Category Archives: US government

U.S. expresses fears as ISIS takes control of northern Libyan town

The Guardian reports: It is a warm October evening in Derna, a small town on Libya’s north east coast, 450 miles from the capital, Tripoli.

The main square is packed with young men, brought by a summons from the town’s self-proclaimed emir to swear allegiance to a newly formed Islamic caliphate.

The emir, on a stage just visible through the jumping throng, calls for the crowd to repeat his calls to join the a caliphate, to listen and follow orders, and to acclaim that the Islamic State (Isis) is here to stay.

To each call, they repeat the chant, roaring their support – and with that, the emir declares Derna the first town in Libya to join the Islamic State, making common cause with fighters in Iraq and Syria.

This week, the Pentagon went public with its concerns, when the commander of the US army’s Africa Command told reporters that Isis – also known as Isil – is now running training camps in Libya, where as many as 200 fighters are receiving instruction. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. transfers six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay

The New York Times reports: The United States transferred six detainees from the Guantánamo Bay prison to Uruguay this weekend, the Defense Department announced early Sunday. It was the largest single group of inmates to depart the wartime prison in Cuba since 2009, and the first detainees to be resettled in South America.

The transfer included a Syrian man who has been on a prolonged hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention without trial, and who has brought a high-profile lawsuit to challenge the military’s procedures for force-feeding him. His release may make most of that case moot, although a dispute over whether videotapes of the procedure must be disclosed to the public is expected to continue.

The transfer was also notable because the deal has been publicly known since it was finalized last spring. Significantly, however, delays by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in signing off on the arrangement placed it in jeopardy. Mr. Hagel’s slow pace this year in approving proposed transfers of low-level detainees contributed to larger tensions with the White House before his resignation under pressure last month. [Continue reading…]

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CIA won’t defend its one-time torturers

The Daily Beast reports: There may have been bourbon punch and festive lights at the CIA’s holiday party Friday night, but a frosty gloom hung in the air.

As everyone in the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters knew, the long-awaited “torture report” from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democrats was set to drop early the next week, perhaps as soon as Monday morning. It seemed a rather awkward time for a party.

The CIA’s response to the report will be muted. The agency will neither defend the so-called rendition, detention, and interrogation programs. Nor will the CIA disavow those controversial efforts entirely. According to current and former officials familiar with the higher-ups’ thinking, CIA Director John Brennan is likely to keep his powder dry and essentially agree to disagree with the agency’s critics. Even though some CIA employees remain convinced that brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists, including waterboarding, produced useful information that helped prevent terrorist attacks, the agency’s leaders will take no position on whether that information could have been obtained through less coercive means.

Such a Jesuitical response will do absolutely nothing to satisfy critics of the program or its supporters — some of whom still go work at Langley every day. But it’s the result of the precarious political position that Brennan finds himself in now. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s power to purge

An editorial in the New York Times says: Last September, a brief mention in a welter of bureaucratic announcements caught the eye of Steven Aftergood, an advocate for government transparency at the Federation of American Scientists. He investigated and discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency was proposing to eventually destroy the email of all but a small number of its thousands of employees, from covert operatives to counterterrorism officers.

Not only that, Mr. Aftergood found out the National Archives and Records Administration had already offered tentative approval in August of the plan to — as a spy might put it — disappear the email of every worker but the C.I.A.’s top 22 managers, three years after they left the agency.

The proposal was treated as part of a governmentwide effort to trim worthless emails from federal archives. But, please, it was shocking on its face considering the agency’s dark history of destroying videotaped evidence of waterboarding and other torture methods and its repeated finessing of congressional attempts to take account of the C.I.A.’s clandestine clout in the world. Station chiefs in the Middle East, Mr. Aftergood noted, surely could shed interesting light retrospectively on history and agency mismanagement via their email record. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration again tries to block release of CIA torture report

The New York Times reports: The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday faced a new obstacle in its efforts to make public its report on the torture of prisoners once held by the Central Intelligence Agency after last-minute warnings from the Obama administration that the report’s release could ignite new unrest in the Middle East and put American hostages at risk.

The warnings were delivered on Friday during a phone call between Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the committee. According to congressional officials, Mr. Kerry warned that allies were concerned that the report could incite violence in the Middle East.

Ms. Feinstein had planned to make the report public next week, but it is uncertain whether the call from Mr. Kerry would affect that timetable.

The exchange between Mr. Kerry and Ms. Feinstein is just the latest turn in the protracted dispute over the Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the detention and interrogation of C.I.A. prisoners during the Bush administration, an investigation that set out to examine the efficacy of the brutal interrogation methods. [Continue reading…]

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It’s not top-secret if you can Google it

Michael Richter writes: Former Navy SEAL Matthew Bissonnette recently filed a federal malpractice suit against an attorney for telling him that the manuscript of his book, “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, ” didn’t need to undergo prepublication review by the Pentagon. Mr. Bissonnette claims that not letting Defense Department censors vet the book before its 2012 release has left him vulnerable to a criminal investigation and the likely confiscation of nearly all income earned from his best seller.

Mr. Bissonnette has acknowledged that his secrecy agreement with the Pentagon required him to submit the manuscript for prepublication review. But in a broader sense Mr. Bissonnette’s case has brought renewed attention to a dilemma facing every government employee who has ever been issued a security clearance. It seems these employees have in effect agreed to whatever limits on their First Amendment rights the Pentagon decides to impose. For instance, the government is now using its power to restrain speech regarding material that is already in the public domain.

I have firsthand experience of this First Amendment abridgment. After resigning from the U.S. intelligence community in 2011 to enter private practice as an attorney in Manhattan, I traveled to Cuba as a nongovernmental observer to the pretrial proceedings against the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000. I later prepared an article on the proceedings for a professional journal.

After submitting it for prepublication review to my former employers at the Defense Department, they ordered me to delete a paragraph citing a classified document that had likely been leaked by former Army Pfc. Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden , although the source is not revealed. The document is on the New York Times website — and perhaps elsewhere — and it concerns information I never saw or had anything to do with while in government.

Courts have ruled that the government cannot do this sort of thing, but the Pentagon isn’t listening. [Continue reading…]

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Inside the battle over the CIA torture report

Josh Rogin and Eli Lake write: After months of internal wrangling, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally set to release its report on President George W. Bush-era CIA practices, which among other details will contain information about foreign countries that aided in the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Several U.S. officials told us that the negotiations are nearly complete between the Central Intelligence Agency and the committee’s Democratic staff, which prepared the classified 6,300-page report and its 600-page, soon-to-be-released declassified executive summary. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s chairman, is set to release the summary early next week. Her staff members had objected vigorously to hundreds of redactions the CIA had proposed in the executive summary. After an often-contentious process to resolve the disputes, managed by top White House officials, Feinstein was able to roll back the majority of the disputed CIA redactions.

Among the most significant of Feinstein’s victories, the report will retain information on countries that aided the CIA program by hosting black sites or otherwise participating in the secret rendition of suspected terrorists. The countries will not be identified by name, but in other ways, such as code names like “Country A.” This falls short of Feinstein’s original desire, which was to name the countries explicitly, but represents a big victory for the committee nonetheless. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-led coalition bombards ISIS at Raqqa with up to 30 air strikes

The Associated Press reports: US-led coalition warplanes carried out as many as 30 air strikes overnight against Islamic State (Isis) militants in and around the group’s de facto capital in north-eastern Syria, activists said on Sunday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes targeted Isis positions in the city of Raqqa as well as the Division 17 air base, which the militants seized earlier this year from government forces.

The monitoring group, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria, reported at least 30 coalition strikes in all. The Local Coordination Committees, an activist collective, also confirmed the air strikes. Neither group had casualty figures. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. sending A-10 ‘Warthogs’ to attack ISIS

Stars and Stripes reports: An attack aircraft that the Pentagon is trying to get rid of has been deployed to the Middle East to take on the Islamic State.

A squadron-sized element of A-10 Thunderbolts arrived in the region during the week of Nov. 17-21, according to the Air Force. The aircraft were previously being used in Afghanistan.

The move marks the first time the ugly but battle-proven jet, also known as the “Warthog,” has been thrown into the fight against Islamic State, which controls much of Iraq and Syria. The A-10 is a slow, low-flying plane that can unleash massive amounts of firepower against enemy ground forces while conducting close-air-support missions.

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U.S.-led raid rescues eight held in Yemen

The New York Times reports: In a predawn raid on Tuesday, United States Special Operations commandos and Yemeni troops rescued eight hostages being held in a cave in a remote part of eastern Yemen by Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, officials from both countries said.

The freed captives were six Yemeni citizens, a Saudi and an Ethiopian, who were unharmed, Yemeni officials said in a statement. Earlier reports that an American hostage was freed were incorrect, according to Yemeni and American officials.

About two dozen United States commandos, joined by a small number of American-trained Yemeni counterterrorism troops flew secretly by helicopter to a location in Hadhramaut Province near the Saudi border, according to American and Yemeni officials. The commandos then hiked some distance in the dark to a mountainside cave, where they surprised the militants holding the captives.

An ensuing shootout left seven of the Qaeda militants dead, the officials said. The hostages were then evacuated in helicopters.

The rare and risky dash into Qaeda-infested territory was organized fairly quickly, within two weeks of a request from President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi of Yemen to help rescue the captives, one American official said.

The operation appeared to be at least partly an attempt to bolster the stature of Mr. Hadi, a committed but wobbling United States ally whose authority was badly undermined when a rebel group suddenly seized control of Yemen’s capital in September.

In an apparent effort to play down the leading American role in the clandestine operation, the Pentagon referred questions about what had happened to the Yemeni government. [Continue reading…]

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The insignificance of Hagel’s arrival and departure

Peter Beinart writes: When I heard that Chuck Hagel was leaving as secretary of defense, I called someone close to the administration to try out the explanation bubbling up on Twitter: that Hagel had been hired to bury the “war on terror” and was being replaced because the White House now needed someone who wanted to vigorously prosecute it. My source sighed. “You guys tend to over interpret these things,” he said.

Oh yeah, I thought. I should know that by now. When Hagel was chosen I wrote a 3,000-word essay claiming his nomination “may prove the most consequential foreign-policy appointment of his [Obama’s] presidency. Because the struggle over Hagel is a struggle over whether Obama can change the terms of foreign-policy debate.” In one sense, that claim was correct. Hagel’s confirmation did spark a large, nasty fight over the terms of American foreign policy. Hawks blasted Hagel for casting doubt on military action against Iran and for criticizing what he called, inaccurately, “the Jewish lobby.” Hagel’s defenders argued that by nominating him, Obama was declaring independence from a foreign-policy establishment that had not reconsidered the assumptions that led America into Afghanistan and Iraq. And we argued that by nominating someone who had spoken uncomfortable truths about the influence groups like AIPAC wield in Congress, Obama was combatting the culture of hyper-caution that stymied provocative thinking inside the Democratic foreign-policy elite.

It was an interesting debate. It just didn’t have a lot to do with what Hagel would do as secretary of defense. Intoxicated by the symbolic significance of a Hagel appointment, both his defenders and his adversaries tended to overlook one mundane but crucial fact: That in the ultra-centralized Obama White House, Hagel’s foreign-policy views wouldn’t matter all that much. [Continue reading…]

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Rand Paul calls for a formal declaration of war against ISIS

The New York Times reports: Senator Rand Paul is calling for a declaration of war against the Islamic State, a move that promises to shake up the debate over the military campaign in Iraq and Syria as President Obama prepares to ask Congress to grant him formal authority to use force.

Mr. Paul, a likely presidential candidate who has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s most cautious voices on military intervention, offered a very circumscribed definition of war in his proposal, which he outlined in an interview on Saturday. He would, for instance, limit the duration of military action to one year and significantly restrict the use of ground forces.

Unlike other resolutions circulating on Capitol Hill that would give the president various degrees of authority to use force against Islamic militants, Mr. Paul would take the extra step of declaring war — something Congress has not done since World War II. [Continue reading…]

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Afghanistan quietly lifts ban on nighttime raids

The New York Times reports: The government of the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, has quietly lifted the ban on night raids by special forces troops that his predecessor had imposed.

Afghan National Army Special Forces units are planning to resume the raids in 2015, and in some cases the raids will include members of American Special Operations units in an advisory role, according to Afghan military officials as well as officials with the American-led military coalition.

That news comes after published accounts of an order by President Obama to allow the American military to continue some limited combat operations in 2015. That order allows for the sort of air support necessary for successful night raids. [Continue reading…]

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Highest-value terror detainees excluded from Senate investigation of CIA torture

The Guardian reports: A widely anticipated report by the Senate intelligence committee into torture committed by the Central Intelligence Agency has a hole at the center of its story: the men the CIA tortured.

Lawyers for four of the highest-value detainees ever held by the CIA, all of whom have made credible allegations of torture and all of whom remain in US government custody, say the Senate committee never spoke with their clients. In some cases the Senate’s investigators never attempted to speak with the men whose abuse is at the heart of what the committee spent over four years investigating.

The absence of the torture victims’ accounts calls the thoroughness of the Senate committee inquiry “directly into question”, said David Nevin, who represents accused 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

“If you’re conducting a genuine inquiry of a program that tortured people, don’t you begin by talking to the people who were tortured? It seems here, as far as my client is concerned, no effort was made to do that.” [Continue reading…]

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In secret, Obama extends U.S. role in Afghan combat

The New York Times reports: President Obama decided in recent weeks to authorize a more expansive mission for the military in Afghanistan in 2015 than originally planned, a move that ensures American troops will have a direct role in fighting in the war-ravaged country for at least another year.

Mr. Obama’s order allows American forces to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militant groups threatening American troops or the Afghan government, a broader mission than the president described to the public earlier this year, according to several administration, military and congressional officials with knowledge of the decision. The new authorization also allows American jets, bombers and drones to support Afghan troops on combat missions.

In an announcement in the White House Rose Garden in May, Mr. Obama said that the American military would have no combat role in Afghanistan next year, and that the missions for the 9,800 troops remaining in the country would be limited to training Afghan forces and to hunting the “remnants of Al Qaeda.”

The decision to change that mission was the result of a lengthy and heated debate that laid bare the tension inside the Obama administration between two often-competing imperatives: the promise Mr. Obama made to end the war in Afghanistan, versus the demands of the Pentagon that American troops be able to successfully fulfill their remaining missions in the country.

The internal discussion took place against the backdrop of this year’s collapse of Iraqi security forces in the face of the advance of the Islamic State as well as the mistrust between the Pentagon and the White House that still lingers since Mr. Obama’s 2009 decision to “surge” 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan. Some of the president’s civilian advisers say that decision was made only because of excessive Pentagon pressure, and some military officials say it was half-baked and made with an eye to domestic politics.

Mr. Obama’s decision, made during a White House meeting in recent weeks with his senior national security advisers, came over the objection of some of his top civilian aides, who argued that American lives should not be put at risk next year in any operations against the Taliban — and that they should have only a narrow counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda. [Continue reading…]

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The roots of the jihadist resurgence in Iraq

Craig Whiteside, in a two-part series at War on the Rocks, writes: In the Sunni areas where the Iraqi government had little control, it did not take long for the Islamic State to slowly and methodically eliminate resistance one person at a time. For example, in the small but strategic town of Jurf ah Sakhar south of Baghdad, and on the Sunni-Shia fault line, there were 46 Awakening members reported killed between 2009 and 2013, in 27 different incidents. Most were shot singly or in pairs in the first three years of the campaign, and four were Sheiks from the local Janabi tribe and leaders of the council. By my count, 1,345 Awakening members across Iraq have been killed since the beginning of 2009, and this is a massive undercount as the data is only based on confirmed media reports of killings. More importantly, there are obvious patterns of activity that focus on the contested areas that the Islamic State wants to control.

While the killing of one of the founders of the Awakening, Abdul Sattar Abu Risha in late 2007, attracted some attention, most killings were barely noticed by the Iraqi government or in the media. This is despite the fact that the Islamic State proudly claimed such kills, albeit several months later, in their periodic operational reports. [Continue reading…]

Part Two: As part of the Islamic State’s military campaign to return to relevance, introduced in the first part of this series, they constructed a multi-layered plan to free their members in Iraqi prisons.

To accomplish this feat, the Islamic State created a brigade that specialized in targeting the criminal justice system as a whole, with assassination squads responsible for killing judges, prosecutors, investigators, prison staff, and witnesses. Physical infrastructure was also targeted, including crime labs, detention facilities, and courtrooms. [Continue reading…]

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White House sides with CIA in effort to shield torturers

The New York Times reports: In a tense confrontation with President Obama’s closest adviser on Thursday, a group of Senate Democrats accused the White House of trying to censor significant details in a voluminous report on the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency.

During a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill with Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, the senators said that the White House was siding with the C.I.A. and trying to thwart negotiations over the report’s release. The negotiations have dragged on for months because of a dispute over the C.I.A.’s demand that pseudonyms of agency officers be deleted from the report.

The C.I.A., supported by the White House, has argued that even without using the real names of the officers, their identities could still be revealed.

According to several people in attendance, the meeting was civil, but neither side gave ground, and it ended without resolution. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent five years working on the 6,000-page report, which is said to provide grim details about the torture of detainees in C.I.A. prisons during the Bush administration, and describe a persistent effort by C.I.A. officials to mislead the White House and Congress about the efficacy of its interrogation techniques. The committee voted this year to declassify the report’s executive summary, numbering several hundred pages, but the fight over redactions has delayed the release.

The confrontation on Thursday was a sign that Senate Democrats are worried that whatever leverage they have in having the report declassified on their terms is dwindling. Republicans will take control of the Senate in January, and the Intelligence Committee’s new leadership could choose to drag out the report’s release even longer. Most Republican members of the committee have long been opposed to the investigation — which they have said is a partisan attempt to discredit the Bush administration — although several committee Republicans voted in favor of declassifying the report’s executive summary.

With their time in power running out, some Democrats have suggested that they might take the extreme step of bypassing the executive branch and declassifying the report themselves. One option would be to use an arcane Senate procedure to release the report, and another would be to use the Constitution’s “speech or debate clause” to read it into the record from the Senate floor — an echo of 1971, when Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska read parts of the Pentagon Papers aloud in a Senate committee hearing.

Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee who recently lost a bid for re-election, suggested recently he might resort to this tactic. [Continue reading…]

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Between China and Keystone XL

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: On Tuesday evening, when Senate Democrats rejected efforts to force a vote approving the Keystone XL pipeline, they knew they were just delaying the inevitable. The measure was defeated by one vote, and several naysayers will no longer be around come January. The new, Republican-controlled Senate will take up the measure again — “This’ll be an early item on the agenda in the next Congress,” incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed on Tuesday night — and, the next time around, everyone knows, it will pass. In preparation for this eventuality, White House officials have begun hinting that President Barack Obama might be willing to trade approval of the pipeline for Republican acceptance of one of his favored policies.

If this is indeed the President’s plan, let’s hope he asks the right price. Otherwise, his claim to an environmental legacy will end up being what he traded away. As it happens, the Keystone vote came exactly one week after Obama and China’s President, Xi Jinping, announced that they had agreed on a plan to curb carbon emissions. Under the agreement, China, which is now the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter on an annual basis, would cap its emissions by 2030. For its part, the United States, which is still the world’s greatest emitter on a cumulative basis, would reduce its emissions by twenty-eight per cent by 2025. (This is against a 2005 baseline — U.S. emissions have already fallen about ten per cent since that year, owing, in part, to a substitution of natural gas for coal in electricity production.) Obama called the agreement “historic,” and rightly so. It marks the first time that China has officially acknowledged that its rapidly rising emissions need to stop rising, and it also offers a significantly more ambitious goal for the U.S. than it has previously been willing to commit to. Grist called the deal “a game changer,” while Vox labelled it a “BFD.” Many commentators noted that the odds of getting a meaningful global agreement on climate change at a summit scheduled for next year in Paris — odds that had seemed close to zero — suddenly looked a good deal better. The U.S.-China deal, as a Guardian editorial put it, “transforms the prospects” for the summit.

President Obama deserves a great deal of credit for the agreement, as does Secretary of State John Kerry, who conducted the behind-the-scenes negotiations. But, as many commentators have also noted, the deal doesn’t get the U.S. or China remotely near where they need to be if the world is to avoid disaster — which both countries, along with pretty much every other state in the world, have defined as warming of more than two degrees Celsius. Chris Hope, a policy researcher at Cambridge University, ran the terms of the agreement through what’s known as an “integrated assessment model.” He also included in his analysis a recent commitment by the European Union to cut its emissions by forty per cent before 2030. He found that even if all of the pledges made so far are fulfilled, there will be “less than a 1% chance of keeping the rise in global mean temperatures” below two degrees Celsius: “Most likely the rise will be about 3.8° C.” [Continue reading…]

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