapon.

The deal reached in Vienna this month is not only the best way to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon, it is the only durable and viable option for achieving this goal. This comprehensive diplomatic resolution has the unified support of the world’s leading powers. It extends the time Iran would need to develop a nuclear weapon, provides strong verification measures that give us ample time to respond if Iran chooses that path, and takes none of our options off the table.

Specifically, the deal blocks each of Iran’s possible pathways to producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon: the highly enriched uranium and the plutonium production pathways, as well as the covert pathway. This deal is based on verification, not trust. Before obtaining significant relief from economic sanctions, Iran must roll back its enrichment, its research-and-development and its stockpile of enriched uranium. To preclude cheating, international inspectors will have unprecedented access to Iran’s declared nuclear facilities, any other sites of concern and its entire nuclear supply chain, from uranium production to centrifuge manufacturing and operation. [Continue reading…]

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Global warming deniers are an endangered species

Dana Nuccitelli writes: At the end of this year there will be a critically important international climate change conference in Paris. At this conference, nations will attempt to reach an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming.

Over the past few months there’s been a flood of big climate-related news, most of which will help build support and pressure for a strong agreement to curb global warming at the Paris conference. The political and social climate is shifting, and those in denial about human-caused climate change are struggling to adapt. [Continue reading…]

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Climate change seen as top global threat

Pew Research Center: In advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris this December, many publics around the world name global climate change as a top threat, according to a new Pew Research Center survey measuring perceptions of international challenges. This is particularly true in Latin America and Africa, where majorities in most countries say they are very concerned about this issue. But as the Islamic militant group ISIS maintains its hold in Iraq and Syria and intensifies its grisly public executions, Europeans and Middle Easterners most frequently cite ISIS as their main concern among international issues.

Global economic instability also figures prominently as the top concern in a number of countries, and it is the second biggest concern in half of the countries surveyed. In contrast, concerns about Iran’s nuclear program as well as cyberattacks on governments, banks or corporations are limited to a few nations. Israelis and Americans are among the most concerned about Iran’s nuclear program, while South Koreans and Americans have the greatest concern about cyberattacks relative to other publics. And apprehension about tensions between Russia and its neighbors, or territorial disputes between China and surrounding countries, largely remain regional concerns. [Continue reading…]

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By inflating Islamic extremism, David Cameron has lost sight of what really threatens us

George Monbiot writes: Sir Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square should be removed to a museum. All busts and portraits of the great man in parliament and the prime minister’s residence should be taken down and placed in storage. Why? To discourage his successors from slipping their tiny feet into his shoes.

Churchill was right when he claimed, in June 1940: “Upon this battle depends the survival of … our own British life.” Those who have borrowed the sentiment are in most cases wrong. The Taliban, al-Qaida, Saddam Hussein, Isis, Islamic extremism: none of these were, or are, existential threats to the life of this country. But all are inflated until they appear to be so, invested with almost supernatural power by prime ministers hoping to be cast in bronze. This inflation, as we discovered in Iraq, has consequences.

On Monday, David Cameron maintained that confronting Islamic extremism is “the struggle of our generation”. We must pursue this struggle in the spirit with which we “faced down Hitler”. Yes, Islamic extremism is real. Yes, it creates genuine problems and presents genuine threats. But to claim it as the struggle of our generation suggests a total collapse of perspective. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS declares war on Turkey

Serkan Demirtaş writes: The deadly Suruç attack that claimed the lives of 32 activist youngsters and wounded around 100 others is itself a declaration of war by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on Turkey. Its magnitude, scope and method show us that the July 20 Suruç attack cannot be described as just a message conveyed by the extremist jihadists, but rather as a challenge against Turkey’s recent move to intensify its efforts to fight ISIL inside Turkey and Syria.

Although this was not the first attack carried out by ISIL in Turkey, the Suruç bombing may well, unfortunately, come to be known as just a beginning of a new violent campaign. This was the first time that ISIL has sent a suicide bomber against a professionally crafted target, thus killing dozens.

The attack took place in front of cameras and therefore could well be recorded and distributed – even immediately after the incident – thus reaching its propaganda objectives as well. In contrast with Iraq, Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East, the jihadists did not target a mosque or a religious site. Rather, it targeted activists gathered solidarity with Syrian Kurds. What is even more horrifying is the fact that there are dozens of such suicide bombers who have already infiltrated into Turkey recently. [Continue reading…]

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The end of Turkey’s illusion of an ‘entente cordiale’ with ISIS

Iyad Dakka writes: Interestingly, the Turkish government has not hinted that the attack could be the work of Syrian intelligence as it has done in the past. Instead, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and other Turkish officials have unanimously indicated that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is most likely the culprit.

The attack is the final nail in the coffin for anyone inside the Turkish government still holding on to the illusion that an “entente cordiale” with ISIL can continue. Murmurs of such an agreement with ISIL began in earnest last year when Turkey was able to negotiate the release of 49 citizens taken hostage by ISIL. Turkey’s unwillingness to open its airspace to international airstrikes against ISIL further fueled suspicions that the Justice and Development Party (AKP)-led government had in fact struck a deal with the devil. None of this means the Turks were “actively” cooperating with ISIL, but it does suggest that the Turkish government was pursuing some form of a “live and let live” policy towards the terrorist group.

The real likelihood that such a policy existed has less to do with any religious affinity between ISIL and the AKP-dominated government — as some voices have suggested in the past — and more to do with cold realpolitik and hard security calculations. The reality is that ISIL kept both the Bashar al-Assad regime and the Syrian Kurds in check, which killed two birds with one stone for Turkey. In addition, Turkey’s geographic exposure to ISIL meant Turkish leaders preferred to avoid antagonizing the group lest it unleash a wave of ISIL-inspired terrorist attacks inside Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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An ex-senator, a former CIA officer, and an Iraqi mogul lobby Congress for a private army, led by Saddam’s officers, to take on ISIS

Shane Harris writes: The magnificent Chartwell House, a 10,000-square foot mansion surrounded by lush, manicured grounds about 18 miles from central London, might seem an odd place to start a war. But that’s where Mudhar Shawkat, a wealthy Iraqi businessman who has a long history with U.S. intelligence, is making his stand against the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

Shawkat, a Sunni who made his money in the telecom business and running a private security firm called Babylon Eagles, says he’s fielding an autonomous, Sunni army to go toe-to-toe with ISIS and liberate the huge swaths of Iraq that the militants have conquered. And his men are ready to fight without the help of the central government in Baghdad, he says.

Shawkat gave his London address on disclosure forms filed with the U.S. Senate last week, when he hired a band of Washington, DC, lobbyists to help him open a second front in his campaign. The firm is run by former Idaho senator Steve Symms and two ex-senior congressional aides. Their mission: To arrange meetings for Shawkat with U.S. lawmakers and power brokers who might bless his grand vision and help it gain support in Washington. [Continue reading…]

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Yemenis are terrorized by a weapon made in America, sold to the Saudis

PRI reports: A Yemeni man described the chaos that accompanied an air strike near his village on a Monday morning in April, the day of the weekly market.

“Hundreds of people from the surrounding villages were in al-Amar when the bombs were dropped,” he told Human Rights Watch. “When people saw the parachutes they fled, leaving all their produce, cars and livestock. I went to find out what the parachutes had dropped. I do not know what it is, but I thought it was important to keep away from children who might play with it.”

He told Human Rights Watch he’d heard that the attack had wounded two people. HRW confirmed that several people injured in the incident were treated at a local hospital. The objects the Yemeni man discovered on the ground were later identified by HRW as parts of a US-made weapon, the CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon from Textron Systems of Wilmington, Massachusetts. [Continue reading…]

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How Western business helps Putin’s propaganda machine

Peter Pomerantsev writes: Watching Russian TV recently is a disturbing business. As Stephen Ennis at BBC Monitoring has painstakingly recorded, Russian media has developed a habit of delivering death threats to opposition members, using anti-Semitic insinuations against its opponents, screaming about the threat of the “homosexual sodomite tsunami,” and recommending burning the hearts of homosexuals while indulging in “techniques of psychological conditioning designed to excite extreme emotions of aggression and hatred in the viewer.”

It has helped “hallucinate a war into reality in Ukraine” (the Economist’s phrase) with fabricated scare stories about Ukrainian militia crucifying ethnic Russian children, “fascist Juntas” taking power in Kiev and U.S. plots to engineer ethnic cleansing in Donbas, while launching targeted, untrue and vicious attacks on Western academics in Russia as “fifth columnists” (I could go on — but you get the idea).

Zhanna Nemtsova, the daughter of murdered politician Boris Nemtsov, blames Kremlin TV for the death of her father: “Russian propaganda kills,” writes Nemtsova, “it kills reason and common sense but it also kills human beings.”

But here’s the odd thing. In between the frothing rants against the evil West, Kremlin television is full of ads for IKEA, Procter and Gamble and Mercedes, while the rest of the TV schedule is rammed with Russian versions of Western reality shows licensed from British and American production companies. Kremlin TV’s anti-Western hate-speech is financially propped up by Western advertising, and relies on the success of TV formats bought from Western producers.

“If you really want to hurt Russian propaganda consider putting moral pressure on Western advertisers and production companies to stop cooperating with the Kremlin’s hate-channels,” advises USC Annenberg scholar Vasily Gatov. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s plan for Guantánamo is seen faltering

The New York Times reports: President Obama is enjoying a winning streak lately, with the Supreme Court reaffirming his signature health care law and Iran agreeing to curbs on its nuclear program. But one longstanding goal continues to bedevil him: closing the wartime prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The administration’s fitful effort to shut down the prison is collapsing again. Ashton B. Carter, in his first six months as defense secretary, has yet to make a decision on any newly proposed deals to transfer individual detainees. His delay, which echoes a pattern last year by his predecessor, Chuck Hagel, is generating mounting concern in the White House and State Department, officials say.

Last week, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, convened a cabinet-level “principals committee” meeting on how to close the prison before the president leaves office in 18 months. At that meeting, Mr. Carter was presented with an unsigned National Security Council memo stating that he would have 30 days to make decisions on newly proposed transfers, according to several officials familiar with the internal deliberations. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS transforming into functioning state that uses terror as tool

The New York Times reports: The Islamic State uses terror to force obedience and frighten enemies. It has seized territory, destroyed antiquities, slaughtered minorities, forced women into sexual slavery and turned children into killers.

But its officials are apparently resistant to bribes, and in that way, at least, it has outdone the corrupt Syrian and Iraqi governments it routed, residents and experts say.

“You can travel from Raqqa to Mosul and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million,” said Bilal, who lives in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, and insisted out of fear on being identified only by his first name. “No one would dare to take even one dollar.”

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, initially functioned solely as a terrorist organization, if one more coldblooded even than Al Qaeda. Then it went on to seize land. But increasingly, as it holds that territory and builds capacity to govern, the group is transforming into a functioning state that uses extreme violence — terror — as a tool. That distinction is proving to be more than a matter of perspective for those who live under the Islamic State, which has provided relative stability in a region troubled by war and chaos while filling a vacuum left by failing and corrupt governments that also employed violence — arrest, torture and detention. [Continue reading…]

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