Senate report on CIA use of torture

This is the declassified, redacted, 525-page Executive Summary of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report which was approved for release two years ago but has not until today been made public.

The New York Times reports: A scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday found that the Central Intelligence Agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were more brutal than the C.I.A. acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report, which took five years to produce and is based on more than six million internal agency documents, is a sweeping indictment of the C.I.A.’s operation and oversight of a program carried out by agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It also provides a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects.

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.” [Continue reading…]

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The death of tree-cutting journalism

As The New Republic imploded last week, the vanity of its editors and former editors was on full display when they claimed — on Facebook — that, “The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow.”

Seriously?!

The magazine’s Wikipedia entry already captures the spirit of national mourning by referring to TNR in the past tense.

But did a publication with a circulation of 50,000 really have such a pivotal role in the life of the nation?

Are today’s media moguls — Chris Hughes, Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, et al — any worse than old ones like William Randolph Hearst, Rupert Murdoch, and Ted Turner?

The death of journalism can be overstated if it’s mostly about the loss of self-importance for those whose words once reliably became enshrined in the permanence of print — writers whose words now float freely as digital ephemera, all too easily lost.

For writing to be print-worthy, implies a certain value independent of whether it’s being read, yet this value is much more culturally ascribed than inherent.

The written word, through its permanence, is invested with the legal power of ownership.

The demise of printing press ownership, since print no longer requires paper, has reduced the value of journalism as it has expanded its availability.

Peter Beinart et al write:

The New Republic cannot be merely a “brand.” It has never been and cannot be a “media company” that markets “content.” Its essays, criticism, reportage, and poetry are not “product.” It is not, or not primarily, a business.

I’m with them in spirit — kind of.

Journalism should go in pursuit of truth — not profit. But those who dedicate themselves to this higher calling while also having the comfort of receiving a regular pay check, are being disingenuous about their lack of interest in money. The only reason they haven’t had to care too much about where the money comes from is because until now it has conveniently kept showing up in their bank accounts.

Emily Bell writes:

When an increasing number of Americans reach news on their phones, and 30% find their news through Facebook, so-called “legacy” journalism is over, at least as an independently constructed and distributed cultural good. So the question for Hughes, and would-be billionaire saviors like him, is what’s next.

“I think we have seen a number of things happen in the last 18 months which are moving things along,” Hughes told me, “from the ‘innovation’ report at the New York Times, what Ezra Klein is doing with Vox.com, the longform journalism that BuzzFeed has started to produce, and even Medium – which on the face of it is bringing a community around a spectrum from very serious longform journalism to bloggers and other diverse voices.”

Still, in rattling off the journalistic competition he admires, Hughes audibly winced over including BuzzFeed, which has become a Pavlovian stand-in through which the uninformed – even among former TNR staff – encapsulate the idea of “declining standards” in journalism. But BuzzFeed has achieved what every journalism organisation needs to: Buzzfeed is successful because of the internet, rather than in spite of it.

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Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Ars Technica reports: Researchers have uncovered an extremely stealthy trojan for Linux systems that attackers have been using to siphon sensitive data from governments and pharmaceutical companies around the world.

The previously undiscovered malware represents a missing puzzle piece tied to “Turla,” a so-called advanced persistent threat (APT) disclosed in August by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec. For at least four years, the campaign targeted government institutions, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies in more than 45 countries. The unknown attackers—who are probably backed by a nation-state, according to Symantec—were known to have infected several hundred Windows-based computers by exploiting a variety of vulnerabilities, at least two of which were zero-day bugs. The malware was notable for its use of a rootkit that made it extremely hard to detect.

Now researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have detected Linux-based malware used in the same campaign. Turla was already ranked as one of the top-tier APTs, in the same league as the recently disclosed Regin for instance. The discovery of the Linux component suggests it is bigger than previously thought and may presage the discovery of still more infected systems. [Continue reading…]

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Three American teens, recruited online, are caught trying to join ISIS

The Washington Post reports: Mohammed Hamzah Khan, 19, rose before dawn on Oct. 4 to pray with his father and 16-year-old brother at their neighborhood mosque in a Chicago suburb.

When they returned home just before 6 a.m., the father went back to bed and the Khan teens secretly launched a plan they had been hatching for months: to abandon their family and country and travel to Syria to join the Islamic State.

While his parents slept, Khan gathered three newly issued U.S. passports and $2,600 worth of airline tickets to Turkey that he had gotten for himself, his brother and their 17-year-old sister. The three teens slipped out of the house, called a taxi and rode to O’Hare International Airport. [Continue reading…]

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OECD reports on the failure of trickle-down economics

The Guardian reports: The west’s leading economic thinktank on Tuesday dismissed the concept of trickle-down economics as it found that the UK economy would have been more than 20% bigger had the gap between rich and poor not widened since the 1980s.

Publishing its first clear evidence of the strong link between inequality and growth, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development proposed higher taxes on the rich and policies aimed at improving the lot of the bottom 40% of the population, identified by Ed Miliband as the “squeezed middle”.

Trickle-down economics was a central policy for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, with the Conservatives in the UK and the Republicans in the US confident that all groups would benefit from policies designed to weaken trade unions and encourage wealth creation.

The OECD said that the richest 10% of the population now earned 9.5 times the income of the poorest 10%, up from seven times in the 1980s. However, the result had been slower, not faster, growth. [Continue reading…]

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A new kind of imperialism from China

Llewellyn King writes: In history, countries have sought to increase their territory by bribery, chicanery, coercion and outright force of arms. But while many have sought to dominate the seas, from the Greek city states to the mighty British Empire, none has ever, in effect, tried to take over an ocean or a sea as its own.

But that is what China is actively doing in the ocean south of the mainland: the South China Sea. Bit by bit, it is establishing hegemony over this most important sea where the littoral states — China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam — have territorial claims.

The importance of the South China Sea is hard to overestimate. Some of the most vital international sea lanes traverse it; it is one of the great fishing areas; and the ocean bed, near land, has large reserves of oil and gas. No wonder everyone wants a piece of it — and China wants all of it.

Historically China has laid claim to a majority of the sea and adheres to a map or line — known as the nine-dash map, the U-shape line or the nine-dotted line — that cedes most of the ocean area and all of the island land to it. The nine-dash map is a provocation at best and a blueprint for annexation at worst. [Continue reading…]

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We should beware Russia’s links with Europe’s Right

Luke Harding writes: It sounds like a chapter from a cheesy spy novel: former KGB agent, chucked out of Britain in the 80s, lends a large sum of money to a far-right European party. His goal? To undermine the European Union and consolidate ties between Moscow and the future possible leader of pro-Kremlin France.

In fact this is exactly what’s just happened. The founder of the Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, borrowed €2m from a Cyprus-based company, Veronisa Holdings, owned by a flamboyant character and cold war operative called Yuri Kudimov.

Kudimov is a former KGB agent turned banker with close links to the Kremlin and the network of big money around it. Back in 1985 Kudimov was based in London. His cover story was that he was a journalist working for a Soviet newspaper; in 1985 the Thatcher government expelled him for alleged spying. (During the same period Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden.)

In Paris, the FN confirmed last week that it had taken a whopping €9.4m (£7.4m) loan from the First Czech Russian bank in Moscow. This loan is logical enough. The FN’s leader, Marine Le Pen, makes no secret of her admiration for Putin; her party has links to senior Kremlin figures including Dmitry Rogozin, now Russia’s deputy prime minister, who in 2005 ran an anti-immigrant campaign under the slogan “Clean Up Moscow’s Trash”. Le Pen defended her decision to take the Kremlin money, complaining that she had been refused her access to capital: “What is scandalous here is that the French banks are not lending.” She also denied reports by the news website Mediapart, which broke the story, that the €9.4m was merely the first instalment of a bigger €40m loan.

The Russian money will fuel Marine Le Pen’s run for the French presidency in two years’ time. Nobody expects her to win, but the FN topped the polls in May’s European elections, winning an unprecedented 25% of the vote; Le Pen’s 25 new MEPs already form a pro-Russian bloc inside the European parliament. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s military will get bigger and better in 2015

Moscow Times reports: Despite a looming recession, Russia will increase military spending by 30 percent next year to a record post-Soviet high of 3.3 trillion rubles ($62 billion), cash that will be used to buy more aircraft, submarines, missiles and weapons for an ascendent armed forces.

The increase, which takes Russia’s spending on defense to 4.2 percent of gross domestic product, comes amid an ongoing crisis in Ukraine that has seen a return to Cold War-style rhetoric and the reinsertion of military posturing into international politics.

Amid the muscle-flexing, the Russian military has had a good year. The Defense Ministry showed during the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March that it had successfully reformed its armed forces since the 2008 war with Georgia, when the Russian army looked disorganized and poorly equipped. [Continue reading…]

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Dick Cheney was lying about torture

Mark Fallon writes: It’s official: torture doesn’t work. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, did not in fact “produce the intelligence that allowed us to get Osama bin Laden,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney asserted in 2011. Those are among the central findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and detention after 9/11.

The report’s executive summary is expected to be released Tuesday. After reviewing thousands of the CIA’s own documents, the committee has concluded that torture was ineffective as an intelligence-gathering technique. Torture produced little information of value, and what little it did produce could’ve been gained through humane, legal methods that uphold American ideals.

I had long since come to that conclusion myself. As special agent in charge of the criminal investigation task force with investigators and intelligence personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I was privy to the information provided by Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I was aware of no valuable information that came from waterboarding. And the Senate Intelligence Committee—which had access to all CIA documents related to the “enhanced interrogation” program—has concluded that abusive techniques didn’t help the hunt for Bin Laden. Cheney’s claim that the frequent waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “produced phenomenal results for us” is simply false. [Continue reading…]

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In West Africa, a model for worldwide conservation takes root

Anna Badkhen writes: An hour before sunup the Bani River uncoils through the dark Sahel in bright silver curves, a reflection of a day not yet dawned, hardships not yet known, hopes not yet broken. Onto such a magical surface the Bozo fishermen of Sindaga shove off with bamboo poles and float downstream in redwood pirogues, one silent man per boat. The fishermen work standing up: solitary Paleolithic silhouettes keeping perfect balance against the river’s luminescence, each man one with his boat like some pelagic centaur, performing one of mankind’s oldest rites. They cast their diaphanous seines into the night. Handmade sinkers kiss the surface, pucker it lightly, drag the nets under.

By the time daybreak trims burgundy the sparse savannah, the fishermen row their day’s first catch back to the village. In squat banco houses that crowd the river, the men take breakfast of rice and fish sauce. They patch up the nets while their wives and mothers sort the morning haul into giant wicker baskets and lug it to the nearest market town. After midday prayer, the men cast off again.

Such has been their fishing schedule for centuries, aligned with the orderly procession across the West African sky of 26 sequential constellations. Each new star signifies the advent of a windy season, of weeks of life-giving drizzle or days of downpour, of merciless heat or relentless malarial mosquitoes dancing in humid nights. Each star announces the arrival of the blue-tinged Nile perch, of the short-striped daggers of clown killi, of the lunar disks of the Niger stingray, of the toothless garras that like to nibble the bare ankles of laundresses, and that, in the West, are used for pedicures in foot spas.

Or so it used to be. Mali has been growing drier and hotter since the 1960s. For the past three decades, the weather has been chaotic, out of whack with the stars. The rainy season has been starting early or late or not arriving at all. Droughts throttle the land and wring dry the river. Flash floods wash away harvests and entire homesteads hand-slapped of rice straw and clay. Acres of deforested riverbank dry out and blow away, or collapse into the water. The fish run off schedule. “The river is becoming broken,” said Lasina Kayantau, a Sindaga elder. [Continue reading…]

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Aid fatigue is hurting displaced Syrians

Newsweek reports: As civil war in Syria inches toward its four-year anniversary, the nation’s humanitarian catastrophe deepens. Some 7.6 million Syrians are now internally displaced, and another 3.3 million have fled to neighboring countries to avoid the complex three-way dogfight among Assad’s forces, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Syrian rebels.

In Lebanon the influx of one million refugees is straining the capacities of a country of only 4.4 million. Today, some 12.2 million Syrians, both inside and outside Syria, rely on emergency food aid.

It thus came as a shock when the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) announced on December 1 that a lack of funds was forcing it to suspend aid to help feed and clothe Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. In fact, the WFP had been signaling for months that its program for Syria was in dire need of a cash injection from international donors.

Last week, the United States donated $125 million to prop up the program until the end of the year, but it clearly wasn’t enough. The WFP stated that it needed an additional $64 million for December alone to support its system of prepaid voucher cards, which can be used at local stores to buy food and supplies.

Without this lifeline, refugees will face the impending harsh winter without food, warm clothes, or heat. [Continue reading…]

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UK and Israel supported Kenyan program of extrajudicial killings

Al Jazeera reports: Kenyan police have assassinated nearly 500 terrorism suspects as part of an extrajudicial killing program supported by intelligence provided by Israel and the United Kingdom, an Al Jazeera investigation has revealed.

Officers from four units of Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) said that police assassinated terrorist suspects on government orders.

The police killings, according to an ATPU officer, were ordered by Kenya’s National Security Council and run into the hundreds every year. “Day in, day out, you hear of eliminating suspects,” the officer said.

“Since I was employed, I’ve killed over 50. Definitely, I do become proud because I’ve eliminated some problems,” added another officer.

The ATPU officers contend that Kenya’s weak judicial system had forced them to resort to assassinations, as police have failed to produce strong enough evidence to prosecute terrorism suspects. [Continue reading…]

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UN reports Israeli support for Syria rebels

Christian Science Monitor reports: The Israeli military has been in direct contact with Syrian rebels for more than 18 months, facilitating the treatment of wounded fighters and at times exchanging parcels and ushering uninjured Syrians into Israel, according to UN reports.

The quarterly reports bolster speculation over the past year that Israel’s humanitarian assistance to more than 1,000 wounded Syrians had also opened a channel of communication with Syrian rebels.

Today, the Syrian military accused Israel of carrying out two airstrikes near Damascus. The Israeli military declined to comment on that claim.

Though some in Israel appear to support the Assad regime as the lesser evil, Israel is no doubt interested in gleaning intelligence from rebel groups in order to better assess and defend itself against jihadi activity in the occupied Golan Heights.

In August this year, the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front) took over the Quneitra border crossing, raising concerns of infiltration and attacks on Israeli targets. [Continue reading…]

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Why is Israel preventing human rights experts from entering Gaza?

Amira Hass reports: Israel prevented experts from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch from entering the Gaza Strip during Operation Protective Edge, and it still is preventing them. As a result, no independent professionals (for example, a certain retired British military officer) have been able to check in real time the army’s claims and versions; for example, about weapons caches or firing near or from inside UN buildings.

If the Israel Defense Forces and its legal advisers were so sure they were adhering to international law, why were they scared to let these experts enter Gaza – alongside the many journalists who were allowed in?

It could very well be that every word in the IDF spokesman’s recent statement on the decision to investigate “exceptional incidents that occurred during Operation Protective Edge” is truthful. But these words – true or not – are just a veneer covering the problematic layers of Protective Edge and all Israeli military operations against the Palestinians.

The IDF, its lawyers and its commanders hold a monopoly on information from Israeli theaters of war because of the IDF’s technological superiority. So they also hold a monopoly on concealing information, telling untruths and dismissing the findings of Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups – and of course on ignoring Hamas’ claims. [Continue reading…]

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Chechen militants: ‘more prestigious’ to fight for ISIS

Syria Direct interview: Fighters from Chechnya are one of the forces behind IS’s meteoric rise in Syria. The attraction to jihad is not only ideological but practical.

“The Syrian ‘jihad’ began as a sort of proxy conflict for fighters who could not go home to fight in Chechnya or Dagestan,” says Joanna Paraszczuk, a journalist and blogger who has lived and worked in the Middle East and Russia and has a special interest in researching Russian-speaking foreign fighters in Syria. Many of them, she says, are wanted by security authorities.

ShowImageBranching out from the Caucasus and fighting for the Islamic State is now seen as “prestigious,” Paraszczuk, who writes and curates Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s blog on the Islamic State, tells Syria Direct’s Kristen Gillespie.

“IS gets a lot more media attention than the Caucasus Emirate, which they see as a parochial sort of jihad, struggling away unnoticed while the IS Chechens are part of a movement that controls vast tracts of land and is (to them) successful.” [Continue reading…]

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The Egyptian revolution isn’t dead because it never happened in the first place

Eric Trager writes: When an Egyptian court dismissed all criminal charges against former dictator Hosni Mubarak last weekend, many called it the final nail in coffin of the “revolution” that ousted Mubarak from power in February 2011. “Egypt’s revolution is dead,” CNN reported. “The January revolution is over; they ended it,” the father of an activist who was killed during the uprising told the New York Times. After the July 2013 ouster of Egypt’s first freely elected president and the subsequent rise of another former military general to the presidency, the end of Mubarak’s criminal case looks like the icing on Egypt’s counterrevolutionary cake.

Yet this narrative misunderstands what Egypt’s Tahrir Square revolt meant to many Egyptians, particularly those from the country’s political center, which is overwhelmingly rural and traditional, although not necessarily Islamist. Far from desiring the far-reaching – revolutionary – political reform that the “Arab Spring” narrative embodied, many of these Egyptians endorsed only the uprising’s two most basic goals: ending Mubarak’s 30-year rule and preventing the succession of his son Gamal. From their perspective, Mubarak had simply ruled for too long, and his apparent attempt to install Gamal as his successor reeked of pharaonism. For these Egyptians, the “revolution,” as they refer to the uprising, didn’t die with Saturday’s trial verdict, because Mubarak still isn’t president. And ever since Mubarak was overthrown, their goal has been to return to normalcy, even if that falls short of democracy.

It is difficult to establish just how widely this view is held: Polling in Egypt is notoriously weak; the Egyptian military used its control of the state media to discourage further revolutionary activity after Mubarak fell; and the current regime has quashed dissent substantially. But it is a sentiment that I have encountered repeatedly during the dozen or so research trips that I have taken to Egypt over the past four years, and it is useful for understanding the main reason the “revolution” didn’t die on Saturday: A true revolution never happened in the first place. This is what a crucial bloc of Egyptians wanted: stability, as they defined it, rather than the deep institutional reforms that a true revolution required. [Continue reading…]

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Why everyone walked free in the Mubarak trial

Mada Masr: Judge Mahmoud al-Rashidy knew that the acquittal of former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly and six of his aides on charges of inciting and conspiring in the killing of protesters during the January 25 revolution would shock many.

He released a 280-page long judgment to mitigate the shock.

As Rashidy flatly dismissed the charges against former strongman Hosni Mubarak on procedural grounds, the judgment that was given to the media must be read, as his reasoning behind the exculpation of the interior minister and his aids.

The case largely hangs on the testimony of security officials and former regime officials. Incriminating testimony has been dismissed and individual acts are justified given the extenuating circumstances.

At the heart of it all, Rashidy argues, is a global conspiracy.

Below, we have laid out the key arguments in Rashidy’s judgment:

The conspiracy

Through the document, the judge moves beyond the scope of the case and gives his view of the events that occurred within the case’s time frame (January 25-31). Rashidy maintains that an American-Zionist conspiracy had been plotting to divide the country.

This claim, Rashidy continues, is based on the testimonies of “the nation’s wise men,” namely the late intelligence head Omar Suleiman, former Defense Minister Hussein Tantawy, Mubarak-era Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, his head of intelligence Mourad Mowafy and other top officials, in addition to journalist Ibrahim Eissa.

The Muslim Brotherhood were key conspirators, helping groups like Hamas and Hezbollah to sneak into the country. These actors, the court concludes, executed a choreographed plan on January 28 to bring down the state. [Continue reading…]

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