In the fall of 2008, the US Special Operations Command asked top US diplomats in Pakistan and Afghanistan for detailed information on refugee camps along the Afghanistan Pakistan border and a list of humanitarian aid organizations working in those camps. On October 6, the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, sent a cable marked “Confidential” to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the CIA, US Central Command and several US embassies saying that some of the requests, which came in the form of emails, “suggested that agencies intend to use the data for targeting purposes.” Other requests, according to the cable, “indicate it would be used for “NO STRIKE” purposes.” The cable, which was issued jointly by the US embassies in Kabul and Islamabad, declared: “We are concerned about providing information gained from humanitarian organizations to military personnel, especially for reasons that remain unclear. Particularly worrisome, this does not seem to us a very efficient way to gather accurate information.”
What this cable says in plain terms is that at least one person within the US Special Operations Command actually asked US diplomats in Kabul and/or Islamabad point-blank for information on refugee camps to be used in a targeted killing or capture operation. It also seems possible whoever made that request actually put it in an email (FOIA anyone?). It is no longer a publicly deniable secret that US special operations forces and the CIA have engaged in offensive operations in Pakistan, but this cable is evidence that they sought to exploit the US embassies’ humanitarian aid operations through back channel communications to conduct potentially lethal operations. Needless to say, this type of request is extremely dangerous for aid workers because it reinforces the belief that USAID and other nongovernmental organizations are fronts for the CIA. In November 2009, a US military intelligence source told me that some Blackwater contractors working for US special operations forces in Pakistan have posed as aid workers. “Nobody even gives them a second thought,” he said. Blackwater, at the time, denied it was operating in Pakistan.
The Defense Department forced all “war on terror” detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called “pharmacologic waterboarding.”
The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.
The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government’s investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees.
Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who was stationed at Guantanamo at the time of the suicides in 2006, and has presented evidence that demonstrates the three detainees could not have died by hanging themselves, noticed in the detainees’ medical files that they were given mefloquine. Hickman has been investigating the circumstances behind the detainees’ deaths for nearly four years.
Interviews with mefloquine and malaria experts and a review of peer-reviewed journals and government documents show there were no preexisting cases where mefloquine was ever prescribed for mass presumptive treatment of malaria.
The intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, in his most recent series of reports from Afghanistan, describes his meeting with Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who spent three years from 2002 in Guantánamo and who, until July this year, was on the UN list of known terrorists.
Zaeef is now a prolific writer and speaks five languages fluently. According to many Taliban insiders, if there are any negotiations between the Taliban and the Americans they will go through him.
“The Americans came and sat here,” he said, pointing at one of the big sofas. “They said they needed to talk to the Taliban but couldn’t find them. They didn’t know who the Taliban were. I said go and look, they are everywhere, the Taliban have shadow governors and administrators, why don’t you go and talk to them?”
The real reason the Americans didn’t talk, he said, was that they had no respect for the Taliban.
“I told the Americans to respect their enemy. You can’t negotiate with the Taliban from a position of strength, so why would the Taliban come and talk to you? If you want talks you have to treat the Taliban as equals.”
In any negotiation, the Taliban would assert that as long as their land was under occupation they would struggle to liberate it.
They would continue to fight until the foreigners left. Their argument was with the Americans, not the Afghan government. They did not want to bring down the government, they just wanted to renew it.
“The Taliban have no problem with the Afghan government. We have no problem with Karzai or the Afghans. The problem lies with the Americans,” he said.
“Why would we negotiate with Karzai if he has no say in running his government? They are under occupation and all orders come from foreigners.”
The Americans, he said, had not talked to any senior Taliban to his knowledge. However, “the government and the Taliban have been talking for two years on local matters, health-related issues, prisoner exchange, education.
“This is not a negotiation, this is a way to help and benefit our Afghan people and nation. Negotiations haven’t started yet.”
The Americans had a right to know that Afghanistan would not be used as a base for attacks against them, he said, but that was all.
“The Americans have one right only, and that is their right to be assured that Afghanistan will not be used against them and that is something the Taliban should give.
“Apart from that they have no rights, they have no right to tell us about democracy and human rights. That’s an Afghan issue and it will be decided by the Afghans.
“The Americans behave with arrogance and if they don’t want to be defeated in Afghanistan they should talk.
“They don’t belong here,” he said. “They are foreigners, outsiders.”
Meanwhile, The Guardian contradicts earlier reports which had claimed that British intelligence had been responsible for engaging an impostor negotiator.
Peace talks conducted with an impostor who posed as a Taliban leader, and which led to a meeting with Hamid Karzai in Kabul and thousands of dollars in “goodwill payments”, were started by the Afghan government and approved by the former American commander, Stanley McChrystal, the Guardian has learned.
This account sharply contradicts claims made by the Afghan presidency, which has put the entire blame on Britain, apparently supported privately by US officials.
The U.S. Air Force moved a WC-135 Constant Phoenix reconnaissance jet from the U.S. mainland to the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, in September in preparation for another nuclear test by North Korea, the Sankei Shimbun reported Tuesday.
The WC-135, a modified aircraft, is able to detect nuclear explosions from the air by collecting samples from the atmosphere. It was stationed in Okinawa about a month before North Korea carried out its second nuclear test in May 2009. Apparently the U.S. believes that another nuclear test is imminent after unusual movements were detected at the North’s test site.
Senator John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said billions of dollars could be saved from the defense budget by cutting lawmakers’ pet projects, known as earmarks, and fixing troubled arms programs.
McCain told a foreign policy forum on Monday that he is confident Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be able to cut $100 billion from the defense budget over the next five years to fund personnel costs and keep weapons programs on track.
He cited several big arms programs that were over budget and behind schedule, saying they presented further opportunities to save money.
He said the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter program, now projected to cost $382 billion, was one example, saying it was “unacceptable” that the cost of each fighter jet was now double what was initially planned.
Axe the most expensive defense program ever — sounds like a good idea. But the Israelis will be disappointed. Maybe this says something about why the Obama administration is offering F-35 squadrons as though it was handing out candy.
Mature cosmological systems recognize the cyclical nature of change: that growth is followed by decay and that power gathered is later dispersed. These are not ideas readily embraced by an imperial power and thus America has driven itself into a trap which it cannot back out of without undermining its own image of preeminence.
The trap that a great power falls into as soon as it makes the mistake of using blunt force against an asymmetrical threat is that its opponent has the exclusive ability to make tactical retreats with its pride in tact.
For a decade now, America has been fighting adversaries who operate unwaveringly according to the Maoist principles of guerrilla warfare: “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.”
The war on terrorism, whose sole purpose was to put on display the preeminence of American power, has instead in every possible way demonstrated the limits of American power and yet even now the prospect of defeat cannot be entertained.
The Obama administration, desperate to find a way out of Afghanistan, refuses to admit that it is developing an exit strategy. The plan to end combat missions by 2014 is not an exit strategy; it is a “transition strategy” US envoy Richard Holbrooke claims.
And as if to guard against the risk that Obama might end a second term (if he gets one) with the United States no longer at war, he seems intent on starting a war of his very own — a war whose beginning echoes America’s entry into Vietnam.
The U.S. is preparing for an expanded campaign against al Qaeda in Yemen, mobilizing military and intelligence resources to enable Yemeni and American strikes and drawing up a longer-term proposal to establish Yemeni bases in remote areas where militants operate.
The developments are part of a U.S. scramble to step up the hunt for members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist organization behind a recent failed attempt to blow up two planes over the U.S. using bombs hidden in cargo.
Limited U.S. intelligence experience in Yemen has created “a window of vulnerability” that the U.S. government is “working fast to address,” a senior Obama administration official said.
For now, the U.S. gets much of its on-the-ground intelligence from a growing partnership with Saudi Arabia, which shares a border with Yemen and has a fruitful informant network in Yemen’s tribal areas.
In the rush to build up capabilities, the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies are moving in equipment and personnel from other areas, and over the past year have expanded the size of teams in the U.S. analyzing intelligence on AQAP. The emphasis now is on expanding the number of intelligence operatives and analysts in the field.
There is a debate within the Obama administration and Pentagon about how best to ramp up the fight against AQAP, the Yemen-based terrorist group. Supporters of establishing forward operating bases for Yemeni forces say they would help the weak Yemeni government expand its control and create an opportunity to get a small number of American Special Operations trainers and advisers out of the capital region and into the field.
The U.S. government is to move an additional $400 million worth of military equipment to emergency storage in Israel over the next two years.
The equipment, which includes so-called smart bombs, will stand at Israel’s disposal in an emergency.
The U.S. Congress approved the hike last month, which will bring the value of American military equipment stockpiled in Israel to $1.2 billion by 2012. The story was first reported this week by Defense News magazine’s reporter in Israel, Barbara Opall-Rome.
The U.S. stores equipment in Israel by virtue of a special clause in U.S. foreign aid law governing war reserves stockpiles for allies. According to the clause, the equipment can be utilized by American forces throughout the world, and also, in an emergency, by the military in the country where the equipment is stored.
The clause was originally intended to allow South Korea use of American equipment in case of a surprise attack by North Korea.
The type of equipment stockpiled in Israel is determined through dialogue between the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. Army’s European Command. The issue was raised in discussions last week during the visit by the IDF’s logistics and technology chief, Maj. Gen. Dan Biton, at the Pentagon in Washington.
The agreement between the two armed forces also includes conditions under which the IDF may use the equipment. It is believed that a great deal of the equipment will include precision weapons launched from the air.
IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said this week that in Israel’s future wars, much more precise weaponry will be needed to strike urban targets from the air without injuring civilians.
During Operation Cast Lead, 81 percent of the missiles and bombs launched from the air on and by IDF artillery were of the precision type.
Use of the the American equipment is allowed with permission of the American administration; Israel used such U.S. weaponry during the Second Lebanon War.
A defense official quote in this report from the Washington Post says: “Al Qaeda is everywhere.”
That’s the same as saying that anyone who has a blog is “everywhere” — presence on the web is by its nature global. Still, it’s a dubious claim when coming out of the mouth of a US government official because it will inevitably be used to justify the extension of government powers in ways that vastly exceed the size or scope of the threat that they are designed to counter.
The Pentagon’s new Cyber Command is seeking authority to carry out computer network attacks around the globe to protect U.S. interests, drawing objections from administration lawyers uncertain about the legality of offensive operations.
Cyber Command’s chief, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who also heads the National Security Agency, wants sufficient maneuvering room for his new command to mount what he has called “the full spectrum” of operations in cyberspace.
Offensive actions could include shutting down part of an opponent’s computer network to preempt a cyber-attack against a U.S. target or changing a line of code in an adversary’s computer to render malicious software harmless. They are operations that destroy, disrupt or degrade targeted computers or networks.
But current and former officials say that senior policymakers and administration lawyers want to limit the military’s offensive computer operations to war zones such as Afghanistan, in part because the CIA argues that covert operations outside the battle zone are its responsibility and the State Department is concerned about diplomatic backlash.
The administration debate is part of a larger effort to craft a coherent strategy to guide the government in defending the United States against attacks on computer and information systems that officials say could damage power grids, corrupt financial transactions or disable an Internet provider.
The effort is fraught because of the unpredictability of some cyber-operations. An action against a target in one country could unintentionally disrupt servers in another, as happened when a cyber-warfare unit under Alexander’s command disabled a jihadist Web site in 2008. Policymakers are also struggling to delineate Cyber Command’s role in defending critical domestic networks in a way that does not violate Americans’ privacy.
A source provides details to the American government about the nefarious activities of a Middle Eastern country. That information ends up in scores of secret U.S. government documents. Subsequently, the information winds up on the front pages of major newspapers, and is heralded by war hawks in Washington as a casus belli.
Sound familiar? It should, but perhaps not in the way you’re thinking. Here’s a hint: It’s not 2003, but 2010. This is the story of what happened recently to Iran in the wake of the latest WikiLeaks document release, where U.S military field reports from Iraq made their way into major national newspapers and painted the Islamic Republic as a force out to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
While the WikiLeaks document dump provided a useful way to glean historic details of the seven-year-old occupation, much of the prominent media coverage focused closely on the extent of Iranian support for anti-U.S. forces in Iraq and Iran’s alleged role.
“Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias,” blared the headline on a front page story in The New York Times, which went on to report on several incidents recounted in WikiLeaks documents that journalist Michael Gordon called “the shadow war between the United States and Iraqi militias backed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.”
“The field reports also provide a detailed account of what American military officials on the ground in Iraq saw as Iran’s shadowy role training and equipping Iraqi Shiite militias to fight the U.S.,” wrote Julian Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. “American intelligence believed the training was provided not only by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran, but also by Hezbollah, their Lebanese ally.”
Why is it that a country that defines itself in terms of existential threats and the need to provide a safe refuge for the Jewish people, nevertheless seems strangely remiss in securing its own autonomy?
Even if Israel stands out as the preeminent military power in the Middle East, it has only been able to acquire this status through its dependence on the United States. It often masks that dependence by behaving like a brash teenager who is secretly terrified by the thought of leaving home.
Last week, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas party — part of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition — made his latest inflammatory statement. In August Yosef called for the annihilation of the Palestinian people. This time he showed his contempt for humanity — at least that rather large portion which happens not to be Jewish, the Goyim.
Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel …Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [lord] and eat…
Yosef’s comments and the lack of censure they received from Israeli politicians, drew swift criticism from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Director Abraham Foxman and David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. Foxman warned that this might have a detrimental effect on Israel’s relations with American Jewry.
While leaders of the American Jewish community acknowledged the damage Yosef’s words could cause, they did not attempt to analyse them.
The Israeli-born anti-Zionist activist and musician, Gilad Atzmon suffers no such reservations.
In just a few words Rabbi Yossef expresses the depth of Judaic contempt towards labour.
The senior Rabbi provides us with a devastating glimpse into the Judaic alienation from these aspects of the human condition and human experience. In an unequivocal manner, Rabbi Yosef depicts a clear dichotomy: Jews are the master race and the Goyim are nothing but a work force. The Goyim are there to sweat and struggle while the Jew is ‘sitting’ and ‘eating.’ I guess that Rabbi Yossef has managed, in just a few words, to portray the intrinsic relationships between Judaism and Capitalism.
But in fact, Rabbi Yossef didn’t invent anything new here — his Saturday sermon sounds familiar enough to me. Karl Marx in his paper “On The Jewish Question,” identified aspects of Jewish ideology at the heart of Capitalism: “It is mankind (both Christians and Jews) that needs to emancipate itself from Judaism.”
Marx managed to identify an inclination towards exploitation at the heart of Jewish culture.
However, being a humanist, Marx wanted to believe that mankind (Jews and others) could overcome this tendency. Many early Zionists too, were also convinced that in Zion, Jews would liberate themselves and eventually become a nation like other nations, through productivity and labour.
Seemingly though, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is not that impressed with either Marx, or some of the ideals within the early Zionist dream: Rabbi Yossef is brave (or foolish) enough to sketch the inherent bond between Jewish culture and Capital.
The only question that is still open is, for how long can the rest of humanity tolerate that kind of Rabbinical arrogance?
Meanwhile, the publication of a “millionaire’s list” last week, revealed Netanyahu’s complete dependence on foreign money for his fundraising efforts. His office in an attempt to explain his donor preferences released a statement in which they made the implausible claim: “His approach is that funds should be raised abroad so as not to put anyone in a potential conflict of interests, and this is the reason he prefers donations from abroad.”
On Capitol Hill, U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican whip and the only Jewish Republican in the House of Representatives, is concerned that a GOP-led Congress which aims to cut foreign aid could make Israel vulnerable, since it receives more aid than any other country. A possible solution would be that aid to Israel be part of the US defense budget, adding new meaning to the idea that Israel and US interests are indivisible.
Israel demands that it be recognized as a Jewish state by the Palestinians. “Affirmation of Israel’s Jewishness…, is the very foundation of peace, its DNA,” says Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Oren. Yet in the shadow of this fixation on Jewish identity, we see a singular lack of interest in autonomy expressed through a religious leader’s contempt for work, a prime minister’s appetite for foreign money, and a Congressman’s concern that the umbilical chord tying Israel to the US not suffer any interruption or constriction in the steady supply of US tax dollars required for supporting the Jewish state.
Where in this condition is any understanding of the real meaning of sovereignty? Might not Israel’s greatest existential threats be the ones of its own making?
One of the strange aspects relating to conspiracy theories concerning 9/11 is that they unwittingly obscure something even worse: that the US government foments terrorism not by design but by neglect; that its policies have had a direct and instrumental role in creating terrorists not simply by providing individuals and groups with an ideological pretext for engaging in terrorism but much more specifically by creating the conditions an individual’s political opposition to America’s actions would shift to unrestrained violent opposition.
The key which often unlocks the terrorist’s capacity for violence is his experience of being subject to violence through torture.
There is ample evidence that a number of prominent militants — including al-Qaeda deputy commander Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and the late al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — endured systematic torture at the hands of the Egyptian and Jordanian authorities, respectively. Many observers believe that their turn toward extreme radicalism represented as much an attempt to exact revenge against their tormentors and, by extension, the United States, as it was about fulfilling an ideology. Those who knew Zawahiri and can relate to his experience believe that his behavior today is greatly influenced by his pursuit of personal redemption to compensate for divulging information about his associates after breaking down amid brutal torture sessions during his imprisonment in the early 1980s. For radical Islamists and their sympathizers, U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic support for regimes that engage in this kind of activity against their own citizens vindicates al-Qaeda’s claims of the existence of a U.S.-led plot to attack Muslims and undermine Islam. In al-Qaeda’s view, these circumstances require that Muslims organize and take up arms in self-defense against the United States and its allies in the region.
The latest revelations provided by Wikileaks show how the war in Iraq — the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism — became not simply a terrorist training ground, but a cauldron in which terrorists could be forged.
FRAGO 242: PROVIDED THE INITIAL REPORT CONFIRMS U.S. FORCES WERE NOT INVOLVED IN THE DETAINEE ABUSE, NO FURTHER INVESTIGATION WILL BE CONDUCTED UNLESS DIRECTED BY HHQ. JUNE 26, 2004
A grim picture of the US and Britain’s legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The Pentagon might hide behind claims that it neither authorized nor condoned violence used by Iraqi authorities on Iraqi detainees, but the difference between being an innocent bystander and being complicit consists in whether one has the power to intervene. The US military’s hands were not tied. As the occupying power it had both the means, the legal authority and the legal responsibility to stop torture in Iraq. It’s failure to do so was a matter of choice.
Will the latest revelations from Wikileaks be of any political consequence? I seriously doubt it, given that we now have a president dedicated not only to refusing to look back but also to perpetuating most of the policies instituted by his predecessor.
For more information on the documents released by Wikileaks, see The Guardian‘s Iraq war logs page.
The U.S. has been wooing Netanyahu for weeks with offers including a squadron of F-35 fighters, support for a long-term Israeli troop presence in a new Palestinian state, and a pledge to veto any anti-Israel resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council. The U.S. also is offering access to its satellites that could provide early warning of attacks.
To the Palestinians, the White House is pledging support for their position on the exact location of borders for a future state in exchange for a promise to continue negotiating even if Israel refuses to extend the construction moratorium.
Although the Obama administration was expected to eventually give out incentives to keep the negotiations alive, diplomats and other observers say they are surprised that it has offered so much, so early for such a small victory: a commitment by both sides to keep talking.
“From the left to the right, people are saying that the administration is looking desperate,” said Robert Danin, a former U.S. official and an advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, an envoy to the region for the United Nations, U.S., European Union and Russia.
Making a hint that they will be used to bomb Iran, he described them as being “one of the answers” for dealing with the “problem” of Tehran.
Israel will get the jets at a discount, pay for them with US tax dollars (through recession-proof military aid), while also likely profiting from F-35 production — it has expressed an interest in manufacturing 25% of the wings of the more than 3,000 aircraft Lockheed expects to build.
The jets won’t be delivered until about 2016, but by that point Israel’s war-mongers no doubt feel optimistic that there will be a war-friendly Republican administration in place — though whether GOP control of the White House is necessary to serve Israel’s needs, is highly debatable.
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.
– – –
Late last year, 60 Minutes reported on America’s vulnerability to a major cyber attack.
The U.S. soldiers hatched a plan as simple as it was savage: to randomly target and kill an Afghan civilian, and to get away with it.
For weeks, according to Army charging documents, rogue members of a platoon from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, floated the idea. Then, one day last winter, a solitary Afghan man approached them in the village of La Mohammed Kalay. The “kill team” activated the plan.
One soldier created a ruse that they were under attack, tossing a fragmentary grenade on the ground. Then others opened fire.
According to charging documents, the unprovoked, fatal attack on Jan. 15 was the start of a months-long shooting spree against Afghan civilians that resulted in some of the grisliest allegations against American soldiers since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Members of the platoon have been charged with dismembering and photographing corpses, as well as hoarding a skull and other human bones.
The subsequent investigation has raised accusations about whether the military ignored warnings that the out-of-control soldiers were committing atrocities. The father of one soldier said he repeatedly tried to alert the Army after his son told him about the first killing, only to be rebuffed.
Two more slayings would follow. Military documents allege that five members of the unit staged a total of three murders in Kandahar province between January and May. Seven other soldiers have been charged with crimes related to the case, including hashish use, attempts to impede the investigation and a retaliatory gang assault on a private who blew the whistle.
Army officials have not disclosed a motive for the killings and macabre behavior. Nor have they explained how the attacks could have persisted without attracting scrutiny. They declined to comment on the case beyond the charges that have been filed, citing the ongoing investigation.
But a review of military court documents and interviews with people familiar with the investigation suggest the killings were committed essentially for sport by soldiers who had a fondness for hashish and alcohol.
The accused soldiers, through attorneys and family members, deny wrongdoing. But the case has already been marked by a cycle of accusations and counter-accusations among the defendants as they seek to pin the blame on each other, according to documents and interviews.
The Army has scheduled pre-trial hearings in the case this fall at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, home of the Stryker brigade. (The unit was renamed the 2nd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, when it returned from Afghanistan in July.) Military officials say privately that they worry the hearings will draw further attention to the case, with photos and other evidence prompting anger among the Afghan civilians whose support is critical to the fight against the Taliban.
Does the Washington Post share the military’s concern about the effects of publicity around this case? It has certainly taken the newspaper a long time to get around to covering this story.
The case was reported by the Seattle Times in early June.
Premeditated murder, the crime that the soldiers are charged with, is the most serious of four murder charges that can be levied under the military code of justice, according to Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale University. It carries the death penalty.
In cases involving multiple soldiers, military prosecutors, like their civilian counterparts, may sometimes cut deals with some defendants to gain evidence against other defendants.
“The prosecutors’ door is likely to open, and they may have to make some wrenching decisions about whom to make a deal with to gain evidence,” Fidell said.
There are hints that the Washington Post itself may now be part of just such a prosecution process as indicated by the weight its report gives to the testimony of Spc. Adam Winfield, one of the accused soldiers.
Guns are very durable — ownership tends to be transient.
The New York Times examines a weapons cache which provides a snapshot of the arsenal that the Taliban in Marja — the part of Helmand Province that has seen the most sustained fighting of 2010 — have been using against US marines.
In this collection, a third of the weapons are bolt-actions rifles from World War II or earlier.
The photograph above shows a 1915 Lee Enfield rifle — a gun that was manufactured in the millions to defend the British Empire.
Did the manufacturers have the slightest idea that they were making weapons that would outlast an empire?
What does the fact that the US military is now locked in a stalemate against an irregular force with vastly inferior weaponry say about the return American taxpayers are getting from a defense budget that dwarfs all others?
Would the Marines be significantly worse off if they too carried Lee Enfields?
But here’s the serious question:
When Britain was amassing an arsenal to defend its empire, it spent a tiny fraction of what the US now spends producing an array of weapons far less potent than those the Pentagon now requires.
If we assume that, just as was the case for the British, the American arsenal far outlasts the American empire, what kind of world will we see a hundred years from now when America is a shadow of its former self and fighters across the planet are wielding M16 rifles instead of Lee Enfields?
The defense of America leads inexorably to the weaponization of the planet.
Greg Mitchell reports (parts one and two) on the suicide of Spc. Alyssa Peterson, one of the first women soldiers to die in Iraq. She took her own life exactly seven years ago after being reprimanded for showing empathy for Iraqi prisoners who were undergoing interrogation. All records of the techniques being used have been destroyed but there seems little doubt that the Iraqis were being tortured.
The 27-year-old’s parents didn’t even know their daughter was in Iraq until they were informed of her death. The fact that she committed suicide was concealed by the military for several more years — the most likely reason for the cover-up being that it was Peterson’s unwillingness to participate in torture that drove her to take her own life.
Kayla Williams, a US Army sergeant who served with Peterson, described the impact of participating in interrogations which she could see clearly contravened the Geneva Conventions.
Fellow soldiers, echoing then vice-president Dick Cheney, told the young sergeant that “the old rules no longer applied because this was a different world. This was a new kind of war.” But Williams said: “it really made me feel like we were losing that crucial moral higher ground, and we weren’t behaving in the way that Americans are supposed to behave.”
“It also made me think,” Williams says, “what are we as humans, that we do this to each other? It made me question my humanity and the humanity of all Americans. It was difficult, and to this day I can no longer think I am a really good person and will do the right thing in the right situation.”
As the famous Milgram experiment demonstrated, individuals who choose to do the right thing — especially when that demands defying authority — are usually in a minority. The much more prevalent tendency is a willingness to follow orders and suspend ones own moral judgment — even when that involves participating in torture.
Should Alyssa Peterson have been turned away from the military on the grounds that she was too humane, her conscience too strong, for her to serve in the US Army? She ended up being reprimanded for showing empathy to Iraqi prisoners. As the official investigation of her death revealed: “She said that she did not know how to be two people; she… could not be one person in the cage [where prisoners were apparently tortured] and another outside the wire.”
Suppose before she took her life, Dick Cheney had had an opportunity to council her, what would he have said? Or suppose Cheney was now to speak to her father, what would he say?
Empathy is a liability in wartime? Americans need to set aside their humanity when they put on a uniform?
Peterson’s ability to empathize with Iraqi prisoners was no doubt in large part an expression of her character and her humanity, yet to an extent it must also have resulted from the humanizing effect of understanding and speaking Arabic. In spite of the dehumanizing effect of seeing men stripped of their dignity, she must also have been able to see beyond that and through their words seen not mere “terrorist” suspects, but fathers with daughters and sons with parents.
Recognition of humanity is not something we can pick up or discard whenever it seems expedient — whenever cast aside it henceforth becomes increasingly difficult to rediscover.
The choice to cross over to the “dark side” is a choice that may prove impossible to reverse. At 27 Alyssa Peterson seems to have understood that. As far as we can tell, Dick Cheney has not even attempted to find the way back.
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Zaeef is now a prolific writer and speaks five languages fluently. According to many Taliban insiders, if there are any negotiations between the Taliban and the Americans they will go through him.
Even if Israel stands out as the preeminent military power in the Middle East, it has only been able to acquire this status through its dependence on the United States. It often masks that dependence by behaving like a brash teenager who is secretly terrified by the thought of leaving home.
The 27-year-old’s parents didn’t even know their daughter was in Iraq until they were informed of her death. The fact that she committed suicide was concealed by the military for several more years — the most likely reason for the cover-up being that it was Peterson’s unwillingness to participate in torture that drove her to take her own life.