Category Archives: News

Bush administration feared chemical weapons inspections would conflict with rationale for invading Iraq

The New York Times reports: More than a decade before the international agency that monitors chemical weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize, John R. Bolton marched into the office of its boss to inform him that he would be fired.

“He told me I had 24 hours to resign,” said José Bustani, who was director general of the agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. “And if I didn’t I would have to face the consequences.”

Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state and later the American ambassador to the United Nations, told Mr. Bustani that the Bush administration was unhappy with his management style.

But Mr. Bustani, 68, who had been re-elected unanimously just 11 months earlier, refused, and weeks later, on April 22, 2002, he was ousted in a special session of the 145-nation chemical weapons watchdog.

The story behind his ouster has been the subject of interpretation and speculation for years, and Mr. Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat, has kept a low profile since then. But with the agency thrust into the spotlight with news of the Nobel Prize last week, Mr. Bustani agreed to discuss what he said was the real reason: the Bush administration’s fear that chemical weapons inspections in Iraq would conflict with Washington’s rationale for invading it. Several officials involved in the events, some speaking publicly about them for the first time, confirmed his account. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Radiation experts confirm polonium on Arafat clothing

AFP reports: Swiss radiation experts have confirmed they found traces of polonium on clothing used by Yasser Arafat which “support the possibility” the veteran Palestinian leader was poisoned.

In a report published by The Lancet at the weekend, the team provide scientific details to media statements made in 2012 that they had found polonium on Arafat’s belongings.

Arafat died in France on November 11 2004 at the age of 75, but doctors were unable to specify the cause of death. No autopsy was carried out at the time, in line with his widow’s request.

His remains were exhumed in November 2012 and samples taken, partly to investigate whether he had been poisoned — a suspicion that grew after the assassination of Russian ex-spy and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

That investigation is ongoing, conducted separately by teams in France, Switzerland and Russia.

In the Lancet report, eight scientists working at the Institute of Radiation Physics and University Centre of Legal Medicine in Lausanne said they had carried out radiological tests on 75 samples. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Gov’t moves to keep NSA surveillance lawsuit away from Supreme Court

Ars Technica: Not long after widespread NSA phone surveillance was revealed by a series of leaks this summer, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy-oriented nonprofit, tried a bold and novel legal tactic: it appealed straight to the Supreme Court, asking for an immediate shutdown of the program.

The high court was the only place to turn, wrote EPIC, because it can’t go to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which actually authorized the orders. EPIC’s argument was straightforward: the FISC could only authorize NSA spying on foreigners, not Americans.

Now Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who represents the Obama Administration at the Supreme Court, has advised the justices not to take the case. It’s not a surprising move. Just the publicity of a Supreme Court debate over NSA spying would be a giant headache for the administration; not to mention, the government obviously doesn’t want the program shut down.

Facebooktwittermail

GCHQ accused of monitoring privileged emails between lawyers and clients

The Guardian reports: GCHQ is probably intercepting legally privileged communications between lawyers and their clients, according to a detailed claim filed on behalf of eight Libyans involved in politically sensitive compensation battles with the UK.

The accusation has been lodged with Britain’s most secret court, the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT), which examines complaints about the intelligence services and government use of covert surveillance. Most of its hearings are in private.

The allegation has emerged in the wake of the Guardian’s revelations about extensive monitoring by GCHQ of the internet and telephone calls, chiefly through its Tempora programme.

The system taps directly into fibre optic cables carrying the bulk of online exchanges transiting the UK and enables intelligence officials to screen vast quantities of data.

The eight Libyans, members of two families now living in the country’s capital, Tripoli, say they were victims of rendition. They claim they were kidnapped by MI6 and US intelligence agencies, forcibly returned to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime and tortured. At that time, in 2004, when Gaddafi relinquished his nuclear weapons programme, intelligence relations between Tripoli, London and Washington were close.

A landmark legal action between Abdel Belhaj, 47, and the UK government is due to be heard at the high court shortly to resolve the kidnap and torture allegations.

But lawyers working with the human rights group Reprieve fear their ability to fight the case will be undermined because their legal correspondence may be surreptitiously monitored. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Gaza chokes as Egypt’s economic garotte tightens

The Guardian reports: In Gaza City’s main market Mohammed Hilis stood disconsolately among piles of fruit and vegetables, waiting for customers. In the runup to Eid al-Adha, the second most important festival in the Muslim calendar, the market was unusually quiet. Steep price rises, unpaid salaries and layoffs – the consequences of the new Egyptian regime’s antipathy towards Hamas – have been painfully felt by the Gaza Strip.

“A kilo of tomatoes used to be one shekel [17p]; now it is five shekels. Most prices have gone up 50 – 60%,” said Hilis. “Why? Because of the costs of transportation, because there is no power to pump water to the fields, because there is no water. So people buy less.” As a result, his wages have slumped from 30 – 20 shekels a day, playing its small part in propelling the downward spiral of Gaza’s economy.

Six years after Israel imposed a stranglehold on Gaza as a punitive measure against the Hamas government, the strip of land along the Mediterranean is facing a new chokepoint from the south. After the Egyptian military forced President Mohamed Morsi out of office in July amid a brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the army embarked on a drive to regain control of the anarchic Sinai peninsula, isolate the Brotherhood’s allies in neighbouring Gaza, and halt the traffic in goods, weapons and people through the tunnels under the border with the Palestinian territory.

According to the commander of Egypt’s border guards force, Major-General Ahmad Ibrahim, almost 800 tunnels have been destroyed by his troops this year. Hamas is coy about the number of tunnels put out of action. But Hatem Owida, Gaza’s deputy economic minister, said activity had been reduced by 80-90% since the military takeover in Egypt. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian combatants urged to let inspectors visit chemical sites

The New York Times reports: Pressure mounted on Syrian rebels on Monday to permit access to chemical weapons sites in areas under their control, as the head of the international watchdog on such toxic munitions said the rapidly shifting lines in the civil war made it difficult for inspectors to reach some locations.

Ahmet Uzumcu, director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday, told the BBC that the government of President Bashar al-Assad had been cooperating with inspectors who had reached 5 out of 20 chemical weapons production sites.

But some other sites had “access problems,” he said, reflecting perils and complexities facing inspectors who are trying to dismantle chemical weapons facilities as the war rages around them.

Some roads “change hands from one day to another, which is why we appeal to all sides in Syria to support this mission, to be cooperative and not render this mission more difficult,” Mr. Uzumcu said. “It’s already challenging.”

A Western diplomat in the Arab world, moreover, said that while the Syrian government was legally responsible for dismantling its chemical weapons, its opponents should cooperate in the process, as several chemical weapons sites were close to confrontation lines or within rebel-held territory.

“The international community also expects full cooperation from the opposition,” the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

There were clear signs from inspectors in Syria “that the government is delivering on its responsibilities and the opposition needs to hear a clear signal that they must play their part, too, in making sure that the inspectors have free and unhindered access to the chemical weapons sites with complete safety and security,” the diplomat said. “However divided the opposition might be, it would look very bad if the government was seen to be cooperating fully, while inspections were held up because of problems with the opposition.”

The inspection team has not publicly cited any specific instance of opposition fighters impeding access to chemical weapons sites. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Key Syria opposition group refuses Geneva peace talks

AFP reports: A key group within the Syrian opposition National Coalition said Sunday it would not attend proposed peace talks in Geneva and would quit the Coalition if it participated.

The decision deals a potential blow to international efforts to convene a peace conference in Geneva, which was first proposed for June but has been pushed back multiple times.

The Syrian Red Crescent meanwhile said it had evacuated around 1,500 people from a suburb of the capital Damascus that has been under a regime siege for months.

The president of Syrian National Council, the biggest member of the opposition Coalition, told AFP on Sunday that it was impossible to carry out negotiations given the suffering of people on the ground.

“The Syrian National Council, which is the biggest bloc in the Coalition, has taken the firm decision… not to go to Geneva, under the present circumstances (on the ground),” George Sabra told AFP.

“This means that we will not stay in the Coalition if it goes” to the peace talks, he added. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria’s commuting rebels

The New York Times reports: The Syrian rebel leader was sitting comfortably on a cushion at his home here recently, his wife and children filling the rooms with conversation and laughter. Then one day he shaved off his beard and slipped back into Syria, where he leads a rebel brigade.

“I cried,” said his mother-in-law, Wesal al-Aweer. “I pleaded with him not to leave.”

“We were used to having him around the house,” said his wife, Montaha Zoubi, 34, “so now we feel there is an emptiness in the house.”

A hardware store owner in Syria before the civil war, Hussein Zoubi, 40, took up arms against the government almost two years ago. Since then, like thousands of Syrian men in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, he has been leading the life of a commuter rebel, a fighter inside Syria and a family man across the border.

Men have long gone to war after packing off their families to safer places. But the war’s proximity here along the Syrian-Jordanian border has collapsed the distances. The vast majority of the refugees are women and children, who have sought safety here, while the men slip in and out of Syria.

Unlike the battle-hardened Islamist combatants who have made rapid gains inside Syria in recent months, these are ordinary men — small-business owners, plumbers, carpenters — caught up in the war. They fight for weeks at a time and keep in constant touch electronically, but then return to see their families, nurse wounds and take care of businesses that may have suffered in their absence. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

DoJ: If we can track one American, we can track all Americans

Ars Technica reports: Seven months after his conviction, Basaaly Moalin’s defense attorney moved for a new trial (PDF), arguing that evidence collected about him under the government’s recently disclosed dragnet telephone surveillance program violated his constitutional and statutory rights. Moalin’s is the only thwarted “terrorist plot” against America that the government says also “critically” relied on the National Security Agency phone surveillance program, conducted under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The government’s response (PDF), filed on September 30th, is a heavily redacted opposition arguing that when law enforcement can monitor one person’s information without a warrant, it can monitor everyone’s information, “regardless of the collection’s expanse.” Notably, the government is also arguing that no one other than the company that provided the information — including the defendant in this case — has the right to challenge this disclosure in court.

The success of these arguments is critical to the government; the terrorist plot for which Moalin and three other defendants were convicted in February was sending about $8,500 to al-Shabaab, known most recently for the Kenyan Westgate mall attack. The money was sent in 2007 and 2008.

The United States government designated al-Shabaab — which means “The Youth” — a terrorist group in 2008, but the FBI’s extensive wiretapping of Moalin started about two months before that. FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce recently revealed to Congress that the FBI had also conducted another investigation into Moalin’s activities in 2003 and ultimately concluded that there was “no nexus to terrorism.” This evidence was kept from the defense during trial. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The core Internet institutions abandon the U.S. government

Internet Governance Project: In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations – ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries – turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance.

A statement released by this group called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.” That part of the statement constituted an explicit rejection of the US Commerce Department’s unilateral oversight of ICANN through the IANA contract. It also indirectly attacks the US unilateral approach to the Affirmation of Commitments, the pact between the US and ICANN which provides for periodic reviews of its activities by the GAC and other members of the ICANN community. (The Affirmation was conceived as an agreement between ICANN and the US exclusively – it would not have been difficult to allow other states to sign on as well.)

Underscoring the global significance and the determination of the group to have a global impact, the Montevideo statement was released in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian and Chinese. In conversations with some of the participants of the Montevideo meeting, it became clear that they were thinking of new forms of multistakeholder oversight as a substitute for US oversight, although no detailed blueprint exists.

But that was only the beginning. A day after the Montevideo declaration, the President and CEO of ICANN, Fadi Chehadi – the man vetted by the US government to lead its keystone Internet governance institution – met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. And at this meeting, Chehade engaged in some audacious private Internet diplomacy. He asked “the president [of Brazil] to elevate her leadership to a new level, to ensure that we can all get together around a new model of governance in which all are equal.” A press release from the Brazilian government said that President Rousseff wanted the event to be held in April 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. The President of ICANN thus not only allied himself with a political figure who has been intensely critical of the US government and the NSA spying program, he conspired with her to convene a global meeting to begin forging a new system of Internet governance that would move beyond the old world of US hegemony. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Air raids and clashes near Syrian chemical weapons site

Reuters reports: Syrian air force warplanes bombarded rebel-held targets close to a major chemical weapons facility on Friday in fighting that highlights the perils facing an international mission to eliminate President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical arsenal.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, is due to visit 20 sites across Syria to verify the destruction of 1,000 tons of chemical agents and precursors.

The mission in the midst of a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people is an unprecedented challenge for the OPCW, whose members came under fire near Damascus in August.

The OPCW experts have visited three undisclosed sites in their first week of operation and say that Syrian authorities have been cooperating. But they will face great challenges reaching locations in rebel-held or disputed territory.

The air raids struck the town of Safira, on the edge of a sprawling military complex believed to hold chemical weapons production facilities, after overnight clashes between rebel fighters and Assad forces in a nearby village, activists said.

The army has fought hard to retain control of the Safira military complex and is now trying to recapture the town from rebel brigades including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

Unless they succeed in pushing those fighters back, any attempt by the OPCW experts to visit Safira would be risky.[Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Terrorist suspect will not be granted his legal rights until after his interrogation

The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Manhattan on Friday rejected a request that he appoint a lawyer to represent a terror suspect who was captured last weekend in Libya and was said to be undergoing interrogation while in military custody on a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea.

After that interrogation is over, the suspect, Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, is expected to be advised of his right to a lawyer and speedy court appearance, and would eventually be brought to Manhattan for criminal prosecution.

Mr. Ruqai, 49, who is better known as Abu Anas al-Libi, faces indictment in Federal District Court on conspiracy charges stemming from the 1998 bombings of two United States embassies in East Africa that killed 224 people.

On Tuesday, David E. Patton, the chief federal public defender in New York City, wrote to the judge overseeing cases stemming from that indictment, arguing that Mr. Ruqai was “a defendant in an indicted case before this court” and was entitled to be taken “without unnecessary delay” before a magistrate judge, where he would also have the right to counsel.

But on Friday, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, said that such a requirement was triggered only by a “federal criminal arrest.”

“The government denies that any federal criminal arrest has taken place,” he wrote, “and there is no evidence to the contrary.” As a result, Judge Kaplan wrote, there was “no proper basis” for the court to conclude that “the obligation to produce the defendant before it in this criminal case has come into existence.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Libya’s attempted coup: Inside the kidnapping of Prime Minister Ali Zidan

The Daily Beast reports: They came in the dead of night in pick-up-trucks and battered cars, surprising a police checkpoint and moving quickly in a precise military-style configuration befitting fighters who helped to bring down Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorial rule.

Their target this time wasn’t a despot but the elected leader of post-Gaddafi Libya, Prime Minister Ali Zidan, whose brief abduction on Thursday marked yet another low for a country struggling to establish order and stricken by a spate of kidnappings and assassinations over the past year—including the razing of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the death of American ambassador Christopher Stevens. On Friday, a day after the Prime Minister’s abduction, a car bomb exploded outside of the Swedish consulate in Benghazi, damaging the building and nearby houses.

The militiamen, angry over a U.S. Special Forces team seizing of suspected al-Qaeda bigwig Abu Anas al-Liby in Tripoli seven days ago, used pick-up trucks equipped with anti-aircraft guns to block entrances to the luxury Corinthia Hotel in downtown Tripoli where Zidan resides in a suite on the 22nd floor.

Witnesses, including guards assigned to the hotel by the Interior Ministry, say about 400 gunmen were involved in the abduction and that the leaders marched into the cavernous, marble-floored lobby demanding to know from alarmed nighttime staff the whereabouts of the Prime Minister. A receptionist was hauled off when he refused to say. The gunmen brandished a warrant for Zidan’s arrest on national security and corruption charges, signed by the Prosecutor General, says Khalil Yahia, the head of the government security team at the Corinthia, which also houses several foreign missions.

“I was shocked,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘How could they have an arrest warrant for the Prime Minister?’” The militiamen grabbed most of the hotel’s surveillance equipment and tapes. “There was no gunfire—we only had about half-a-dozen guards on duty. There wasn’t anything we could do. I didn’t call for reinforcements, because these people—the ones waving the warrant—would have been the people detailed to be the reinforcements.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Patriot Act author prepares bill to put NSA bulk collection ‘out of business’

The Guardian reports: The conservative Republican who co-authored America’s Patriot Act is preparing to unveil bipartisan legislation that would dramatically curtail the domestic surveillance powers it gives to intelligence agencies.

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who worked with president George W Bush to give more power to US intelligence agencies after the September 11 terrorist attacks, said the intelligence community had misused those powers by collecting telephone records on all Americans, and claimed it was time “to put their metadata program out of business”.

His imminent bill in the House of Representatives is expected to be matched by a similar proposal from Senate judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy, a Democrat. It pulls together existing congressional efforts to reform the National Security Agency in the wake of disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Sensenbrenner has called his bill the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-Collection, and Online Monitoring Act – or USA Freedom Act, and a draft seen by the Guardian has four broad aims.

It seeks to limit the collection of phone records to known terrorist suspects; to end “secret laws” by making courts disclose surveillance policies; to create a special court advocate to represent privacy interests; and to allow companies to disclose how many requests for users’ information they receive from the USA. The bill also tightens up language governing overseas surveillance to remove a loophole which it has been abused to target internet and email activities of Americans. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Executions, indiscriminate shootings, and hostage taking by Islamist factions outside Latakia, Syria

The New York Times reports: Before dawn on Aug. 4, Raed Shakouhi, an olive and walnut farmer in a government-held hilltop village near the Syrian coast, just across a valley from rebel territory, was woken by gunshots and cries of “God is great.”

Mr. Shakouhi, 42, hid among nearby trees with his wife and four young children. The next day, he emerged to find his uncle shot dead, his family’s possessions stolen or destroyed, and the streets littered with bloodstains and the carcasses of farm animals, he recalled last month in an interview in the state-run shelter where he now lives. Many of his neighbors here in Latakia and in the surrounding villages, mostly members of Syria’s minority Alawite sect, fared even worse.

In a coordinated attack, numerous rebel groups fought off a small garrison of government troops and swept into the villages, killing 190 people, according to a Human Rights Watch report to be released on Friday. At least 67 of the dead appeared to have been shot or stabbed while unarmed or fleeing, including 48 women and 11 children, the report said. More than 200 civilians are still being held hostage.

“This is the first time that we have documented opposition forces actually systematically targeting civilians,” said Lama Fakih, the group’s deputy director in Beirut, Lebanon, who last month visited five of the villages, which the government had recaptured by Aug. 19. She also reviewed medical records and interviewed 19 witnesses as well as doctors, military officials and opposition members for the 113-page report.

“We have up to now not documented anything approaching this scale of abuse” by opposition fighters, Ms. Fakih said, adding that the number and methodical nature of the killings constituted a “crime against humanity.”

There have been reports of smaller-scale atrocities by rebel forces, including the videotaped execution of seven Syrian Army soldiers last year. Human Rights Watch has documented some of those attacks, as well as what it calls “egregious war crimes and crimes against humanity” by government forces, including the killing of nearly 250 people in the mostly Sunni towns of Banias and Bayda in May, and a widespread policy of detaining and torturing opposition activists. [Continue reading…]

Joanna Paraszczuk writes: While HRW document in detail the killings and hostage-takings that took place, the report fails to determine definitively which particular groups or factions within these groups were responsible for killing civilians.

Specifically, the report fails to distinguish between attacks carried out by ISIS/ Jaish and the offensive carried out by Free Syrian Army brigades, instead using the blanket term “armed opposition groups” to refer to those responsible for the killings. The report conflates the FSA’s “Operation to Liberate the Coast” with the offensives by Islamist factions — even though the Islamist factions operated independently rather than in conjunction with the FSA.

The HRW report takes information and eyewitness testimony from local residents in the villages to document the circumstances of civilian deaths. However, the report is problematic because it relies heavily on information from a regime Military Intelligence officer, as well as regime military personnel, the police, National Defense Force members, and regime media outlets.

In contrast, HRW do not appear to have obtained responses or information from the Supreme Military Council to ascertain the movement of FSA brigades in relation to the Islamist groups accused of perpetrating the mass killings of civilians. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Editors on the NSA files: ‘What the Guardian is doing is important for democracy’

In response to an editorial in Britain’s Daily Mail, which described The Guardian as “The paper that helps Britain’s enemies,” The Guardian asked for comments from editors at the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Haaretz, Le Monde, El País, Slate, The Hindu, Clarin, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Washington Post, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, La Repubblica, Aftenposten, Dagens Nyheter, La Stampa, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, Gazeta Wyborcza, Politiken, Buzzfeed, ORF-TV, Der Standard, Fairfax Media, Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Conversation, and Crikey.

None share the Mail’s assessment.

Facebooktwittermail

CIA warning on Snowden in 2009 went unheeded

The New York Times reports: Just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion.

The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.

But the red flags went unheeded. Mr. Snowden left the C.I.A. to become a contractor for the National Security Agency, and four years later he leaked thousands of classified documents. The supervisor’s cautionary note and the C.I.A.’s suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the N.S.A. or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowden’s record once the documents began spilling out, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.

“It slipped through the cracks,” one veteran law enforcement official said of the report. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Skype under investigation in Luxembourg over link to NSA

The Guardian reports: Skype is being investigated by Luxembourg’s data protection commissioner over concerns about its secret involvement with the US National Security Agency (NSA) spy programme Prism, the Guardian has learned.

The Microsoft-owned internet chat company could potentially face criminal and administrative sanctions, including a ban on passing users’ communications covertly to the US signals intelliigence agency.

Skype itself is headquartered in the European country, and could also be fined if an investigation concludes that the data sharing is found in violation of the country’s data-protection laws.

The Guardian understands that Luxembourg’s data-protection commissioner initiated a probe into Skype’s privacy policies following revelations in June about its ties to the NSA. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail