Category Archives: News

Russia and China skip UN meeting on aid to Syria

n13-iconThe New York Times reports from the UN: The morning after an aid convoy came under fire when it tried to reach a besieged Syrian city, a meeting here on a draft resolution that would force all parties in the bloody conflict to allow access for humanitarian organizations fell apart when representatives from Russia and China failed to show up, Security Council diplomats said.

On Monday afternoon, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly I. Churkin, did not directly say he would veto the draft if it came up for a vote, but called it “one of those political things” that would not be adopted by the Security Council. “This text would not have any practical, positive impact on the situation,” Mr. Churkin said.

The Chinese Mission declined to comment.

A United Nations spokesman said that 11 people were killed as aid workers delivered food and medicine over the weekend to the old city of Homs. About 800 people, mainly women, children and elderly people, have been evacuated so far, and some of them told United Nations officials that they had resorted to eating grass and weeds to survive. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS suicide bomb instructor kills most of his Iraqi students by accident

n13-iconThe New York Times reports: A group of Sunni militants attending a suicide bombing training class at a camp north of Baghdad were killed on Monday when their commander unwittingly conducted a demonstration with a belt that was packed with explosives, army and police officials said.

The militants belonged to a group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which is fighting the Shiite-dominated army of the Iraqi government, mostly in Anbar Province. But they are also linked to bomb attacks elsewhere and other fighting that has thrown Iraq deeper into sectarian violence.

Twenty-two ISIS members were killed, and 15 were wounded, in the explosion at the camp, which is in a farming area in the northeastern province of Samara, according to the police and army officials. Stores of other explosive devices and heavy weapons were also kept there, the officials said. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda splinter group withdraws from oil-rich Syrian province

n13-iconReuters reports: An al Qaeda splinter group has withdrawn its forces from Syria’s oil-rich eastern province of Deir al-Zor, activists and rebels said on Monday, after days of heavy fighting with its rivals.

Rebel groups, including al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate the Nusra Front, have been battling the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) for control of towns and oilfields in the area, sparking a spate of car bombs in the province.

“The ISIL fighters have almost completely withdrawn from Deir al-Zor. The fighters are moving to Hassaka and Raqqa (provinces),” said a source from the Nusra Front, who asked not to be named. Raqqa remains the stronghold of ISIL.

Pro-ISIL activists on Twitter said the group had withdrawn from Deir al-Zor to prevent further bloodshed.

Several rebel groups launched a campaign last month to try to push ISIL forces, their former allies, out of opposition-held regions in northern and eastern Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Violence rocks Homs during another civilian evacuation attempt

n13-iconThe Wall Street Journal reports: An attempt to implement the second phase of a United Nations plan to evacuate civilians and take desperately needed aid into a besieged rebel-held area in this central Syrian city was marred by violence on Saturday, with one U.N. official describing what happened as “a day in hell.”

One day after succeeding in evacuating 83 people trapped in sections of central Homs for more than 18 months, a convoy comprising U.N. and Syrian Arab Red Crescent vehicles was attacked with mortars and gunfire. The attack killed at least five people on the rebel side, wounded one Syrian aid worker and forced a U.N. team including its top representative in the country to remain trapped in the rebel-held sector for hours.

Opposition activists and one member of the aid team that went into the rebel-held area blamed pro-regime forces for the attack, while Homs Governor Talal al Barazi and several security and military officials blamed the rebels.

The aid trucks had attempted to take food rations, flour, medicine for chronic diseases and hygiene kits into the besieged parts of Homs, which encompass sections of the downtown area and what’s known as the Old Quarter.

The plan was also to evacuate more civilians out of the estimated 2,500 believed still to be in these rebel-held areas. But only some of the aid ultimately went in, no civilians were able to leave and the entire mission was overshadowed by the ordeal of the U.N. team and aid workers. [Continue reading…]

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Rebel statement: As Geneva II reconvenes, we ‘are fighting a two-front war’

n13-iconSyria Direct: The second round of the Geneva II peace talks is slated to begin Monday in Switzerland, and expectations remain low. The conference’s first round concluded January 31 with little tangible progress. The Syrian government delegation reluctantly agreed to base further negotiations on the Geneva I Communiqué—which calls for the establishment of a transitional governing body with full executive powers—and the two sides reached a tentative agreement to evacuate citizens from besieged Old Homs while allowing aid into the neighborhoods.

This agreement was finally put into effect Saturday, only to have the United Nations aid convoy come under shelling that injured one aid working and killed five Homs residents. Another convoy reentered the city Sunday, and was again shelled. The source of the attacks remains unknown, but UN officials have speculated that militias loyal to the regime were responsible. Meanwhile, the Syrian government has since the start of negotiations sustained a campaign of bombarding rebel-held areas of Syrian cities—particularly Aleppo—with “barrel bombs,” improvised bombs with little accuracy and great destructive capacity.

One day before Geneva’s second round is set to begin, two Islamist militias fighting in Syria—Jaish al-Mujahideen and the Islamic Union for Soldiers of the Levant—released a joint statement Sunday expressing their skepticism toward resuming the Geneva talks amidst the current circumstances. The statement warns that those parties who are prepared to negotiate with the regime “bear a large portion of the moral responsibility for what has been done to the Syrian people,” and insists that their participation in Geneva II will stand as “a vicious stab to the body of the Syrian revolution” unless it achieves four goals, including an end to regime blockades and the release of detained women and children. The two signatory groups released a similar statement prior to the first round of negotiations; the earlier statement, however, was signed by the Islamic Front, which ranks as Syria’s strongest rebel coalition and whose signature is conspicuously absent from the new statement. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes at five-year high

n13-iconReuters reports: Aid agencies working in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem expressed alarm on Friday at a spike in Israeli demolitions of Palestinian property coinciding with renewed U.S.-backed peace negotiations.

The statement by 25 aid organisations said the number of demolitions increased by almost half and the displacement of Palestinians by nearly three-quarters between July 2013, when the talks began, and the end of the year, compared to the same period in 2012.

Of the 663 Palestinian structures torn down last year, the highest number in five years, 122 were built with international donor aid, the groups said.

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Snowden docs: British spies used sex and ‘dirty tricks’

n13-iconNBC News and Glenn Greenwald report: British spies have developed “dirty tricks” for use against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers that include releasing computer viruses, spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming phones and computers, and using sex to lure targets into “honey traps.”

Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and exclusively obtained by NBC News describe techniques developed by a secret British spy unit called the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG) as part of a growing mission to go on offense and attack adversaries ranging from Iran to the hacktivists of Anonymous. According to the documents, which come from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for NSA cyber spy conferences, the agency’s goal was to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.

Both PowerPoint presentations describe “Effects” campaigns that are broadly divided into two categories: cyber attacks and propaganda operations. The propaganda campaigns use deception, mass messaging and “pushing stories” via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. JTRIG also uses “false flag” operations, in which British agents carry out online actions that are designed to look like they were performed by one of Britain’s adversaries. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden used low-cost tool to best NSA

n13-iconThe New York Times reports: Intelligence officials investigating how Edward J. Snowden gained access to a huge trove of the country’s most highly classified documents say they have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to “scrape” the National Security Agency’s networks, and kept at it even after he was briefly challenged by agency officials.

Using “web crawler” software designed to search, index and back up a website, Mr. Snowden “scraped data out of our systems” while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. “We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,” the official said. The process, he added, was “quite automated.”

The findings are striking because the N.S.A.’s mission includes protecting the nation’s most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from cyberattacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from Russia and China. Mr. Snowden’s “insider attack,” by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators found.

Moreover, Mr. Snowden succeeded nearly three years after the WikiLeaks disclosures, in which military and State Department files, of far less sensitivity, were taken using similar techniques. [Continue reading…]

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CIA confirms agency obliged to follow federal surveillance law

n13-iconThe Guardian reports: The CIA has confirmed that it is obliged to follow a federal law barring the collection of financial information and hacking into government data networks.

But neither the agency nor its Senate overseers will say what, if any, current, recent or desired activities the law prohibits the CIA from performing – particularly since a section of the law explicitly carves out an exception for “lawfully authorized” intelligence activities.

The murky episode, arising from a public Senate hearing on intelligence last week, illustrates what observers call the frustrations inherent in getting even basic information about secret agencies into public view, a difficulty recently to the fore over whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its surveillance partners.

Last Wednesday, in a brief exchange at the hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked CIA director John Brennan if the agency is subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a three-decade-old law intended to protect computer systems, like those of financial and government networks, from unauthorized access.

Brennan demurred, citing the need to check on the legal complexities posed by Wyden’s question, and pledged to give the senator an answer within a week.

The answer, agency spokesman Dean Boyd told the Guardian, is: “Yes, the statute applies to CIA.”

Wyden gave no indication of what prompted his query. His office would not elaborate, citing classification rules, and neither would the CIA. [Continue reading…]

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NSA incapable of accomplishing its own mass surveillance goals

As I have long argued, Americans have less reason to be afraid of the NSA intercepting their communications than afraid that vast resources are being wasted on an effort that turns out to be fruitless.

Along with an over-extension of powers comes an over-extension of competence. Finding a needle in a haystack is very difficult. But finding a needle while examining less than a third of the haystack is just a waste of time.

The Washington Post reports: The National Security Agency is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans’ call records because of an inability to keep pace with the explosion in cellphone use, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The disclosure contradicts popular perceptions that the government is sweeping up virtually all domestic phone data. It is also likely to raise questions about the efficacy of a program that is premised on its breadth and depth, on collecting as close to a complete universe of data as possible in order to make sure that clues aren’t missed in counter­terrorism investigations.

In 2006, a senior U.S. official said, the NSA was collecting “closer to 100” percent of Americans’ phone records from a number of U.S. companies under a then-classified program, but as of last summer that share had plummeted to less than 30 percent.

The government is taking steps to restore the collection — which does not include the content of conversations — closer to previous levels. The NSA is preparing to seek court orders to compel wireless companies that currently do not hand over records to the government to do so, said the current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

That effort comes in the wake of President Obama’s decision last month to find a way to move the data out of the government’s hands to assuage concerns about intrusions on privacy. Obama has given the Justice Department and the intelligence community until March 28 to come up with a plan.

The actual percentage of records gathered is somewhere between 20 and 30 percent and reflects Americans’ increasing turn away from the use of land lines to cellphones. Officials also have faced technical challenges in preparing the NSA database to handle large amounts of new records without taking in data such as cell tower locations that are not authorized for collection. [Continue reading…]

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Bill in Congress would punish academic boycott of Israel

n13-iconElectronic Intifada reports: Weeks after Ambassador Michael Oren, Israel’s former envoy to the United States, suggested it, members of the United States Congress have introduced a bill to punish American universities if their members support the academic boycott of Israeli institutions.

The so-called “Protect Academic Freedom Act” would deny federal funding to any institution that participates in a boycott of Israeli universities or scholars or even whose departments issue statements in support of a boycott.

The proposed law defines “an institution of higher education to be participating in a boycott” if “the institution, any significant part of the institution, or any organization significantly funded by the institution adopts a policy or resolution, issues a statement, or otherwise formally establishes the restriction of discourse, cooperation, exchange, or any other involvement with academic institutions or scholars on the basis of the connection of such institutions or such scholars to the state of Israel.” [Continue reading…]

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War on Anonymous: GCHQ launched DDoS attack on hackers, Snowden docs show

n13-iconNBC News and Glenn Greenwald report: A secret British spy unit created to mount cyber attacks on Britain’s enemies has waged war on the hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News.

The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous.

According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.

The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack – which it dubbed Rolling Thunder — and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms.

The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly.

The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites.

Intelligence sources familiar with the operation say that the British directed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where they believed criminal hackers were concentrated. Other intelligence sources also noted that in 2011, authorities were alarmed by a rash of attacks on government and corporate websites and were scrambling for means to respond.

“While there must of course be limitations,” said Michael Leiter, the former head of the U.S. government’s National Counterterrorism Center and now an NBC News analyst, “law enforcement and intelligence officials must be able to pursue individuals who are going far beyond speech and into the realm of breaking the law: defacing and stealing private property that happens to be online.”

“No one should be targeted for speech or thoughts, but there is no reason law enforcement officials should unilaterally declare law breakers safe in the online environment,” said Leiter.

But critics charge the British government with overkill, noting that many of the individuals targeted were teenagers, and that the agency’s assault on communications among hacktivists means the agency infringed the free speech of people never charged with any crime.

“Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs,” said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University and author of an upcoming book about Anonymous. “Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism. The majority of those embrace the idea primarily for ordinary political expression.” Coleman estimated that the number of “Anons” engaged in illegal activity was in the dozens, out of a community of thousands. [Continue reading…]

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Glenn Greenwald denies selling NSA documents

n13-iconPolitico reports: Writer Glenn Greenwald charged Tuesday that claims by U.S. officials that he’s selling National Security Agency documents are wrong and that those officials are pursuing a campaign that could criminalize the practice of journalism.

“I’m never selling documents,” Greenwald said in an interview. “I don’t get money and give them documents, like, ‘Hey, nice doing business with you.’”

Greenwald said he has worked with news outlets around the globe to publicize newsworthy aspects of the documents Edward Snowden copied while working for the NSA in Hawaii. However, Greenwald said he and others working with him supply the foreign outlets with proposed articles and are not “fencing stolen material,” as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) argued at a hearing Tuesday.

“We do the reporting first… I vet the stories,” Greenwald said. “We come with the story already formed. We work on drafts of the story. We always edit the story. We have approval rights.”

Greenwald, who is an attorney, acknowledged insisting on freelance contracts in order to supply the stories. However, he said that is itself a legal precaution aimed at ensuring that authorities treat him as a journalist and not as a source. Traditionally, sources have sometimes been subject to prosecution for disclosing secret documents, while the government has shied away from prosecuting those who act as journalists or publishers. [Continue reading…]

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Alberta oil sands pollution two to three times higher than thought

n13-iconAFP reports: The amount of harmful pollutants released in the process of recovering oil from tar sands in western Canada is likely far higher than corporate interests say, university researchers said Monday.

Actual levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emissions into the air may be two to three times higher than estimated, said the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

The study raises new questions about the accuracy of environmental impact assessments on the tar sands, just days after a US State Department report said the controversial Keystone pipeline project to bring oil from Canada to Texas would have little impact on climate change or the environment.

Current government-accepted estimates do not account for the evaporation of PAHs from wastewater pools known as tailing ponds, which are believed to be a major source of pollution, said researchers at the University of Toronto.

According to corporate interests which are responsible for projecting their environmental impact, the Athabasca oil sands beneath Alberta, Canada — which hold the third largest reserve of crude oil known in the world — are only spewing as much pollution into the air as sparsely populated Greenland, where no big industry exists.

Lead study author Frank Wania, a professor in the department of physical and environmental sciences, described the corporate estimates as “inadequate and incomplete.”

“If you use these officially reported emissions for the oil sands area you get an emissions density that is lower than just about anywhere else in the world,” he told AFP. [Continue reading…]

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The latest threat to Jewish continuity

n13-iconThe Times of Israel reported in late January: Yair Netanyahu is “spitting on the grave of his grandfather and grandmother,” Dr. Hagai Ben-Artzi, brother of Sara Netanyahu, said Monday of his nephew’s relationship with a non-Jewish Norwegian woman.

News that the prime minister’s son, who is 23, is dating Sandra Leikanger, 25, was first reported by the Norwegian daily Dagen. The tall, svelte blonde met the younger Netanyahu at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, where the two study.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week that his son traveled with Leikanger in Norway over the summer, and that the two had been dating for months.

In an interview with ultra-Orthodox website Kikar HaShabbat, Ben-Artzi urged his nephew to cut ties with his new girlfriend, and warned him that should he choose to pursue the relationship, Ben-Artzi would personally see to it that he would not be allowed near his grandparents’ graves.

“It’s terrible,” Ben-Artzi said. “Just terrible, and the son of the prime minister no less. It is the worst thing that is threatening and was a threat throughout the history of the Jews.”

Should his nephew marry Leikanger, Ben-Artzi said he “would bury myself, I don’t know what I would do with myself, I’d take to the streets and rip the hair out of my head — and here it’s coming true.”

If his father was alive, Ben-Artzi added, that is precisely how he would respond too.

Ben-Artzi and Sara Netanyahu have not been in touch for years for undisclosed reasons.

Earlier on Monday, ultra-Orthodox Shas MK Arye Deri responded to news of the relationship by saying, “If God forbid it’s true, then woe to us, woe to us.”

Deri told the Kol Barama radio station the relationship was no mere personal matter because Netanyahu is a “symbol of the Jewish people.”

“I know friends of mine who invest tens of millions and more, hundreds of millions to fight assimilation in the world,” Deri said. [Continue reading…]

Elianna Yolkut, a Conservative Rabbi in New York City, writes: Though it might sound fatalistic, if our Jewish leadership and institutions do not stop obsessing over demographics and statistics, we will lose the true fight. Judaism will lose its wisdom, its value and its meaning. We must, as a community, dedicate our resources, time, money, leadership and energy to being the voice for the powerful messages Judaism can bring to the world, and to Jewish community; message of love and responsibility, of hope and possibility, of compassion and commitment.

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Al Qaeda breaks link with Syrian militant group ISIS

n13-iconReuters reports: Al Qaeda’s general command said on Monday it had no links with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL aka ISIS), in an apparent attempt to reassert its authority over fragmented Islamist fighters in Syria’s civil war.

After a month of rebel infighting, al Qaeda disavowed the increasingly independent ISIL in a move likely to bolster a rival Islamist group, the Nusra Front, as al Qaeda’s official proxy in Syria.

The switch is seen as an attempt to redirect the Islamist effort towards unseating President Bashar al-Assad rather than waste resources in fighting other rebels, and could be intended to shift the strategic balance at a time when government forces are increasingly active on the battlefield. It could also embolden Nusra in its dispute with ISIL.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Two prominent Republican senators say that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told them — along with 13 other members of a bipartisan congressional delegation — that President Barack Obama’s administration is in need of a new, more assertive, Syria policy; that al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria pose a direct terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland; that Russia is arming the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and is generally subverting chances for a peaceful settlement; that Assad is violating his promise to expeditiously part with his massive stores of chemical weapons; and that, in Kerry’s view, it may be time to consider, once again, supporting the arming of more moderate Syrian rebel factions.

At a time that al Qaeda, the organization led by Ayman Zawahri, is disavowing ISIS, it’s time that Washington and the press stop using al Qaeda and al Qaeda affiliates as the preferred catch-all terms for branding America’s enemies.

Know Your Enemy 101: Al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/Syria (ISIL or ISIS) are not interchangeable terms. The idea that all these groups pose a threat to the U.S. homeland is either an expression of the ignorance of those making the claim or a cynical attempt to exploit the ignorance of their audience.

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ISIS fighters kill Syrian rebel leaders

n13-iconAl Jazeera reports: Fighters linked to al-Qaeda have killed two rebel leaders in bombings in Syria, in an apparent shift of tactics to target the command structures of their rivals.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Adnan Bakour, the leader of Liwa al-Tawhid, was among 26 people killed in a double suicide bombing late on Saturday in Aleppo.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has links with al-Qaeda, said it carried out the attack on Tawhid, a brigade aligned to the Islamic Front coalition, a group fighting the ISIL [aka ISIS] in Aleppo and beyond.

In another attack late on Saturday in Hama, the leader of the powerful Suqour al-Sham group, Abu Hussein al-Dik, was killed by the ISIL, according to sources spoken to by Al Jazeera.

Charles Lister, of the Brookings Doha Centre, told Al Jazeera that the ISIL was clearly targeting key headquarters, “strategic checkpoints and senior influential commanders” of their rival rebel groups.

The attacks are the latest in weeks of rebel infighting that has pitted a loose alliance of Syrian fighters against al-Qaida linked groups such as the ISIL. [Continue reading…]

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Hillary Clinton opposes new Iran sanctions

n13-iconHuffington Post reports: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supports President Barack Obama’s opposition to imposing new sanctions on Iran as negotiations continue on the country’s nuclear program.

Clinton detailed her position in a letter to Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), first reported on by Politico. Clinton sent the letter in response to a request by Levin for her stance on the issue.

“The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that imposing new unilateral sanctions now ‘would undermine the prospects for a successful comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran.’ I share that view. It could rob us of the diplomatic high ground we worked so hard to reach, break the united international front we constructed, and in the long run, weaken pressure on Iran by opening the door for other countries to chart a different course,” Clinton wrote in the January 26 letter. [Continue reading…]

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