Category Archives: US government

Somebody in government finally asks a taxing question about the next war

Walter Pinkus writes: At last, after 11 years of the United States at war, a few minutes of public discussion of a tax to pay for the fighting. But that would be for the next war.

“What would be the impact of going to war again without committing to pay for that war with up-front taxes, something we did not do in either Iraq or Afghanistan, for the first time in the history of the country?” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta at a Senate Defense Appropriation subcommittee hearing on June 13.

That’s a question that should be asked before any president sends U.S. forces into a fight overseas or members of Congress propose legislation that authorizes some sort of military action abroad.

“We basically ran that war [Iraq] on a credit card,” Leahy told Panetta, who was there to discus the fiscal 2013 Defense Appropriations bill. “Now we find people who are calling for more military action in other parts of the world; at the same time, they do not want to consider any way of paying for it.”

No details were mentioned, but Leahy obviously was thinking about the drumbeat to provide air cover and arms to the Syrian opposition to President Bashar al-Assad coming from Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), as well as from the presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his advisers. And who is ready to pay for whatever it may take if the United States has to resort to military action to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? The Libyan effort cost more than $1 billion.

Leahy could also have been thinking about Congress authorizing President Obama’s sending of 100 Special Forces into Central Africa in October. They are providing support to Ugandan, Congolese and Central African Republic units searching for the ruthless Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.

Panetta gave the answer you would expect from a former House Budget Committee chairman, Office of Management and Budget director and chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. As Clinton’s chief of staff in 1996, he helped negotiate a budget compromise with Republican congressional leaders.

“Obviously,” Panetta told the senators, “if we repeated the mistake of not paying for the war that we decide to engage in, whatever that might be, the results would be that you would simply add more to the deficit and to the debt of this country for the future. You just put that burden on our kids for the future.”

He added, “All of us bear some responsibility to pay those costs if we’re willing to engage in war.”

How quickly would Congress have voted in October 2002, on the eve of a congressional election, to give President George W. Bush authority to use force in Iraq if the resolution also contained a provision to raise taxes?

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64 drone bases on American soil

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports: We like to think of the drone war as something far away, fought in the deserts of Yemen or the mountains of Afghanistan. But we now know it’s closer than we thought. There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed.

Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map of military UAV activities in the United States on Tuesday. Assembled from military sources — especially this little-known June 2011 Air Force presentation (.pdf) – it is arguably the most comprehensive map so far of the spread of the Pentagon’s unmanned fleet. What exact missions are performed at those locations, however, is not clear. Some bases might be used as remote cockpits to control the robotic aircraft overseas, some for drone pilot training. Others may also serve as imagery analysis depots.

The medium-size Shadow is used in 22 bases, the smaller Raven in 20 and the miniature Wasp in 11. California and Texas lead the pack, with 10 and six sites, respectively, and there are also 22 planned locations for future bases. ”It is very likely that there are more domestic drone activities not included in the map, but it is designed to provide an approximate overview of the widespread nature of Department of Defense activities throughout the US,” Michael Haynes from Public Intelligence tells Danger Room. [Continue reading…]

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When Chomsky wept

Fred Branfman recounts how he first met Noam Chomsky in Laos in February 1970 and goes on to write: In recent years I have been in regular contact with Noam, mainly by email, but also when staying in his house for 10 days prior to attending Howard Zinn’s April 3, 2010, memorial service. It was a deeply emotional period for both of us, particularly Noam, who had deep ties to Howard, and the visit made a deep impression on me.

I found essentially the same Noam whom I had met 40 years earlier. No interest in small talk. Self-deprecation. Anger at the ongoing refusal of America’s intellectuals and journalists to take a stand on U.S. leaders’ war crimes. Great moral issues of our time. A nice guy, offering to give me a ride back from a meeting in Cambridge, or to pick up some groceries at the supermarket for one of our meals.

I asked Noam how he felt about being routinely criticized for focusing on the crimes of U.S. leaders and not those of other nations. He said he felt this was appropriate since he was an American citizen, and U.S. leaders have by far committed more war crimes abroad than any others since the end of WWII. I agreed, also noting that there are so many prominent public intellectuals and journalists who criticize foreign leaders, so few who dare point out the war crimes committed by their own.

And, as 40 years earlier, I was above all struck by his unrelenting work. He spent almost all his time reading, writing, being interviewed in person or over the telephone, speaking and, in an act of generosity for which he is particularly known, continually answering an unending stream of emails — often for as much as five or six hours a day.

And, I discovered, he continued to speak widely all over the country and world, to the point where his schedule is usually filled up years in advance. At age 82 he kept a schedule that would overwhelm someone 40 years younger.

I was also struck by his asceticism. When I telephoned him I realized he had the same phone number and lived in the same modest suburban home as he had 40 years ago. He wears jeans, and has virtually no interest in food or material possessions. He is periodically visited by friends and family, but engages in no other leisure-time activities.

I was particularly moved one night as I was sitting opposite him at dinner, struck as usual by the enormous distance between what Noam knows about U.S. leaders’ slaughter of innocents around the world and what the public realizes. I suddenly thought of Winston Smith from Orwell’s “1984,” who sees little hope of changing society and focuses only on trying to remain sane and commit to paper the truth in the hope that future generations will remember it. I told Noam that to me, at that moment, he represented Winston Smith to me.

I will always remember his reaction.

He just looked at me.

And smiled sadly.

Noam can be tough on those who he feels support U.S. war-making, but he is even harder on himself. On one occasion I mentioned that I had asked a lifelong political activist with whom we were both friendly whether, looking back on his life, he had any regrets. Our friend had responded that he wished he had spent more time with his family, and pursuing a variety of his non-political interests. “Do you have any regrets?” I asked Noam. His answer shocked me. Muttering more to himself than to me he said, “I didn’t do nearly enough.”

On another occasion I asked Noam how much satisfaction he took from having written so many books, founding a new field of linguistics, being so influential around the world. “None,” he answered grimly, explaining that he felt he hadn’t really been able to convince enough people to understand the true depth of U.S. leaders’ savage and brutal treatment of the world’s non-people. He felt frustrated, for example, that more people did not understand how U.S. leaders’ killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and destroying the very base of South Vietnamese society had succeeded, how they had actually won in Indochina by destroying the possibility of an alternative economic and social model to that of the U.S. emerging.

One evening as I was climbing the stairs to my bedroom I looked into Noam’s office. He spends his time at home these days sitting in a large office chair in front of his computer, and his posture resembled nothing so much to me as a Buddhist monk in meditation.

And then it hit me.

I suddenly realized, “Noam has been living, as I did relatively briefly during the war, for the past 40 years. He has been working around the clock, reading, writing, speaking, not wasting a minute, in a focused attempt to try and stop U.S. killing, to force the world to realize the plight of the ‘unpeople.’” [Continue reading…]

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Contractors run U.S. spying missions in Africa

The Washington Post reports: Four small, white passenger planes sit outside a hangar here under a blazing sun, with no exterior markings save for U.S. registration numbers painted on the tails. A few burly men wearing aviator sunglasses and short haircuts poke silently around the wing flaps and landing gear.

The aircraft are Pilatus PC-12s, turboprops favored by the U.S. Special Operations forces for stealth missions precisely because of their nondescript appearance. There is no hint that they are carrying high-tech sensors and cameras that can film man-size targets from 10 miles away.

To further disguise the mission, the U.S. military has taken another unusual step: It has largely outsourced the spying operation to private contractors. The contractors supply the aircraft as well as the pilots, mechanics and other personnel to help process electronic intelligence collected from the airspace over Uganda, Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

In October, President Obama sent about 100 elite U.S. troops to central Africa to scour the terrain for Joseph Kony, the messianic and brutal leader of a Ugandan rebel group. But American contractors have been secretly searching for Kony from the skies long before that, at least since 2009, under a project code-named Tusker Sand, according to documents and people familiar with the operation.

The previously unreported practice of hiring private companies to spy on huge expanses of African territory — in this region and in North Africa, where a similar surveillance program is aimed at an al-Qaeda affiliate — has been a cornerstone of the U.S. military’s secret activities on the continent. Unlike uniformed troops, plainclothes contractors are less likely to draw attention.

But because the arms-length arrangement exists outside traditional channels, there is virtually no public scrutiny or oversight. And if something goes wrong, the U.S. government and its partners acknowledge that the contractors are largely on their own.

U.S. Africa Command, which oversees military operations on the continent, declined to discuss specific missions or its reasons for outsourcing the gathering of intelligence.

In response to written questions from The Washington Post, the command stated that contractors would not get special treatment in case of a mishap. Instead, they “would be provided the same assistance that any U.S. citizen would be provided by the U.S. Government should they be in danger.”

There is precedent for the use of contractors in spying operations. The military hired private firms to conduct airborne surveillance in Latin America in the 1990s and early 2000s, with sometimes-disastrous results.

In 2003, for instance, one American was killed and three others were taken hostage by Colombian insurgents after their plane crashed in the jungle. The contractors, who were working for Northrop Grumman on a Defense Department counter-narcotics program, endured five years of captivity before they were freed in a raid by Colombian police.

Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and an expert on military contracting, said the Pentagon typically turns to the private sector for “deniability,” but he added that “it rarely turns out that way.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s death squads operating outside war zones

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. military is expanding its secret intelligence operations across Africa, establishing a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts from the fringes of the Sahara to jungle terrain along the equator, according to documents and people involved in the project.

At the heart of the surveillance operations are small, unarmed turboprop aircraft disguised as private planes. Equipped with hidden sensors that can record full-motion video, track infrared heat patterns, and vacuum up radio and cellphone signals, the planes refuel on isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their effective flight range by thousands of miles.

About a dozen air bases have been established in Africa since 2007, according to a former senior U.S. commander involved in setting up the network. Most are small operations run out of secluded hangars at African military bases or civilian airports.

The nature and extent of the missions, as well as many of the bases being used, have not been previously reported but are partially documented in public Defense Department contracts. The operations have intensified in recent months, part of a growing shadow war against al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups. The surveillance is overseen by U.S. Special Operations forces but relies heavily on private military contractors and support from African troops.

The surveillance underscores how Special Operations forces, which have played an outsize role in the Obama administration’s national security strategy, are working clandestinely all over the globe, not just in war zones. The lightly equipped commando units train foreign security forces and perform aid missions, but they also include teams dedicated to tracking and killing terrorism suspects.

The establishment of the Africa missions also highlights the ways in which Special Operations forces are blurring the lines that govern the secret world of intelligence, moving aggressively into spheres once reserved for the CIA. The CIA has expanded its counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations in Africa, but its manpower and resources pale in comparison with those of the military. [Continue reading…]

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Private prisons profit from immigration crackdown, federal and local law enforcement partnerships

Chris Kirkham reports: On a flat and desolate stretch of Interstate 10 some 50 miles south of Phoenix, a sheriff’s deputy pulls over a green Chevy Tahoe speeding westbound and carrying three young Hispanic men.

The man behind the wheel produces no driver’s license or registration. The deputy notices $1,000 in cash stuffed in the doorframe — payment, he presumes, for completed passage from Mexico. He radios the sheriff’s immigration enforcement team, summoning agents from the U.S. Border Patrol. Soon, the three men are ushered into the back of a white van with a federal seal.

This routine traffic stop represents the front end of an increasingly lucrative commercial enterprise: the business of incarcerating immigrant detainees, the fastest-growing segment of the American prison population. The three men loaded into the van offer fresh profit opportunities for the nation’s swiftly expanding private prison industry, which has in recent years captured the bulk of this commerce through federal contracts. By filling its cells with undocumented immigrants caught in the web of increased border security, the industry has seen its revenues swell at taxpayer expense.

The convergence of the people on the Interstate on this recent afternoon, as well as the profits that flow from imprisoning immigrants, are in part the result of concerted efforts by the private prison industry to tilt immigration detention policies in its favor, a Huffington Post investigation has shown.

In Washington, the industry’s lobbyists have influenced policy to secure growing numbers of federal inmates in its facilities, while encouraging Congress to increase funding for detention bedspace. Here in this southern Arizona community, private prison companies share the spoils of their business with the local government, effectively giving area law enforcement an incentive to apprehend as many undocumented immigrants as they can. [Continue reading…]

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The School of the Americas, the CIA and the U.S.-condoned cancer of torture continue to spread in Latin America, including Mexico

Mark Karlin reports: By academic pedigree and personal background, Jennifer Harbury should be among the ruling elite in the US. She is a graduate of Cornell and Harvard Law School, in fact receiving her law degree from Harvard just a few years before Barack Obama. Instead of following the path of most of her classmates to money and power, she became a legal aid attorney in Texas.

As part of her interest in human rights, she traveled to Guatemala in the early ’90s to write a book, “Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of Guatemalan Compañeros & Compañeras.” It was at that time she met, fell in love with and married Everardo (Efraín Bámaca Velásquez), who was a commandante in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity Front. He was fighting against the US-backed military and government, which was committing genocide against the indigenous population and the poor (ending in more than 200,000 dead – and countless more tortured, but released).

In 1992, Everardo was captured by the Guatemalan military. Harbury demanded to know the whereabouts of her husband and held a hunger strike in front of the Clinton White House, which was covered by the media and made into a national story by “60 Minutes.” Harbury’s request was simple: she wanted the State Department or CIA to tell her what had happened to her husband. But both agencies didn’t acknowledge they knew of his whereabouts.

In an interview with Truthout, Harbury recounted:

After a year of trying to find out what had really happened to him, a young prisoner escaped from the army torture program and reported that Everardo was alive and being severely tortured. After my third hunger strike to save his life, in March 1995, then New Jersey Senator Toricelli disclosed that official US documents indicated that he had been killed by Guatemalan officers on the CIA payroll.

After receiving many files at last through the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], it became clear that the State Department and the CIA had known where Everardo was and that he was in the hands of our own CIA liaisons or assets, since the week of his capture. They also knew approximately 300 other secret prisoners of war were suffering the same fate. The files show that all these prisoners were tortured to death, thrown down wells, out of helicopters, etc., yet the truth was only revealed to us in 1995. By then all were dead. We could have saved them.

In fact, Everardo, Harbury discovered, was kept in a body cast to keep him constrained while he was tortured for more than two years before being executed, all the time with the full knowledge and likely operational involvement of the CIA. [Continue reading…]

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From hopeful immigrant to FBI informant — the inside story of the other Abu Zubaidah

Jason Leopold writes: Hesham opened the envelope at the bar, expecting a green card. Instead, it was a subpoena from a federal prosecutor, which would force him to testify–against his brother.

He thought about fleeing to Norway or Poland with his wife and daughter. But it would be much easier to cross the border into Canada in his Cadillac Escalade and avoid the hassle of airport security and the possibility that his name would pop up on the no-fly list. In Canada, he could start over again. Raise farm animals or something. Change his name. Never look back. Hesham had played this fantasy out in his head dozens of times since he had quit working as a confidential informant for the FBI.

“This is what you wanted from me all along, isn’t it?” Hesham asked the FBI agent who handed him the envelope. “You guys used me.”

When he’d been living in Portland, Oregon, Hesham had agreed to infiltrate mosques and spy on other Muslims because his FBI handler led him to believe she could help him obtain a green card. She didn’t, and he cut off contact with the agency when he moved to a small town in Florida. But they had found him again.

“No way,” Hesham said.

“You don’t have a choice,” the agent told Hesham. “Testify or go back to jail.”

Hesham stared at the agent. He didn’t say a word. His eyes started to twitch, which happens whenever he gets angry. He stood up, pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, placed a $20 bill under his whiskey glass and walked outside to light a cigarette. He paced the parking lot, cursing his brother’s name. Two FBI agents and a special agent with the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command watched him from a distance.

Hesham flicked his cigarette butt and walked back toward them. Going back to jail wasn’t an option. He was afraid he would never get out and would never see his wife and daughter again.

“When do I need to do this?” Hesham asked the agents.

“Probably in a few weeks,” the Army special agent said. “We’ll either stop by or call you.”

Hesham got into his car and tore out of the parking lot, his tires screeching. He felt weak, trapped and ashamed. Hesham hoped his brother would forgive him for ratting him out.

Hesham Mohamed Hussain Abu Zubaidah is the younger brother of Zayn al-Abidin Mohamed Husayn, better known to the world as the high-value Guantanamo detainee “Abu Zubaidah,” whom the US government has for more than a decade claimed was “one of the highest-ranking members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization” and “involved in every major terrorist operation carried out by al-Qaeda,” including the 9/11 attacks [1].

Research I was conducting on the accused terrorist led me to Hesham. I had stumbled across a three-year-old comment on a blog post left by someone who identified himself as Hesham.

“Yes that is my brother and I live in Oregon,” the commenter said. “Do you think I should have been locked away for 2 years with no charges for a [sic] act of a sibling? I am the younger brother of Zayn and I live in the USA. Tell me what you think.”

I was blown away. A search of his name on Google turned up only 28 results, including another comment posted by a person using Hesham’s name, as well as one by a person identifying herself as Hesham’s wife. Who was Hesham, and why hadn’t we heard of him before? [Continue reading…]

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America’s spy state: How the telecoms sell out your privacy

David Rosen writes: You need to know one simple truth: you have no privacy with regard to your electronic communications.

Nothing you do online, via a wireline telephone or over a wireless device is outside the reach of government security agencies and private corporations. Your ostensible personal communication — whether a phone call, an email, a search, visiting a website, a credit card purchase, a 140 character Tweet, a movie download or a Facebook friending — is a public commodity, subject to the dictates of the security state and market opportunists.

Corporate surveillance has begun to raise consumer, Congressional and regulatory concerns – a major case, Amnesty v. Clapper, is now before the Supreme Court. One can only wonder why it is not an issue in this year’s election?

Corporate spying takes a variety of forms. GPS tracking over a wireless device is widespread. Google’s efforts to commercialize its users’ keystrokes resulted in a $25,000 fine from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Potentially more consequential, a growing chorus of criticism over its recently introduced data-harvesting program seems to have contributed to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation of Google; the FTC retained Beth Wilkinson, a high-powered outside counsel, to oversee a possible anti-trust prosecution of the company. On March 1st, Google introduced a new program that collects user data from its 60 services. Google stores “cookies” (i.e., code that compiles a record of an individual’s web browsing history) on a growing number of communications devices, whether a home PC, tablet, smartphone and a growing number of TV sets. These cookies track every website a person visits or function s/he uses. As the New York Times wrote, “The case has the potential to be the biggest showdown between regulators and Silicon Valley since the government took on Microsoft 14 years ago.

The surveillance state is a multi-headed hydra. Corporate spying is intimately linked to the surveillance state, an omnipresent system consisting of federal, state and local security agencies. This spying system is made up of many of the leading private telecommunications and Internet companies working closely with the Department of Justice (DoJ), NSA, FBI, DHS, FCC and still other entities. This increasingly integrated federal system is complemented by an ever-growing army of state and local police “intelligence” agencies. Individual entities work either on their own, together with others and/or with private companies, many that financially benefit from commercial data harvesting. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s fake vaccination drive has damaged the battle against polio

Heidi Larson writes: I was in New York on 11 September 2001, standing near one of the TV screens in the media section of Unicef’s communication division, where I headed up Unicef’s global communication work on immunisation. As the second plane crashed into the twin towers, we were quickly evacuated out of Unicef headquarters. I remember looking at the tall UN secretariat on First Avenue, home of the UN security council and the office of the UN secretary general. The building had always struck me as looking so graceful, but that morning it just looked like another ideal terrorist target. In fact, I never looked at the UN secretariat building with the same eyes again, and the impacts of that day – and the weeks and months that followed – were just the beginning of a changed, less trusting, anxious world.

The impacts of that day in New York became an unexpected thread in my Unicef work and the current research I lead at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where we monitor trends in vaccine confidence globally.

Last week’s call by the World Health Assembly for an emergency response to polio eradication is not unrelated to the news that Dr Shakil Afridi has been convicted of treason in Pakistan and sentenced to 33 years in prison. Dr Afridi, former surgeon general of the Khyber agency, was central to the CIA-led fake vaccination drive used to confirm the presence of Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The news of Dr Afridi’s role did not emerge until a Guardian article in July 2011, when it shook the immunisation world. Although Dr Afridi had pretended to provide a hepatitis B vaccination, not normally a door-to-door delivery, the news had a particularly strong impact on those working in polio eradication, where door-to-door vaccination is the norm. Anxieties and distrust about the polio vaccine and its western providers were rampant in some communities, and suspicions about CIA links with the polio vaccination campaigns, and rumours they were a front for the sterilising of Muslims, had been around for a decade after 9/11. After years of working to dispel myths about CIA links to the polio eradication efforts – from northern Nigeria to Pakistan and India, all of the work seemed fruitless. [Continue reading…]

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FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit

CNET reports: The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement’s ability to listen in on private communications.

While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC — it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who’s running it, for instance — CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.

DCAC’s mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order. It’s also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police. [Continue reading…]

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Congressmen seek to lift propaganda ban

Michael Hastings reports: An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.

The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

In a little noticed press release earlier in the week — buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations — Thornberry warned that in the Internet age, the current law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.”

The bill’s supporters say the informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home, and that new techniques are needed to help fight Al-Qaeda, a borderless enemy whose own propaganda reaches Americans online.

Critics of the bill say there are ways to keep America safe without turning the massive information operations apparatus within the federal government against American citizens. [Continue reading…]

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How FBI entrapment is inventing ‘terrorists’ – and letting bad guys off the hook

Rick Perlstein writes: This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, “suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks” and “scarves or towels around their heads” were heard grumbling at the protesters’ unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as “Cyco,” explained to his anarchist colleagues how “you can make plastic explosives with bleach,” and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – “Gotta slow the traffic that’s going to make them money” – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that’s because, more or less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling “very pressured” by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: “We’re in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don’t cut it,” he said. “And it’s actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that.” Though when Cleveland’s NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it “Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence.”

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. [Continue reading…]

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Suspected drone strikes kill 12 civilians in Yemen

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: Two suspected US drone strikes have killed up to 12 civilians in the south of Yemen.

Reports vary but between 14 and 15 people have been killed in a double air strike on the southern city of Jaar. Of these, as many as a dozen are being reported as civilians. Up to 21 civilians have also been reported injured.

Witnesses said the first strike targeted alleged militants meeting in a house. Civilians who had flocked to the impact site were killed in a follow-up strike. Although the attack is unconfirmed, if accurate this tactic would echo the grim hallmarks of US drone tactics in Pakistan.

Earlier this year the Bureau exposed a CIA practice of ‘follow-up’ strikes in an investigation with the Sunday Times. On at least a dozen occasions twin strikes killed at least 50 civilians. The civilians died when they rushed to help victims of an initial attack and were hit by a second, follow-up strike.

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How the State Dept has wasted hundreds of millions on training programs Iraq doesn’t want

The New York Times reports: In the face of spiraling costs and Iraqi officials who say they never wanted it in the first place, the State Department has slashed — and may jettison entirely by the end of the year — a multibillion-dollar police training program that was to have been the centerpiece of a hugely expanded civilian mission here.

What was originally envisioned as a training cadre of about 350 American law enforcement officers was quickly scaled back to 190 and then to 100. The latest restructuring calls for 50 advisers, but most experts and even some State Department officials say even they may be withdrawn by the end of this year.

The training effort, which began in October and has already cost $500 million, was conceived of as the largest component of a mission billed as the most ambitious American aid effort since the Marshall Plan. Instead, it has emerged as the latest high-profile example of the waning American influence here following the military withdrawal, and it reflects a costly miscalculation on the part of American officials, who did not count on the Iraqi government to assert its sovereignty so aggressively.

“I think that with the departure of the military, the Iraqis decided to say, ‘O.K., how large is the American presence here?’ ” said James F. Jeffrey, the American ambassador to Iraq, in an interview. “How large should it be? How does this equate with our sovereignty? In various areas they obviously expressed some concerns.”

Last year the State Department embarked on $343 million worth of construction projects around the country to upgrade facilities to accommodate the police training program, which was to have comprised hundreds of trainers and more than 1,000 support staff members working in three cities — Baghdad, Erbil and Basra — for five years. But like so much else in the nine years of war, occupation and reconstruction here, it has not gone as planned.

A lesson given by an American police instructor to a class of Iraqi trainees neatly encapsulated the program’s failings. There are two clues that could indicate someone is planning a suicide attack, the instructor said: a large bank withdrawal and heavy drinking.

The problem with that advice, which was recounted by Ginger Cruz, the former deputy inspector general at the American Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, was that few Iraqis have bank accounts and an extremist Sunni Muslim bent on carrying out a suicide attack is likely to consider drinking a cardinal sin.

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MI5 and MI6 implicated in illegal CIA assassinations

U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI are conducting investigations to find the source of a leak about the use of a double agent in Yemen who had joined al Qaeda but was serving as an informant for both Saudi intelligence and the CIA. The leak is said to have undermined intelligence operations. What the leak also reveals is that British intelligence agents are now implicated in assassinations — operations that are illegal under British law.

The Guardian reports: A British citizen played a central role in foiling the latest “underwear” bomb plot hatched in Yemen to attack a US-bound plane, as well as in the assassination of a top al-Qaida operative at the weekend, according to various sources in Washington on Thursday.

CNN reported that the agent involved was a British citizen of Saudi origin who had been recruited about a year ago by Saudi intelligence.

MSNBC, which also reported that the agent was a British passport holder, said that British intelligence was “heavily involved”. Other US media outlets gave the Saudi intelligence service most of the credit for the successful running of the operation. The Guardian independently confirmed British involvement.

The agent was recruited by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and asked to carry a bomb aboard a US-bound plane.

The revelation is politically and legally awkward for MI6 and MI5 whose agents, unlike American ones, are banned from missions that lead to assassinations, such as the US drone attack at the weekend that killed the top al-Qaida operative in the Yemen, Fahd al-Quso. The attack is being attributed to information from the agent.

Such is the sensitivity that America’s National Public Radio reported that the British government asked the Obama administration not to reveal the role of British intelligence in the mission.

James Clapper, the US director of National Intelligence, has opened an “internal review” of US intelligence agencies to determine whether there had been leaks of classified information related to the underwear bomb operation.

The FBI is conducting a separate criminal investigation, a law enforcement official said. The US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, said: “When these leaks take place, they damage our ability to be able to pursue our intelligence efforts.”

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The risks of recruiting members of al Qaeda

The Washington Post reports: For al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, the volunteer seemed ideal. He was willing to die in a suicide operation, and he had travel papers that would allow him to board a U.S.-bound flight.

It was a perfect dangle, in the parlance of spycraft, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula took the bait.

The group’s bombmaker fitted the man with a new version of a nonmetallic “underwear bomb.” What he didn’t know was that the would-be martyr was an agent run by Saudi Arabia. And the man turned the device over to his Saudi handlers inside Yemen.

The Saudis flew the bomb out of the country on a noncommercial jet and handed it over to American officials in an unidentified third country, according to Mustafa Alani, director of security and defense studies at the Gulf Research Center in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, who has close contacts with the kingdom’s intelligence and counterterrorism agencies. A U.S. official confirmed aspects of his account.

The informant was one of several operatives sent into Yemen over the past two years with Western passports and other documents designed to attract the attention of a terrorist group that is determined to attack the United States, U.S. and Western intelligence officials said Wednesday.

One official described the effort to disrupt the airline plot as part of a broader use of operatives with “clean skins” who can pass themselves off as militants capable of traveling into Europe or the United States.

As part of the effort, the Saudis have used fledgling al-Qaeda operatives who were temporarily detained, as well as individuals who have entered the country’s rehabilitation program, which seeks to turn militants against terrorist groups.

The effort has focused on flipping low-level and aspiring jihadis, according to a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the operation, which was revealed in news reports Monday.

It’s worth remembering that al Qaeada has demonstrated that it can be as adept in the art of deception as are the intelligence agencies. As the Washington Post reported in January, 2010:

The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda’s top leadership, former U.S. government officials said Monday.

The attacker, a physician-turned-mole, had been recruited to infiltrate al-Qaeda’s senior circles and had gained the trust of his CIA and Jordanian handlers with a stream of useful intelligence leads, according to two former senior officials briefed on the agency’s internal investigation. His track record as an informant apparently allowed him to enter a key CIA post without a thorough search, the sources said.

The bomber, identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was standing just outside an agency building on the base Wednesday when he exploded a bomb hidden under his clothes, killing the seven Americans along with a Jordanian officer who had been assigned to work with him. Six CIA operatives were wounded.

The agency has declined to publicly identify the victims, a mix of career officers and contractors with backgrounds ranging from law enforcement to military Special Forces.

Details about the suicide bomber’s identity provided jarring insight into how a vital intelligence post in eastern Afghanistan was penetrated in the deadliest attack on the CIA in more than 25 years. Initial reports suggested that the bomber was an Afghan soldier or perhaps a local informant who had been brought onto the base for debriefing.

Instead, the new evidence points to a carefully planned act of deception by a trusted operative from a country closely allied with the United States in the fight against al-Qaeda. U.S. and Jordanian officials had come to regard Balawi as trustworthy, former officials said, despite a history of support for Islamist extremism — a point of view he appeared to endorse in an interview with an al-Qaeda-affiliated publication as recently as this past fall.

“He was someone who had already worked with us,” said a former U.S. counterterrorism officer who discussed the ongoing investigation on the condition of anonymity. The official said Balawi had been jointly managed by U.S. and Jordanian agencies and had provided “actionable intelligence” over several weeks of undercover work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

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In ‘total war’ on Islam, Mecca becomes another Hiroshima, U.S. military officers taught

Over five years ago, I reported that in the Pentagon, several senior officers and defense executives have confided: “There may come a time when we have to kill millions of Muslims.” I was told this by Dr. Michael Vlahos, who has served in the United States Navy and the CIA and is now on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. He reiterated this a few months later in The American Conservative:

I have had many “Defense World” conversations that have ended with: “the time may come when we will have to kill millions of Muslims,” or, “history shows that to win over a people you have to kill at least 10 percent of them, like the Romans” (for comparison, we killed or contributed to the death of about five percent of Japan from 1944-46, while Russia has killed at least eight percent of the Chechen people). Or consider the implications of “Freeper” talk-backs to an article of mine in The American Conservative: “History shows that wars only end with a totally defeated enemy otherwise they go on … Either Islam or us will quit in total destruction.”

Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman now report for Wired Magazine’s Danger Room:

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college, pending an investigation. The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.

For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.

“We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.” [Continue reading…]

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