Category Archives: News

Meet the Cossack ‘Wolves’ doing Russia’s dirty work in Ukraine

Time reports: The Wolves’ Hundred, a Russian paramilitary force with a dark history, is carrying on the fight in eastern Ukraine in the place of Russian soldiers. TIME interviewed its commander and his men about their motives and links to the Russian state
Co-chairman of the Presidium of the People’s Republic of Donetsk Boris Litvinov, left, Insurgent leader head of the elections commission of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic Denis Pushilin, and vote-counter Roman Lyagin, right, show documents with the results of Sunday’s referendum at a news conference in Donetsk, May 12, 2014.

About a month ago, soon after arriving in eastern Ukraine, a group of Russian paramilitaries known as the Wolves’ Hundred seized an old truck from a local police station and used some spray paint to give it a makeover. They did not remove the blue siren from the roof, as it seemed to lend them an air of authority as they drove around the towns that they control. But on the hood of the black, Russian-made Hunter SUV, they drew their insignia — the snarling head of a wolf in profile.

For weeks, the central government in Kiev, along with its allies in the U.S. and Europe, have been trying to find solid evidence of Russian boots on the ground in eastern Ukraine. They need look no further than the men of the Wolves’ Hundred. In separate interviews with TIME over the past three weeks, four of its heavily armed fighters have admitted that they came from the southern Russian region of Kuban. They are part of the Cossack militias that have been in the service of Russian President Vladimir Putin for almost a decade, and they say they will not go home until they conquer Ukraine or die trying.

Their links to the Russian state are, however, just tenuous enough for Putin to deny having sent them, and these fighters in turn deny being paid, equipped or deployed by the Kremlin. They say they are volunteers driven by the ideals of their Cossack brotherhood — Russian imperialism, service to the sovereign and the heavenly mandate of the Russian Orthodox Church. [Continue reading…]

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NASA says West Antarctic glacier collapse is now unstoppable

The New York Times reports: A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.

Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said.

The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.

“This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research, said in an interview. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

Two scientific papers released on Monday by the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters came to similar conclusions by different means. Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades. [Continue reading…]

Mashable reports on the impact on some U.S. cities.

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ODNI issues misleading statement on policy changes

Steve Aftergood writes: “Recent media reports have misconstrued ODNI’s policy for pre-publication of information to be publicly released,” according to a May 9 statement that was issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The ODNI policy had been described in articles published in Secrecy News (ODNI Requires Pre-Publication Review of All Public Information, May 8) and in the New York Times (Intelligence Policy Bans Citation of Leaked Material by Charlie Savage, May 8).

ODNI said that the new pre-publication review policy was basically a consolidation of two previous policies (ODNI Instruction 80.14/2007-6, July 25, 2007, and ODNI Instruction 80.04, August 5, 2009) and that it represented nothing very new.

“The revised policy is not significantly different from the two previous policies,” the new ODNI statement asserted.

But that assertion is hard to understand, since the text of the revised policy appears significantly different from its predecessors in several respects.

First and foremost, the previous policies focused on protection of classified information, while the revised policy casts a much broader net. [Continue reading…]

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Separatists prepare for voting in eastern Ukraine while 100,000 ‘yes’ ballots for referendum intercepted

The New York Times reports: A day before snap elections to try to legitimize two self-declared new countries in eastern Ukraine, the preparations seemed as ad hoc as the votes themselves.

Ballots for the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk were created on copiers. Voting booths in one city were thrown together Saturday with red drapes stapled to wooden frames, and an election organizer in Donetsk said he was sure the vote would count because there was no rule for a minimum turnout. [Continue reading…]

The Kyiv Post reports: A group of armed Kremlin-backed rebels in possession of a 100,000 ballots already marked with a ‘yes’ vote for the May 11 referendum in Donetsk Oblast were captured and the ballots seized during the Ukrainian government’s anti-terrorist operation near the rebel-occupied city of Sloviansk on May 10.

In addition, a Kalashnikov rifle, Makarov pistol, plus ammunition were seized, Obezrevatel reported. Earlier, Ukrainska Pravada reported that the separatists had seized 80 schools in Donetsk city to carry out their referendum.

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Israel’s aggressive spying in the U.S. mostly hushed up

Jeff Stein reports: When White House national security advisor Susan Rice’s security detail cleared her Jerusalem hotel suite for bugs and intruders Tuesday night, they might’ve had in mind a surprise visitor to Vice President Al Gore’s room 16 years ago this week: a spy in an air duct.

According to a senior former U.S. intelligence operative, a Secret Service agent who was enjoying a moment of solitude in Gore’s bathroom before the Veep arrived heard a metallic scraping sound. “The Secret Service had secured [Gore’s] room in advance and they all left except for one agent, who decided to take a long, slow time on the pot,” the operative recalled for Newsweek. “So the room was all quiet, he was just meditating on his toes, and he hears a noise in the vent. And he sees the vent clips being moved from the inside. And then he sees a guy starting to exit the vent into the room.”

Did the agent scramble for his gun? No, the former operative said with a chuckle. “He kind of coughed and the guy went back into the vents.”

To some, the incident stands as an apt metaphor for the behind-closed-doors relations between Israel and America, “frenemies” even in the best of times. The brazen air-duct caper “crossed the line” of acceptable behavior between friendly intelligence services – but because it was done by Israel, it was quickly hushed up by U.S. officials.

Despite strident denials this week by Israeli officials, Israel has been caught carrying out aggressive espionage operations against American targets for decades, according to U.S. intelligence officials and congressional sources. And they still do it. They just don’t get arrested very often. [Continue reading…]

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New poll shows eastern Ukraine’s separatists are wrong

The Washington Post: Separatists in eastern Ukraine are pressing ahead with their plan to hold a referendum on secession from Kiev, despite even the stated wishes of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The move may signal a dangerous escalation of an already deadly conflict. On Thursday, Denis Pushilin, the self-proclaimed chairman of the Donetsk People’s Republic, insisted at a news conference that there was a popular will for the vote.

“People want the referendum,” he said. “And it’s not just a few people; it’s millions of people who want the referendum, who need to give this vote for their ideals.”

But according to a new poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a vast majority of those living in Ukraine — both in the restive east and more nationalist west — want the country’s borders to remain the same, despite the many political and social tensions that have come to the surface in recent months.

Only 18 percent of those surveyed in eastern Ukraine think the country’s regions should be allowed to secede — a statistic that serves as something of a rebuke to Pushilin and his fellow separatists. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu using scare tactics on Iran nuclear program, says ex-atomic agency chief

Ynet reports: An insider in Israel’s nuclear program believes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is employing needless fearmongering when it comes to Iran’s atomic aspirations, in order to further his own political aims.

Brigadier General (res.) Uzi Eilam, who for a decade headed the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, does not believe that Tehran is even close to having a bomb, if that is even what it really aspires to.

“The Iranian nuclear program will only be operational in another 10 years,” declares Eilam, a senior official in Israel’s atomic program. “Even so, I am not sure that Iran wants the bomb.”

Uzi Eilam comes from the heart of Israel’s secret security mechanisms, having served in senior roles in the defense establishment that culminated in a decade as the head of the atomic agency. His comments are the first by a senior official that strongly criticize Netanyahu’s policies on the Islamic Republic. [Continue reading…]

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Assad’s new bomb: Syrian regime hasn’t abandoned chemical weapons

Christoph Reuter reports: Despite its pledge to eliminate chemical weapons, the Assad regime is attacking towns and villages with chlorine gas bombs. SPIEGEL visited the communities hit by the most recent bombings to interview victims, doctors and eyewitnesses.

The green wheat fields shimmer in the late afternoon light as the wind slowly starts to pick up. A cloud of dust drifts by. This is good, says Abu Abdu, a farmer from the village of Telminnes, located deep in the south of Syria’s Idlib province. Prior to the war, the evening wind had been an annoyance for the dust it kicked up. But these days, it is windless nights that people in the area despise. That’s when air force helicopters come and the gas attacks take place. Often, they circle over the city before dropping their cargo.

Usually, there is no big bang, just the sound of a minor detonation, sometimes even just the thud of an impact. Death comes quietly, as it did on the evening of April 21 in Telminnes.

That’s the evening a bomb landed near Abu Abdu’s garden. The farmer says the explosion was a quiet one. “I thought the point of impact was far away,” he recalls. The bomb, which carried a small amount of explosives and a gas cylinder, fell close by — so close that Abu Abdu could already see the cloud before he had the chance to flee. “Yellow vapor rose, it smelled strongly of chlorine and it burned like fire. I could no longer speak or breathe,” he says. Neighbors took him to a makeshift hospital where he was treated with oxygen and an anticonvulsant. “Hours later, I could still barely move my arms, I was coughing up blood and every breath I took was hellish.” [Continue reading…]

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Israel won’t stop spying on the U.S.

Jeff Stein reports: Whatever happened to honor among thieves? When the National Security Agency was caught eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, it was considered a rude way to treat a friend. Now U.S. intelligence officials are saying—albeit very quietly, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill—that our Israeli “friends” have gone too far with their spying operations here.

According to classified briefings on legislation that would lower visa restrictions on Israeli citizens, Jerusalem’s efforts to steal U.S. secrets under the cover of trade missions and joint defense technology contracts have “crossed red lines.”

Israel’s espionage activities in America are unrivaled and unseemly, counterspies have told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, going far beyond activities by other close allies, such as Germany, France, the U.K. and Japan. A congressional staffer familiar with a briefing last January called the testimony “very sobering…alarming…even terrifying.” Another staffer called it “damaging.”

The Jewish state’s primary target: America’s industrial and technical secrets.

“No other country close to the United States continues to cross the line on espionage like the Israelis do,” said a former congressional staffer who attended another classified briefing in late 2013, one of several in recent months given by officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the State Department, the FBI and the National Counterintelligence Directorate. [Continue reading…]

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The Pentagon tossed millions of dollars into the trash

Matthew Gault reports: Over the past four years, the Defense Department’s logistics agency threw away a significant portion of the spare parts it purchased via a $21-million contract with the manufacturer of a lifesaving armored vehicle.

The parts were for the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected trucks, which are specially shaped and reinforced to deflect the blasts from buried and roadside bombs. Starting in 2007, the Pentagon purchased tens of thousands of the high-tech vehicles at a cost of $49 billion.

The Defense Logistics Agency handles spare parts worth billions of dollars for the thousands of MRAPs in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In 2010, the DLA placed a parts order with Navistar Defense, the weapons arm of an Illinois truck-maker that produced thousands of MRAPs.

The long-term contract, which is ongoing, has cost taxpayers $21 million. But according to one DLA worker, many of the parts never arrived, showed up in the wrong packaging or were surplus to requirements. [Continue reading…]

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Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA

Jason Leopold reports: Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.

But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.

On the morning of June 28, 2012, an email from Alexander invited Schmidt to attend a four-hour-long “classified threat briefing” on Aug. 8 at a “secure facility in proximity to the San Jose, CA airport.”

“The meeting discussion will be topic-specific, and decision-oriented, with a focus on Mobility Threats and Security,” Alexander wrote in the email, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the first of dozens of communications between the NSA chief and Silicon Valley executives that the agency plans to turn over.

Alexander, Schmidt and other industry executives met earlier in the month, according to the email. But Alexander wanted another meeting with Schmidt and “a small group of CEOs” later that summer because the government needed Silicon Valley’s help.

“About six months ago, we began focusing on the security of mobility devices,” Alexander wrote. “A group (primarily Google, Apple and Microsoft) recently came to agreement on a set of core security principles. When we reach this point in our projects we schedule a classified briefing for the CEOs of key companies to provide them a brief on the specific threats we believe can be mitigated and to seek their commitment for their organization to move ahead … Google’s participation in refinement, engineering and deployment of the solutions will be essential.”

Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, said she believes information sharing between industry and the government is “absolutely essential” but “at the same time, there is some risk to user privacy and to user security from the way the vulnerability disclosure is done.” [Continue reading…]

One of the most corrosive effects of the revelations about the NSA’s exploitation of information security flaws is that this has created a perception that any kind of interaction between the NSA and Silicon Valley should be viewed with suspicion. In reality, information security would be undermined if the NSA wasn’t talking to the tech companies. The real problem comes when the NSA applies a definition of national security interests that conflicts with public interests.

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Youths sue U.S. government over climate inaction

Al Jazeera reports: Young people across the country are suing several government agencies for failing to develop a climate change recovery plan, conduct that amounts to a violation of their constitutional rights, says their lawyer Julia Olson.

Their futures are at stake, say the young plaintiffs.

“Climate change is the biggest issue of our time,” said 13-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez, a member of nonprofit Kids vs. Global Warming, a plaintiff in the suit.

“It’s not every day you see young people getting involved politically, but the climate crisis is changing all that. Every generation from here on out is going to be affected by climate change,” added Roske-Martinez, who founded environmental nonprofit Earth Guardians and organized successful actions in his hometown of Boulder, Colorado.

The federal suit, which has made its way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, is part of a groundbreaking nationwide legal campaign spearheaded by youth and backed by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and legal scholars. [Continue reading…]

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Stanford University will divest from coal companies

Bloomberg: Stanford University said it will stop investing in coal companies in response to a student-led campaign aimed at curbing climate change.

The university’s board of trustees voted today to no longer make direct investments in publicly traded companies that mine coal for energy generation. The vote followed the recommendation of a panel including students, faculty, staff and alumni that has been studying the impact of fossil-fuel companies for several months, Stanford said.

“Moving away from coal in the investment context is a small but constructive step while work continues at Stanford and elsewhere to develop broadly viable sustainable energy solutions for the future,” John Hennessy, Stanford’s president, said in a statement.

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Even Russian human rights body finds Crimean referendum falsified

Khpg.org reports: Vladimir Putin’s own Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights has confirmed that the turnout for the so-called “referendum” on the Crimea’s status was much lower than reported, and the results also far less overwhelmingly in favour of joining Russia. The same results have been reported from other sources, however this report can hardly be dismissed as seditious US propaganda. The confirmation that Russia used falsified figures to justify the annexation comes on the eve of other supposed “referendums” planned for two east Ukrainian oblasts.

The report finds that while the overwhelming majority of residents of Sevastopol voted for joining Russian (turnout of 50-80%), the turnout for all of Crimea was from 30-50% and only 50-60% of those voted for joining Russia.

The authors also noted that Crimean residents voted less for joining Russia, than for what they called an end to corrupt lawlessness and thieving rule of people brought in from Donetsk (where Viktor Yanukovych and most of his people were from). It was only in Sevastopol, they say, that people genuinely voted for joining Russia. They add that the fear of “illegal armed formations” was higher in Sevastopol than in other regions of Crimea. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu pushes to define Israel as nation state of Jewish people only

The Guardian reports: Binyamin Netanyahu will push ahead with a rare change to Israel’s basic laws – which amount to the country’s constitution – to insist Israel is “the nation state of one people only – the Jewish people – and of no other people”.

At Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said the civil rights of minorities, including Arabs, would be guaranteed, and the move was vital at a time when aspects of Israel’s legitimacy were “under a constant and increasing assault from abroad and at home”.

Netanyahu proposed the change last week during a visit to Tel Aviv’s Independence Hall, attracting fierce criticism from political rivals and support from some of his allies. The move follows a Palestinian refusal in peace talks to recognise the status that Netanyahu described.

The proposed law would be in addition to Israel’s declaration of independence of May 1948 – the anniversary of which is celebrated on Tuesday – which defines Israel as a Jewish state. [Continue reading…]

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Sisi says Muslim Brotherhood will not exist under his reign

The Guardian reports: Egypt’s former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Monday night that the Muslim Brotherhood – the group he removed from power last year – will not exist if he is elected president later this month.

The comments, in an interview broadcast on two Egyptian television stations, were the clearest indication yet there was no prospect for political reconciliation with the Islamist group that propelled Mohamed Morsi to the presidency in 2012.

“There will be nothing called the Muslim Brotherhood during my tenure,” Sisi said on Egypt’s privately-owned CBC and ONTV television channels.

The Brotherhood has been subject to an aggressive state-led crackdown in the months since Morsi’s overthrow. The movement was formally blacklisted as a terrorist organisation on Christmas Day and continues to be blamed for bomb attacks across Egypt, although many have been claimed by militant groups, including the al-Qaida-linked Ansar Beit el Maqdis.

Sisi said he had survived two assassination attempts in the months since Morsi’s ousting in July last year.

The former field marshal’s claims appeared to vindicate the tight security measures that have dominated his campaign. Instead of taking to the campaign trail like his sole opponent, Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi, Sisi will reportedly be sending emissaries to his rallies across the country. [Continue reading…]

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Britain cancels three arms contracts to Sisi’s Egypt

Middle East Eye reports: Britain cancelled export licenses for three arms contracts to Egypt’s military backed government in October last year, fearing the arms would be used for internal repression, the Middle East Eye can reveal.

The contracts were cancelled during a prolonged correspondence between officials of the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the legal team acting on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The lawyers claim that it was a result of their representations that a second review of the contracts was carried out in October. An earlier blanket suspension was implemented in August last year, after the mass shootings of protesters in Cairo.

Edward Bell, head of export control and organization wrote to ITN solicitors on 13 January that “we consider there is now sufficient information available about the situation in Egypt to consider each extant licence and new application on a case-by-case basis rather than applying the blanket suspension which we implemented in August”. [Continue reading…]

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CIA falls back in Afghanistan

The Daily Beast reports: The CIA is dismantling its frontline Afghan counterterrorist forces in south and east Afghanistan, leaving a security vacuum that U.S. commanders fear the Taliban and al Qaeda will fill—and leaving the Pakistan border open to a possible deluge of fighters and weapons.

“The CIA has started to end the contracts of some of those militias who were working for them,” said Aimal Faizi, spokesman for outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a longtime critic of the CIA’s Afghan operatives. “Some of them were in very important locations, so we deployed our troops there.”

U.S. and Afghan military commanders tell The Daily Beast that Afghan forces are stretched too thin to replace many of those departing CIA paramilitaries. Thousands more CIA-trained operatives are about to get the boot ahead of what already promises to be a bloody summer fighting season. That could mean spectacular attacks against U.S. and Afghan targets just as the White House is weighing its long-term commitment to Afghanistan. And it could give the now-small al Qaeda movement inside the country more freedom to grow and eventually hatch new plots more than a decade after the invasion meant to wipe out the perpetrators of the Sept. 11th attacks. [Continue reading…]

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