Category Archives: Analysis

The NSA has assumed the expansive powers of colonial Britain against which Americans fought

In the first in-person interview Edward Snowden has conducted since his arrival in Moscow in June, Barton Gellman reports:

Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”

“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.

Technology, of course, has enabled a great deal of consumer surveillance by private companies, as well. The difference with the NSA’s possession of the data, Snowden said, is that government has the power to take away life or freedom.

At the NSA, he said, “there are people in the office who joke about, ‘We put warheads on foreheads.’ Twitter doesn’t put warheads on foreheads.”

Privacy, as Snowden sees it, is a universal right, applicable to American and foreign surveillance alike.

“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”

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Snowden took on a responsibility that others refused to exercise

In the first in-person interview Edward Snowden has conducted since his arrival in Moscow in June, Barton Gellman reports:

It is commonly said of Snowden that he broke an oath of secrecy, a turn of phrase that captures a sense of betrayal. NSA Director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., among many others, have used that formula.

In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the ­classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.

“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”

People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on that responsibility?

“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”

He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual — that I’m uniquely qualified, an angel descending from the heavens — as that they put it on someone, somewhere,” he said. “You have the capability, and you realize every other [person] sitting around the table has the same capability but they don’t do it. So somebody has to be the first.”

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When ‘60 Minutes’ checks its journalistic skepticism at the door

David Carr writes: Last week, a study commissioned by the president concluded that the National Security Agency had reached too far into the private lives of Americans. The study, which came after a series of journalistic revelations exposing the agency’s surveillance practices, recommended numerous reforms that would curb the N.S.A.’s prerogatives. President Obama said he was “open to many” of the suggestions.

It was exactly the kind of news-making moment that “60 Minutes” — America’s leading purveyor of serious television news — has often been responsible for creating. For more than four decades, the program has exposed C.I.A. abuses, rogue military contractors and hundreds of corporate villains.

But where was “60 Minutes” on the N.S.A. story? The Sunday before the damning study, the program produced a segment that scanned as a friendly infomercial for the agency. Reported by John Miller, a CBS News reporter, the piece included extensive interviews with Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the N.S.A.

In a scene that served as something of a metaphor for the whole segment, the producers negotiated access to the Black Chamber, a supersecret area where the nation’s top code breakers work. The door is briefly opened, we see a deserted office hall that looks like any other and then the door is closed. We get a look in, but we learn nothing.

Coming as it does on the heels of the now-discredited Benghazi report — in which “60 Minutes” said it was fooled by an eyewitness who was apparently nothing of the kind — the N.S.A. segment raises the question of whether the program has not just temporarily lost its mojo, but its skepticism as well. It didn’t help that the day after the piece aired, a federal judge ruled that the agency’s program of collecting phone records was most likely unconstitutional. [Continue reading…]

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A spy world reshaped by Edward Snowden

The Los Angeles Times reports: After news reports that the National Security Agency had secretly monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone calls, America’s top intelligence official was asked why congressional oversight committees were kept in the dark.

Shouldn’t Congress have been briefed, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) asked James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, about a spying operation that would embarrass the U.S. government if exposed?

“Well, sir, there are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback,” Clapper replied at a House Intelligence Committee hearing in October. “The conduct of intelligence is premised on the notion that we can do it secretly, and we don’t count on it being revealed in the newspaper.”

Not these days. [Continue reading…]

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Foreign fighters in Syria still remain a small fraction of the opposition

The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation: We estimate that – from late 2011 to 10 December 2013 – between 3,300 and 11,000 individuals have gone to Syria to fight against the Assad government. These figures include those who are currently present as well as those who have since returned home, been arrested or killed.

Based on the credibility of various sources, our own judgement, and the feedback we have received since publishing our April estimate, we believe the “true” figure to be above 8,500. This would mean that the numbers have nearly doubled since April, with a particularly steep increase among non-Arabs, especially Westerners.

While Arabs and Europeans continue to represent the bulk of foreign fighters (up to 80 per cent), we have identified individuals from Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and (non-Arab) Africa. Overall, we believe that residents and citizens from at least 74 countries have joined militant opposition groups in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Bashar al Assad’s talent for survival

Annia Ciezadlo writes: If there’s one thing those who know him agree on, it’s that Bashar Al Assad is awfully eager to please. Friends and even some enemies portray the Syrian president as a kind and generous man, always ready to use his connections to provide a favor: for a job, a heart operation, or just the permit the government has required, under Syria’s authoritarian form of socialism, to buy a tank of propane gas for cooking food. “Easygoing,” say diplomats who have faced him in negotiations. “I would have described him as a real gentleman, before this,” says a Damascene businessman who was part of Assad’s social circle and has now fled the country to escape its ongoing civil war.

The subtext here is that Assad is weak; the polite phrasing, among educated Syrians, has always been that he “does not have the qualities of a leader.” That is to say, he does not have the gravitas of his ruthless, gnomic father, Hafez Al Assad, who ruled the country from 1970 until June 2000. Other Syrians put it less delicately. They call him donkey, giraffe, taweel wa habeel — a Levantine putdown for a big, bumbling doofus. Diplomats, analysts, and a few heads of state have been just as harsh, predicting his imminent downfall since the day he took power.

Two-thousand thirteen was the year when it seemed as if those predictions would finally come true. As the uprising against him ground into its third summer, his regime lost territory and international legitimacy. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states lavished cash and weaponry on rebel fighters. Even the United States was reluctantly edging closer to supporting the revolution with something more than words. Then, on August 21, Assad’s regime used the nerve gas sarin to kill hundreds of Syrian civilians, crossing the “red line” that Barack Obama had said would prompt a U.S. military response. It looked like the end. If a formerly untouchable military dictator like Hosni Mubarak could go down in Egypt, then why not Syria’s lanky, lisping president?

What outsiders have been slow to realize is that in the game Assad is playing, a weak man (or one perceived that way) can cling to his throne just as tenaciously, and violently, as a strongman. Over the course of his reign, he has learned how to turn his biggest shortcomings—his desire for approval, his tendency toward prevarication—into his greatest assets. The world wants him to give up the chemical munitions he used against his own citizens, and he has begun to do that. The world wants an end to the conflict that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians and displaced millions more; his government is now willing to participate in peace talks. This nebbishy second son, who was never meant to inherit the family regime, has proved exceptionally talented in the art of self-preservation. [Continue reading…]

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Officials’ defenses of NSA phone program may be unraveling

The Washington Post reports: From the moment the government’s massive database of citizens’ call records was exposed this year, U.S. officials have clung to two main lines of defense: The secret surveillance program was constitutional and critical to keeping the nation safe.

But six months into the controversy triggered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the viability of those claims is no longer clear.

In a three-day span, those rationales were upended by a federal judge who declared that the program was probably unconstitutional and the release of a report by a White House panel utterly unconvinced that stockpiling such data had played any meaningful role in preventing terrorist attacks.

Either of those developments would have been enough to ratchet up the pressure on President Obama, who must decide whether to stand behind the sweeping collection or dismantle it and risk blame if there is a terrorist attack.

Beyond that dilemma for the president, the decision by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon and the recommendations from the review panel shifted the footing of almost every major player in the surveillance debate.

NSA officials, who rarely miss a chance to cite Snowden’s status as a fugitive from the law, now stand accused of presiding over a program whose capabilities were deemed by the judge to be “Orwellian” and likely illegal. Snowden’s defenders, on the other hand, have new ammunition to argue that he is more whistleblower than traitor.

Similarly, U.S. officials who have dismissed NSA critics as naive about the true nature of the terrorist threat now face the findings of a panel handpicked by Obama and with access to classified files. Among its members were former deputy CIA director Michael J. Morrell and former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, both of whom spent years immersed in intelligence reports on al-Qaeda. [Continue reading…]

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Meet the American hedge fund billionaire who could start a ‘holy war’ in the Middle East

Alex Kane reports: Henry Swieca is a money man. The New York-based billionaire made his fortune by co-founding Highbridge Capital Corp., a hedge fund that boasted clients like the American International Group.

In 2009, the banking giant JP Morgan Chase, another client of Highbridge, fully took over the flagship hedge fund. Swieca went on to play a role at two more hedge funds: Talpion Fund Management, which he launched, and Clearline Capital, which Swieca joined as a startup investor in February 2013.

Swieca, whose net worth is $1.2 billion as of September 2013, is well-known as a financial guru. His every move is covered by the financial press. But he’s less known for what his foundation pours money into: right-wing, pro-Israel causes. Along with a host of charitable groups and domestic Jewish centers, the Swieca Family Foundation, which he runs with his Israeli-American wife Estee, has poured tons of cash into pro-Israel groups–including to religious extremist groups that operate in the most sensitive of holy places. Swieca did not return requests for comment on his donations.

According to tax records reviewed by AlterNet, Swieca, an Orthodox Jew, has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the American Israel Education Foundation, the non-profit offshoot of the powerful lobbying group called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He’s also handed over cash to groups like the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces; the right-wing, anti-Muslim David Horowitz Freedom Center; and the Hebron Fund, a Brooklyn-based organization that funnels American money into illegal Israeli settlements in Hebron, a big city in the West Bank that has the most intense regime of settler violence and enforced segregation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

But perhaps most alarmingly is Swieca’s funding of the Temple Institute, an organization that promotes the building of the Third Temple on the third most holy site for Muslims. [Continue reading…]

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The many enemies of a deal with Iran

Christopher Dickey writes: “Black swans” are the unlikely and unforeseen events that change the world. Mathematical probability cannot predict them and conventional wisdom is blind to them, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wrote six years ago when he coined the term. They seem to come out of nowhere, like the airliners of 9/11. But anyone who has a feel for the ever-deceptive volatility of the Middle East can see that right now the black swans are circling like vultures.

Their dark wings can be glimpsed in random headlines: a mysterious American disappears during on an off-the-books mission for the CIA. Members of a cult-like Iranian opposition group are slaughtered in Iraq even as their leaders forge close ties to famous American politicians. The worsening U.S. relationship with its old ally Saudi Arabia is threatened by renewed questions about the complicity of Saudi officials in the 9/11 attacks. Those are just a few of the sinister bits of information floating around the chaotic region these days.

None of these developments are certain to provoke cataclysmic change and, probability-wise, they probably won’t. But the region is so on edge, with Libya crumbling, Egypt in turmoil, and Syria tearing itself apart, that, like the act of a single assassin in Sarajevo in 1914, one unforeseen incident can bring on a cascade of catastrophes.

Let’s set the scene by looking at the Iran talks: The Obama administration has made those negotiations, to stop the mullahs from acquiring atomic weapons, a top priority. But last month’s breakthrough accords between Iran and the United States (plus France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China) are “just interim,” as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius reminded the World Policy Conference in Monaco on Saturday. A final deal isn’t due for six months, if then.

The Iranians now have most of the know-how and most of the radioactive stuff they need to build a bomb. Will they truly and definitively step back from that threshold? Fabius, whose skepticism stalled the Geneva accords for a time, says he is skeptical still.

If the talks fail, the chances increase dramatically that the United States will get dragged into a new war in the Middle East, most likely alongside Israel. The objective of the surgical attacks that have been talked about would be to stall the Iranian program for just a few years—perhaps a very few years. But in response to such an action, it’s likely the Iranians would pursue a much more secretive effort without any United Nations inspectors to track it, and they’d eventually wind up with the bomb.

The only way to be 100 percent sure they won’t go down that path would be to change the regime. That was the logic behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and we know how that went. [Continue reading…]

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What NSA reforms would mean for Americans (and everyone else)

Joshua Brustein writes: The White House just released the report from an advisory panel (PDF) suggesting changes to intelligence gathering surrounding communication technologies. The Obama administration doesn’t have to accept any of the 46 recommendations, of course, but if it does, it would mean some major shifts in the government’s approach to privacy, and critics of the National Security Agency are taking the proposals seriously. “We view it as a blueprint for restoring privacy protection in post-9/11 America,” says Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Here’s what the policy recommendations would mean for three key groups.

American Citizens: The panel essentially calls for an end to fishing expeditions where the government collects a lot of information and holds on to it in case it becomes useful at some point. The report calls for an end to the collection and storage of metadata about phone communications, and the panel would prevent “mass, undigested, non-public personal information about individuals to enable future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.” It also suggests tighter restrictions on specific requests for information.

This doesn’t mean loads of personal information shouldn’t be collected and stored. Instead, the panel suggests having private companies or a third party hold on to the information. If the government wants to get it, it would have to ask. This could provide a level of safety, since the private groups would presumably push back against such requests (although it seems telephone companies haven’t done much of that so far). But not everyone likes the idea. “What we’re concerned about is this is opening the door for mandatory data retention, meaning there is a massive database about everything you do,” says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The panel also wants to break up the duties of the NSA so that the military-related aspects of its work are separate from its defensive duties. Perhaps a civilian would be in charge. There are also various suggestions for tightening control of classified information to prevent the next coming of Edward Snowden. [Continue reading…]

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Three months in Rouhani’s Iran

Farideh Farhi writes: I have recently returned from a three-month trip to Iran. I arrived in Tehran in early September before the famous Rouhani/Obama phone call and departed last week as the mood was turning more skeptical regarding the potential for some sort of final nuclear deal, which, in the words of Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, would “normalize” the status of Iran’s nuclear program if it were to happen.

Frankly, sitting in Tehran, it was hard to listen to various Obama administration officials’ frenzied explanations to the US Congress and Israeli government regarding how, even with the first-step agreement, Iran will remain in dire straits. It was hard to listen without becoming skeptical about the US political environment allowing an agreement that would also be acceptable to Iran. From the receiving end of all the nuclear chatter, the whole American demeanor on Iran appears imperious, even outright uncivilized; like people speaking calmly about the taking of others’ lives and imposing further economic misery on them as options that are still very much on the table.

As I write this, news has broken that the Iranian experts engaged in talks in Vienna over the first phase of the “Joint Plan” were abruptly recalled to Tehran in reaction to the blacklisting of 19 Iranian companies by the US Treasury Department — a move that both Iran and Russia said violated the “spirit” of the Geneva accord. The spokesperson of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Marzieh Afkham, in describing the “unconstructive moves” by the Obama Administration, regretted “serious confusion in the approach, decisions, and statements of US officials.”

When I was in Tehran, Iranian officials of various political persuasions were rather soft in their reaction to all the hard talk coming out of Washington. Several officials, including key members of the Parliament, expressed their understanding of the Obama administration’s predicament in trying to sell the Geneva agreement to the US Congress. Talk about continuing pressure on Iran did provide ammunition to folks like Hossein Shariatmadari, the hawkish chief editor of the well-known Iranian daily, Kayhan, but Washington’s verbal assaults were mostly tolerated, even if Foreign Minister Zarif acknowledged that they were making his efforts to maintain support for the agreement difficult. But it appears that the latest Treasury Department move, which followed a rather harsh op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by David Cohen, the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, made looking the other way difficult. Lest we forget: Iran also has domestic politics. Unlike its reception in Washington, the Iranian nuclear agreement was mostly greeted positively in Tehran given the general consensus that it’s time to resolve the nuclear imbroglio. But there are limits to what Tehran can ignore.

I am inclined to view this event as an “enough is enough” public statement directed at Congress and aimed at limiting further moves by the Treasury Department. Both the Obama and Rouhani administrations have raised the stakes in the talks high enough to prevent unraveling at this early stage. Nevertheless, the chances of this are quite high, particularly if the Iranian context for the decision to engage in talks in the current manner is misunderstood or willfully misconstrued. [Continue reading…]

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NSA goes on 60 Minutes: the definitive facts behind CBS’s flawed report

The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency is telling its story like never before. Never mind whether that story is, well, true.

On Sunday night, CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a remarkable piece that provided NSA officials, from director Keith Alexander to junior analysts, with a long, televised forum to push back against criticism of the powerful spy agency. It’s an opening salvo in an unprecedented push from the agency to win public confidence at a time when both White House reviews and pending legislation would restrict the NSA’s powers.

But mixed in among the dramatic footage of Alexander receiving threat briefings and junior analysts solving Rubik’s cubes in 90 seconds were a number of dubious claims: from the extent of surveillance to collecting on Google and Yahoo data centers to an online “kill-switch” for the global financial system developed by China.

Reporter John Miller, a former official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and an ex-FBI spokesman, allowed these claims to go unchallenged. The Guardian, not so much. Here’s our take: [Continue reading…]

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Refugee stories from the Syrian exodus

Dania-Amroosh

The Washington Post reports: Dania Amroosh wears a Hello Kitty shirt, tiny heart-shaped earrings and her hair in cute little pigtails. She looks like any other 7-year-old, except for the jagged scars on the bridge of her nose and across her chin.

There is much worse beneath her blanket on the third floor of the Kilis State Hospital in southern Turkey. A huge seeping wound on her stomach is closed with an angry grid of stitches. The casts are finally off her broken right leg and right hand, but her fingers are still black and blue and she can barely walk. Her lower body is covered with shrapnel scars.

Five months ago, Dania and her family were sitting in their home in Aleppo, Syria, about 60 miles south of here, when a bomb dropped from the sky. Her grandmother, aunt, uncle and two cousins were killed instantly. Another cousin lost his legs. Dania was mangled.

Mohammad Amroosh, her father, says that after what Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military did to them, he can’t go back. When Dania is ready to leave the hospital, the family will stay in Turkey, joining nearly 700,000 other Syrians who have taken shelter in the country.

“This is our home now,” he says.

One of the world’s largest forced migrations since World War II is transforming the Middle East.

The United Nations and governments in the countries where the refugees have taken shelter estimate that between 2.3 million and 2.8 million Syrians have fled their homeland. The United Nations says that number is rising by nearly 3,000 people a day, with no end in sight for a conflict that has lasted nearly three years. [Continue reading…]

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No more secrets

Nick Bilton writes: Anyone who can watch you will watch you.

In technology, that is one of the big lessons of 2013. The National Security Agency and who knows who else have been tracking this or hacking that. China has been breaking into our computers. Google has been sifting through our home networks. Facebook has been tinkering with its privacy settings.

No wonder outfits like Snapchat have exploded onto the scene. They seem to go against the grain, holding out the promise that all those selfies, texts and emails will simply vanish.

Whisper, an “it” app for teens, supposedly lets people share secrets anonymously via smartphone. Telegram is being pitched as the adult version of Snapchat.

But the fact is, many services that claim to offer that rarest of digital commodities — privacy — don’t really deliver. Read the fine print.

“Just because information is unavailable to you and you don’t see it doesn’t mean that it is not being captured, stored, or even seen by someone else in transit,” said Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton.

Snapchat’s privacy page explains that private images are stored on someone’s phone — and on its own servers. “Forensically, even after they are deleted,” Snapchat says, those images can be retrieved. Whisper’s privacy page says the company owns the intellectual property, both images and text, that people post; Whisper reserves the right to sell that stuff to third parties. And Telegram, while seemingly less innocuous with its claims, nonetheless leaves out something you might want to know: someone can just take a screenshot or picture of that “private” conversation. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda and America’s deep battle

In a review, Owen Bennett-Jones writes: In Decoding al-Qaida’s Strategy Michael Ryan draws a useful distinction between the drawn-out or ‘deep’ battle of ideas and the ‘close’ battle of combat. The recent al-Qaida advances can be seen as close-battle victories of relatively little importance, but al-Qaida and the West are also engaged in a broad ideological struggle and it is here, significantly, that the West’s inability to put up a decent counterargument to al-Qaida is more worrying. In the last three years bin Laden and now al-Zawahiri have convinced millions of people that, for all their excesses, they have a point. Their key messages relate to Western double standards now so widely discussed as to require only the briefest rehearsal: the West’s creation and subsequent abandonment of a mujahedin fighting force to confront the Soviets; the neglect of the hallowed principle of habeas corpus implicit in extraordinary rendition; detentions without trial in Guantánamo; the humiliation and torture of prisoners in Iraq; the CIA’s use of drones in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; and, most recently, the NSA’s disregard for privacy. This litany of human rights abuses, al-Qaida argues, is explained by the West’s hatred of Islam. The actions of a few fringe figures such as Pastor Terry Jones who do indeed seem to hate Islam are then cited as supporting evidence.

One aspect of the US’s use of torture, incidentally, has received too little attention. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded no fewer than 183 times. At some point he worked out his interrogator’s protocols, including the length of time (40 seconds) he could have water poured down his throat. By the end he was seen counting down the seconds with his fingers. It’s said by people who have read the transcripts of his confessions that some of his information led to the arrests of leading jihadis. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later told the Red Cross that he also gave false information so as to confuse the Americans. Crucially, he failed to answer questions about the location of either al-Zawahiri (despite having met him the day before his capture) or bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man who led the Americans to Abbotabad. Other detainees told the Americans that al-Kuwaiti had been well known to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for years. So the waterboarding not only fed al-Qaida’s narrative, it was also ineffective.

Other examples of counterproductive Western policies abound. Take the 2013 drone strike on the Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud. Mehsud was known to have deployed suicide bombers all over Pakistan, yet his death evoked a wave of sympathy in the country. It was simultaneously a close-battle victory for the US and a deep-battle defeat. Although many Pakistanis were happy that Mehsud was no long threatening them, their relief was outweighed by the thought that the US’s use of drones in Pakistan was an unacceptable breach of sovereignty and a national humiliation. Sympathy for Mehsud was punctured only when a journalist revealed that his house in the tribal areas was worth $120,000 (a huge sum in that part of Pakistan) and included extensive gardens with orchards.

At a stroke the news dented the Taliban’s carefully burnished image as selfless holy warriors renouncing worldly comforts for their faith. Some jihadis evoke the kind of admiration that Western socialists feel for the volunteers who fought in Spain. YouTube videos of fit young men, brave, idealistic and pious, washing themselves in mountain streams, give jihadism a romantic air. Bin Laden was perfectly placed to take advantage of this appeal, having given up his riches for a life of hardship and struggle. You can’t help thinking that the US would have been well advised to use the drones not to kill Mehsud but to leaflet his admirers with images of his luxurious lifestyle.

The carefully honed Robin Hood image is only part of the story. Ryan’s stated purpose in Decoding al-Qaida’s Strategy is to identify other aspects of radical Islam’s support base, the better to equip US strategists for the deep battle. The book consists of summaries, translations and analysis of important al-Qaida texts including al-Zawahiri’s Knights under the Prophet’s Banner; The Administration of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji; A Practical Course for Guerrilla Warfare (actually not an ideological text but a description of military tactics) by Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin; various articles by Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi including Fourth Generation Warfare, which argues that al-Qaida should conceive of itself as a revolutionary vanguard; and finally a perennial favourite on many jihadi websites, The Call to Global Islamic Resistance by Abu Musab al-Suri.

Ryan’s survey pins down crucial elements of al-Qaida’s appeal. Even many of its detractors in the Middle East would accept that the organisation is trying to respond to the humiliations meted out to the Arab people by colonial European powers, the US, Israel and, according to al-Zawahiri, the United Nations, the multinationals, internet providers, the global news media and international aid agencies. All these stand accused of using puppet regimes in the Middle East to continue the colonial project by other means. As I travelled around the Middle East during the Arab Spring, the word that most often cropped up in the slogans in various capitals was not ‘freedom’ – the one the Western media recognised and highlighted – but ‘dignity’. The failure of the Arab Spring has reinforced al-Qaida’s case. For a moment it looked as if people power rather than jihadi violence would topple the authoritarian regimes bin Laden railed against. Today those hopes have been dashed. Indeed, the Egyptian army’s successful assault on the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government may turn out to be as useful to al-Qaida as the US invasion of Iraq. It’s already a familiar argument that only the jihadis have the resolve and drive to sweep away entrenched dictatorial regimes. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s foreign fighters

Thomas Hegghammer writes: Sometime in the spring or summer of 2013, history was made in Syria. That was when the number of foreign fighters exceeded that of any previous conflict in the modern history of the Muslim world. There are now over 5,000 Sunni foreign fighters in the war-torn country, including more than a thousand from the West. The previous record-holder — the 1980s Afghanistan war — also attracted large numbers overall, but there seems never to have been more than 3,000 to 4,000 foreign fighters at any one time in Afghanistan. This influx of war volunteers will have a number of undesirable consequences, from strengthening the most uncompromising elements of the Syrian insurgency to reinvigorating radical communities in the foreign fighters’ home countries. Not all of these fighters can be considered jihadists, of course, but many can, and more will be radicalized as they spend time in the trenches with al Qaeda-linked groups. At this rate, the foreign fighter flow into Syria looks set to extend the life of the jihadi movement by a generation.

But why is Syria attracting so many war volunteers? How could this happen only two years after the Arab spring and the death of Osama bin Laden prompted many to predict the decline of jihadism? The short answer is that it’s easy to get there. Not since the early days of the Bosnia war has it been less complicated for Islamists to make it to a war zone. This was stated in a recent Washington Post interview with a Syrian facilitator:

“‘It’s so easy,’ said a Syrian living in Kilis who smuggles travelers into Syria through the nearby olive groves and asked to be identified by only his first name, Mohammed. He claims he has escorted dozens of foreigners across the border in the past 18 months, including Chechens, Sudanese, Tunisians and a Canadian. ‘For example, someone comes from Tunisia. He flies to the international airport wearing jihadi clothes and a jihadi beard and he has jihadi songs on his mobile,’ Mohammed said. ‘If the Turkish government wants to prevent them coming into the country, it would do so, but they don’t.'”

The obstacles facing Syria volunteers today are smaller than those faced by most other foreign fighters in the past two decades. A Saudi showing up at Islamabad airport in 2002 humming jihadi anashid would be on the next plane to Guantanamo, and woe to the Arab caught in combat gear on the Chechen border. It is not just the border crossing which is less complicated; the risk of legal sanctions at home also seems lower, thus far at least, for Syria-farers than for their predecessors. A European Islamist with al Qaeda in Yemen would face almost certain prosecution on his return. The United States has been even less forgiving, sending several Somali-Americans to prison for merely trying to join al-Shabab. Thus far, few if any European countries seem to be systematically prosecuting foreign fighters returning from Syria, although some E.U. officials have called for stricter legislation. [Continue reading…]

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NYT and Washington Post provide cover for Israel lobby’s efforts to obstruct Iran deal

Philip Weiss writes: The lobby is doing its utmost to sandbag the breakthrough agreement between the U.S. and Iran. The Congress is now readying yet more sanctions bills; the Forward says Democrats are backing the legislation or doing nothing to oppose it because “These are the men and the women, after all, who are on a first-name basis with most of the board of AIPAC.” MJ Rosenberg says the Israel lobby is the reason Sens. Tim Kaine, Sherrod Brown and — conspicuously — progressive Elizabeth Warren have been silent on the diplomatic breakthrough.

One reason that supposed liberals can get away with this is that the New York Times and the Washington Post give them no heat. In reporting on the sanctions effort, our leading papers leave out the lobby’s role, allowing the nightflower to remain a nightflower. [Continue reading…]

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Why Seymour Hersh got it wrong this time

Following the publication of Seymour Hersh’s London Review of Books article, “Whose sarin?,” Dan Kaszeta, a former US Army and US Secret Service specialist on chemical, biological, and radiological defense, writes: The most damaging assertion made by Mr. Hersh is his insinuation that the insurgent group Jabhat al-Nusra may have been responsible for the chemical attacks. As a life-long professional in defense against chemical weapons, it seems increasingly improbable to me that a non-state actor, Nusra or otherwise, perpetrated the sarin attack on 8/21. Even if Nusra has an individual who might understand the science of how sarin is be made, there is a wide gulf between understanding the basic chemistry and perpetrating the 8/21 attacks.

Mr. Hersh patently ignores the practical barriers to al-Nusra, or any other Syrian non-state faction for that matter, producing enough sarin to have done the 8/21 attacks. A large, but still indeterminate number of people (Hersh is right to point out discrepancies in the fatality figures) over a large area were killed or injured. The practical reality of chemical warfare is that it is far less efficient, in terms of amount of material required, than most laymen understand. Numerous casualties over a large area require a large amount of material. A lot of sarin was used. My own attempts to apply Cold War-era methodologies to reverse-engineer the attack gave me a rough range of sarin from 370 kg to 4400 kg of sarin. Although my methods are too lengthy to state here, my best guess is that the real answer is somewhere in the middle of this range, perhaps a ton. The current total of “Volcano” rockets so far discovered is eight, giving a yield of perhaps 400-420 kg of sarin, well within this range.

Mr. Hersh seems unaware of just how hard accumulating a ton of sarin might be. It can’t be summarily waved away as he does by saying (I paraphrase) that “Nusra has a guy who knows how to do it.” A ton of sarin is no easy undertaking for anyone to manufacture, regardless of expertise or access to precursors. Sarin manufacture, as I pointed out in various places, is complex and can’t be done in a kitchen or bathtub, and certainly not in the quantities needed for the 8/21 attack. To put it into proper perspective, in 1994-1995 the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan built a purpose-built facility, spent many millions, and had a number of chemists and engineers. (Amy Smithson describes the Aum operation quite well in her book, “Ataxi.”) But the best that Aum could do, despite mastering the mechanics of the process, was to produce bucket-sized quantities. To produce at the scale required for the 8/21 attack, a large, sophisticated, and very expensive factory-scale facility is needed. By hinting that Nusra performed the attack, he implies the presence of such a factory somewhere. Where is it? Sarin doesn’t get conjured up out of nothing. [Continue reading…]

Eliot Higgins, challenging many of Hersh’s assertions, provides additional analysis on the munitions used in the attacks.

In an interview on Democracy Now!, Hersh refused to provide any additional information about his source(s), but Joanna Paraszczuk and Scott Lucas engage in some interesting speculation based on a comparison made between Hersh’s statements and those coming from Michael Maloof, well-known for his role in the Bush administration’s Office of Special Plans.

It is impossible to know for sure, of course, who unnamed former officials are, but it there is a high likelihood based on the information given that the “former senior intelligence official” is F. Michael Maloof, a former staffer in the Undersecretary of State of Defense’s office in the George W. Bush Administration.

Here is Hersh’s passage on Islamist factions handling chemical toxins:

By late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.

And here is Maloof writing on the right-wing website WorldNet Daily in mid-September:

In a classified document just obtained by WND, the U.S. military confirms that sarin was confiscated earlier this year from members of the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the most influential of the rebel Islamists fighting in Syria.

The document says sarin from al-Qaida in Iraq made its way into Turkey and that while some was seized, more could have been used in an attack last March on civilians and Syrian military soldiers in Aleppo.

The document, classified Secret/Noforn – “Not for foreign distribution” – came from the U.S. intelligence community’s National Ground Intelligence Center, or NGIC, and was made available to WND Tuesday.

It revealed that AQI had produced a “bench-scale” form of sarin in Iraq and then transferred it to Turkey.

A U.S. military source said there were a number of interrogations as well as some clan reports as part of what the document said were “50 general indicators to monitor progress and characterize the state of the ANF/AQI-associated Sarin chemical warfare agent developing effort.”

“This (document) depicts our assessment of the status of effort at its peak – primarily research and procurement activities – when disrupted in late May 2013 with the arrest of several key individuals in Iraq and Turkey,” the document said.

“Future reporting of indicators not previously observed would suggest that the effort continues to advance despite the arrests,” the NGIC document said.

Maloof repeated his claim six days later on Russia Today, which had campaigned for weeks to link the insurgents to the August 21 attacks.

This, however, was far from the first time that Maloof had condemned the insurgency as foreign-supported terrorists linked to Al Qa’eda. In March, he denounced a lifting of the European arms embargo on the insurgency, telling Iran’s Press TV:

They have no guarantee into which hands these arms will go. We’ve got al-Nusra leading the charge with the rebels up there in Damascus and they’re very, very powerful and they’re the ones that are al-Qaeda related and they’re probably going to gain the arms and there would be no control over who gets them, how they’re going to be used.

If Hersh’s main source is Maloof — which fits the public assertions — there is a telling irony. Condemning the Obama Administration’s “cherry-picking” of intelligence over Syria, Hersh compares it to the Bush Administration’s selection of “evidence” on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

That selection of raw intelligence was taken over in 2002 by Undersecretary of State Douglas Feith’s office — of which F. Michael Maloof was a key member.

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