Charles Horman Truth Project

In the wake of the 1973 coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, Charles Horman, a young American journalist, was abducted from his home in Santiago, tortured and executed. His widow Joyce and his father Edmund spent agonizing weeks in Chile looking for him before finally learning of his death. There is reason to believe that Charles Horman’s knowledge of U.S. involvement in the coup was related to his execution. These events became the subject of the Costa-Gavras movie MISSING.

In 1976, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Horman family sued Henry Kissinger and other Nixon Administration officials for the wrongful death of Charles and the family’s pain and suffering caused by the concealment of his death. After years of vigorous attempts to obtain classified State Department and CIA documents, the case was dismissed in 1980 “without prejudice,” recognizing that information was being withheld and thereby enabling the Horman family to reopen the case should additional facts become available.

The arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998, which reinvigorated the global movement to bring human rights violators to justice, rekindled Joyce Horman’s hope of uncovering the truth about her husband’s murder. She joined the Spanish lawsuit that charged Pinochet with crimes against humanity and requested his extradition from the United Kingdom for trial in Spain. That suit led to the landmark decision of the House of Lords granting the Spanish judge’s request (later rendered moot by the British Home Secretary on the grounds of Pinochet’s health, which returned Pinochet to Chile).

At the same time, Horman’s attorneys obtained documents released by the U.S. government as a result of the Chile declassification order issued by President Bill Clinton in February 1999. Several of the documents had originally been released in the late 1970’s pursuant to the Horman’s 1976 lawsuit but were heavily blacked out. The version released in 1999 revealed what had been censored for 20 years: the State Department’s own conclusion that the CIA may have had “an unfortunate part” in Horman’s death.

In the summer of 2000, Chile’s Supreme Court stripped Pinochet of his senatorial immunity, resulting in the filing of more than 300 human rights cases against him. At roughly the same time, the third release of declassified documents in the United States provided little additional information, and the Horman family decided to file their own case in Chile with Judge Juan Guzman against Pinochet and his subordinates. Kissinger and other members of the Nixon Administration State Department were named as witnesses in the case, resulting in the Chilean Supreme Court approving the transmission of official questions to the Bush Administration for answers. It is noteworthy that during the summer of 2001, when the Chilean government allocated more judges to handle human rights cases, Judge Guzman, the highest-ranking judge, retained only six cases, the Horman case among them.

To continue this pursuit of justice in Chile, Joyce Horman has established the Charles Horman Truth Project to support ongoing investigations of the human rights violations that were carried out in Pinochet’s detention centers and efforts to bring him and his subordinates to justice. Research, supported in part by the Ford Foundation, is looking to determine who took part in the repressive structure at Chile’s National Stadium just after the 1973 coup. This work has resulted in new testimony regarding the human rights crimes of that era. On May 15th, 2002 in New York, the Project will commemorate the film MISSING and honor those who made it with the Charles Horman Truth Project 2002 Human Rights Awards.

Find this story at September 2013

Washington and the Pinochet coup in Chile; Declassified documents confirm US role in 1973 death of Charles Horman

More than a quarter century after the execution in Chile of Charles Horman, an American freelance journalist, Washington has released a document admitting that US intelligence agents played a role in his death.

The Horman case was made famous by the Hollywood movie Missing. Directed by Constantino Costa Gavras, the film dramatized the struggle of Charles Horman’s family to uncover the truth about his murder and the collaboration of US officials with the Chilean military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in carrying it out.
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The State Department memo, dated August 25, 1976, was declassified just over two weeks ago (October 8), together with 1,100 other documents released by various US agencies. These papers dealt primarily with the years leading up to the military coup that brought Pinochet to power in September 1973. An initial set of 5,800 previously classified documents, made public last June 30, concerned the first five years of the dictatorship, when tens of thousands of Chilean workers, students and political oppositionists were imprisoned, tortured and executed.

Charles Horman was one of the victims of the Pinochet coup. On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into a make-shift concentration camp. There prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. One month later, Horman’s body was found in a morgue in the Chilean capital. A second American journalist, Frank Terrugi, was killed in the same fashion.

Written by three State Department functionaries—Rudy Fimbres, R.S. Driscoll and W.V. Robertson—and addressed to Harry Schlaudeman, a high-ranking official in the department’s Latin American division—the August 1976 document described the Horman case as “bothersome,” given reports in the press and Congressional investigations charging that the affair involved “negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman’s death.” The memo was written while Henry Kissinger was still Secretary of State.

The State Department, the memo declared, had the responsibility to “categorically refute such innuendoes in defense of US officials.” It went on, however, to lay out the case that these “innuendoes” were well founded.

The three State Department officials said they had evidence that “The GOC [Government of Chile] sought Horman and felt threatened enough to order his immediate execution. The GOC might have believed this American could be killed without negative fall-out from the USG [US Government].”

The report went on to declare that circumstantial evidence indicated “US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman’s death. At best it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the GOC. At worst, US intelligence was aware the GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia.”

What the document does not mention is that the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency had their own reasons not only to feed the Chilean dictatorship’s “paranoia,” but also to take a direct role in sanctioning the execution. Horman spent the day of the military uprising and several days thereafter in the resort town of Viña del Mar, near the port of Valparaiso, which was a key base for both the Chilean coup plotters and US military and intelligence personnel who were supporting them. While there, he spoke with several US operatives and took careful notes documenting the US role in overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende.

After the release of the State Department memo, Horman’s widow, Joyce, described it as “close to a smoking pistol.”

The same document had been released to the Horman family more than 20 years ago. But the paragraphs cited above were blacked out by the State Department. It took nearly two decades for Washington to reveal what had been hidden in the 28 lines blacked out by government censors.

Still, the Clinton administration’s “Chile Declassification Project,” touted by the president as an effort to “shed light on human rights abuses, terrorism and other acts of political violence” under Pinochet, has amounted to an exercise in hypocrisy. Motivated by Washington’s desire to distance itself from its former ally after the ex-dictator’s arrest in London and efforts to extradite him to Spain, the declassification has hidden more than it has revealed.

The Horman document released October 8 came from the State Department, as have the vast bulk of the material that has been declassified. In it, the State Department officials themselves express skepticism about the account given by the CIA of its relations with key Chilean figures involved in Horman’s case.

While this section of the document still has sections deleted for reasons of “national security,” it declares that the agency’s account “needs further illumination no matter CIA disclaimers.” It goes on to declare that the authors find it hard to believe “that the Chileans did not check with [name deleted] regarding two detained Americans … lack of candor with us on other matters only heightens our suspicions.”

But where are the CIA documents, both those shared with the State Department at the time and those whose concealment prompted such suspicions? They remain classified, as do documents from the Pentagon which would have recounted contacts between US military officers and Charles Horman in Viña del Mar.

In the first batch of declassified material, 5,000 of the 5,800 documents came from the State Department, while the CIA released only 500. Out of some 25,000 pages of reports, memos and cables that have been made public thus far, not a single one provides any information on the part played by the CIA, the Pentagon or other US agencies in the Chilean coup itself and the bloody repression which followed.

There is no dispute that these documents exist. Daily cables went back and forth between Washington and Santiago as the CIA and the Nixon government followed the progress of “Track II,” as the planned coup was known in intelligence circles. These documents have been referred to repeatedly in congressional investigations and access to them has been repeatedly denied in various Freedom of Information requests.

One of the recently released State Department documents gives an indication of the scale of US collaboration with Pinochet’s preparations. It establishes that US military aid was raised dramatically between the coming to power of Allende in 1970, when it amounted to $800,000, to $10.9 million in 1972, as the coup plans were elaborated. Even as Nixon and Kissinger vilified the Allende government, they poured vast resources into the instrument they would use to overthrow it, the Chilean military.

Further documents withheld by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies concern the 1976 car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean minister and opponent of the dictatorship, together with his American aide, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington, DC. American officials have made the improbable claim that these documents must remain secret because they are material to the investigation of Pinochet’s crimes.

According to Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, the CIA has rejected any review of documents emanating from its Directorate of Operations, the covert arm that earned the agency the nickname Murder Inc., on the grounds that the US government has never officially acknowledged carrying out covert operations in Chile. Similarly, the agency has taken the position that planning and policy documents are not covered by Clinton’s declassification order.

This guarding of Washington’s dirty secrets relating to Chile is motivated in part by the fact that former and present US officials who played a role as criminal as that of Pinochet himself are still alive. They, like the ex-dictator, could conceivably be called to account.

Men like ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the CIA’s former coup master in Latin America, General Vernon Walters, are among them, as are many lesser-known functionaries of US intelligence and the Pentagon.

Even more important, “national security interests” are at stake in keeping these documents secret because, 25 years after the Chilean coup, US imperialism is still prepared to use the methods employed by Pinochet and his American backers in defending the interests of the US banks and multinationals and suppressing the struggles of the working class all over the world.

By Bill Vann
26 October 1999

Find this story at 26 October 1999

Copyright © 1998-2013 World Socialist Web Site

“Terrorism is Part of Our History”: Angela Davis on ’63 Church Bombing, Growing up in “Bombingham”

Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. On Sept. 15, 1963, a dynamite blast planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls in the church — Denise McNair, age 11, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14 years old. Twenty other people were injured. No one was arrested for the bombings for 14 years. We hear an address by world-renowned author, activist and scholar Angela Davis, professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz. She spoke last night in Oakland, California, at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. On September 15, 1963, a dynamite blast planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four little girls in the church Denise McNair was 11 years old, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins were all 14. Twenty other people were injured. No one was arrested for the bombings for 14 years.

We turn now to world renowned author, activist, scholar Angela Davis, Professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz. She spoke last night in Oakland, California, at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law.

ANGELA DAVIS: And remembering and paying tribute to this tragic event, let us not pretend that we are simultaneously celebrating the end of racist violence, and the triumph of democracy. Let us also not labor under the illusion that this church bombing was an anomaly. We know that Robert Chambliss, who was eventually convicted of carrying out the bombing, along with three others, we know that he had been responsible for bombing black homes and churches over so many years. As a matter of fact, during the eight years prior to the church bombing, there had been 21 bombings in Birmingham. This man’s nickname was “Dynamite Bob”. He was known in white communities, you know, talking about terrorism. And I want to emphasize the importance of understanding how much terrorism, racist terrorism, has shaped the history of this country. And there are lessons we need to learn from that.

But I’ve often pointed out that some of my very earliest childhood memories, are the sounds of dynamite exploding. Homes across the street from where I grew up were bombed when they were purchased by black people who were moving into a neighborhood that had been zoned for whites. So many bombings took place in the neighborhood where I grew up. And we know now that Chambliss was probably responsible. That the neighborhood came to be called “Dynamite Hill”. And of course as you know, the city of Birmingham was known as “Bombingham”. In fact on September 4, 1963, less than two weeks before the 16th Street church bombing, the home of the leading civil rights attorney in Birmingham, Arthur Shores was bombed. And that house was right down the street from our house.

You’ve also heard that from Margaret that on the day of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, two other black youth were killed. Johnny Robinson and Virgil Weir. Bombings continued to plague black communities in Birmingham after September 15, and everyone, including the FBI, knew who was behind them. But Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss was simply charged with the possession of dynamite. And J Edgar Hoover refused to reveal the evidence that the FBI had gathered against the perpetrators so that there was no trial during that period.

Now I’m not arguing that justice would have necessarily prevailed had Robert Chambliss and the others, Thomas Blanton, Bobby Cherry and Herman Cash had been immediately tried and tried and convicted, although, since that was the only way we had to deal with such transgressions, they should have been tried and convicted. But true justice is about transformation. Justice is about changing the relations that link us together. And as you’ve heard, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project attempts to forge justice in a much deeper sense than is possible within the existing criminal justice system.

A broader way of thinking about justice in the case of the Birmingham bombing would require, first of all, a fuller understanding of the event and its historical context, and would require us to ask questions about the way our lives today bear the historical imprint of that era. What I fear is that many of the 50th anniversary observances, and there are many as Margaret pointed out, many that have taken place, many to come, that many of them are just to close the book on the racist violence of the civil rights era so that we can embalm that violence and transform it into something to be gazed at through the conventional lens of the museum.

Maybe there is something to be learned from the way that Birmingham Civil Rights Institute frames that bombing. As opposed to regular museum exhibit, and if any of you have ever visited the Civil Rights Institute, you know that it is an absolutely incredible museum with amazing exhibits. But for the church bombing, there is simply a window. There is a window through which one can see the church, meditate on its history, and see it as it changes and transforms. Remembering that this was the site of one of the most vicious terror attacks this country has witnessed.

If you have ever visited Birmingham and the museum, you will also know that across 6th Avenue from the museum and kitty corner from the church is the Kelly Ingram Park, where demonstrations that were organized in the 16th Street Baptist Church were staged. It was the home base for the Children’s Crusade. And how many of us remember that it was young children, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, some as young as 9 or 10, who faced police dogs and faced high-power water hoses and went to jail for our sake? And so there is deep symbolism in the fact that these four young girls’ lives were consumed by that bombing. It was children who were urging us to imagine a future that would be a future of equality and justice.

It’s important that we resist the temptation of abstraction. How easy it is to think about four innocent young black girls whose lives were violently taken away by white supremacists. And I’m not suggesting that this did not happen. Of course it did. What I’m saying is that it was a lot more complicated. And if we don’t attempt to understand the complexity of this historical event, then we will certainly not be capable of comprehending that violence, that racist violence, and its connections with sexist violence or homophobic and xenophobic violence, which continues to erupt in our lives today. Resisting the temptation of historical abstraction requires us to realize that this was not an extraordinary event that erupted one Sunday morning 50 years ago in otherwise peaceful city. As I pointed out, violence was very much the norm.

When I was growing up, Bull Connor, Eugene Bull Connor, was the commissioner of public safety. And of course his notoriety is linked to the way in which he used those high-power water hoses and dogs against the children and because of the KKK violence, against the Freedom Riders in Birmingham, and violence, in which the police whom Bull Connor controlled did not intervene. But I remember hearing when I was growing up, I remember growing up hearing when black people moved into previously white neighborhoods, Bull Connor would announce that there would be bloodshed. And indeed, there would be a bombing or a house would be burned.

As much talk as there has been about terrorism over the last decade, I have not heard one official acknowledgment of the terrorism that prevailed in places like Birmingham. Terrorism is a part of our history. It is not something that is alien. And, by the way, no one ever suggested that we plant dynamite in white communities as a response to that terrorism. So I guess I would say, why do we need to respond with devastating violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria?

It is also not widely known that black people arm themselves. This is a story that has been excised from the official record of the “freedom movement”. And interestingly, Condoleezza Rice has described her minister father, this was recently in an interview with Al Sharpton. She described her minister father as being a leader of an armed patrol of black men in her neighborhood. And as she pointed out, no one was ever shot. Guns may have been fired to scare the Klu Klux Klan away, they may, have been, she says they may have been fired in the air, but no one was ever shot. No one was ever hurt. And I wonder why she didn’t learn this lesson about ways to respond to terrorism, you know which she could’ve used during her tenure as Secretary of State. And I should say I was happy to see that this morning Melissa Harris Perry called her out on this after showing clips of her interview with Al Sharpton.

But my father was also a member of an armed patrol in our neighborhood. Black people had guns, but only because we had no other choice. Black people had to arm themselves after the 1877 Hayes Tilden compromise in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes was handed the presidency under the condition, remember, the Republicans were supposed to be the good guys in those days, OK, under the condition that he would draw all federal troops from the south. And so black people were effectively informed that they were on their own from then on, from 1877 on. This is the period that witnessed the emergence of official structures of white supremacy that did not begin to come down until the resistance of the mid-20th century freedom movement.

Just as sediments of slavery are still with us, most dramatically represented by the country’s incarceration practices and by the racism of the death penalty. The vestiges of an era where racist violence was the norm and was condoned by officials from local governments to Washington are still haunting us. We know the names of young black and brown people who have been killed by the police or by vigilantes. We know the names of Trayvon Martin in Florida, of Haditha Pendleton in Chicago who was killed shortly after having participated in the second Obama inauguration. And then of course, here in Oakland, we know the name of Oscar Grant, Oscar Grant. And I can say, that no matter how long an individual perpetrator is sent to prison in any of these cases and any others, no one can say that justice has been done. Because we know that the roots of racist violence, the roots of the violence that claimed their lives are so tightly woven into our country’s social fabric that an eye for an eye will not do it. An eye for an eye will not do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Author, activist, scholar, Angela Davis. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, knew two of the girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing 50 years ago Sunday. She spoke in Oakland Sunday night at an event organized by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, in Northeastern School of Law.

Monday, September 16, 2013

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Tightening the Screws; Azerbaijan’s Crackdown on Civil Society and Dissent

Azerbaijan’s record on freedom of expression, assembly, and association has been on a
steady decline for some years, but it has seen a dramatic deterioration since mid-2012.
Since then the government has been engaged in a concerted effort to curtail opposition
political activity, punish public allegations of corruption and other criticism of government
practices, and exercise greater control over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It has
done so by arresting and imprisoning dozens of political activists on bogus charges,
adopting restrictive legislative amendments, consistently breaking up public
demonstrations in the capital, and failing in its duty to investigate and punish those
responsible for violent attacks and smear campaigns against critical journalists.
The crackdown started in response to youth groups’ attempts to organize protests in Baku
soon after the uprisings broke out in the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011. It
intensified in mid-2012, apparently in anticipation of the October 2013 presidential
elections.
This report, based on more than 100 interviews, documents the cases of 39 individuals
detained, charged, convicted, and/or harassed in the 18 months from February 2012 to
August 2013. The government of Azerbaijan has for many years used bogus charges to
imprison some of its critics and has a long record of dispersing – often violently – peaceful
public protests and arresting protesters. However, the sheer number of arrests, the
adoption of harsher laws, and extensive government efforts to stop and prevent peaceful
public protests indicate a new concerted government effort to curtail political and civic
activism in the country.
Arrest and Imprisonment
Individuals arrested and imprisoned have included several high-ranking members of
opposition political parties, government critics who frequently blog or have large
followings on social media, and people who have been consistently involved in political
protests in Azerbaijan, which have increased since the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East
and North Africa.
TIGHTENING THE SCREWS 2
Activists in youth wings of political parties and the youth opposition movement NIDA have
been particular targets. NIDA, which means “exclamation mark” in Azeri, was founded in
2010 and campaigns for democratic reforms and the rule of law in Azerbaijan. From March
7 to April 1, 2013, police arrested seven NIDA members, claiming they were involved in an
alleged plan to instigate violence at a peaceful protest. Another NIDA board member and
two other youth activists were arrested on misdemeanor charges and had their heads
forcefully shaven while they served their brief jail terms. All are active Facebook and
Twitter users who frequently posted criticism about alleged government corruption and
human rights abuses.
Others who have been arrested or imprisoned include at least six journalists, two human
rights defenders who had worked on getting assistance to flood victims, one defender who
documented abuse in police custody, and a lawyer who tried to secure adequate
compensation for people forcibly evicted from their homes.
Bogus Charges and Other Due Process Irregularities
The authorities have used a range of misdemeanor and trumped-up criminal charges
against these activists, including narcotics and weapons possession charges, hooliganism,
incitement, and even treason. In many of the cases described in this report, Human Rights
Watch documented numerous irregularities as well as due process and other violations
that have marred the investigations and legal proceedings against the victims. Authorities
have in many cases denied defendants’ access to lawyers of their own choosing whilst in
detention. Courts have ordered defendants to be held on remand despite the absence of
any evidence justifying the need for pretrial detention. In 17 cases documented here, the
authorities did not adequately – if at all – investigate credible allegations of beatings,
threats, and other abuses.
In a vivid example of this, two days after the arrests of the first three NIDA members, nearly
all Azerbaijani television channels, including the state channel and the public broadcaster,
broadcast a police video of two of them allegedly confessing to a plan to use Molotov
cocktails at a street protest. The televised statements had been made while the activists
were in custody without access to their lawyers, and the statements gave the impression of
being coached, raising fears that the activists were coerced or threatened in order to give
3 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2013
false confessions. Yet the police did not effectively investigate allegations by several of the
detained NIDA activists that they were beaten or otherwise ill-treated in custody.
The Azerbaijani government also has a longstanding practice of pressing bogus drugs
charges against its critics, and it has used this method in the current crackdown. From May
2012 to May 2013 at least six government critics were arrested on charges of possession of
narcotics. In these cases, the defendants’ lawyers were not present during the searches
and could not access their clients for several days following their arrest. Furthermore,
during interrogations several of the men were questioned primarily about their political
activities rather than the allegations of possession of narcotics, further highlighting the
political nature of their prosecution.
Targeting of Journalists and Attacks on Freedom of Expression
State antagonism toward independent and opposition media has been a serious problem
in Azerbaijan for many years. In the past six years dozens of journalists have been
prosecuted and imprisoned or fined on defamation and other charges. Police and
sometimes unidentified assailants physically attacked journalists with impunity. In 2012
the authorities released several journalists who had been wrongfully imprisoned, and
there has been a sharp decline in criminal defamation suits pursued by the authorities.
However, since January 2013 at least six more journalists have been handed prison
sentences on spurious charges in apparent retaliation for doing their job of engaging in
critical and investigative journalism. We documented four cases taking place in February,
March, and April 2013 alone in which threats, smear campaigns, and violent attacks clearly
sought to silence critical journalists and a writer.
Since at least 2011 the Azerbaijani government has committed to decriminalize libel, a
promise for which it has received not insignificant praise. However, in May 2013 the
parliament of Azerbaijan expanded the definition of criminal slander and insult to
specifically include content “publicly expressed in internet resources.”
Targeting of NGOs
The crackdown has also affected NGOs. Azerbaijan has a large and vibrant community of
NGOs devoted to such public policy issues as human rights, corruption, democracy
promotion, revenue transparency, rule of law, ethnic minorities, and religious freedom.
TIGHTENING THE SCREWS 4
Legislative amendments adopted in February 2013, however, make it impossible for
unregistered groups to legally receive grants and donations. In recent years the authorities’
refusal to register several human rights groups and their closure and harassment of
several others demonstrates the government’s determination to interfere with NGOs in
order to restrict controversial work or criticism of the government.
The amendments also increased by fivefold fines for NGOs that receive funding from a
donor without concluding a grant agreement and registering it with the Ministry of Justice.
The amendments give the government greater latitude to exercise control over registered
groups while at the same time significantly restricting the ability of unregistered groups to
receive donations and grants. Human Rights Watch is concerned that the cumulative effect
of these factors will be to marginalize the activities of organizations that are outspoken,
challenge government policies, and/or work on controversial issues.
Restrictions on Freedom of Assembly
Another manifestation of the government’s crackdown has been severe limitations on
freedom of assembly. The Baku municipal authorities have implemented a blanket ban on
all opposition demonstrations in the city center since early 2006. The authorities have
broken up unsanctioned ones – often with violence – and have arrested and imprisoned
peaceful protestors, organizers, and participants. Our research shows that the
misdemeanor trials of those charged for involvement in unsanctioned protests are
perfunctory. In an effort to further limit the right to assembly, in November 2012 and May
2013 parliament adopted amendments to laws increasing by more than hundredfold the
fines for participating in and organizing unauthorized protests. Other amendments
increased the maximum jail sentence for minor public order offenses often used to
incarcerate protesters from 15 to 60 days.
What Should be Done?
The government of Azerbaijan should take immediate steps to ensure the release of
political activists, journalists, human rights defenders, and other civil society activists
held on politically motivated charges and end the use of trumped-up or spurious charges
to prosecute government critics.
5 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2013
The authorities should conduct prompt, thorough, impartial, and effective investigations to
end impunity for violence and threats of violence against journalists. The investigations
should be capable of leading to prosecutions of the assailants, as required under
Azerbaijan’s international obligations.
The government should also abolish criminal defamation laws, allow peaceful assemblies,
and repeal legislative changes establishing harsher penalties for the participants and
organizers of unsanctioned, peaceful protests.
The government should also take immediate steps to end any undue interference with the
freedom of the Azerbaijani people to form associations and revise the NGO law in line with
the recommendations made by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, particularly
ensuring that overly complicated registration requirements do not create undue obstacles
to freedom of association.
Under international law, and as a state party to both the European Convention on Human
Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Azerbaijani
government has specific legal obligations to protect the rights to freedom of expression,
assembly, and association. International human rights law recognizes those freedoms as
fundamental human rights, essential for both the effective functioning of a democratic
society and the protection of individual dignity. Any limitations to those rights must be
narrowly defined to serve a legitimate purpose and must be demonstrably necessary in a
democratic society. Furthermore, the European Court of Human Rights has consistently
made clear, including through four rulings against the government of Azerbaijan, that the
right “to form a legal entity in order to act collectively in a field of mutual interest is one of
the most important aspects of the right to freedom of association, without which that right
would be deprived of any meaning.”
For many years, and particularly since Azerbaijan became a member of the Council of
Europe in 2001, it has been receiving international assistance from multilateral and
bilateral donors, including the Council of Europe, the European Union, the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the United States, to meet its commitments on
freedom of expression, association, and assembly. While Azerbaijan’s international
partners have been critical of Baku’s serious shortcomings in meeting its commitments,
the criticism appears to have had little impact on these actors’ relationships with the
government, perhaps because most actors prioritize the country’s geostrategic importance
and hydrocarbon resources in their relations with it. Azerbaijan’s international partners
should set clear benchmarks for improvements on human rights if the international
community is to succeed in persuading Baku to respect its commitments under freedom of
expression, association, and assembly and should be prepared to impose concrete policy
consequences should those expectations not be met.

Find this story at 9 September 2013

© 2013 Human Rights Watch

 

 

From Mosques to Soccer Leagues: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spy Unit Targeting Muslims, Activists

Since 9/11, the New York City Police Department has established an intelligence operation that in some ways has been even more aggressive than the National Security Agency. At its core is a spying operation targeting Arab- and Muslim-Americans where they live, work and pray. The NYPD’s “Demographics Unit,” as it was known until 2010, has secretly infiltrated Muslim student groups, sent informants into mosques, eavesdropped on conversations in restaurants, barber shops and gyms, and built a vast database of information. The program was established with help from the CIA, which is barred from domestic spying. Just last month, it emerged the NYPD has labeled at least 50 Muslim organizations, including a dozen mosques, as terrorist groups. This has allowed them to carry out what are called “Terrorism Enterprise Investigations,” sending undercover informants into mosques to spy on worshipers and make secret recordings. We’re joined by the Pulitzer-winning duo who exposed the NYPD’s spy program, Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, co-authors of the new book, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” We’re also joined by Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, which was among the groups targeted by the NYPD.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: Yes, well, it’s been 12 years since the 9/11 attacks, but only now is a full picture emerging of what could be one of its most controversial legacies. In the aftermath of 9/11, the New York City Police Department established an intelligence operation that in some ways has even been even more aggressive than the National Security Agency. At its core, a spying operation targeting Muslim Americans, where they live, work, and pray. The NYPD’s demographics unit, as it was known until 2010, has a secretly infiltrated Muslim student groups, sent informants into mosques, eavesdropped on conversations and restaurants, barber shops, and gyms, and built a vast database of information on Muslim Americans. The program was established with help from the CIA, which is barred from spying on Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: Just last month, it emerged that the NYPD has labeled at least 50 Muslim organizations including a dozen mosques as terrorist groups. This has allowed them to carry out what are called terrorism enterprise investigations, sending undercover informants into mosques to spy on worshipers and make secret recordings. That news came just weeks after a group of Muslim Americans filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD’s spy program, alleging what they call unconstitutional religious profiling and suspicionless surveillance. At a news conference, plaintiff Asad Dandia described his run-in with the man who turned out to be a police informant.

ASAD DANDIA: In March of 2012, I was approached by a 19-year-old man. He came to me telling me that he was looking for spirituality, and that he was looking to change his ways. He said he had a very dark past and wanted to be a better practicing Muslim. So, I figured what better way to have him perform his obligations than to join this organization? In October of 2012 he released a public statement saying he was an informant for the NYPD. When I found out, I had a whole mixture of feelings. Number one, I was terrified and I was afraid for my family, especially my younger sisters who were exposed to all of this. I felt betrayed and hurt because someone I took in as a friend and brother was lying to me.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Asad Dandia, one of the plaintiffs in the suit by Muslim Americans against the NYPD for spying. Arguments in the case began last week. While the spy program has been intrusive, it has also been ineffective. The NYPD has even admitted that the demographics unit failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead. In a deposition last year, the commanding officer of the intelligence division, assistant NYPD chief, Thomas Galati, said “I could tell you that I have never made a lead from rhetoric that came from a Demographics report and I’m here since 2006. I don’t recall other ones prior to my arrival.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the NYPD spy program was first exposed in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Associated Press. Two lead reporters on the story have just come out the new book that expands on their ground breaking reporting. Their book is called, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” Co-authors Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman join us here in New York. They shared the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Matt, lay it out. Lay out this book for us. In a nutshell, how you got on this story, and what you found.

MATT APPUZO: Sure, well, our book really goes a lot deeper and a lot broader than we were able to do even in all the many stories we wrote for the AP. What we really focused on is how in the aftermath of 9/11, about how the NYPD working hand-in-hand with the CIA, built an intelligence apparatus that focuses on American citizens like no other police department in the country. This active-duty CIA officer and a retired CIA officer built in apparatus by which, you know, a sort of army of informants is out there and we have these demographics officers who their job is just to hang out in neighborhoods and listen for what people are talking about.

Some of what we have seen in these files, it’s a file says, we saw two men speaking at a cafe and they were talking about what they thought about the president’s state of the union address, and here’s what they thought. What do they think about drones, what do they think about foreign policy, what do they think about American policies toward civil liberties, you know, TSA. Are we too discriminatory against Muslims? All the stuff ends up in police files and their justification is, we need to know what the sentiment of these communities are so we can look for hotspots.

AARON MATÉ: Adam, talk to us about how this plays out. So, you have NYPD Commissioner, Ray Kelly, working with David Cohen from the CIA, and they set out to create basically a map of all New York’s ethnic neighborhoods?

ADAM GOLDMAN: Yeah, that’s right, I mean, that is what the demographics unit was doing. They wanted to literally map the human terrain of the five boroughs of New York. And they went beyond too, they went into Newark, they went into other places as well; Newark, New Jersey. So, they had this fear after 9/11, and they looked out into the Queens and Brooklyn and these other places where there were a lot of Muslim Americans and thought, we don’t know much about these communities and they looked, as an example, at people like Mohammed Atta, who was one of the 9/11 hijackers. Mohammed Atta had radicalized, he had grown more religious, and he was — he had given off the signals in front of the community, and they wanted to be in the communities in New York, so if there is anyone like Mohammed Atta, in fact anybody who was radicalizing they would have listening posts. They would have eyes and ears in the community to pick up on that.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the things you write about is how the undercover officers would go to the best Arab food restaurants, not coming up with leads, but because the food was good and just “spy” there.

ADAM GOLDMAN: We found a lot that these plainclothes officers working with the demographics unit were gravitating toward the better restaurants. There is a bakery, the Damascus Bakery in Brooklyn that serves excellent pastries. There is a kebab house in Flushing, Queens that serves excellent kebab. And what the commanding officer in charge of the demographics unit started to see was there were many reports being filed from similar locations. And how do spend you $40 at the pastry shop? And so, eventually, he determined they were going there, following these reports, simply because the food was good.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Appuzo, talk about the main players here. Talk about Larry Sanchez, talk about David Cohen who’d come from the CIA and went to the NYPD.

MATT APPUZO: Sure, Ray Kelly comes on board as police commissioner after 9/11, and says, look, we can’t rely solely on the federal government. And I think really smartly said, we can’t do business as usual. We need to start developing our own intelligence and have a better sense of what is going on in the city. So, the guy he hired to do that is a man named Dave Cohen, who we profile really deeply in the book, who made his career at the CIA, rose to the level of the deputy director for operations, basically a nation’s top spy.

So, he retired as the head of the clandestine service. And he was basically recruited out of retirement to start what is, basically a mini-CIA at the NYPD. One of Cohen’s first things, is he then calls down to the CIA and says, hey, I need an active-duty guy who can be my right-hand man. George tenet, the director of the CIA, sends Larry Sanchez to New York. And Larry is this very likable guy, skydiver, scuba diver, a guy’s guy, and he’s active duty, so he’s got a blue CIA badge. So, he can start the morning — early morning at the CIA station in New York and then kind of go over to the NYPD and he is directing domestic operations for NYPD and he is telling officers how to do collection or where to focus their efforts. And he really was the architect of the demographics unit. So, this guy, active-duty for the CIA, was really the intellectual father of the demographics unit.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We are speaking with the prize-winning reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, who have written the book, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” We will be back with them in a moment.

[Music]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, reporters for the Associated Press, co-authors of the brand-new book, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” We are also joined by Linda Sarsour. She is here in New York City, a leading Arab-American activist with the Arab American Association of New York, a national network for Arab American communities. I’m Amy Goodman with Aaron Maté.

AARON MATÉ: Well, before break, we were talking about Larry Sanchez who came to the NYPD from the CIA. Let’s turn to a part of a 2007 hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs that looked at the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts. This is, then Senator, Joe Lieberman questioning New York City Assistant Police Commissioner Larry Sanchez, the analyst who came to the NYPD from the CIA.

JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: I’m paraphrasing, but I think you said that the aim of this investigation and of the NYPD was not just to prevent terrorist attacks, obviously, post-9/11 in New York City, but to try to prevent — understand and then prevent the radicalization that leads to terrorist attacks. So, in the end of it, what are the steps that you come away with that you feel in this very usual area, unremarkable people, not on the screen of law enforcement — how do you begin to try to prevent the radicalization that leads to terrorism?

LARRY SANCHEZ: Let me try to answer this way; the key to it was, first, to understand it, and to start appreciating what most people would say would be noncriminal, would be innocuous, looking at behaviors that could easily be argued in a western democracy, especially in the United States, to be protected by First and Fourth Amendment rights, but not to look at them in a vacuum, but to look across to them as potential precursors to terrorism. New York City, of course, has created its own methods to be able to understand them better, to be able to identify them and to be able to make judgment calls if these are things that we need to worry about.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Larry Sanchez, testifying in 2007. Matt Apuzzo?

MATT APPUZO: Adam and I have watched that clip and read the transcript, I don’t know, dozens of times, and one of our great regrets is that this happened in 2007 and nobody, and including us, said, hey, that guy just got up and said stuff that is protected by the First Amendment shouldn’t be viewed as such and should be viewed as potential precursor to terrorism and that the NYPD has these sort of unspecified methods to decide how to ferret that out. I kind of watch that now, and I remember when that happened, and now I’m kind of like, how the heck did I not — how did the reporter in me not say, geez, well what are these methods? Why the heck did it take four years before…? You know, Adam and I look back now and we’re like, jeez, they told us they were doing this stuff, they told us — they laid it all out there. And why weren’t we as journalists, as a public, more skeptical and why weren’t we willing to ask more questions?

AMY GOODMAN: The FBI, Adam Goldman, and the NYPD were also competing with each other, so much so they were going to sue each other. Can you explain what was happening?

ADAM GOLDMAN: Well, there was enormous friction between the FBI and the NYPD, mainly the NYPD intelligence division. And these two outfits would sometimes not work in harmony. Mainly because Dave Cohen thought that the intelligence division and his detectives should go on their own. He didn’t want to be part of the part of what they called group think. So, they said, look, we’ll go out and we’re going to investigate and if we find something, we’;ll bring it to you. But, the problem with doing that is that, sometimes these investigations were in late stages and the FBI had concerns about how they had developed these cases. And it flared up in the newspaper. And in the end, the FBI felt like, look, you just can’t go out and do your own thing. We’re going to stop this, we got to work as a team and that is how you build — cooperation is how you build stronger cases.

AARON MATÉ: Matt, and the spying of course, also extended beyond the Muslim community. There’s reports in your book about spying on left-wing activists, on bicycle protests?

MATT APPUZO: Yeah, so, everybody remembers the bombing of the Times Square recruiting station. The pipe bomb, thankfully didn’t injure injure anyone, but it was 3:00 in the morning and blew out a window. Well, in the aftermath of that, the NYPD, and we’ve seen this in the files, the NYPD did an investigation were they said, you know, we have identified this blog that posts links to protests, news stories about protests and pictures of protests all around the world, confrontations, anarchist protests, radical protests, people throwing people throwing Molotov cocktails. That’s what this blog does, and they said, boy, that blog had a link up to a Fox news story about the Times Square bombing within three hours. And to the NYPD, the three hours seemed awfully quick. And so, they said, well, maybe that suggests that the guy who runs the blog knew in advance. And it turns out that at one point years earlier, one of the guys who ran the blog, this guy named Dennis Burke, he had ties to Critical Mass, the guys who ride the bikes, and Time’s Up New York, the protest group in New York City.

AMY GOODMAN: And friends of Brad Will.

MATT APPUZO: And friends of Brad Will, the group that wants to get to the bottom of the death of American journalists in Mexico. So, they actually open an investigation based on those facts. They open an investigation not only into Burke, but also into his associates in these other groups. And so, they infiltrated the Times Up guys, the Critical Mass guys, the Friends of Brad Will. They actually sent an undercover officer as part of this investigation out to the People’s Summit in New Orleans, which is a group of sort of anti-globalization groups, and the NYPD was there. Because of this investigation into the bombing, they actually put into the files, people who were organized — labor organizing for nannies, people who were talking about the Palestinian conflict with the Israelis, people who are writing newsletters from, sort of, left-wing organizations, this stuff that had no connection — nobody believed there was any connection to the bombing, but it just shows you how this stuff spirals away from its central focus.

AMY GOODMAN: Linda Sarsour, can you talk about, as your with the Arab-American Association of New York, how the investigations that the NYPD was conducting that Adam and Matt are describing, affected you and your community?

LINDA SARSOUR: So, Adam and Matt basically confirmed everything that our community already knew was happening, at least since immediately after 9/11. And the terrorist enterprise investigations that you heard also included, I believe, my organization. And what the NYPD wanted to do to my organization, they clearly lay this out in a secret document, they wanted to recruit a confidential informant to sit on my board. So, not only were they creating listening posts and going into our restaurants, coming to our events, coming — acting as clients in our organization, they wanted to actually have someone who would be a deciding figure on my board, have access donors, have access to information, access to financial information, and I think that we keep learning that the program is just more outrageous. And what it does is it creates psychological warfare in our community.

How am I supposed to know if the NYPD was successful in that endeavor? That’s number one. Number two is, the community, right now, is in a position where, how do we even know the guy next to us that’s praying at the mosque or the guy at the restaurant that’s like trying to open a conversation with us about something that is happening in Egypt, for example, and for those people who know, Arabs, particularly, we love to talk about politics. And a lot of our families came to the United States so we could have a place to practice our religion freely, to have our own political views, and now that we know that the NYPD wants to hear what our sentiment is, people probably don’t want to share their sentiment.

The most disturbing of all is our Muslim student association who are calling us to consult about how political should their events be. Now, when I was in college, I wanted my events to be as political as possible. And if they weren’t, I wanted to figure out how to make them controversial. And the fact that our students feel that they can’t do that because there are going to be NYPD informants, because they can be taken out of context and because they think that something like what happened to Fahad Hashmi is going to happen to them, I think it is a valid concern.

So, I’m a New Yorker and I hope others are outraged to know that the New York Police Department is spying on innocent Americans in their neighborhood. The last point that I want to make is that these terrorist investigations, what happens is, is that if they open one, anyone who comes into that facility that’s under investigation is subject to that investigation. So, if my organization has this terrorist enterprise investigation, that means every client, every staff member, every family member, every vendor that we work with is subject to this investigation by the New York Police Department.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about the NYPD Soccer League.

LINDA SARSOUR: A program that the NYPD touts as a community outreach program, and something we that believed as a community we were involved in because we wanted to get kids off the street, we wanted kids to play sports and it was organized sports competition between kids from different boroughs. It was fun. We joined, as the Arab American Association of New York. We had a team, Brooklyn United. In 2009 we beat the Turks from Queens, and it was great, and it was fun, and we have a huge trophy from the New York Police Department. What we learned later learned through secret documents is that the New York Police Department was using a sports league — now imagine that your child is part of this league and is being spied on by the New York Police Department. And what the New York Police Department did is they actually mapped out for you two different documents. One was, where did the South Asians play cricket and watch cricket, and where did the Arabs play soccer and watch soccer? For those of you who know soccer, Arabs are not the only ones that play soccer. Definitely not in New York City anyway.

So, I feel the information just gets more outrageous that even something as simple as sports, as playing soccer, is something that is under the terrain of the New York Police Department, that our kids were subject to intelligence gathering and spying by the New York Police Department when all they wanted to do was beat some people or some other kids in another borough. And I think our kids, right now, you know, their families are like what’s this. How am I supposed to explain to them that I didn’t know, that I was not — that I had no intention of subjecting their children to intelligence gathering by the New York Police Department? And so, I personally get put in a situation that Commissioner Kelly and his people put us in. And actually the Arab officers who worked in the Community Affairs Department, I don’t know if they knew, but if they did know, shame on them for allowing us to be a part of something where they knew had ultimate if reasons.

AARON MATÉ: Now, Linda, hear in New York, there is obviously a lot of public protest against stop-and-frisk. How has it been to organize resistance to this spying on your community? What are you finding in terms of the public’s perception to this program?

LINDA SARSOUR: In New York right now, and I think in the country as a whole, I think that you’ll find it is more likely for people to say, oh, stopping 685,000 blacks and Latino young people, that’s a little racist, you know, that’s kind of a little too much. I think we’re finding more people, and I’m part of the stop-and-frisk movement as a person who is not black or Latino. So, I’ve seen that sentiment. But, with the spying, it has been hard to get people to understand that it is the same thing. They are both discriminatory policies that target communities of color. No matter what way somebody tries to explain it to me.

The problem with our movement is that it’s framed in the sense of personal security, so people are like, well, if you are not doing anything wrong, what’s the problem? What’s the inconvenience of some guy who listens to, like, your conversations. And I think that’s where the fundamental principles of who we are as Americans and what our rights are, right to privacy — I shouldn’t have to worry about working in an organization that — that’s infiltrated by the New York Police Department. I hope no one else has to worry about that. But, it’s been a little difficult for us to organize around this, but continue to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking to MSNBC last month, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly responded to the report by our guests Matt Appuzo and Adam Goldman that the NYPD has labeled mosques as terrorist organizations. Kelly insisted the NYPD’s operations are legal.

RAYMOND KELLY: I haven’t seen the story, but they’re hyping a book coming out next week. Actually, the book is based on a compilation of about 50 articles that two AP reporters did on the department. It’s a reflection of the articles and the book will be a fair amount of fiction, it will be half-truths, it will be lots of quotes from unnamed sources. And our sin is to have the temerity, the chutzpah, to go into the federal government’s territory of counter-terrorism and trying to protect the city by supplementing what the federal government has done.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: You do agree that entire mosques should not be labeled terrorist organizations, right?

RAYMOND KELLY: Absolutely, of course, of course. And again, we do according to law, what we are investigating, and how we investigated is now pursuant to a federal judge’s direction.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who is reportedly one of the people being considered to head the Department of Homeland Security. Adam Goldman, there was a lot there, accusations that your reports are fiction and based on unnamed sources. Go ahead.

ADAM GOLDMAN: Well, one of the things we tried to do with this book that the NYPD doesn’t do is we tried to be incredibly transparent. If Ray Kelly gets the chance, he can read the book, he’ll find that many people spoke on record about what the NYPD was doing. Named individuals, including Hector Berdecia who ran the demographics unit. Another thing we tried to do is end note all these secret documents that were leaked to us so the reader themselves can go and look at the end note and then go to our website, enemieswithinbook.com, and read the secret files them self, and come to their own conclusions. So we lay all that out and in an effort to be completely transparent. The book is, as The Wall Street Journal said, assiduously reported. The other point I’d like to make about Ray’s comments is that he won’t engage with us on the book and he’s never engaged with us either on the book or our reporting. And Matt and I went to great lengths in the book to make a good case for why the NYPD felt like they needed these programs in the aftermath of 9/11.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the head of the demographics unit who then came to be completely disturbed about what his unit was doing.

ADAM GOLDMAN: Yeah, he was guy, he was a legendary narcotics detective. I mean, he was taking down drug dealers, taking guns off the streets. He was also a military reservist.

AMY GOODMAN: His name?
>> Hector Berdecia. And after 9/11, he spent time in Iraq and he was there post-invasion. And he came back to New York and they offered him this job to run this secretive unit that he was unfamiliar with. And he took this job. And he felt that, you know, hey, there are bad guys in New York, there are bad guys in New York, there’s Al Qaeda in New York, and he believed it. He, himself, had said himself he sort of drank the Kool-Aid. As he went on running this unit, he began to get frustrated and he began to see that he had really talented detectives, right, with really great language skills, right, and they weren’t making any cases. It was just and effective way — it was more about effectiveness, is this an effective way to use resources of talented police investigators? These were guys who are used to putting bad guys in jail, right? Taking drugs off the street, taking guns off the streets. Guns kill people. And he, instead, was writing intelligence reports about what people think of the state of the union address. And eventually, I think he got frustrated and disillusioned with the program.

AARON MATÉ: Matt, can you talk about the issue of oversight? First of all, this raises a lot of civil rights issues. Has there been a response from White House or from the Justice Department? And then also talk about what kind of oversight exists here in the city.

AMY GOODMAN: Right, and what — is this happening now?

MATT APPUZO: Everything that we talk about in the book, with the exception of a few sort of ancillary programs, but the core of the book, to our knowledge, is still happening now. Fascinating the issue of oversight, the NYPD gets money from the City Council every year, obviously, the City Council never held a hearing to actually look into the intelligence division’s programs. They have never been subjected to an audit. The intelligence division gets money from the White House under a drug trafficking grant. The White House says, we don’t have any — we don’t know what the money is used for. You can’t hold us to account with what the NYPD does with our money. Congress has funded these programs. They don’t know, they’re not equipped to know, they don’t ask. Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have spent $1 billion, $2 billion at the NYPD since 9/11. They say they don’t know what goes on, and the way the grants are set up they they don’t have the ability to know.

There is essentially, no outside oversight at the NYPD intelligence division. The programs are opened in house. They don’t have to be approved by a judge, they don’t have to be approved by a prosecutor. Kelly likes to talk about we have all the federal prosecutors and the district attorney, but they don’t actually decide when the Intel division can open the case. So there isn’t the kind of outside review that you would see at the CIA or the FBI. And, you know what, from our standpoint, the lack of transparency, the fact this was all done in secret with no public airing, was really what drove us to write this book, because you can’t — people can’t give their informed consent to a program that they don’t know exists, they don’t know what they’re giving up, they don’t know what they’re getting in exchange.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, as we come to the end of this conversation, Najibullah Zazi, of course, a key figure in your book?

MATT APPUZO: The book, in its essence, is a thriller book, I mean, it’s a chase. This is essentially 48 hours inside New York City as the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States tries to unravel the most serious Al Qaeda plot since 9/11, inside the United States, three young men led by Najibullah Zazi, with a bomb, bearing down on the New York City subways, had this been successful, it would caused hundreds if not thousands of fatalities. And we take a real hard look, a real critical look — or we think a thorough look, at what works and what doesn’t. And what we found is at every opportunity, that Zazi is interacts with these intelligence programs of the NYPD Intelligence Division, the [Unintelligible].

AARON MATÉ: They were in his neighborhood.

MATT APPUZO: They were in his neighborhood, they were in his mosque, they had turned his Imam into a cooporative, they had an undercover in his mosque, they were in his co-conspirator student group, they were in all the restaurants in his neighborhood, they were in the travel agency where he bought tickets to go to Pakistan — the train. This was not a failure of resources and manpower.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened?

MATT APPUZO: Well, they didn’t — they missed him. Well, you have to read the book to find out how they stop him, come on. The subways don’t blow up, so the real rush is good collaboration, good cooperation is what saves the day.

AMY GOODMAN: And Adam, what most surprised you in doing this series of articles? You did scores of articles, and of course, the book is more than the compilation of the articles.

ADAM GOLDMAN: I think what most surprised us is while we were doing the series that led to the Pulitzer, we knew they were in the mosques and we knew they had informants in the mosques, they had under covers in the mosques. And Ray said, well, we’re just following leads, and this is all legal. That’s been Ray’s — that’s Ray’s phrase, it’s all legal. And we didn’t really didn’t understand how is this all legal. How can you just be a mosque?

AMY GOODMAN: People might be surprised that the CIA is involved in local surveillance.

ADAM GOLDMAN: Right, right. Then while we were reporting at the book we obtained documents this is how they were doing it. We learned about the terrorism enterprise investigation. And so, now, holistically, we understood, oh, right, so, they open this investigation on sometimes reed-thin suspicions and they use that to gather their intelligence on these mosques — the leadership of the mosques for years and years and years and years. They never made a terrorism enterprise case. And by designating the mosque a terrorism enterprise, they could send in their informants and undercovers, you now, they send in people with spy gadgets, listening devices in their watches and their [] and that was really extraordinary. I want to make a point —- one last point about Ray, and why we make the -—

AMY GOODMAN: Ray Kelly, the Commissioner.

ADAM GOLDMAN: Ray Kelly, and why we wrote this book. We’re not questioning Ray Kelly’s patriotism, and we’re not questioning his authority as Police Chief to keep this city better. I guess what we’re doing is, and maybe to use one of Ray’s words, is it’s chutzpah. I guess we have the chutzpah to ask questions about what the police department is doing and whether these tactics work.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there, but we will continue to talk to you as you continue to uncover what is taking place. I want to thank you both for being with us, and congratulations on your Pulitzer for your series of articles. The new book is, “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.” Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman. And thank you so much, Linda Sarsour; Arab American Association of New York and the National Network for Arab American Communities. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we look at a terrorist attack that occurred 50 years ago this past Sunday. It was September 15, 1963, and it happened in the Birmingham Baptist Church. Four little girls were the fatalities. We’re going to speak to the fifth who did not die, but lost her eye. We’ll go to Birmingham, Alabama. Stay with us.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

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CIA Warned Tunisia of Threat to Brahmi, According to Leaked Document

Tunisian newspaper Al Maghreb published a document Saturday that appears to contain details of intelligence obtained by the Ministry of Interior prior to the assassination of opposition politician Mohamed Brahmi. The memo from the ministry’s National Security Administration states that the Foreign Security Administration received a letter from someone in the United States Central Intelligence Agency about a potential threat to Brahmi. More on Mohamed Brahmi:Ministry of Interior Received Warning of Brahmi Threat Prior to AssassinationTunisian Media Ethics Questioned in Coverage of Brahmi AssassinationWho’s Who: Mohamed Brahmi Communication between the two offices included information about the possible targeting of National Constituent Assembly (NCA) member Mohamed Brahmi by “Salafist members” but there were no “further clarifications,” according to the memo. The document obtained by Al Maghreb is signed by the director general of national security Mustapha Ben Amor and dated July 15, ten days before Brahmi’s assassination. Release of the document follows Minister of the Interior Lotfi Ben Jeddou’s Friday announcement that the ministry received information of a threat to Brahmi’s life from an “external” security source. According to the document, Tunisian public security, intelligence, and counter-terrorism administrations were informed of the potential threat “in order to take the necessary procedures.” Brahmi was shot outside his home on July 25, the second assassination of an opposition politician this year. Chokri Belaid was killed in February.

16 September 2013 10:37 am | Alexandra Hartmann |

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The document

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Snowden Documents Reveal NSA Gave Israeli Spies Raw Emails, Texts, Calls of Innocent Americans

Despite assurances from President Obama, the scandal around the National Security Agency continues to grow. The Guardian reports the NSA has routinely passed raw intelligence to Israel about U.S. citizens. “The NSA was sharing what they call raw signals intelligence, which includes things like who you are calling and when you are calling, the content of your phone call, the text of your emails, your text messages, your chat messages,” says Alex Abdo of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It sounds like all of that was handed over.” Abdo also discusses the ACLU’s successful fight to force the government to declassify documents that show the NSA wrongly put 16,000 American phone numbers on an “alert list.”
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday the National Security Agency routinely has passed raw intelligence to Israel without first removing details about U.S. citizens. Documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of a secret intelligence-sharing agreement between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart, that shows the U.S. government handed over intercepted communications containing phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

Meanwhile, newly declassified documents show the NSA wrongly put 16,000 phone numbers on an “alert list” so their incoming calls could be monitored in violation of court-ordered privacy protections.

AMY GOODMAN: When the NSA notified the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the error, Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wrote, quote, “The court is exceptionally concerned about what appears to be a flagrant violation of its order in this matter.” The documents were declassified after a long fight with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union that filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit two years ago.

In other NSA news, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is facing pressure at home to cancel an upcoming state visit to the White House after documents leaked by Snowden revealed the NSA had hacked into the computer networks of Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras. On Wednesday, President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, met with Brazilian Foreign Minister Luiz Alberto in an attempt to smooth relations between the countries.

To talk more about all of these latest developments, we’re joined by Alex Abdo. He is staff attorney at the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Alex, let’s take these in order. The information about the NSA, the U.S. intelligence agency, handing over raw data that it’s collected—legally or illegally, I think remains to be determined—to Israel, can you explain what’s taken place?

ALEX ABDO: It’s difficult to explain. And it’s, you know, of course, not surprising that the NSA is sharing foreign intelligence with our intelligence partners, but what’s troubling is that along with the foreign intelligence is information about innocent Americans that hasn’t been taken out of the data that’s being shared with our intelligence partners. And it’s troubling for a couple of reasons, the first of which, we haven’t known about this, and this may have been going on for years, and the second of which, there’s no avenue for Americans, innocent Americans who are swept up into these dragnets and have their information handed over to our intelligence partners, to stop that flow of information, to assert their rights and prevent it. So this has been going on for some time, it seems, and it raises new questions about the NSA’s—the extent to which we should trust the NSA with information, very sensitive, about innocent Americans.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what limitations were placed on the information that was—that was handed over to the Israelis, in terms of what they could do with it or how long they could hold it?

ALEX ABDO: Well, based on the documents that were released, it seems as though we basically had a “trust us” regime in place for the sharing of data with Israel. And that’s cold comfort, I think, to the potentially thousands or millions of Americans who find their way into these international surveillance dragnets of the NSA. But there’s simply no way of knowing right now how many Americans were affected, how the information was used, or what other measures the NSA may have taken or may not have taken to protect our privacy.

AMY GOODMAN: And what the information was that was handed over, is it the actual—is it the metadata of phone calls, who you called, when you called them? Is it the actual phone call?

ALEX ABDO: It sounds as though it was all of that. The NSA was sharing what they call raw signals intelligence, which includes things like who you’re calling and when you’re calling, but also the content of your phone calls, the text of your emails, your text messages, your chat messages. It sounds as though all of that was handed over in what they call this raw intelligence.

AMY GOODMAN: And who was targeted?

ALEX ABDO: It’s hard to say. It sounds as though the information sharing was indiscriminate, that they handed over large amounts of information without actually targeting at the outset, and allowing the Israeli analog to the NSA to then scour this information for what was useful. And like I said, they, you know, apparently had in place a clause asking Israel not to abuse this information, but there really didn’t seem to be any legally enforceable way to prevent Americans’ privacy from being violated in the course of this intelligence sharing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, the documents you have referred to appear between 2006 and 2009, which would be the tail end of the Bush administration, but your battle to get access to the documents occurred during the Obama administration. Can you talk about that battle to be able to get these documents released?

ALEX ABDO: Sure. In 2011, two senators, Senators Wyden and Udall, started raising red flags, warnings to America about a secret interpretation that the government was relying on to collect an extraordinary amount of information about innocent Americans. And on the heels of that discussion, the ACLU and other organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed requests with the government for these secret interpretations of law. And the Obama administration, which had come into power on a promise of a new era of transparency, fought bitterly to keep these documents secret for years. And they were—it’s actually a bit ironic. In the midst of the disclosures, Obama was in the course of defending very vigorously in court extreme secrecy about these very same documents that were released two days ago. So, it’s—the secrecy was troubling. The fact that they’re now public is a good first step toward greater transparency, but this is information that did not come easily out of the Obama administration.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the documents released was a March 2nd, 2009, court order written by Judge Reggie Walton, now the presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Walton writes of the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records, quote, “To approve such a program, the Court must have every confidence that the government is doing its utmost to ensure that those responsible for implementation fully comply with the Court’s orders. The Court no longer has such confidence.” This is the judge.

ALEX ABDO: This is extremely troubling, and it should be very disturbing. We have trusted for years a secret and one-sided judicial process to safeguard Americans’ right to privacy when it comes to NSA surveillance. And the disclosures over the past few months have confirmed that we shouldn’t trust that system to safeguard our right to privacy. And at the end of the day, the battle is between a system in which the NSA is required to go to court to engage in lawful surveillance versus the system that it has now, where it rarely has to go to court to spy even on innocent Americans. And we shouldn’t have confidence in that system, and now we know that there are even more reasons than we suspected not to have confidence in the system. But at the end of the day, that’s the debate, whether the NSA, when it wants to spy on Americans, should be forced to go to a court to justify that spying. The NSA hasn’t been doing that for years, and we need to change that, to force the NSA to justify its surveillance in court.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Of course, President Obama has been justifying that surveillance. I want to turn to a clip from him speaking last month about the leaks by Edward Snowden.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If you look at the reports, even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden’s put forward, all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and, you know, listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails. What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now, part of the reason they’re not abused is because these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What about President Obama’s claim that the checks are in place?

ALEX ABDO: Well, I think it’s quite obvious now that the checks are not in place, that the very authorities that the government says are carefully overseen by the secret court in D.C. and by regulators within the intelligence communities are failing, that there are violations of even these very permissive rules. But at the end—you know, a core problem is not just that there are violations, but that the law authorizes an extraordinary amount of surveillance in the first place. And that underlying authorization is far too broad. It allows the NSA to engage in a form of dragnet surveillance of even Americans’ communications, that’s not tied to a particular investigation. It’s not tied to a particular terrorist plot that the NSA is trying to stop. That, I think, is the most troubling aspect of these revelations, is that these powers are simply too broad, to begin with.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, the Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, responded to critics who have accused Internet companies of working with the NSA. During an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, she was asked why tech companies had not simply decided to tell the public more about what the NSA was doing.

MARISSA MAYER: We can’t talk about those things.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Why?

MARISSA MAYER: Because they’re classified.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: What is—I mean, why?

MARISSA MAYER: And so—so, I mean—just to—

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Let’s just say, look, right now you were just to tell us the truth about what’s going on, the stuff that’s classified, like what do you think would happen to you?

MARISSA MAYER: I mean, releasing classified information is treason.

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: And then what happens?

MARISSA MAYER: Just generally, and you—you know, incarcerated.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Marissa Mayer. She is the head of Yahoo. Alex Abdo?

ALEX ABDO: You know, Ms. Mayer is correct that there are extraordinary limits on what these companies can say, but it’s not correct to say that they can’t be doing more to protect the privacy of their users. There are a number of steps that these companies can take and should take, and Yahoo recently took one of those steps in joining Google and Microsoft in pushing the secret court in D.C. to allow them to say more about the government surveillance. Those companies want to be able to tell the public how many Americans are affected by the government’s surveillance, the numbers of court orders they get to turn over this information, and, very generally, the type of information they’re being asked to turn over. That’s all information that the government should allow these companies to disclose. It would allow Americans to better understand the surveillance that’s taking place in our name, and it would allow us to make a decision for ourselves whether the surveillance is lawful and whether it’s necessary.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Not only that, but I think there is a—as I’ve said before on this show, there is a conflict between the economic needs of these companies, because they’re all global companies, and no matter what happens in the United States, this is going to affect their businesses in other parts of the world as more and more countries decide you can’t trust American technology companies to use their search engines or use their products if they are allowing the government to serveil not only American citizens, but people around the world, so that it seems to me there’s a need to meet the needs of their own shareholders, the business interests of the company, to oppose these kind of government policies.

ALEX ABDO: I think that’s right. We’re putting our American companies at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to their business. They’re being forced to compete with companies outside the U.S. that aren’t receiving these NSA surveillance orders. But it’s important to note, too, that these companies can do more to protect the privacy of their consumers, even when they are not allowed to talk about the surveillance of the NSA. They can put in place technological fixes that allow users to trust their services more. And we’re starting to see that type of a response by the tech industry. They’re starting to compete over privacy. One of Microsoft’s—for example, its new campaigns is “Don’t get Scroogled.” It’s their way of competing against Google’s skimming of our emails for ad tracking. And as Americans, I think, come to appreciate the value of our privacy and the vastness of the information we trust with these companies, they’ll come to demand greater assurances from the Googles and the Microsofts and the Yahoos.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us, and just end with what surprised you most by all of these revelations that have come out from Ed Snowden. I mean, the president says this debate has—would have happened anyway. You’re a longtime—and certainly the ACLU has been deeply concerned about civil liberties issues. Would it have happened anyway? And what have you found most shocking in the last few months?

ALEX ABDO: I don’t think this transparency would have happened. This is an involuntary debate that the administration is now welcoming after the fact, and it’s a long overdue one. And one of the things that has shocked me the most, I think, is, in reading these documents, to see how much information is kept secret that should never have been kept secret in the first place. Americans deserve to be a part of this conversation, but they’re being kept out of it by unnecessary overclassification of this information.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks so much, Alex Abdo, staff attorney at the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

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NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans’ data with Israel

The agreement for the US to provide raw intelligence data to Israel was reached in principle in March 2009, the document shows. Photograph: James Emery

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process “minimization”, but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing.

The five-page memorandum, termed an agreement between the US and Israeli intelligence agencies “pertaining to the protection of US persons”, repeatedly stresses the constitutional rights of Americans to privacy and the need for Israeli intelligence staff to respect these rights.

But this is undermined by the disclosure that Israel is allowed to receive “raw Sigint” – signal intelligence. The memorandum says: “Raw Sigint includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

According to the agreement, the intelligence being shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove US communications. “NSA routinely sends ISNU [the Israeli Sigint National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection”, it says.

Although the memorandum is explicit in saying the material had to be handled in accordance with US law, and that the Israelis agreed not to deliberately target Americans identified in the data, these rules are not backed up by legal obligations.

“This agreement is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law,” the document says.

In a statement to the Guardian, an NSA spokesperson did not deny that personal data about Americans was included in raw intelligence data shared with the Israelis. But the agency insisted that the shared intelligence complied with all rules governing privacy.

“Any US person information that is acquired as a result of NSA’s surveillance activities is handled under procedures that are designed to protect privacy rights,” the spokesperson said.

The NSA declined to answer specific questions about the agreement, including whether permission had been sought from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court for handing over such material.

The memorandum of understanding, which the Guardian is publishing in full, allows Israel to retain “any files containing the identities of US persons” for up to a year. The agreement requests only that the Israelis should consult the NSA’s special liaison adviser when such data is found.

Notably, a much stricter rule was set for US government communications found in the raw intelligence. The Israelis were required to “destroy upon recognition” any communication “that is either to or from an official of the US government”. Such communications included those of “officials of the executive branch (including the White House, cabinet departments, and independent agencies), the US House of Representatives and Senate (member and staff) and the US federal court system (including, but not limited to, the supreme court)”.

It is not clear whether any communications involving members of US Congress or the federal courts have been included in the raw data provided by the NSA, nor is it clear how or why the NSA would be in possession of such communications. In 2009, however, the New York Times reported on “the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip”.

The NSA is required by law to target only non-US persons without an individual warrant, but it can collect the content and metadata of Americans’ emails and calls without a warrant when such communication is with a foreign target. US persons are defined in surveillance legislation as US citizens, permanent residents and anyone located on US soil at the time of the interception, unless it has been positively established that they are not a citizen or permanent resident.

Moreover, with much of the world’s internet traffic passing through US networks, large numbers of purely domestic communications also get scooped up incidentally by the agency’s surveillance programs.

The document mentions only one check carried out by the NSA on the raw intelligence, saying the agency will “regularly review a sample of files transferred to ISNU to validate the absence of US persons’ identities”. It also requests that the Israelis limit access only to personnel with a “strict need to know”.

Israeli intelligence is allowed “to disseminate foreign intelligence information concerning US persons derived from raw Sigint by NSA” on condition that it does so “in a manner that does not identify the US person”. The agreement also allows Israel to release US person identities to “outside parties, including all INSU customers” with the NSA’s written permission.

Although Israel is one of America’s closest allies, it is not one of the inner core of countries involved in surveillance sharing with the US – Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. This group is collectively known as Five Eyes.

The relationship between the US and Israel has been strained at times, both diplomatically and in terms of intelligence. In the top-secret 2013 intelligence community budget request, details of which were disclosed by the Washington Post, Israel is identified alongside Iran and China as a target for US cyberattacks.

While NSA documents tout the mutually beneficial relationship of Sigint sharing, another report, marked top secret and dated September 2007, states that the relationship, while central to US strategy, has become overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of Israel.

“Balancing the Sigint exchange equally between US and Israeli needs has been a constant challenge,” states the report, titled ‘History of the US – Israel Sigint Relationship, Post-1992′. “In the last decade, it arguably tilted heavily in favor of Israeli security concerns. 9/11 came, and went, with NSA’s only true Third Party [counter-terrorism] relationship being driven almost totally by the needs of the partner.”

In another top-secret document seen by the Guardian, dated 2008, a senior NSA official points out that Israel aggressively spies on the US. “On the one hand, the Israelis are extraordinarily good Sigint partners for us, but on the other, they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems,” the official says. “A NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] ranked them as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”

Later in the document, the official is quoted as saying: “One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel. There are parameters on what NSA shares with them, but the exchange is so robust, we sometimes share more than we intended.”

The memorandum of understanding also contains hints that there had been tensions in the intelligence-sharing relationship with Israel. At a meeting in March 2009 between the two agencies, according to the document, it was agreed that the sharing of raw data required a new framework and further training for Israeli personnel to protect US person information.

It is not clear whether or not this was because there had been problems up to that point in the handling of intelligence that was found to contain Americans’ data.

However, an earlier US document obtained by Snowden, which discusses co-operating on a military intelligence program, bluntly lists under the cons: “Trust issues which revolve around previous ISR [Israel] operations.”

The Guardian asked the Obama administration how many times US data had been found in the raw intelligence, either by the Israelis or when the NSA reviewed a sample of the files, but officials declined to provide this information. Nor would they disclose how many other countries the NSA shared raw data with, or whether the Fisa court, which is meant to oversee NSA surveillance programs and the procedures to handle US information, had signed off the agreement with Israel.

In its statement, the NSA said: “We are not going to comment on any specific information sharing arrangements, or the authority under which any such information is collected. The fact that intelligence services work together under specific and regulated conditions mutually strengthens the security of both nations.

“NSA cannot, however, use these relationships to circumvent US legal restrictions. Whenever we share intelligence information, we comply with all applicable rules, including the rules to protect US person information.”

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian, Wednesday 11 September 2013 15.40 BST

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Read the NSA and Israel’s ‘memorandum of understanding’

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Israel’s secret intel unit spawns high-tech tycoons

TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 9 (UPI) — The Israeli military’s top-secret Unit 8200, the Jewish state’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, has spawned a generation of high-tech start-ups and more technology millionaires than many business schools, and these days the cyber security sector is booming.

Unit 8200 is now the Israeli military’s biggest branch in manpower terms. It has grown swiftly in recent years as cyberwarfare has become one of the major security threats to military organizations and industrialized states whose vital infrastructure is vulnerable to cyberattack.

But Unit 8200 remains the most secretive of Israel’s military units. Even the name of its commander is a state secret, as is its annual budget .

It has a major, highly secure base in the Negev Desert south of Tel Aviv. But little is known about its work in what’s known as signals intelligence, intercepting and analyzing other forces’ communications and data traffic from mobile phones chatter and emails to flight paths and electronic signals.

Unlike other branches of the Israeli military, virtually all its research and development is conducted in-house by its huge cadre of engineers, programmers and technicians.

Unit 8200 headhunts the brightest students from high schools and colleges, and there seems to be no shortage of volunteers.

So it’s no surprise that many veterans of Unit 8200 — invariably known as “eight-two hundred” — have been behind a host of successful high-tech start-ups in the commercial sector after they leave the service.

These enterprises provide a unique contribution to Israel’s high-tech sector, widely recognized as one of the most advanced in the world.

The country’s high-tech exports total an estimated $25 billion a year, a quarter of Israel’s exports.

The high-tech sector currently boasts 5,000 companies that employ 230,000 people and earn

Recent Israeli success in the field include the Zisapel brothers, Yehuda and Zonhar, who sold and floated a dozen companies for hundreds of millions of dollars; and Yair Cohen, a former brigadier general who once commanded Unit 8200, who heads the intelligence cyberdivision of Elbit Systems, a major defense company.

Then there’s Aharon Zeevi Farkash, another former Unit 8200 chief, founder and chief executive of FST21, which employs a mix of technologies, combining hardware and software to suit specific needs that are in the hands of young men and women hardly out of their teens.

Yossi Vardi, who founded Israel’s first software company in 1969, says “more high-tech millionaires have been created from 8200 than from any business school in the country.”

Israeli tech firms like Nice, Converse and Check Point were all set up by Unit 8200 alumni or based on technology developed by the unit which cyber insiders say is in some cases decades ahead of the U.S. and Europe

A measure of these companies’ success is that many are bought out by the titans of the field.

IBM announced in August that it’s buying Trusteer, a privately owned Israeli cloud-based cybersecurity software provider whose customers include many of the largest banks in the United States and Britain.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. But the Financial Times reported that IBM, which will form a cybersecurity software laboratory in Israel with more than 200 researchers from both companies, is believed to be forking up $800 million-$1 billion for Trusteer.

The Israeli outfit says its equipment can identify security threats that escape more traditional security software.

Trusteer software is designed to help ensure that bank customers can safely transfer funds on mobile devices by detecting malware that can infect a smartphone, allowing the bank to prevent fraudulent transactions taking place.

“The way organizations protect data are quickly evolving,” observed Trusteer’s chief executive, Mickey Boodaei, who founded the firm in 2006.

“As attacks become more sophisticated, traditional approaches to securing enterprise and mobile data are no longer valid.”

Unit 8200’s success as an incubator for Israel’s high-tech venture is likely to grow since under the military’s new strategic plan it’s downsizing conventional land, sea and air forces to meet the challenges of a new era of warfare with more agile, technology-oriented forces.

Farkash says 8200’s alumni are so successful because its organizational ethos encourages out-of-the-box thinking.

“We’re very tolerant of mistakes,” he explains. “It’s impossible to be creative when fear leads you.”

Published: Sept. 9, 2013 at 11:51 AM
TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 9 (UPI) —

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© 2013 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Ex-Mossad-Agent; Israel zahlt Schweigegeld an Familie von Häftling X

Ben Zygier war ein Mossad-Agent, der Geheimnisse an Israels Feinde weitergab. Während der Isolationshaft erhängte sich der Spion. Die genauen Umstände seiner Haft will Jerusalem unter keinen Umständen preisgeben – und bezahlt Zygiers Familie für ihr Schweigen.

Tel Aviv – Einer der spektakulärsten Justizfälle der israelischen Geschichte hat ein finanzielles Nachspiel. Israels Regierung will die Familie des sogenannten Häftling X mit vier Millionen Schekel entschädigen – umgerechnet etwa 842.000 Euro.

Das Geld fließt an die Familie des früheren Mossad-Agenten Ben Zygier. Der australisch-israelische Doppelstaatsbürger hatte jahrelang für den Geheimdienst gearbeitet, war dann aber Anfang 2010 verhaftet worden. Nach Erkenntnissen des SPIEGEL hatte Zygier Informationen an die libanesische Hisbollah-Miliz weitergegeben, die zur Verhaftung zweier Mossad-Agenten im Libanon führten.

Zygier wurde in der Hochsicherheitsanstalt Ajalon im israelischen Ramle in Einzelhaft unter Videoüberwachung gehalten. Das Gefängnispersonal kannte weder seinen Namen noch den Grund für seine Haft. Trotz der Überwachung konnte er sich im Dezember 2010 in seiner Zelle erhängen. Eine Untersuchungsrichterin hatte daher im April festgestellt, dass Zygier nicht ausreichend überwacht worden sei. Der Fall wurde erst Jahre später durch australische Medienberichte publik.

“Ihr werdet schweigen, wir werden bezahlen”

Israels Regierung betont, dass die nun getroffene Einigung mit den Hinterbliebenen kein Eingeständnis eines “vorgeblichen Fehlverhaltens” sei. Vielmehr solle vermieden werden, die Angelegenheit vor Gericht zu bringen, weil dann Einzelheiten an die Öffentlichkeit kämen und die nationale Sicherheit ernsten Schaden nehmen können.

Zygiers Familie hat sich zu Stillschweigen verpflichtet. “Ihr werdet schweigen, wir werden bezahlen”, titelte die israelische Tageszeitung “Jedioth Achronoth” am Mittwoch. Die Hinterbliebenen von Häftling X hatten direkt mit dem Büro des Premierministers Benjamin Netanjahu und dem Justizministerium verhandelt.

Jahrelang war die Familie über die Umstände des Todes falsch informiert worden. Den Hinterbliebenen wurde erzählt, dass Zygier als Mossad-Agent hinter feindlichen Linien ums Leben gekommen war.

11. September 2013, 13:06 Uhr

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© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

Prisoner X: Israel to pay $1m to Ben Zygier’s family

Family of Australian-born Mossad agent who died in jail in 2010 while facing treason charges, is offered settlement

Ben Zygier, known as Prisoner X, picture in a still from an ABC TV report. Photograph: AAP/ABC TV

Israel is to pay more than $1m to the family of Ben Zygier, an Australian-born Mossad agent who hanged himself in an Israeli prison, in order to avoid damaging disclosures in a court case.

The agreement will see Zygier’s family receive four million shekels, or around $1.19m, in staged payments in return for the state of Israel being absolved of responsibility for the death.

Zygier, who held Australian and Israeli citizenships, hanged himself in the Ayalon Prison in 2010. He was known as Prisoner X due to his secret incarceration, where he was facing a 10-year sentence for treason.

A judicial inquiry found that guards did not properly check his cell and that at least one CCTV camera wasn’t working. Central district court president, Daphna Blatman, said: “Failure by various elements in the Israel prison service caused his death.”

The Israeli government has said that there was not enough evidence to bring charges over Zygier’s death.

Zygier’s parents – who are leading figures in Melbourne’s Jewish
community – threatened to bring a legal case against the state of
Israel, claiming negligence and seeking compensation.

According to a statement from the Israeli justice ministry,
negotiations between the state of Israel and the Zygiers led to the
settlement, “under which the state agreed to pay the family of the
deceased the sum of four million shekels”. The agreement was made
“without admitting claims raised against”, it said.

Israel made the payment in order to avoid court action, which might have
involved the disclosure of information “which could cause real damage
to national security”, the statement added.

Earlier this year, the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program reported that the Israeli government attempted to cover up the story of Zygier’s death, urging editors of Israeli newspapers not to report the incident.

The program claimed that Zygier was imprisoned for sabotaging a Mossad mission to recover the bodies of soldiers killed in action in Lebanon. Israel has refused to comment on the reasons for his incarceration.

Oliver Milman in Sydney and Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
The Guardian, Wednesday 11 September 2013 09.07 BST

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© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

‘Prisoner X’ family to get Israeli payout

Justice ministry says $1.1 million to be paid to family of alleged Mossad spy who hanged himself in prison.

Zygier known as “Prisoner X” was found hanged in his isolation cell in Ayalon prison near in December 2010. [EPA]

Israel is to pay more than $1 million to the family of an alleged Mossad spy who hanged himself in prison in 2010, the justice ministry has said.

“After negotiations, the two parties have reached an agreement whereby the state will pay $1.1 million to the deceased’s family,” the ministry said in a statement late on Tuesday.

The family of Ben Zygier, an Australian-Israeli known as “Prisoner X,” had accused Israel of negligence in dealing with his case, according to the statement.

Zygier was found hanged in his isolation cell in Ayalon prison near Tel Aviv in December 2010 — a case Israel went to extreme lengths to cover up.

A court document released on April 25 this year said Israel’s prison service had caused Zygier’s death by failing to prevent him from committing suicide.

The document revealed details about his background and imprisonment, indicating he was suicidal and had an emotionally-charged exchange with his wife the day he was found hanged.

It also said that his cell was not properly watched by prison guards.

The justice ministry statement stressed that the deal with Zygier’s family was not an “admission of alleged wrongdoing.”

It was instead “to avoid the affair going to court, which would lead to the publication of numerous details of the case which could cause serious harm to national security.”

The reasons for Zygier’s detention were unclear, but the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said in a report in May that the 34-year-old, who was allegedly working for Israel’s foreign spy service Mossad, had unwittingly sabotaged a top secret spy operation in Lebanon.

Last Modified: 11 Sep 2013 08:52

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www.aljazeera.com

Israel pays £714,000 to the family of ‘Prisoner X’

The move is designed to keep their allegation of negligence from becoming a public lawsuit that could expose state secrets

Israel has agreed to pay four million shekels (£714,000) in compensation to the family of an Australian-Israeli Mossad agent who apparently committed suicide while being held in secret detention in 2010.

The settlement with relatives of Ben Zygier, who was known as “Prisoner X” during his detention for unspecified crimes, is designed to keep their allegation of negligence from becoming a public lawsuit that could expose state secrets, the justice ministry said in a statement.

“It is possible that in the course [of a trial] details would be liable to be made public which could cause tangible damage to the security of the state,” the statement said. The justice ministry stressed that the payment was not tantamount to admitting that state was negligent in its care of Mr Zygier.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation broke the story of Mr Zygier’s secret incarceration in February. Before then, the Israeli media had been subject to a blackout on the “Prisoner X” case. A judicial inquiry later found that Mr Zygier’s death was a suicide enabled by “neglect of duty’’ on the part of those holding him.

Uri Misgav, an investigative reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said he doubted that security was the real reason for the state keeping the matter out of court. “There is at least suspicion of a cover up of failures in all aspects of this matter including recruitment, handling of him as an agent and his handling as a prisoner by the state,” he added.

The case has been an embarrassment to Israel, raising the question of whether the judiciary, which approved the secret incarceration, had acted as a rubber stamp of the security branches.

Ben Lynfield
Wednesday, 11 September 2013

Find this story at 11 September 2013

© independent.co.uk

The silent military coup that took over Washington

This time it’s Syria, last time it was Iraq. Obama chose to accept the entire Pentagon of the Bush era: its wars and war crimes

Children, many of whose deformities are believed to be the results of the chemical dioxin that the US used in the Vietnam war, play outside a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

On my wall is the Daily Express front page of September 5 1945 and the words: “I write this as a warning to the world.” So began Wilfred Burchett’s report from Hiroshima. It was the scoop of the century. For his lone, perilous journey that defied the US occupation authorities, Burchett was pilloried, not least by his embedded colleagues. He warned that an act of premeditated mass murder on an epic scale had launched a new era of terror.

Almost every day now, he is vindicated. The intrinsic criminality of the atomic bombing is borne out in the US National Archives and by the subsequent decades of militarism camouflaged as democracy. The Syria psychodrama exemplifies this. Yet again we are held hostage by the prospect of a terrorism whose nature and history even the most liberal critics still deny. The great unmentionable is that humanity’s most dangerous enemy resides across the Atlantic.

John Kerry’s farce and Barack Obama’s pirouettes are temporary. Russia’s peace deal over chemical weapons will, in time, be treated with the contempt that all militarists reserve for diplomacy. With al-Qaida now among its allies, and US-armed coupmasters secure in Cairo, the US intends to crush the last independent states in the Middle East: Syria first, then Iran. “This operation [in Syria],” said the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas in June, “goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned.”

When the public is “psychologically scarred”, as the Channel 4 reporter Jonathan Rugman described the British people’s overwhelming hostility to an attack on Syria, suppressing the truth is made urgent. Whether or not Bashar al-Assad or the “rebels” used gas in the suburbs of Damascus, it is the US, not Syria, that is the world’s most prolific user of these terrible weapons.

In 1970 the Senate reported: “The US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity of toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to six pounds per head of population.” This was Operation Hades, later renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand – the source of what Vietnamese doctors call a “cycle of foetal catastrophe”. I have seen generations of children with their familiar, monstrous deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked war record, will remember them. I have seen them in Iraq too, where the US used depleted uranium and white phosphorus, as did the Israelis in Gaza. No Obama “red line” for them. No showdown psychodrama for them.

The sterile repetitive debate about whether “we” should “take action” against selected dictators (ie cheer on the US and its acolytes in yet another aerial killing spree) is part of our brainwashing. Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and UN special rapporteur on Palestine, describes it as “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence”. This “is so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable”.

It is the biggest lie: the product of “liberal realists” in Anglo-American politics, scholarship and media who ordain themselves as the world’s crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. Stripping humanity from the study of nations and congealing it with jargon that serves western power designs, they mark “failed”, “rogue” or “evil” states for “humanitarian intervention”.

An attack on Syria or Iran or any other US “demon” would draw on a fashionable variant, “Responsibility to Protect”, or R2P – whose lectern-trotting zealot is the former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, co-chair of a “global centre” based in New York. Evans and his generously funded lobbyists play a vital propaganda role in urging the “international community” to attack countries where “the security council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time”.

Evans has form. He appeared in my 1994 film Death of a Nation, which revealed the scale of genocide in East Timor. Canberra’s smiling man is raising his champagne glass in a toast to his Indonesian equivalent as they fly over East Timor in an Australian aircraft, having signed a treaty to pirate the oil and gas of the stricken country where the tyrant Suharto killed or starved a third of the population.

Under the “weak” Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before. With not a single tank on the White House lawn, a military coup has taken place in Washington. In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried their eyes, Obama accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor, George Bush: its wars and war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by an emerging police state, those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe, piled up the rubble in Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian nightmare, are ascendant across the US administration. Behind their beribboned facade, more former US soldiers are killing themselves than are dying on battlefields. Last year 6,500 veterans took their own lives. Put out more flags.

The historian Norman Pollack calls this “liberal fascism”: “For goose-steppers substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.” Every Tuesday the “humanitarian” Obama personally oversees a worldwide terror network of drones that “bugsplat” people, their rescuers and mourners. In the west’s comfort zones, the first black leader of the land of slavery still feels good, as if his very existence represents a social advance, regardless of his trail of blood. This obeisance to a symbol has all but destroyed the US anti-war movement – Obama’s singular achievement.

In Britain, the distractions of the fakery of image and identity politics have not quite succeeded. A stirring has begun, though people of conscience should hurry. The judges at Nuremberg were succinct: “Individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity.” The ordinary people of Syria, and countless others, and our own self-respect, deserve nothing less now.

John Pilger
The Guardian, Tuesday 10 September 2013 19.15 BST

Find this story at 10 September 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk

Many times I’ve mentioned the foreign-policy assessments of William R. Polk, at right, who first wrote for the Atlantic (about Iraq) during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, back in 1958, and served on the State Department’s Policy Planning staff during the Kennedy years. He now has sent in a detailed analysis about Syria.

Polk wrote this just before President Obama switched from his go-it-alone policy and decided to seek Congressional approval for a Syrian strike. It remains relevant for the choices Congress, the public, and the president have to make. It is very long, but it is systematically laid out as a series of 13 questions, with answers. If you’re in a rush, you could skip ahead to question #7, on the history and use of chemical weapons. Or #6, about the under-publicized role of drought, crop failure, and climate change in Syria’s predicament. But please consider the whole thing when you have the time to sit down for a real immersion in Congress’s upcoming decision. It wouldn’t hurt if Senators and Representatives read it too.

By William Polk

Probably like you, I have spent many hours this last week trying to put together the scraps of information reported in the media on the horrible attack with chemical weapons on a suburb of Damascus on Wednesday, August 21. Despite the jump to conclusions by reporters, commentators and government officials, I find as of this writing that the events are still unclear. Worse, the bits and pieces we have been told are often out of context and usually have not been subjected either to verification or logical analysis. So I ask you to join me in thinking them through to try to get a complete picture on what has happened, is now happening and about to happen. I apologize for both the length of this analysis and its detail, but the issue is so important to all of us that it must be approached with care.

Because, as you will see, this is germane in examining the evidence, I should tell you that during my years as a member of the Policy Planning Council, I was “cleared” for all the information the US Government had on weapons of mass destruction, including poison gas, and for what was then called “Special Intelligence,” that is, telecommunications interception and code breaking.

[JF note: This is the list of questions around which the rest of the essay is structured.] I will try to put in context 1) what actually happened; 2) what has been reported; 3) who has told us what we think we know; 4) who are the possible culprits and what would be their motivations; 5) who are the insurgents? 6) what is the context in which the attack took place; 7) what are chemical weapons and who has used them; 8) what the law on the use of chemical weapons holds; 9) pro and con on attack; 10) the role of the UN; 11) what is likely to happen now; 12) what would be the probable consequences of an attack and (13) what could we possibly gain from an attack.

1: What Actually Happened

On Wednesday, August 21 canisters of gas opened in several suburbs of the Syrian capital Damascus and within a short time approximately a thousand people were dead. That is the only indisputable fact we know.

2: What Has Been Reported

Drawing primarily on Western government and Israeli sources, the media has reported that canisters of what is believed to be the lethal nerve gas Sarin were delivered by surface-to-surface rockets to a number of locations in territory disputed by the Syrian government and insurgents. The locations were first reported to be to the southwest, about 10 miles from the center of Damascus, and later reported also to be to the east of the city in other suburbs. The following Voice of America map shows the sites where bodies were found.

3: Who Told Us What We Think We Know

A UN inspection team that visited the site of the massacre on Monday, August 26, almost 5 days after the event.

Why was the inspection so late? As a spokesman for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pointed out (Gareth Porter in IPS, August 27), the request to the Syrian government to authorize an inspection was not made until August 24 and was granted the next day. In any event, according to the spokesman, the delay was not of fundamental importance because “Sarin can be detected for up to months after its use.”

What was the American government position on inspection? Secretary of State John Kerry initially demanded that the Syrian government make access to the suspected site or sites possible. Then it charged that the Syrian government purposefully delayed permission so that such evidence as existed might be “corrupted” or destroyed. On the basis of this charge, he reversed his position and urged UN Secretary General Ban to stop the inquiry. According to The Wall Street Journal of August 26, Secretary Kerry told Mr. Ban that “the inspection mission was pointless and no longer safe…” To emphasize the American position, according to the same Wall Street Journal report,“Administration officials made clear Mr. Obama would make his decision based on the U.S. assessment and not the findings brought back by the U.N. inspectors.”

IPS’s Gareth Porter concluded after talks with chemical weapons experts and government officials that “The administration’s effort to discredit the investigation recalls the George W. Bush administration’s rejection of the position of U.N. inspectors in 2002 after they found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the administration’s refusal to give inspectors more time to fully rule out the existence of an active Iraqi WMD programme. In both cases, the administration had made up its mind to go to war and wanted no information that could contradict that policy to arise.” Is this a fair assessment?

Why was the first UN inspection so limited? The only publicly known reason is that it came under sniper fire while on the way to the first identified site. Who fired on it or for what reason are, as of this writing, unknown. The area was contested by one or more rebel groups and under only limited or sporadic control by the Syrian government. Indeed, as photographs published by The New York Times on August 29, show the UN inspectors in one area (Zamaka) guarded by armed men identified as “rebel fighters.” So the sniper could have been almost anyone.

How limited was the first phase of inspection? According to a report in The Guardian (Monday, August 26, 2013), the small team of UN Inspectors investigating the poison gas attack in Syria spent only an hour and a half at the site. So far, we have not been given any report by the UN team, but the doctor in charge of the local hospital was apparently surprised by how brief and limited was their investigation. According toThe Guardian reporter, he said,

“The committee did not visit any house in the district. We asked the committee to exhume the bodies for checking them. But they refused. They say that there was no need to do that.

‘We had prepared samples for the committee from some bodies and video documentation. There were urine and blood samples as well as clothes. But they refused to take them.

‘After an hour and a half, they got an order from the regime to leave ASAP. The security force told the committee if they did not leave now, they could not guarantee their security. They could not visit the main six sites where the chemical rockets had fallen and lots of people were killed.’ ”

Why did the investigators not do a more thorough job? The doctor at the site told the Guardian reporter that the Assad regime warned the investigators that they should leave because it could not guarantee their safety but the newspaper’s headline says that the Syrian government authorities ordered them out. Which is true? Is there another explanation? And why did the inspection team not have the means to retrieve parts of the delivery equipment, presumably rockets? Were they told by the UN or other authorities not to retrieve them or were they refused permission by the Syrian government? We simply do not know.

To say the least, the inspection was incomplete. The best that the State Department spokesman could say about such evidence as was gathered is that there is “’little doubt’ [Vice President Biden later raised the certainty from the same limited evidence to “no doubt”] that forces loyal to Mr. Assad were responsible for using the chemical weapons.” (“’Little Doubt’ Syria Gassed Opposition,” The Wall Street Journal,August 26, 2013).

Much was made of the belief that the gas had been delivered by rocket. However, as The New York Times correspondent Ben Hubbard reported (April 27, 2013) “”Near the attack sites, activists found spent rockets that appeared to have been homemade and suspected that they delivered the gas.” Would the regular army’s chemical warfare command have used “homemade” rockets? That report seemed to point to some faction within the opposition rather than to the government.

Several days into the crisis, we have been given a different source of information. This is from Israel. For many years, Israel is known to have directed a major communications effort against Syria. Its program, known as Unit 8200 is Mossad’s equivalent of NSA. It chose to share what it claimed was a key intercept with outsiders. First, a former officer told the German news magazine Focus (according to The Guardian,August 28, 2013) that Israel had intercepted a conversation between Syrian officers discussing the attack. The same Information was given to Israeli press (see “American Operation, Israeli Intelligence” in the August 27 Yediot Ahronoth,) It also shared this information with the American government. Three Israeli senior officers were reported to have been sent to Washington to brief NSC Director Susan Rice. What was said was picked up by some observers. Foreign Policy magazine reported (August 28, “Intercepted Calls Prove Syrian Army Used Nerve Gas, U.S. Spies Say”) that “in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Minister of Defense exchanged what Israeli intelligence described as “panicked phone calls” with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answer for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people.”

But, as more information emerged, doubts began to be expressed. As Matt Apuzzo reported (AP, August 29, “AP sources: Intelligence on weapons no ‘slam dunk.’”), according to a senior US intelligence official, the intercept “discussing the strike was among low level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack to an Assad insider or even a senior commander.” Reminding his readers of the famous saying by the then head of the CIA, George Tenet, in 2002 that the intelligence against Saddam Husain was “slam dunk,” when in fact it was completely erroneous, the AP correspondent warned that the Syrian attack of last week “could be tied to al-Qaida-backed rebels later.”

Two things should be borne in mind on these reports: the first is that Israel has had a long-standing goal of the break-up or weakening of Syria which is the last remaining firmly anti-Israeli Arab state. (the rationale behind this policy was laid out by Edward Luttwak in the OpEd section of the August 24, 2013 New York Times). It also explains why Israel actively had sought “regime change” in Iraq. The second consideration is that Israeli intelligence has also been known to fabricate intercepts as, for example, it did during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

So, unless or until more conclusive evidence is available, the request by Mr. Ban (“U.N. seeks more time for its inspectors,”International Herald Tribune, August 29, 2013) for more time appears to be prudent. Despite what Messrs Biden and Kerry have said, I believe a court would conclude that the case against the Syrian government was “not proven.”

4: Who Are the Possible Culprits and What Would be Their Motivations?

Since such information as we have is sketchy and questionable, we should seek to understand motives. As a historian, dealing as one always does, with incomplete information, I have made it a rule when trying to get at the “truth” in any contentious issue to ask a series of questions among which are who benefits from a given action and what would I have done in a given situation? Look briefly at what we think we now know in light of these questions:

First, who gains by the action. I do not see what Assad could have gained from this gas attack. It is evident that while the area in which it took place is generally held to be “disputed” territory, the government was able to arrange for the UN inspection team to visit it but not, apparently, to guarantee their safety there. If Assad were to initiate an attack, it would be more logical for him to pick a target under the control of the rebels.

Second, to have taken the enormous risk of retaliation or at least loss of support by some of his allies (notably the Russians) by using this horrible weapon, he must have thought of it either as a last ditch stand or as a knockout blow to the insurgents. Neither appears to have been the case. Reports in recent weeks suggest that the Syrian government was making significant gains against the rebels. No observer has suggested that its forces were losing. All indications are that the government’s command and control system not only remains intact but that it still includes among its senior commanders and private soldiers a high proportion of Sunni Muslims. Were the regime in decline, it would presumably have purged those whose loyalties were becoming suspect (i.e. the Sunni Muslims) or they would have bolted for cover. Neither happened.

Moreover, if it decided to make such an attack, I should have thought that it would have aimed at storage facilities, communications links, arms depots or places where commanders congregated. The suburbs of Damascus offered none of these opportunities for a significant, much less a knockout, blow.

Third, as students of guerrilla warfare have learned guerrillas are dispersed but civilians are concentrated. So weapons of mass destruction are more likely to create hostility to the user than harm to the opponent. The chronology of the Syrian civil war shows that the government must be aware of this lesson as it has generally held back its regular troops (which were trained and armed to fight foreign invasion) and fought its opponents with relatively small paramilitary groups backed up by air bombardment. Thus, a review of the fighting over the last two years suggests that its military commanders would not have seen a massive gas attack either as a “game changer” or an option valuable enough to outweigh the likely costs.

So, what about the enemies of the Assad regime? How might such an attack have been to their advantage?

First, a terrorizing attack might have been thought advantageous because of the effect on people who are either supporting the regime or are passive. There are indications, for example, that large numbers of the pathetic Palestinian refugees are pouring out their camps in yet another “displacement.” The number of Syrian refugees is also increasing. Terror is a powerful weapon and historically and everywhere was often used. Whoever initiated the attack might have thought, like those who initiated the attack on Guernica, the bombing of Rotterdam and the Blitz of London, that the population would be so terrorized that they might give up or at least cower. Then as food shortages and disease spread, the economy would falter. Thus the regime might collapse.

That is speculative, but the second benefit to the rebels of an attack is precisely what has happened: given the propensity to believe everything evil about the Assad regime, daily emphasized by the foreign media, a consensus, at least in America, has been achieved is that it must have been complicit. This consensus should make it possible for outside powers to take action against the regime and join in giving the insurgents the money, arms and training.

We know that the conservative Arab states, the United States, other Western powers and perhaps Israel have given assistance to the rebels for the last two years, but the outside aid has not been on a scale sufficient to enable them to defeat the government. They would need much more and probably would also need foreign military intervention as happened in Libya in April 2011 to overthrow Muamar Qaddafi. The rebels must have pondered that situation. We know that foreign military planners have. (See “Military Intervention in Syria” Wikileaks reprinted on August 25, 2013, memorandum of a meeting in the Pentagon in 2011.) Chillingly, the just cited Wikileaks memorandum notes that the assembled military and intelligence officers “don’t believe air intervention would happen unless there was enough media attention on a massacre, like the Ghadafi [sic] move against Benghazi.” (See Time, March 17, 2011.) As in Libya, evidence of an ugly suppression of inhabitants might justify and lead to foreign military intervention.

Clearly, Assad had much to lose and his enemies had much to gain. That conclusion does not prove who did it, but it should give us pause to find conclusive evidence which we do not now have.

5: Who are the insurgents?

We know little about them, but what we do know is that they are divided into hundreds – some say as many as 1,200 — of small, largely independent, groups. And we know that the groups range across the spectrum from those who think of themselves as members of the dispersed, not-centrally-governed but ideologically-driven association we call al-Qaida, through a variety of more conservative Muslims, to gatherings of angry, frightened or dissatisfied young men who are out of work and hungry, to blackmarketeers who are trading in the tools of war, to what we have learned to call in Afghanistan and elsewhere “warlords.”

Each group marches to its own drumbeat and many are as much opposed to other insurgents as to the government; some are secular while others are jihadists; some are devout while others are opportunists; many are Syrians but several thousand are foreigners from all over the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia. Recognition of the range of motivations, loyalties and aims is what, allegedly, has caused President Obama to hold back overt lethal-weapons assistance although it did not stop him from having the CIA and contractors covertly arm and train insurgents in Jordan and other places.

The main rebel armed force is known as the Free Syrian Army. It was formed in the summer of 2011 by deserters from the regular army. Similar to other rebel armies (for example the “external” army of the Provisional Algerian Government in its campaign against the French and various “armies” that fought the Russians in Afghanistan) its commanders and logistical cadres are outside of Syria. Its influence over the actual combatants inside of Syria derives from its ability to allocate money and arms and shared objectives; it does not command them. So far as is known, the combatants are autonomous. Some of these groups have become successful guerrillas and have not only killed several thousand government soldiers and paramilitaries but have seized large parts of the country and disrupted activities or destroyed property in others.

In competition with the Free Syrian Army is an Islamicist group known as Jabhat an-Nusra (roughly “sources of aid”) which is considered to be a terrorist organization by the United States. It is much more active and violent than groups associated with the Free Syrian Army. It is determined to convert Syria totally into an Islamic state under Sharia law. Public statements attributed to some of its leaders threaten a blood bath of Alawis and Christians after it achieves the fall of the Assad regime. Unlike the Free Syrian Army it is a highly centralized force and its 5-10 thousand guerrillas have been able to engage in large-scale and coordinated operations.

Of uncertain and apparently shifting relations with Jabhat an-Nusra, are groups that seem to be increasing in size who think of themselves as members of al-Qaida. They seem to be playing an increasing role in the underground and vie for influence and power with the Muslim Brotherhood and the dozens of other opposition groups.

Illustrating the complexity of the line-up of rebel forces, Kurdish separatists are seeking to use the war to promote their desire either to unite with other Kurdish groups in Turkey and/or Iraq or to achieve a larger degree of autonomy. (See Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa, “The Civil War Within Syria’s Civil War,” Foreign Policy, August 28, 2013). They are struggling against both the other opposition groups and against the government, and they too would presumably welcome a collapse of the government that would lead to the division of the country into ethnic-religious mini-states.

It seems reasonable to imagine that at least some and perhaps all of these diverse groups must be looking for action (such as a dramatic strike against the regime) that would tip the scale of military capacity. Listening to the world media and to the intelligence agents who circulate among them, they must hope that an ugly and large-scale event caused by or identified with the government might accomplish what they have so far been unable to do.

6: What Is the Context in Which the Attack Took Place?

Syria is and has always been a complex society, composed of clusters of ancient colonies. Generally speaking, throughout history they have lived adjacent to one another rather than mixing in shared locations as the following map suggests.

[Syrian ethnic and/or religious communities. The large white area is little-inhabited desert. Courtesy of Wikipedia]

The population before the outbreak of the war was roughly (in rounded numbers) 6 in 10 were Sunni Muslim, 1 in 7 Christian, 1 in 8 Alawi (an ethnic off-shoot of Shia Islam), 1 in 10 Kurdish Muslim, smaller groups of Druze and Ismailis (both off-shoots of Shia Islam) and a scattering of others.

Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011. Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well. But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it.

[USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Commodity Intelligence Report, May 9, 2008]

In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others crop failures reached 75%. And generally as much as 85% of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies. Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”

The domestic Syrian refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water and jobs, but also with the already existing foreign refugee population. Syria already was a refuge for quarter of a million Palestinians and about a hundred thousand people who had fled the war and occupation of Iraq. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.

Survival was the key issue. The senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative in Syria turned to the USAID program for help. Terming the situation “a perfect storm,” in November 2008, he warned that Syria faced “social destruction.” He noted that the Syrian Minister of Agriculture had “stated publicly that [the] economic and social fallout from the drought was ‘beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.’” But, his appeal fell on deaf ears: the USAID director commented that “we question whether limited USG resources should be directed toward this appeal at this time.” (reported on November 26, 2008 in cable 08DAMASCUS847_a to Washington and “leaked” to Wikileaks )

Whether or not this was a wise decision, we now know that the Syrian government made the situation much worse by its next action. Lured by the high price of wheat on the world market, it sold its reserves. In 2006, according to the US Department of Agriculture, it sold 1,500,000 metric tons or twice as much as in the previous year. The next year it had little left to export; in 2008 and for the rest of the drought years it had to import enough wheat to keep its citizens alive.

So tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry and impoverished former farmers flooded constituted a “tinder” that was ready to catch fire. The spark was struck on March 15, 2011 when a relatively small group gathered in the town of Daraa to protest against government failure to help them. Instead of meeting with the protestors and at least hearing their complaints, the government cracked down on them as subversives. The Assads, who had ruled the country since 1971, were not known for political openness or popular sensitivity. And their action backfired. Riots broke out all over the country, As they did, the Assads attempted to quell them with military force. They failed to do so and, as outside help – money from the Gulf states and Muslim “freedom fighters” from the rest of the world – poured into the country, the government lost control over 30% of the country’s rural areas and perhaps half of its population. By the spring of 2013, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), upwards of 100,000 people had been killed in the fighting, perhaps 2 million have lost their homes and upwards of 2 million have fled abroad. Additionally, vast amounts of infrastructure, virtually whole cities like Aleppo, have been destroyed.

Despite these tragic losses, the war is now thought to be stalemated: the government cannot be destroyed and the rebels cannot be defeated. The reasons are not only military: they are partly economic– there is little to which the rebels could return; partly political – the government has managed to retain the loyalty of a large part of the majority Muslim community which comprises the bulk of its army and civil service whereas the rebels, as I have mentioned, are fractured into many mutually hostile groups; and partly administrative — by and large the government’s structure has held together and functions satisfactorily whereas the rebels have no single government.

7: What are Chemical Weapons and Who Has Used Them?

When I was a member of the Policy Planning Council and was “cleared” for all information on weapons of mass destruction, I was given a detailed briefing at Fort Meade on the American poison gas program. I was so revolted by what I learned that I wrote President Kennedy a memorandum arguing that we must absolutely end the program and agree never to use it. Subsequently, the United States is said to have destroyed 90% of its chemical weapons.

My feelings aside, use of chemical weapons has been common. As the former head of the US Congress’s committee on foreign affairs and later president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Lee Hamilton, told me, his experience was that when a weapon was available, the temptation to use it was almost irresistible. History bears him out. While most people were horror-stricken by the use of gas, governments continued to use it. In times of severe stress, it became acceptable. As Winston Churchill wrote, use “was simply a question of fashion changing as it does between long and short skirts for women.” Well, perhaps not quite, but having begun to use gas in the First World War, when about 100,000 people were killed by it, use continued.

After the war, the British, strongly urged by Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, used combinations of mustard gas, chlorine and other gases against tribesmen in Iraq in the 1920s. As he said, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” In the same spirit, the Spaniards used gas against the Moroccan Rif Berbers in the late 1920s; the Italians used it against Ethiopians in the 1930s; and the Japanese used it against the Chinese in the 1940s. Churchill again: during the Second World War, he wrote that if the Blitz threatened to work against England, he “may certainly have to ask you [his senior military staff] to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany…” More recently in 1962, I was told by the then chief of the CIA’s Middle Eastern covert action office, James Critichfield that the Egyptians had used lethal concentrations of tear gas in their campaign against royalist guerrillas in Yemen.

America used various chemical agents including white phosphorus in Vietnam (where it was known as “Willie Pete”) and in Fallujah (Iraq) in 2005. We encouraged or at least did not object to the use of chemical agents, although we later blamed him for so doing, by Saddam Husain. Just revealed documents show that the Reagan administration knew of the Iraqi use in the Iraq-Iran war of the same poison gas (Sarin) as was used a few days ago in Syria and Tabun (also a nerve gas). According to the US military attaché working with the Iraqi army at the time, the US government either turned a blind eye or approved its use (see the summary of the documents in Shane Harris and Matthew Aid, “Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran,” Foreign Policy, August 26, 2013) We were horrified when Saddam Husain used poison gas against the Kurdish villagers of Halabja in 1988 (killing perhaps 4-5 thousand people) but by that time we had dropped our support for the Iraqi government. Finally, Israel is believed to have used poison gas in Lebanon and certainly used white phosphorus in Gaza in 2008.

I cite this history not to justify the use of gas – I agree with Secretary Kerry that use of gas is a “moral obscenity” — but to show that its use is by no means uncommon. It is stockpiled by most states in huge quantities and is constantly being produced in special factories almost everywhere despite having been legally banned since the Geneva Protocol of June 17, 1925.

8: What Is Current Law on the Use of Chemical Weapons?

Use, production and storage of such weapons was again banned in the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (to which Syria it not a party). But nearly all the signatories to that convention reserved the right legally to use such weapons if the weapons had been used against them (i.e. no first strike). The Convention, unfortunately, contains no provision banning the use of weapons, as Saddam certainly did and as Assad is accused of doing, in civil war. My understanding of the current law, as set out in the 1993 Convention, is that the United States and the other NATO members are legally entitled to take military action only when we – not their citizens — are actually threatened by overt military attack with chemical weapons.

9: Pro and Con on Attack

Putting the legal issue aside, there is precedent. A part of the rationale for the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq was the charge that it had or was developing weapons of mass destruction including poison gas which it planned to use against us. This was the essence of Secretary of State Collin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

Powell then realized that there was no evidence to back up his charge (and it was later shown to be false), but that did not stop or even delay the attack. The determination to attack had already been made, regardless of evidence. An attack was undoubtedly then generally approved by the American public and its elected representatives. They, and our NATO allies, concluded on the basis of what the second Bush administration told them that there was a threat and, therefore, that action was not only necessary for defense but also legal. It is the memory of this grave misleading of the public that haunts at least some government officials and elected representatives today.

Memory of the Iraqi deception and the subsequent disaster is apparently responsible for the Parliamentary rejection of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s announced plan to take military action against the Syrian government. “The vote was also a set back for Mr. Obama, who, having given up hope of getting United Nations Security Council authorization for the strike, is struggling to assemble a coalition of allies against Syria…

But administration officials made clear that eroding support would not deter Mr. Obama in deciding to go ahead with a strike.” (“Obama Set for Limited Strike on Syria as British Vote No,” The New York Times, August 29, 2013)

The New York Times editorial board essentially joined with the British Parliament in arguing that “Despite the pumped-up threats and quickening military preparations, President Obama has yet to make a convincing legal or strategic case for military action against Syria.” (Editorial of August 28, 2013)

“As he often so eloquently does, President Obama said on August 23, ‘…what I think the American people also expect me to do as president is to think through what we do from the perspective of, what is in our long-term national interests?…Sometimes what we’ve seen is that folks will call for immediate action, jumping into stuff, that does not turn out well, gets us mired in very difficult situations, can result in us being drawn into very expensive, difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment in the region.’ ”

However, as I point out below, his actions, as unfortunately also is typical of him, do not seem to mesh with his words.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, Secretary General Ban urged the European heads of state and President Obama to “Give peace a chance…give diplomacy a chance.”

There has been a steady outpouring of informed non-governmental opposition to an attack. Sir Andrew Green, the former British ambassador called it “poor foolishness…It beggars belief that we appear to be considering an armed attack on Syria with no clear purpose and no achievable objective.” (Blundering into war in Syria would be pure foolishness.” The English Conservative Party daily, Conservative Home, August 26, 2013). This was from a member of the Prime Minister’s Conservative party; the Labour opposition was even more opposed to the adventure.

The Russian government was outspoken in opposition. Many Western commentators regarded their opposition as a sort of echo of the Cold War, but the Russians were acutely aware of the danger that their own large (16% of their population) and growing Muslim population might be affected by the “forces of extremism in country after country in the Middle East by [the US] forcing or advocating a change in leadership – from Iraq to Libya, Egypt to Syria.” (Steven Lee Myers, “Putin stays quiet as his aides assail the West,”International Herald Tribune, August 29, 2013) As I have mentioned, President Obama believed that the Russians would veto the resolution the British had submitted to the Security Council before the English Parliament voted down the Prime Minister’s plan to intervene.

10): What is the role of the United Nations?

Perhaps the most important role of the United Nations has not been in the highly publicized meetings and decisions of the Security Council, but in its specialized agencies, particularly the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in the attempt to mobilized food aid and the High Commission for Refugees (HCR) in attempting to ameliorate the conditions of the millions of people displaced by the fighting. They have had little to work with.

But it is the UN in its more peace seeking role that is now in the forefront. Weapons experts from the UN are conducting the investigation of the sites where the victims were killed. There has been, as I mentioned above, an effort to end their work after their initial visit, but the UN Secretary General insisted that they continue for at least two more days. The British, French and American governments have attempted also to limit the role of the UN to give them more latitude for whatever action they wish to take. Indeed, the US State Department spokesman was quoted as saying that whatever the inspectors reported would make no difference to the decisions of the Western powers. Of course, the Western powers are concerned that whatever might be laid before the UN Security Council might be vetoed by Russia and perhaps also by China.

11: What is Likely to Happen Now

[This section written just before the president’s surprise announcement that he would go to Congress.]

While President Obama has spoken of caution and taking time to form a coalition, the gossip around the White House (The Wall Street Journal,August 26 and later accounts cited above) suggests that he is moving toward a cruise missile strike to “deter and degrade” the Syrian government even if this has to be a unilateral action. (Paul Lewis and Spencer Ackerman, “White House forced to consider unilateral strikes against Assad after British PM unexpectedly loses key motion on intervention,” The Guardian, August 30, 2013) The US Navy has moved 5 cruise missile armed destroyers into the Mediterranean off the Syrian coast and “all indications suggest that a strike could occur soon after United nations investigators charged with scrutinizing the Aug. 21 attack leave the country. They are scheduled to depart Damascus on Saturday [August 31, 2013].” (Mark Lander et al, “Obama Set for Limited Strike on Syria as British Vote No,” The New York Times, August 29, 2013)

12: What Would Be the Probable Consequences of an Attack?

Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who was head of the Central Command when missiles were launched against Iraqi and Afghan targets warned (Ernesto Londoño and Ed O’Keefe, “imminent U.S. strike on Syria could draw nation into civil war,” The Washington Post, August 28, 2013) that “The one thing we should learn is that you can’t get a little bit pregnant.” Taking that first step would almost surely lead to other steps that in due course would put American troops on the ground in Syria as a similar process did in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Stopping at the first step would be almost impossible as it was in those campaigns. As the former American ambassador to Syria commented “A couple of cruise missiles are not going to change their way of thinking.” And, Zinni put it in more pointed terms, “You’ll knee-jerk into the first option, blowing something up, without thinking through what this could lead to.”

Why is this? It is called “mission creep.” When a powerful government takes a step in any direction, the step is almost certain to have long-term consequences. But, it seldom that leaders consider the eventual consequences. What happens? Inevitably, having taken step “A,” it narrows its options. It is embarked upon one path and not another one. At that point, step “B” often seems the logical thing to do whereas some other, quite different sort of action on a different path, seems inappropriate in the context that step “A” has created. At the same time, in our highly visual age with the forces of television coming to bear, governments, particularly in societies where public opinion or representation exist, come under pressure to do something as President Obama said in the remarks I have just quoted. Where lobbies represent sectors of the economy and society with vested interests, the pressure to do something become immense. We have often seen this in American history. One political party stands ready to blame the other for failure to act. And fear of that blame is often persuasive. Thus, step “C” takes on a life of its own quite apart from what is suggested by a calm analysis of national interest, law or other considerations. And with increasing speed further steps are apt to become almost inevitable and even automatic. If you apply this model to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see how modest first steps led to eventual massive involvement.

During this time, it is likely that the victims of the attacks or their allies would attempt to strike back. Many observers believe that the Syrian government would be prepared to “absorb” a modest level of attack that stopped after a short period. However, if the attacks were massive and continued, it might be impossible for that government or its close allies, the Iranian and Iraqi governments and the Hizbulllah partisans in Lebanon, to keep quiet. Thus, both American installations, of which there are scores within missile or aircraft range, might be hit. Israel also might be targeted and if it were, it would surely respond. So the consequences of a spreading, destabilizing war throughout the Middle East and perhaps into South Asia (where Pakistan is furious over American drone attacks) would be a clear and present danger.

Even if this scenario were not played out, it would be almost certain that affected groups or their allies would seek to carry the war back to America in the form of terrorist attacks.

13: So what could we possibly gain from an attack on Syria?

Even if he wanted to, could Assad meet our demands? He could, of course, abdicate, but this would probably not stop the war both because his likely successor would be someone in the inner circle of his regime and because the rebels form no cohesive group. The likely result would be something like what happened after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a vicious civil war among competing factions.

No one, of course, can know what would happen then. My hunch is that Syria, like Afghanistan, would be torn apart not only into large chunks such as the Kurds in the northeast but even neighborhood by neighborhood as in the Iraqi cities. Muslims would take revenge on Alawis and Christians who would be fighting for their lives. More millions would be driven out of their homes. Food would be desperately short, and disease probably rampant. If we are worried about a haven for terrorists or drug traffickers, Syria would be hard to beat. And if we are concerned about a sinkhole for American treasure, Syria would compete well with Iraq and Afghanistan. It would probably be difficult or even impossible to avoid “boots on the ground” there. So we are talking about casualties, wounded people, and perhaps wastage of another several trillion dollars which we don’t have to spend and which, if we had, we need to use in our own country for better heath, education, creation of jobs and rebuilding of our infrastructure.

Finally, if the missile attacks do succeed in “degrading” the Syrian government, it may read the signs as indicating that fighting the war is acceptable so long as chemical weapons are not employed. They may regard it as a sort of license to go ahead in this wasting war. Thus, the action will have accomplished little. Thus, as General Zinni points out, America will likely find itself saddled with another long-term, very expensive and perhaps unwinnable war. We need to remind ourselves what Afghanistan did – bankrupting the Soviet Union – and what Iraq cost us — about 4,500 American dead, over 100,000 wounded, many of whom will never recover, and perhaps $6 trillion.

Can we afford to repeat those mistakes?

By James Fallows

Find this story at 2 September 2013

Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Obama’s rogue state tramples over every law it demands others uphold

For 67 years the US has pursued its own interests at the expense of global justice – no wonder people are sceptical now

US troops fire a white phosphorous mortar towards a Taliban position on 3 April 2009 in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Photograph: John Moore/Getty

You could almost pity these people. For 67 years successive US governments have resisted calls to reform the UN security council. They’ve defended a system which grants five nations a veto over world affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators. They have abused the powers and trust with which they have been vested. They have collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia, China and France) in a colonial carve-up, through which these nations can pursue their own corrupt interests at the expense of peace and global justice.

Eighty-three times the US has exercised its veto. On 42 of these occasions it has done so to prevent Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians being censured. On the last occasion, 130 nations supported the resolution but Barack Obama spiked it. Though veto powers have been used less often since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the US has exercised them 14 times in the interim (in 13 cases to shield Israel), while Russia has used them nine times. Increasingly the permanent members have used the threat of a veto to prevent a resolution being discussed. They have bullied the rest of the world into silence.

Through this tyrannical dispensation – created at a time when other nations were either broken or voiceless – the great warmongers of the past 60 years remain responsible for global peace. The biggest weapons traders are tasked with global disarmament. Those who trample international law control the administration of justice.

But now, as the veto powers of two permanent members (Russia and China) obstruct its attempt to pour petrol on another Middle Eastern fire, the US suddenly decides that the system is illegitimate. Obama says: “If we end up using the UN security council not as a means of enforcing international norms and international law, but rather as a barrier … then I think people rightly are going to be pretty skeptical about the system.” Well, yes.

Never have Obama or his predecessors attempted a serious reform of this system. Never have they sought to replace a corrupt global oligarchy with a democratic body. Never do they lament this injustice – until they object to the outcome. The same goes for every aspect of global governance.

Obama warned last week that Syria’s use of poisoned gas “threatens to unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by 189 nations”. Unravelling the international norm is the US president’s job.

In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years. In 2007 it requested the maximum extension of the deadline permitted by the Chemical Weapons Convention – five years. Again it failed to keep its promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the same.

In 1998 the Clinton administration pushed a law through Congress which forbade international weapons inspectors from taking samples of chemicals in the US and allowed the president to refuse unannounced inspections. In 2002 the Bush government forced the sacking of José Maurício Bustani, the director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He had committed two unforgiveable crimes: seeking a rigorous inspection of US facilities; and pressing Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, to help prevent the war George Bush was itching to wage.

The US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It also used them during its destruction of Falluja in 2004, then lied about it. The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein to wage war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve and mustard gas. (The Bush administration then cited this deployment as an excuse to attack Iraq, 15 years later).

Smallpox has been eliminated from the human population, but two nations – the US and Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold storage. They claim their purpose is to develop defences against possible biological weapons attack, but most experts in the field consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns about each other’s possession of the disease, they have worked together to bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which have pressed them to destroy their stocks.

In 2001 the New York Times reported that, without either Congressional oversight or a declaration to the Biological Weapons Convention, “the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities”. The Pentagon claimed the purpose was defensive but, developed in contravention of international law, it didn’t look good. The Bush government also sought to destroy the Biological Weapons Convention as an effective instrument by scuttling negotiations over the verification protocol required to make it work.

Looming over all this is the great unmentionable: the cover the US provides for Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. It’s not just that Israel – which refuses to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention – has used white phosphorus as a weapon in Gaza (when deployed against people, phosphorus meets the convention’s definition of “any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm”).

It’s also that, as the Washington Post points out: “Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman’s agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear weapons, Syria’s pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public acknowledgement or criticism.” Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

As for the norms of international law, let’s remind ourselves where the US stands. It remains outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, after declaring its citizens immune from prosecution. The crime of aggression it committed in Iraq – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal as “the supreme international crime” – goes not just unpunished but also unmentioned by anyone in government. The same applies to most of the subsidiary war crimes US troops committed during the invasion and occupation. Guantánamo Bay raises a finger to any notions of justice between nations.

None of this is to exonerate Bashar al-Assad’s government – or its opponents – of a long series of hideous crimes, including the use of chemical weapons. Nor is it to suggest that there is an easy answer to the horrors in Syria.

But Obama’s failure to be honest about his nation’s record of destroying international norms and undermining international law, his myth-making about the role of the US in world affairs, and his one-sided interventions in the Middle East, all render the crisis in Syria even harder to resolve. Until there is some candour about past crimes and current injustices, until there is an effort to address the inequalities over which the US presides, everything it attempts – even if it doesn’t involve guns and bombs – will stoke the cynicism and anger the president says he wants to quench.

During his first inauguration speech Barack Obama promised to “set aside childish things”. We all knew what he meant. He hasn’t done it.

George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 9 September 2013 20.30 BST

Find this story at 9 September 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

Abhör-Spezialisten decken auf; Assad-Kommandeure wollten seit Monaten Giftgas einsetzen; Deutsches Spionageschiff belauscht Funkverkehr der syrischen Truppen

Fast 1500 Menschen starben beim Giftgas-Angriff des Assad-Regimes am 21. August in Damaskus. BILD am SONNTAG erfuhr jetzt aus deutschen Sicherheitskreisen: Die Truppen des Diktators wollten schon häufiger Giftgas einsetzen.

Seit rund vier Monaten haben syrische Divisions- und Brigadekommandeure immer wieder den Einsatz von Chemiewaffen beim Präsidentenpalast in Damaskus gefordert. Das belegen Funkgespräche, die vom Flottendienstboot „Oker“ abgefangen wurden. Das Spionageschiff der Marine kreuzt vor Syriens Küste.
Vergrößern
Die „Oker“ kreuzt vor der Küste Syriens, kann den Funk- und Telefonverkehr abhören
Foto: Imago

Laut den Erkenntnissen der Abhör-Spezialisten wurden die von den Kommandeuren verlangten Giftgas-Angriffe stets abgelehnt und der Einsatz vom 21. August wahrscheinlich nicht von Assad persönlich genehmigt.

Unabhängig von einem Militärschlag der USA gegen Syrien geht der Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) davon aus, dass Diktator Assad sich noch lange an der Macht halten kann. Nach Informationen von BILD am SONNTAG berichtete BND-Präsident Gerhard Schindler am vergangenen Montag dem Verteidigungsausschuss des Bundestages in geheimer Sitzung, der blutige Bürgerkrieg werde sich noch lange hinziehen. Schindler wörtlich: „Das kann noch Jahre dauern.“
Michael Backhaus
Kommentar
Einig gegen Assad?

Die Bereitschaft zum Einsatz von Chemiewaffen ist innerhalb der Assad-Truppen weiter verbreitet als bekannt.
mehr…

In der Geheimsitzung verglich Schindler die Gefechte zwischen Rebellen und Assad-Truppen im Großraum Damaskus mit dem „Kampf um Stalingrad“. Teilnehmer der Sitzung wollten vom Geheimdienstchef wissen, ob sich der Bürgerkrieg in einem Endkampf befindet.

Schindler erklärte daraufhin seinen ungewöhnlichen Vergleich: Für die Herrschaft der alawitischen Minderheit in Syrien, zu der Assad gehört, habe Damaskus eine ähnlich hohe symbolische Bedeutung wie Stalingrad für die Sowjetunion unter Stalin.
Vergrößern

Von einer dramatischen Machtverschiebung innerhalb der Rebellen berichtete den Ausschuss-Mitgliedern der Generalinspekteur der Bundeswehr, Volker Wieker. Danach hat die vom Westen unterstützte Freie Syrische Armee (FSA) ihre einstige militärische Führungsrolle eingebüßt.

Der Zusammenschluss von Deserteuren der Assad-Truppen sei – so der ranghöchste deutsche Soldat – de facto nicht mehr existent. Stattdessen werde der Einfluss der islamistischen Terrororganisation al-Qaida auf die Rebellen-Bewegung immer stärker – mit dramatischen Folgen. Laut Wieker gibt es kaum noch Überläufer aus den Reihen der Assad-Truppen. Denn Deserteure würden von den Rebellen in der Regel sofort erschossen.

Gestern haben die 28 EU-Regierungen die USA aufgefordert, mit einem Militärschlag bis zur Vorlage eines UN-Berichtes über den Einsatz von Chemiewaffen zu warten.

08.09.2013 – 00:01 Uhr
Von MARTIN S. LAMBECK, KAYHAN ÖZGENC und BURKHARD UHLENBROICH

Find this story at 8 September 2013

© www.bild.de

The US has little credibility left: Syria won’t change that; Obama’s argument for intervention is a hollow one: America’s use of chemical weapons in Falluja makes that clear

UN chemical weapons experts carry samples from one of the sites of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Damascus on August 28, 2013. Photograph: Stringer/REUTERS

‘I created Transjordan,” Winston Churchill once boasted, “with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon in Cairo.” Take a look at what remains of Jordan 90 years later and you can see how. Straight borders drawn with a ruler carve indifferent frontiers through a complex region with the kind of callous colonial hubris that displayed scant regard for linguistic, ethnic or religious affiliation.

Much of the contemporary turmoil in the Middle East owes its origins to foreign powers drawing lines in the sand that were both arbitrary and consequential and guided more by their imperial standing than the interests of the region. The “red line” that president Barack Obama has set out as the trigger for US military intervention in Syria is no different.

He drew it unilaterally in August 2012 in response to a question about “whether [he envisioned] using US military” in Syria. “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

On 21 August there was a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus believed to have been carried out by the Syrian government. That changed both Obama’s calculus and his memory. “I didn’t set a red line,” he claimed last week. I didn’t draw it, he insisted, everybody did. “The world set a red line”.

This was news to the world, which, over the weekend, sought to distance itself from his line, as the US president doubled-down on his double-speak.

“My credibility is not on the line,” he argued. “The international community’s credibility is on the line. And America and Congress’s credibility is on the line …. The US recognises that if the international community fails to maintain certain norms, standards, laws, governing how countries interact and how people are treated, that over time this world becomes less safe.”

The alleged urgency to bomb Syria at this moment is being driven almost entirely by the White House’s desire to assert both American power and moral authority as defined by a self-imposed ultimatum. It is to this beat that the drums of war are pounding. But thus far few are marching. The American public is against it by wide margins. As a result it is not clear that Congress, whose approval he has sought, will back him. The justification and the objectives for bombing keep changing and are unconvincing. He has written a rhetorical cheque his polity may not cash and the public is reluctant to honour. On Tuesday night he’ll make his case to a sceptical nation from the White House.

Before addressing why people are right to be sceptical, it is necessary to attend to some straw men lest they are crushed in the stampede to war. The use of chemical weapons is abhorrent and the Syrian regime is brutal (whether it used chemical weapons in this case or not). With more than 100,000 dead in the civil war, diplomatic efforts have clearly not been successful thus far. Those who claim the principles of human solidarity and internationalism should not sit idly by while the killing continues. Nobody can claim, with any integrity, that they have a plan that will stem the bloodshed.

But the insistence that a durable and effective solution to this crisis lies at the end of an American cruise missile beggars belief. It is borne from the circular sophistry that has guided most recent “humanitarian interventions”: (1) Something must be done now; (2) Bombing is something; (3) Therefore we must bomb.

The roots of this conflict are deep, entangled and poisoned. Arguments against the Syrian regime and the use of chemical weapons are not the same as arguments for bombing. And arguments against bombing are not the same as arguments to do nothing. That is why most remain unconvinced by the case for military intervention. It carries little chance of deterring the Syrian regime and great risk of inflaming an already volatile situation. Intensifying diplomatic pressure, allowing the UN inspectors to produce their report while laying the groundwork for a political settlement between the rival factions, remains the best hope from a slender range of poor options.

The problem for America in all of this is that its capacity to impact diplomatic negotiations is limited by the fact that its record of asserting its military power stands squarely at odds with its pretensions of moral authority. For all America’s condemnations of chemical weapons, the people of Falluja in Iraq are experiencing the birth defects and deformities in children and increases in early-life cancer that may be linked to the use of depleted uranium during the US bombardment of the town. It also used white phosphorus against combatants in Falluja.

Its chief ally in the region, Israel, holds the record for ignoring UN resolutions, and the US is not a participant in the international criminal court – which is charged with bringing perpetrators of war crimes to justice – because it refuses to allow its own citizens to be charged. On the very day Obama lectured the world on international norms he launched a drone strike in Yemen that killed six people.

Obama appealing for the Syrian regime to be brought to heel under international law is a bit like Tony Soprano asking the courts for a restraining order against one of his mob rivals – it cannot be taken seriously because the very laws he is invoking are laws he openly flouts.

So his concerns about the US losing credibility over Syria are ill-founded because it has precious little credibility left. The call to bomb an Arab country without UN authority or widespread international support, on the basis of partial evidence before UN inspectors have had a chance to report their findings, sounds too familiar both at home and abroad. The claim that he should fight this war, not the last one, is undermined by the fact that the US is still fighting one of the last ones. And with a military solution proving elusive in Afghanistan, the US is trying to come to a political settlement with the Taliban before leaving.

Obama would enhance US credibility not by drawing lines for others to adhere to, but by drawing a line under the past and championing a foreign policy that bolstered international law and acted with the rest of the world rather than ignoring it. “The noble art of losing face,” Hans Blix told me shortly after the Iraq war started, “will one day save the human race.”

Gary Younge
The Guardian, Sunday 8 September 2013 19.47 BST

Find this story at 8 September 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

US stops jailed activist Barrett Brown from discussing leaks prosecution

Federal court order prohibits Brown from talking to the media in what critics say is latest in crackdown on investigative journalism

Brown’s lawyer says the gagging order is a breach of Brown’s first amendment rights. Photograph: Nikki Loehr

A federal court in Dallas, Texas has imposed a gag order on the jailed activist-journalist Barrett Brown and his legal team that prevents them from talking to the media about his prosecution in which he faces up to 100 years in prison for alleged offences relating to his work exposing online surveillance.

The court order, imposed by the district court for the northern district of Texas at the request of the US government, prohibits the defendant and his defence team, as well as prosecutors, from making “any statement to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, internet (including, but not limited to, bloggers), or other media organization about this case, other than matters of public interest.”

It goes on to warn Brown and his lawyers that “no person covered by this order shall circumvent its effect by actions that indirectly, but deliberately, bring about a violation of this order”.

According to Dell Cameron of Vice magazine, who attended the hearing, the government argued that the gag order was needed in order to protect Brown from prejudicing his right to a fair trial by making comments to reporters.

But media observers seen the hearing in the opposite light: as the latest in a succession of prosecutorial moves under the Obama administration to crack-down on investigative journalism, official leaking, hacking and online activism.

Brown’s lead defence attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, has countered in court filings, the most recent of which was lodged with the court Wednesday, that the government’s request for a gag order is unfounded as it is based on false accusations and misrepresentations.

The lawyer says the gagging order is a breach of Brown’s first amendment rights as an author who continues to write from his prison cell on issues unconnected to his own case for the Guardian and other media outlets.

In his memo to the court for today’s hearing, Ghappour writes that Brown’s July article for the Guardian “contains no statements whatsoever about this trial, the charges underlying the indictment, the alleged acts underlying the three indictments against Mr Brown, or even facts arguably related to this prosecution.”

The gag order does give Brown some room to carry on his journalistic work from prison. It says that he will be allowed to continue publishing articles on topics “not related to the counts on which he stands indicted”.

Following the imposition of the order, Ghappour told the Guardian: “The defense’s overriding concern is that Mr Brown continue to be able to exercise his first amendment right as a journalist. The order preserves that ability.”

The lawyer adds that since the current defence team took over in May, Brown has made only three statements to the media, two of which where articles that did not concern his trial while the third ran no risk of tainting the jury pool. “Defendant believes that a gag order is unwarranted because there is no substantial, or even reasonable, likelihood of prejudice to a fair trial based on statements made by defendant or his counsel since May 1, 2013.”

Brown, 32, was arrested in Dallas on 12 September last year and has been in prison ever since, charged with 17 counts that include threatening a federal agent, concealing evidence and disseminating stolen information. He faces a possible maximum sentence of 100 years in custody.

Before his arrest, Brown became known as a specialist writer on the US government’s use of private military contractors and cybersecurity firms to conduct online snooping on the public. He was regularly quoted by the media as an expert on Anonymous, the loose affiliation of hackers that caused headaches for the US government and several corporate giants, and was frequently referred to as the group’s spokesperson, though he says the connection was overblown.

In 2011, through the research site he set up called Project PM, he investigated thousands of emails that had been hacked by Anonymous from the computer system of a private security firm, HB Gary Federal. His work helped to reveal that the firm had proposed a dark arts effort to besmirch the reputations of WikiLeaks supporters and prominent liberal journalists and activists including the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

In 2012, Brown similarly pored over millions of emails hacked by Anonymous from the private intelligence company Stratfor. It was during his work on the Stratfor hack that Brown committed his most serious offence, according to US prosecutors – he posted a link in a chat room that connected users to Stratfor documents that had been released online.

The released documents included a list of email addresses and credit card numbers belonging to Stratfor subscribers. For posting that link, Brown is accused of disseminating stolen information – a charge with media commentators have warned criminalises the very act of linking.

As Geoffrey King, Internet Advocacy Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, has put it, the Barrett Brown case “could criminalize the routine journalistic practice of linking to documents publicly available on the internet, which would seem to be protected by the first amendment to the US constitution under current doctrine”.

In its motion to the Dallas district court, US prosecutors accuse Brown and his associates of having “solicited the services of the media or media-types to discuss his case” and of continuing to “manipulate the public through press and social media comments”.

It further accuses Ghappour of “co-ordinating” and “approving” the use of the media, and alleges that between them they have spread “gross fabrications and substantially false recitations of facts and law which may harm both the government and the defence during jury selection”.

But Ghappour in his legal response has pointed out that several of the specific accusations raised by the government are inaccurate. Prosecutors refer to an article in the Guardian by Greenwald published on 21 March 2013 based partly on an interview between the journalist and Brown, yet as Ghappour points out that piece was posted on the Guardian website before the accused’s current legal team had been appointed.

Under his legal advice, Ghappour writes, Brown has maintained “radio silence” over his case and has given no further interviews, thus negating the government’s case for a gagging order.

Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 September 2013 22.50 BST

Find this story at 4 September 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years in Jail; But no one can figure out what law he broke. Introducing America’s least likely political prisoner

The mid-June sun is setting on the Mansfield jail near Dallas when Barrett Brown, the former public face of Anonymous, shuffles into the visitors hall wearing a jumpsuit of blazing orange. Once the nattiest anarchist around, Brown now looks like every other inmate in the overcrowded North Texas facility, down to his state-issued faux-Crocs, the color of candy corn.

Who Are America’s New Political Prisoners?

Brown sits down across from his co-counsel, a young civil-liberties lawyer named Ahmed Ghappour, and raises a triumphant fist holding several sheets of notebook paper. “Penned it out,” he says. “After 10 months, I’m finally getting the hang of these archaic tools.” He hands the article, titled “The Cyber-Intelligence Complex and Its Useful Idiots,” to his lawyer with instructions to send it to his editor at The Guardian. Brown used to write for the British daily, but since he’s been in prison, it’s written about him and his strange legal ordeal that has had him locked up for nearly a year while he awaits trial next month. Should he be found guilty of all the charges the federal government is bringing against him – 17 counts, ranging from obstruction of justice to threatening a federal officer to identity fraud – he’ll face more than 100 years in prison.

Given the serious nature of his predicament, Brown, 32, seems shockingly relaxed. “I’m not worried or panicked,” he says. “It’s not even clear to me that I’ve committed a crime.” He describes his time here as a break from the drug-fueled mania of his prior life, a sort of digital and chemical fast in which he’s kicked opiates and indulged his pre-cyber whims – hours spent on the role-playing game GURPS and tearing through the prison’s collection of what he calls “English manor-house literature.”

Brown has been called many things during his brief public career – satirist, journalist, author, Anonymous spokesman, atheist, “moral fag,” “fame whore,” scourge of the national surveillance state. His commitment to investigating the murky networks that make up America’s post-9/11 intelligence establishment set in motion the chain of events that culminated in a guns-drawn raid of his Dallas apartment last September. “For a long time, the one thing I was happy not to see in here was a computer,” says Brown. “It appears as though the Internet has gotten me into some trouble.”

Encountering Barrett Brown’s story in passing, it is tempting to group him with other Anonymous associates who have popped up in the news for cutting pleas and changing sides. Brown’s case, however, is a thing apart. Although he knew some of those involved in high-profile “hacktivism,” he is no hacker. His situation is closer to the runaway prosecution that destroyed Aaron Swartz, the programmer-activist who committed suicide in the face of criminal charges similar to those now being leveled at Brown. But unlike Swartz, who illegally downloaded a large cache of academic articles, Brown never broke into a server; he never even leaked a document. His primary laptop, sought in two armed FBI raids, was a miniature Sony netbook that he used for legal communication, research and an obscene amount of video-game playing. The most serious charges against him relate not to hacking or theft, but to copying and pasting a link to data that had been hacked and released by others.

“What is most concerning about Barrett’s case is the disconnect between his conduct and the charged crime,” says Ghappour. “He copy-pasted a publicly available link containing publicly available data that he was researching in his capacity as a journalist. The charges require twisting the relevant statutes beyond recognition and have serious implications for journalists as well as academics. Who’s allowed to look at document dumps?”

Brown’s case is a bellwether for press freedoms in the new century, where hacks and leaks provide some of our only glimpses into the technologies and policies of an increasingly privatized national security-and-surveillance state. What Brown did through his organization Project PM was attempt to expand these peepholes. He did this by leading group investigations into the world of private intelligence and cybersecurity contracting, a $56 billion industry that consumes 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget.

Meet Jacob Applelaum, the American Wikileaks Hacker

“Barrett was an investigative journalist who was merely doing his professional duty,” says Christophe Deloire of Reporters Without Borders. “The sentence that he is facing is absurd and dangerous.”

B
rown grew up in the affluent North Dallas neighborhood of Preston Hollow, where, following his parents’ divorce, he lived with his New Age mother. Karen Lancaster always believed her only son was special – he once wrote that she called him “an indigo child with an alien soul.” Among her house rules was that mother and son meditate together daily. She instructed him in the predictions of Nostradamus and made sure he kept a dream journal for the purpose, as Brown described it, “of helping him divine the future by way of my external connection to the collective unconscious.” (For her part, Brown’s mother says she was progressive, but not “New Age”, and that her son’s comments were made in jest.)

The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond, Enemy of the State

A precocious pre-adolescent reader and writer, Brown produced a newspaper on his family’s desktop computer while in elementary school. When he started writing for the student paper at his private high school in the mid-Nineties, he quickly clashed with the paper’s censors over his right to criticize the administration. “Barrett always challenged authority, even as a kid, and anytime you go up against authority, you’re going to get in trouble,” says Brown’s father, Robert. “You could sort of always see this coming.”

By the time he reached high school, Brown had discovered Ayn Rand and declared himself an atheist. He founded an Objectivist Society at school and distinguished himself from other Randians by placing second out of 5,000 entrants in a national Ayn Rand essay contest. (Brown now expresses regret over this.) By all accounts, Brown hated everything about organized education, preferring to follow his own curricula and chat up girls on the bulletin-board systems of a still-embryonic Internet.

After his sophomore year, Brown told his parents he wasn’t going back. He signed up for online courses and spent his junior year in Tanzania with his father, a Maserati-driving conservative, safari hunter and serial entrepreneur who was trying to launch a hardwood-harvesting business. “Barrett loved living in Africa,” says his father. “He preferred adventure to being in school with his peers. We weren’t far from the embassy that was bombed that year.”

Brown returned to the U.S. and in 2000 joined some of his childhood friends in Austin, where he spent two semesters taking writing classes at the University of Texas. After dropping out, he spent a summer doing what one friend calls a “heroic” amount of Ecstasy and acid before settling into the charmed life of a pre-crisis Austin slacker – working part-time, smoking pot and paying cheap rent in a series of group houses with enormous porches. Brown’s roommates remember his rooms as being strewn with leaning towers of books and magazines – he especially liked Gore Vidal, P.J. O’Rourke and Hunter S. Thompson – but say he was not especially political. “After 9/11 and Iraq, there were a lot of protests in Austin,” says Ian Holmes, a childhood friend of Brown’s. “I don’t remember him participating in it or being extra vocal, but he was against it all like everyone else.”

As Brown built up his clip book and matured as a writer, his ambitions began to outgrow Austin. In 2007, Brown moved to Brooklyn with a group of old friends that called itself “the Texadus.” Their Bushwick apartment emerged as a hub for Lone Star State refugees who liked to get high, crush beers and play video games. “People were always hanging out and coming and going,” says Caleb Pritchard, a childhood friend of Brown’s who lived with him in Austin and Brooklyn. Among the apartment’s large cast of characters were a crew of weed-delivery guys from Puerto Rico and Honduras who used the apartment as a daytime base of business operations. “They brought over an Xbox, bought us beer and food and played strategy games with us,” Pritchard says. “It was a good cultural exchange for a bunch of skinny white kids from Dallas.”

As virtual-world games grew increasingly sophisticated, Brown spent more time in front of his computer. But he didn’t play the games like most people. In Second Life, he linked up with a group of people known as “griefers,” the term for hackers who in the mid-00s became known for generating chaos inside video-game worlds. Socializing on the bulletin board 4chan.org, they formed the first cells of what would later become Anonymous. In the documentary We Are Legion, about the hacktivist group, Brown waxes nostalgic over his griefer period, when he’d spend entire nights “on Second Life riding around in a virtual spaceship with the words ‘faggery daggery doo’ written on it, wearing Afros, dropping virtual bombs on little villages while waving giant penises around. That was the most fun time I ever had in my life.”

When everyone else went out to the bars, Brown stayed in. Aside from video games and the odd afternoon of pick-up basketball, he also pounded out columns, diaries and blog posts for Vanity Fair, Daily Kos and McSweeney’s, as well as restaurant reviews and essays for weeklies like New York Press and The Onion’s A.V. Club. Though he had some paying gigs, he published most heavily in unpaid, self-edited community forums like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. “Barrett wasn’t really working in New York so much as getting by with the help of friends and family,” says Pritchard. Among his unpaid gigs was his work as the spokesman for the Godless Americans PAC, which led to Brown’s first TV appearance, on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends.

In Brooklyn, Brown resumed shooting heroin, which he’d dabbled in off and on since he was 19. Over the years, doctors have diagnosed him with ADHD and depression. Accurate or not, the diagnoses suggest Brown was drawn to opiates for more than just the high. “When I joined him in Brooklyn in ’08, Barrett was already basically a functional junkie,” says Pritchard.

Heroin did not mellow Brown when it came to America’s pundit class. Brown’s critique made clear he didn’t want to join the journalistic establishment so much as lash it without mercy. Then, in March 2010, he announced in a blog post the goal of replacing it, of making its institutions irrelevant and rebuilding them in the image of an overly self-confident 28-year-old junkie named Barrett Brown. It was perhaps his first public manifestation of extreme self-assurance that could come off as imperious self-importance. Brown himself did not deny it, once saying, “I don’t think arrogance is something I’m in a position to attack anyone on.”

The project envisioned by Brown was a new kind of crowdsourced think tank to be “established with a handful of contributors who have been selected by virtue of intellectual honesty, proven expertise in certain topics and journalistic competence in general.” He named it Project PM, after a gang in William Gibson’s Neuromancer called the Panther Moderns.

Brown conceived his new network partly as a response to what he saw as the sad state of affairs at the two main homes for his work, Daily Kos and HuffPo. After years of vibrancy, both now suffered from “the watering-down of contributor quality,” he said. At Project PM, he assured that “below-average participants will have only very limited means by which to clutter the network.”

How Anonymous Took Down the Music Industry’s Websites

With typical cigarette-waving flourish, Brown declared, “Never has there existed such opportunity for revolution in human affairs.”

Had Project PM developed along the lines of Brown’s original vision – as a kind of exclusive, experts-only, friends-of-Barrett blogger network – it is extremely unlikely that Brown would now be in jail. Or that the FBI would have subpoenaed the company hired to secure its server, as it did in March. But Project PM ended up taking a different route.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview

T
he event that locked Brown’s path into a collision course with the federal government came on February 11th, 2010, when he posted an essay on Huffington Post that he grandiloquently titled “Anonymous, Australia and the Inevitable Fall of the NationState.”

At the time, Anonymous was in the news after some of its hackers, in an action they called Operation Titstorm, brought down Australian government servers in retaliation for the government’s attempt to block certain kinds of niche pornography. For Brown, Titstorm was a world-historic game-changer, a portent of an age in which citizens could successfully challenge state power on their laptops and neutralize government propaganda and censorship.

In the comically aggrandizing tone that had become his trademark, Brown concluded, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and underreported social developments to have occurred in decades.”

Among those taken by Brown’s interpretation of Titstorm was Gregg Housh, a Boston Web designer and early Anonymous associate, who had emerged as a sort of quasi-spokesman for the group. Through Housh, Brown gained entrance to the online inner sanctums of the hackers he thought were turning history on its head. Housh, who was starting to feel burned out from fielding the barrage of international media requests, saw Brown as someone who could step in and talk to reporters for Anonymous.

“Barrett ‘got it’ in a way few journalists did,” says Housh. “Soon, he was one of us, and that pretty much set the course for everything that happened next.”

Brown always denied holding any official capacity as the spokesman of Anonymous, maintaining such a thing was not even possible given the amorphous nature of the group. Yet he embraced the media role with relish, sometimes using the royal “we” during interviews. In March 2011, Brown described himself to a visiting NBC News crew as a “senior strategist” for Anonymous. He also, along with Housh, began writing a book about the group, detailing the transformation of Anonymous from a community of amoral videogame-playing punks into an ethical crusade, assisting street protests across the globe during the Arab Spring.

From the beginning, Brown’s public role was a subject of internal controversy. A minority dismissed and attacked him as a preening “name fag” – Anonymous slang for people who use their real names and speak to the press. Others were more bothered that Brown was a “moral fag,” the term used by unrepentant griefers to describe the new generation of hacktivists who began flocking to the Anonymous banner in 2008. In We Are Legion, Brown makes his allegiance clear, hailing the hacktivists for turning a “nihilist, ridiculous group” into a “force for good.”

Yet something of the old griefer remained in Brown even after his and the group’s politicization process had converged to take on the world of intelligence outsourcing. “He was just trolling the hell out of these corporate-surveillance guys,” says Joe Fionda, a New York activist who assisted Brown in his investigations. “Not just doing the serious research work no one else was doing – getting tax files and all that – but calling them at their homes to introduce himself, sometimes straight up pranking them. He’s legit funny and sees the humor and the absurd in everything.”

Another former colleague, a Boston Web developer and activist named Lauren Pespisa, shared Brown’s love of prank calls: “Sometimes we’d drink and prank-call lobbyists for fun. We went after this one group, Qorvis, because they were helping the kingdom of Bahrain handle its image when they were shooting people. So we’d call them up and ‘dragon shout’ at them,” she says, referring to a sound effect in one of Brown’s favorite video games, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

By combining the two ethos of Anonymous, Brown won over more people than he alienated. Part of his appeal was the act of his drily affected pseudo-aristocratic-asshole persona, which he exaggerated during media appearances. He preferred a corduroy sports jacket to the Guy Fawkes mask that Anonymous members favor. A typical portrait showed Brown’s arm slung over a chair, a Marlboro dangling off his bottom lip and a stuffed bobcat on the wall behind him. He was oth loved and hated for being one of the more colorful characters found in the Internet Relay Chat rooms where hackers gathered. He famously once conducted a strategy session while drinking red wine in a bubble bath.

“Barrett became a bit like the court jester of Anonymous,” says Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who has written about the network. “His behavior was legendary because he was the ethical foil. Anonymous isn’t just for hackers. People like Barrett Brown can thrive: the organizer, the media-maker, the spectacle-maker.”

W
hen Brown met Housh, he was nearing the end of his three-year stint in Brooklyn. In the spring of 2010, Brown called his parents and told them he had a heroin problem. At their urging, he returned to Dallas and began an outpatient treatment that included the heroin replacement Suboxone. It was from a tiny Dallas apartment that Brown deepened his involvement with Anonymous. Since most of his friends lived in Austin, his new social life consisted of the IRC rooms populated by hacktivists. It was a world of nonstop, petty cyberintrigue, which to outsiders can appear like a hellish fusion of The Hollywood Squares, WarGames and Degrassi Junior High.

Bradley Manning Explains His Motives

Pritchard remembers the first time Brown crashed on his couch in Austin after his return to Dallas. “I’d wake up, and he’d be online having conversations with these kids on Skype or something,” he says. “Barrett would say, ‘I know what you’re doing!’ The other guy would be stroking his chin like he’s Dr. Claw, saying, ‘No, I know what you’re doing.’ It was nonstop cyberwar, with these dorks just dorking it out with each other. It seemed like a bunch of kids trolling each other.”

Still, Pritchard appreciated that beneath the dorkery, Brown was involved in serious business. This was Brown’s first year as an unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, and it was eventful. The hackers were aiding the uprisings of the Arab Spring, and assaulted PayPal and credit-card companies in retaliation for their refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks. This latter action, called Operation PayBack, earned the attention of the Justice Department. In the summer of 2011, the FBI issued 35 search warrants and arrested 14 suspected hackers.

The Trials of Bradley Manning

By the time of the arrests, Brown’s focus had settled squarely on the nexus between government agencies, private intelligence firms and the information-security industry – known as InfoSec – contracted to build programs and technologies of surveillance, disruption and control that Brown suspected were in many cases unconstitutional. What’s more, he was as bratty as ever about it. He phoned CEOs and flacks at their homes and called them liars. He boasted about bringing the whole system down. As the first raids and arrests took place following Operation PayBack, some observers of Brown’s antics began to suspect that the court jester of Anonymous was not a very safe thing to be.

“You could just tell it was going to end badly,” says an Anonymous member and veteran hacker. “When he really started making noise about going after these intel-contracting companies, I was like, ‘You’re going to get locked up, kid.'”

A
fter Operation Payback, Anonymous was on the radar of every private security firm looking to build a quick reputation. In the office of Aaron Barr, CEO of a struggling digital-security contractor called HBGary Federal, it was the biggest thing on the radar. Barr was convinced that taking down Anonymous before it struck again was a fast track to industry juice and massive contracts. In February 2011, he bragged to The Financial Times about the supersecret sleuthing techniques he had developed to get the goods on Anonymous. He claimed to know the identities of the group’s leaders. Implicit in Barr’s comments was the possibility of federal raids on those identified.

Partly to avoid that outcome, and partly out of curiosity, an Anonymous cell hacked HBGary’s servers. They discovered that Barr’s techniques involved hanging out on major social-media sites and compiling lists of mostly innocent people. It wasn’t the only example of his staggering miscalculation: Within minutes, the hackers easily got around the firm’s security defenses, ransacking company servers, wiping Barr’s personal tablet and absconding with 70,000 internal e-mails. Stephen Colbert devoted a segment to the fiasco, based around the image of Barr sticking his penis in a hornets’ nest.

Once the hackers who broke into HBGary’s servers discovered that Barr was basically a clown, they abandoned pursuit. “There were tens of thousands of e-mails and no one wanted to go through them,” says an Anonymous associate who observed the HBGary hack. “Everyone was like, ‘We’re not even going to dump these, because there’s no point.'”

Brown disagreed. When the hackers posted the e-mails on a BitTorrent site, he used Project PM to organize the painstaking work of collating and connecting the dots to see what picture emerged.

“Nobody was reading more than a couple of the e-mails before getting bored,” says the Anonymous associate. “But Barrett has this strangely addictive and journalistic kind of mind, so he could stare at those e-mails for 10 hours. He’d be sitting alone in the HBGary channel, yelling at everyone, ‘You’ve got to pay attention! Look at the crap I found!'” Brown quickly drew in some 100 volunteers to help him trawl through and make sense of the e-mails.

The HBGary cache offered one of the fullest looks ever at how corporate-state partnerships were targeting groups they considered subversive or inimical to the interests of corporate America. The projects under consideration at HBGary ranged from cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns targeting civic groups and journalists to Weird Science-supermodel avatars built to infiltrate and disrupt left-wing and anarchist networks.

Project PM volunteer investigator Joe Fionda remembers the disturbing thrill of uncovering HBGary’s use of a Maxim pinup to create online personas designed to spy for corporate and government clients. “I couldn’t believe how much crazy shit they were up to,” Fionda says. “My brain still feels like it’s going to explode.”

The biggest fish flopping in Brown’s net was the story of a cluster of contractors known as Team Themis. The origins of Team Themis dated to Bank of America’s alarm over Julian Assange’s 2010 claim to possess documents that “could take down a bank or two.” The Department of Justice recommended Bank of America retain the services of the white-shoe D.C. law firm Hunton & Williams and the high-­powered intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. On behalf of Bank of America, Hunton & Williams turned to the large and growing world of InfoSec subcontractors to come up with a plan, settling on HBGary and two dataintelligence shops, Berico Technologies and Palantir Technologies.

The Themis three were also preparing a proposal for Hunton & Williams on behalf of another client, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The leaked HBGary documents revealed that Themis was exploring ways of discrediting and disrupting the activities of organized labor and its allies for the Chamber. The potential money at stake in these contracts was considerable. According to Wired, the trio proposed that the Chamber create a $2-milliona-month sort of cyber special-forces team “of the kind developed and utilized by the Joint Special Operations Command.” They also suggested targeting a range of left-of-center organizations, including the SEIU, watchdog groups like U.S. Chamber Watch, and the Center for American Progress. (The Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America have denied ever hiring Team Themis or having any knowledge of the proposals.)

In pursuit of the Chamber and Bank of America contracts, the Themis three devised multipronged campaigns amounting to a private-sector information-age COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program to infiltrate and undermine “subversive” groups between 1956 and 1971. Among the The mis ideas presented to Hunton & Williams: “Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.”

The revelations represented a triumph for Brown and his wiki. A group of Democratic congressmen asked four Republican committee chairs to hold hearings on the “deeply troubling” question of whether “tactics developed for use against terrorists may have been unleashed illegally against American citizens.” But the calls for investigation went nowhere. The lack of outrage in Washington or on influential editorial pages didn’t shock Brown, who had long ago lost hope in the politicians and pundits who are “clearly intent on killing off even this belated scrutiny into the invisible empire that so thoroughly scrutinizes us – at our own expense and to unknown ends.”

It was Brown’s finest moment, but his relationship with Anonymous was rapidly deteriorating. By May 2011, Brown had begun turning on the network. “There’s little quality control in a movement like [Anonymous],” Brown told an interviewer. “You attract a lot of people whose interest is in fucking with video-game companies.”

Brown’s haughty dismissal of the new crop of hacktivists was not a feeling shared by the FBI. The government continued to see Anonymous as a major and growing threat. And in the summer of 2011, it acquired a key piece in its operation to destroy the network. On the night of June 7th, four months after the HBGary hack, two federal agents visited the Jacob Riis publichousing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and introduced themselves to a 27-year-old unemployed hacker named Hector Monsegur, known inside Anonymous as “Sabu.” As a leader of an Anonymous offshoot called Lulzsec, he had hacked a number of state and corporate servers. In early 2011, he made some rookie errors that led the FBI to his door: Facing the prospect of being indicted on 12 counts of criminal conspiracy, Sabu rolled over on his old hacker associates. He signed a cooperation agreement and began feeding the FBI information on Anonymous plots. The biggest of these involved a private global intelligence contractor located in Barrett Brown’s backyard, the Austin-based Stratfor.

I
n early December 2011, a young Chicago Anon named Jeremy Hammond cracked Stratfor’s server and downloaded some 5 million internal documents. With the apparent blessing and supervision of the FBI, Sabu provided the server for Hammond to store the docs. Hammond then proceeded to release them to the public. Sifting through the data dump would require a massive coordinated effort of exactly the kind Project PM had been training for. Brown and his dedicated volunteers attacked the mountains of e-mails. “We had between 30 and 50 people involved, usually 15 at a time,” says Lauren Pespisa, the Boston Project PM volunteer who now helps organize Brown’s legaldefense fund.

Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning?

After six months of work, Brown would discover what he considered the fattest spider amid the miles of Stratfor web: a San Diego-based cybersecurity firm called Cubic. As Brown followed the strings, he discovered links between Cubic and a data-mining contractor known as TrapWire, which had ties to CIA vets. Brown thought that he had stumbled on a major find illuminating new technologies for spying and surveillance, but the media pickup was not what Brown had hoped. Major dailies shrugged off the story, and Gawker and Slate poured cold water on his alarm, calling it “outlandish.” Brown responded to the criticism with a rambling, connect-the-conspiracy-dots YouTube video.

It wasn’t just gossip sites that viewed Brown’s reading of the Stratfor docs with a skeptical eye. Even sympathetic students of intelligence contracting urged caution about interpreting the TrapWire materials. “I applaud anyone digging into this stuff, but you can’t really draw conclusions from what these contractors say in these e-mails because they’re bragging and they’re trying to land business,” says Tim Shorrock, whose 2008 book Spies for Hire first exposed the scope of the intelligence-contracting industry. “Some of the quote-unquote intelligence that Stratfor was reporting on was ludicrous. Why would an intelligence agency buy this stuff?”

WikiLeaks Stratfor Emails: A Secret Indictment Against Julian Assange?

Meanwhile, deeply buried in the TrapWire debate was the fact that included in the Stratfor docs were the credit-card numbers of 5,000 Stratfor clients. Brown likely did not give the numbers a second thought. But it’s these numbers that form the most serious charges against Brown. The government alleges that when Brown pasted a link in a chat room to the alreadyleaked documents, he was intentionally “transferring” data for the purpose of credit-card and identity fraud.

“If the Pentagon Papers included creditcard info, then would The New York Times have been barred from researching them?” says Brown’s co-counsel Ghappour. “There is nothing to indicate Barrett wanted to profit from this information, or that he ever had the information in his possession. He was openly critical of such motives and disapproved of hacking for the sake of it. This was a big part of his rift with Anonymous – why he was considered a ‘moral fag’ by some.”

The FBI raided Brown’s Dallas apartment on the morning of March 6th, 2012, three months after the Stratfor hack, and one day after Jeremy Hammond was arrested in Chicago. More than a dozen feds led by agent Robert Smith knocked down the door with warrants for Brown’s computers and seized his Xbox. Brown was staying at his mother’s house nearby. Later that morning, the agents appeared at the home of Brown’s mother with a second warrant. They found his laptop in a kitchen cabinet, and she was later charged with obstruction. Brown, who was in the shower preparing for a TV interview when the agents arrived, was not arrested. The agents left with his laptop.

Among hacktivists, theories differ on the motive behind the FBI action. As one of the few public figures associated with Anonymous, Brown made a soft target with a potentially very valuable hard drive or two. Some say it was meant as a warning; others say Brown had simply pissed off too many powerful people, or was getting too close to something big.

Then there is the theory, advanced by Gregg Housh, that Brown and Hammond were targeted out of frustration with a blown sting against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. After looking into the Stratfor hack, Housh believes that the FBI allowed the hack to proceed not in order to arrest Hammond but Assange. “The idea was to have Sabu sell the stolen Stratfor material to Assange,” says Housh. “This would give them a concrete charge that he had knowingly bought stolen material to distribute on WikiLeaks.”

Housh believes Hammond got wind of Sabu’s plan to sell the documents to Assange and dumped them before the transaction could take place. While there is no proof of contact between Sabu and Assange, Sabu reportedly communicated with Sigurdur Thordarson, a teenage Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer and an FBI informant.

“Hammond had no idea what he’d done,” says Housh. “The FBI were a day away from having evidence against Assange, and Hammond screwed it up for them. That’s why they went after him so hard.”

Yet Hammond, who led the Stratfor hack, faced only 30 years before cutting a plea deal for 10. Why is Brown facing 105?

F
ollowing the March raid, Brown continued his investigations and planned for the future of Project PM. 2012 was going to be a big year. He had a new nucleus of friends and colleagues in Boston, where he was going to move and live in an activist group house. His investigations increasingly took place outside the Anonymous network. Brown had new allies in groups like Telecomix, a collective that operated its own crowdsourcing investigations into the cybersurveillance industry. That summer, he visited New York for the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, an annual gathering of hackers and activists, where he met a few of his Project PM colleagues offline for the first time. “I remember he was wearing a full suit in this crazy heat, sweating profusely in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania,” says Fionda. “He was still struggling with kicking heroin, he had tremors and looked like he was in a lot of pain. But he was full of energy. He was telling everyone, ‘We’re going to the center of the Earth with this story!'”

But Brown’s mental state seemed to deteriorate during the summer of 2012. Having battled depression throughout his life, he had gone off his meds and was simultaneously struggling with cold-turkey breaks from Suboxone for heroin withdrawal. His YouTube channel documents the effects. In August, Brown posted a clip that showed him skeet-shooting over the words of Caligula’s lament: “If only all of Rome had just one neck.” In early September, as Brown planned his move to Boston, he struggled to contain his rage at the local FBI agent Robert Smith, who had raided his mother’s home and taken his beloved Xbox.

In September, Brown uploaded a discombobulated three-part video series, the last one titled “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith.” In the videos, Brown struggles to maintain focus. He demands the return of his Xbox and warns that he comes from a military family that has trained him with weapons – weapons he says he’ll use to defend his home. He calls Smith a “fucking chickenshit little faggot cocksucker” before uttering the words he has since admitted were ill-considered, as well as the result of a chemically combustive mental state.

Why Shouldn’t Freedom of the Press Apply to WikiLeaks?

“Robert Smith’s life is over,” says Brown. “And when I say his life is over, I don’t say I’m going to go kill him, but I’m going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids. How do you like them apples?”

It takes a suspension of disbelief to hear a credible physical threat as defined by law. The rail-thin Brown appears a desperate, pathetic character in need of psychiatric help. A more humane FBI office might have sent a doctor rather than a car of armed agents. But the FBI didn’t send a shrink. That evening a team of armed agents stormed Brown’s apartment, threw him violently to the ground and arrested him for threatening a federal officer.

WikiLeaks Releases ‘Beat the Blockade’ Benefit CD

Over the next four months, federal grand juries issued three multicount indictments for obstruction and “access devicefraud” related to the Stratfor link. It is the last of these that concern civil-liberties activists and that could have a possible chilling effect. “One can’t apply the transfer provision of the statute to someone conducting research,” says Ghappour. “If cutting and pasting a link is the same as the transfer of the underlying data, then anyone on the Internet is prone to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.”

The FBI has shown interest in expanding that theoretical “anyone” to include Brown’s circle of volunteers. In March, the bureau went hunting for the digital fingerprints of Project PM administrators with a subpoena. The action has shaken the group’s inner circle, as it was surely intended. “It was a pretext to sow discord and fear in Barrett’s project,” says Alan Ross, a U.K. investigator for Project PM. “They were desperate to bolster their case. After the subpoena, people began to worry about being monitored. I worry about my personal safety even though I acted within the confines of the law. I worry about travel.”

Travel is one thing Brown does not have to worry about at the moment. Nor, if the government gets its way, will he have to worry about handling the media, his former specialty. In August, the prosecution requested a gag be placed on Brown and his lawyers, a move that suggests they understand the dangers of public scrutiny of the legal peculiarities of United States vs. Barrett Lancaster Brown.

Meanwhile, Brown has not joined the prison tradition of mastering the law behind bars. Rather than study up on cyberfraud statutes, he has resumed his writing on intel contractors and the pundits who defend them. “Nobody talks to me here,” Brown says of his year in jail, “but I was pretty unsociable on the outside too.” One of the hardest things about incarceration for the atheist has been contending with his cellmates’ singing of hymns. “Prison is great for reading and for thought, until they start in with their Pentecostal nonsense,” says Brown. “It ruins everything.”

His friends keep him supplied with articles and printouts, which lately have included material related to the Edward Snowden leak. Snowden gained access to information about secret NSA spying on private citizens while working for the intelligence subcontractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a company that had been on Brown’s radar long before most Americans learned of it in the wake of Snowden’s bombshells.

“This is all much bigger than me,” Brown says in the visiting room. “What matters is this.” He leans over to tap his handwritten manuscript. The pages of the essay are messy on the table, and sticking out from under the pile is the last sentence on the last page. “This is the world that we accept if we continue to avert our eyes,” it says. “And it promises to get much worse.”

This story is from the August 29th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/barrett-brown-faces-105-years-in-jail-20130905

by Alexander Zaitchik
SEPTEMBER 05, 2013

Find this story at 5 September 2013

Copyright ©2013 Rolling Stone

In Secret AT&T Deal, U.S. Drug Agents Given Access to 26 Years of Americans’ Phone Records

The New York Times has revealed the Drug Enforcement Administration has an even more extensive collection of U.S. phone records than the National Security Agency. Under a secretive DEA program called the Hemisphere Project, the agency has access to records of every phone call transmitted via AT&T’s infrastructure dating back to 1987. That period covers an even longer stretch of time than the NSA’s collection of phone records, which started under President George W. Bush. Each day, some four billion call records are swept into the database, which is stored by AT&T. The U.S. government then pays for AT&T employees to station themselves inside DEA units, where they can quickly hand over records after agents obtain an administrative subpoena. The DEA says the collection allows it to catch drug dealers who frequently switch phones, but civil liberties advocates say it raises major privacy concerns. We speak with Scott Shane, national security reporter for The New York Times and co-author of the report, “Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing NSA’s.”
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment we’ll be talking about the death of David Frost with the director Ron Howard, but first we turn to news that one government agency has an even more extensive collection of U.S. phone records than the National Security Administration, the NSA. That agency is the Drug Enforcement Administration. In a front-page article, The New York Times has revealed a secretive operation inside the DEA called the Hemisphere Project. Under this program, the DEA has access to records of every phone call over AT&T’s network dating back to 1987. That period covers a longer stretch of time than the NSA’s collection of phone records, which began under President George W. Bush. Some four billion call records are gathered to the DEA’s database every day. It’s unclear if other major phone companies are involved.

Unlike with the NSA, the DEA’s phone records are actually stored by AT&T. The U.S. government then pays for AT&T employees to station themselves inside DEA units, where they can quickly hand over data after agents obtain an administrative subpoena. The U.S. government says the program allows DEA agents to keep up with those in the drug trade who often switch phones. In a statement, Justice Department spokesperson Brian Fallon said that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process.”

The disclosure of the DEA’s Hemisphere program follows another major revelation involving the DEA and government surveillance. It was revealed last month a secretive DEA unit has used information taken from NSA wiretaps for cases unrelated to terrorism. The DEA has also provided classified intelligence obtained by the NSA and other sources to the Internal Revenue Service to help in their investigations of Americans.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Scott Shane, national security reporter for The New York Times. His front-page article, co-written with Colin Moynihan, appeared in Monday’s New York Times, “Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Scott Shane. Explain exactly how it’s done and how you found out about this.

SCOTT SHANE: Well, as you mentioned, I wrote this article with Colin Moynihan, a colleague at The New York Times, and he received from an activist in Washington state, named Drew Hendricks, a 27-slide PowerPoint, which was prepared by AT&T and government agents, apparently DEA or possibly other government agencies, and essentially they’re training slides to introduce folks who are going to be working on the Hemisphere Project, how it works and what it can do. And Drew Hendricks, the activist in Washington, got these slides as part of a series of public information requests. He’s sort of a peace activist out there, and he had been helping some folks with a lawsuit and just, you know, fired off a bunch of public information requests to police agencies in Washington state and other places on the West Coast. This set of slides came back with one of those requests.

Drew Hendricks believes it may have been sent actually by accident, included by accident. And so—but, in fact, it’s unclassified. It’s marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” but it’s unclassified, and it actually states that the Hemisphere Project is unclassified. What’s kind of remarkable to us is that this has been going on for at least six years under the name Hemisphere Project, and it’s unclassified, but no one has ever learned about it. I couldn’t find a single reference to it in the Nexis database or on the web. And so, they’ve kept it very well hidden, and indeed some of the slides say, if you get information from Hemisphere, never reveal the source of the information. So, the government has kept this very, very well hidden, along with AT&T.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what exactly it is, what AT&T is keeping records of and how the government uses this information.

SCOTT SHANE: AT&T operates what are called switches, through which telephone calls travel all around the country. And what AT&T does in this program is it collects all the—what are called the CDRs, the call data records, the so-called metadata from the calls that we’ve heard about in the NSA context. This is the phone number—phone numbers involved in a call, its time, its duration, and in this case it’s also the location. Some are cellphone calls; some are land line calls. Anything that travels through an AT&T switch, even if it’s not made by an AT&T customer—for example, if you’re using your T-Mobile cellphone but your call travels through an AT&T switch somewhere in the country, it will be picked up by this project and dumped into this database. So AT&T collects the information on all these calls, basically who called who when all over the country. And as you mentioned, there is a slide that says four billion—with a B—call data records are added to the database every day. I’m told by some technical experts that it’s possible one call can create more than one call data record. Apparently, if a cellphone, for example, in a moving car switches from one tower to another, that could be another record, so—because those numbers sound pretty high, 12—you know, maybe 12 or so calls per American per day.

But anyway, all that call data goes into this giant database, and then when a drug agent at one of three centers around the country—in Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta—finds a number of interest, they can ask the AT&T person sitting next to them, “Check this out.” The AT&T person accesses the database, the Hemisphere database, and they can come back with a record of, you know, “Here’s the other numbers called by this number, the number you’re interested in,” and when and where, in many cases, and then they can follow up.

I should say that in order to access the database, the government says that the agent asking AT&T to make the search has to produce at least what’s called an administrative subpoena, which is essentially a form, a DEA form, not approved by a court or by a judge, but simply a DEA form saying, you know, here’s why we’re interested in this number. So there’s no judicial oversight, but it is—these administrative subpoenas are used routinely in a criminal investigation. So the government’s side of the story is that this is no different from kind of routine criminal investigation that happens every day.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Shane, very quickly, my final question is about the issue of privacy. What does this raise for Americans?

SCOTT SHANE: Well, I think what it shows is that, apart from the program we’ve learned about with the NSA in recent months, there are many other programs that the government has, many of them related to law enforcement as well as to intelligence gathering, and also that the government works extremely closely with some telecommunications and Internet companies, sometimes using court orders but often using voluntary arrangements like this one, and often paying the companies to participate, so that the universe of data that’s gathered and has implications for American privacy goes way beyond any one agency or even beyond the government itself into the corporate sector.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Shane, I want to thank you for being with us, national security reporter for The New York Times. We’ll link to your front-page article yesterday, “Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s.”

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Find this story at 3 September 2013

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DEA has more extensive domestic phone surveillance op than NSA

For at least six years, US anti-drug agents have used subpoenas to routinely gain access to an enormous AT&T database. It’s an intrusion greater in scale and longevity than the NSA’s collection of phone calls, revealed by Edward Snowden’s leaks.

As part of the secret Hemisphere Project the government has been paying AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country, the New York Times reports.

The US’s largest telecoms operator has been supplying phone data to the Drug Enforcement Administration since 1987.

The project covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch, including those made by clients of other operators, with some four billion call records added to the database on a daily basis.

And, unlike the much debated NSA data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the location of those, making the calls.

The New York Times found out about the surveillance program after it received slides, describing the Hemisphere Project, from peace activist, Drew Hendricks.

The activist said he was sent the PowerPoint presentation – which is unclassified, but marked “Law enforcement sensitive” – in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.

The slides revealed that the program was launched back in 2007 and has been carried out in great secrecy since then.

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one of the slides said.

The paper performed a search of the Nexis database, but found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The US administration has acknowledged that Hemisphere is operational in three states, adding that the project employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.

Justice Department spokesman, Brian Fallon, stressed that it’s crucial that the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government like in the NSA case. It has requested phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge, but by a federal agency, the DEA.

According to the spokesman, Hemisphere proved especially effective in finding criminals, who frequently discard their cellphones in order to avoid being tracked by polices.

“Subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations,” he said in a statement.

The 27-slide PowerPoint presentation highlights several cases, in which Hemisphere solved big crimes, with not all of them being drug-related.

For example, this March it found the new phone number and location of a man, who impersonated a general at a San Diego Navy base and then ran over a Navy intelligence agent.

In 2011, Hemisphere tracked Seattle drug dealers, who were rotating prepaid phones, leading to the seizure of 136 kilos of cocaine and $2.2 million.

AT&T spokesman, Mark A. Siegel, declined to answer detailed questions on Hemisphere, only saying that AT&T “like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement.”

Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment when asked by the New York Times whether their companies participated in Hemisphere or any other similar programs.

An undisclosed federal law enforcement official told the paper the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.

It’s not the first time AT&T has been involved in federal surveillance programs, the company operated a telecommunication interception facility for the NSA between 2003 and 2006.

Published time: September 02, 2013 23:41
Edited time: September 04, 2013 09:04

Find this story at 4 September 2013

© Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, 2005–2013.

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.

But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”

Mr. Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”

He said that the program was paid for by the D.E.A. and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.

Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together D.E.A. and local investigators — two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.

Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia, said he sympathized with the government’s argument that it needs such voluminous data to catch criminals in the era of disposable cellphones.

“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates? No,” said Mr. Richman, who worked as a federal drug prosecutor in Manhattan in the early 1990s. “Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”

But Mr. Richman said the program at least touched on an unresolved Fourth Amendment question: whether mere government possession of huge amounts of private data, rather than its actual use, may trespass on the amendment’s requirement that searches be “reasonable.” Even though the data resides with AT&T, the deep interest and involvement of the government in its storage may raise constitutional issues, he said.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises profound privacy concerns.”

“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” he said.

Mr. Jaffer said that while the database remained in AT&T’s possession, “the integration of government agents into the process means there are serious Fourth Amendment concerns.”

Mr. Hendricks filed the public records requests while assisting other activists who have filed a federal lawsuit saying that a civilian intelligence analyst at an Army base near Tacoma infiltrated and spied on antiwar groups. (Federal officials confirmed that the slides are authentic.)

Mark A. Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, declined to answer more than a dozen detailed questions, including ones about what percentage of phone calls made in the United States were covered by Hemisphere, the size of the Hemisphere database, whether the AT&T employees working on Hemisphere had security clearances and whether the company has conducted any legal review of the program

“While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement,” Mr. Siegel wrote in an e-mail.

Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment on Sunday in response to questions about whether their companies were aware of Hemisphere or participated in that program or similar ones. A federal law enforcement official said that the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.

The PowerPoint slides outline several “success stories” highlighting the program’s achievements and showing that it is used in investigating a range of crimes, not just drug violations. The slides emphasize the program’s value in tracing suspects who use replacement phones, sometimes called “burner” phones, who switch phone numbers or who are otherwise difficult to locate or identify.

In March 2013, for instance, Hemisphere found the new phone number and location of a man who impersonated a general at a San Diego Navy base and then ran over a Navy intelligence agent. A month earlier the program helped catch a South Carolina woman who had made a series of bomb threats.

And in Seattle in 2011, the document says, Hemisphere tracked drug dealers who were rotating prepaid phones, leading to the seizure of 136 kilos of cocaine and $2.2 million.

September 1, 2013
By SCOTT SHANE and COLIN MOYNIHAN

Find this story at 1 September 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Release of DEA Agent Kiki Camarena’s “Murderer” Is Game Changer for CIA

Narco-Trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero Knows Where All the Skeletons Are Buried in the US’ Dirty Drug War

The recent release from a Mexican prison of Rafael Caro Quintero — a godfather in Mexico’s narco-trafficking world — rips a scab off a long metastasizing tumor in the US drug war.

A Mexican federal court on Friday, Aug. 9, overturned Caro Quintero’s 40-year sentence after 28 years served because, the court contends, he was tried wrongly in a federal court for a state offense. Caro Quintero was convicted of orchestrating the brutal torture and murder of US DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena — who was abducted on Feb. 7, 1985, after leaving the US Consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico, to meet his wife for lunch. His body was found several weeks later buried in a shallow grave some 70 miles north of Guadalajara.

Caro Quintero’s release from prison brings to the surface once again some longstanding, unsettled questions about the US government’s role in the war on drugs. The recent mainstream media coverage of Caro Quintero’s release has focused, in the main, on the shock and anger of US officials — who are now waving the Camarena case in the public arena like a bloody flag, arguing his honor, and that of the nation’s, must be avenged in the wake of Mexico’s affront in allowing Caro Quintero to walk free.

What is not being discussed is the US government’s complicity in Caro Quintero’s narco-trafficking business, and, yes, even in the Camarena’s gruesome murder.

Breaking It Down

In his definitive book about the US drug war, titled “Down by the River,” journalist Charles Bowden reveals that DEA special agent Camarena spent some time in Mexico with another DEA agent, Phil Jordan, in May 1984, prior to Camarena’s abduction. Jordan, at the time, pointed out to Camarena that they were being followed.

Camarena replied calmly that the individuals who were tailing them worked for Mexico’s intelligence service, the Federal Security Directorate, or DFS in its Spanish initials.

From Bowden’s book:

Camarena brushes off Jordan’s alarm by noting that DFS is trained by the CIA and is functionally a unit in their mysterious work. And he says they are also functionally “the eyes and ears of the cartels.”

That is a stunning revelation, that the CIA and DFS were “functionally” working in unison and simultaneously the DFS also was in league with Mexico’s narco-traffickers — which at the time included Caro Quintero along with his partners Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, considered the top dogs in Mexico’s then-dominate drug organization, The Guadalajara Cartel.

In fact, the DFS also was accused of being complicit in the kidnapping and murder of Camarena and the subsequent attempt to provide protection to Caro Quintero — who was eventually apprehended in Costa Rica after allegedly getting to that country with the help of the DFS.

Caro Quintero and Fonseca Carrillo were eventually convicted and jailed for their roles in Camarena’s murder and the killing of his pilot, Alfrado Zavala Avelar. Each was sentenced to serve 40 years in a Mexican prison. Caro Quintero was 37 at the time.

But Camarena was not the only victim of DFS corruption during that era. A famous Mexican journalist, Manuel Buendia, who in the mid-1980s was investigating the connections between corrupt Mexican officials and narco-traffickers, including Caro Quintero, was murdered in 1984 allegedly with the assistance of DFS’ leadership.

A story by noted Mexican newspaper columnist Carlos Ramirez, translated and published by Narco News in 2000, describes the circumstances surrounding Buendia’s murder as follows:

Buendía was assassinated on May 30, 1984, on a street near the Zona Rosa of México City. The investigation was covered-up by the Federal Security Agency [DFS]. The last investigations undertaken by Buendía into drug trafficking led him into the rural indigenous areas of the country. Buendía had responded to a newspaper ad by the Catholic bishops in the south of the country where they denounced the penetration of the narco in rural Mexico but also the complicity of the Army and police corps.

Buendía did not finish his investigation. His assassination came almost a year before… the assassination of US anti-drug agent Enrique Camarena Salazar in Guadalajara had exposed the penetration of drug traffickers in the Mexican police.

… Agents of the the Political and Social Investigations Agency and of the Federal Security Agency were discovered as protectors of drug trafficking in México. The Attorney General of the Republic, in the investigation of the assassination of Camarena, found credentials of the Federal Security police in the name of drug traffickers. Caro Quintero escaped to Costa Rica using a credential of the Federal Security Agency [DFS] with his photo but with another name. ….

That which Buendía was investigating months before was confirmed by the assassination of Camerena, a DEA agent assigned to the US Consulate in Guadalajara. …

Documents

The DFS was disbanded in 1985, after Camarena’s murder, and integrated into Mexico’s version of the CIA, called CISEN in its Spanish initials. CISEN still works closely with US agencies and officials, including the CIA, but it is the legacy of DFS and its partnership with the CIA that is being brought to the surface once again with the recent release of Caro Quintero.

In particular, a DEA Report of Investigation, prepared in February 1990 and obtained by Narco News, provides some detailed insight into the DFS/CIA connection. The DEA report was referenced in media coverage of the US trial of four individuals accused of playing a role in Camarena’s murder.

From a July 5, 1990, report in the Los Angeles Times:

The [DEA] report is based on an interview two Los-Angeles based DEA agents conducted with Laurence Victor Harrison, a shadowy figure who, according to court testimony, ran a sophisticated communications network for major Mexican drug traffickers and their allies in Mexican law enforcement in the early and mid 1980s.

On Feb. 9, according to the report, Harrison told DEA agents Hector Berrellez and Wayne Schmidt that the CIA used Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS) “as a cover, in the event any questions were raised as to who was running the training operation.”

That training operation, according to the DEA Report of Investigation, involved “Guatemalan Guerrillas” who “were training at a ranch owned by Rafael Caro-Quintero” in Veracruz on Mexico’s East Coast.

More from the DEA report:

The operations/training at the camp were conducted by the American CIA, using the DFS as cover, in the event any questions were raised as to who was running the [camp].

…. Representatives of the DFS, which was the front for the training camp were in fact acting in consort with major drug overlords to insure a flow of narcotics through Mexico and into the United States.

… Using the DFS as cover, the CIA established and maintained clandestine airfields to refuel aircraft loaded with weapons, which were destined for Honduras and Nicaragua.

Pilots of these aircrafts would allegedly load up with cocaine in Barranquilla, Colombia, and in route to Miami, Florida, refuel in Mexico at narcotic trafficker operated and CIA maintained airstrips.

Tosh Plumlee was one of the CIA contract pilots flying drug loads into the US at the time. Plumlee told Narco News that among the places where his aircraft landed while working these missions was the Caro Quintero-owned ranch in Veracruz, Mexico.

“I was flying sanctioned operations transporting cocaine out of Colombia and into the United States,” Plumlee says. “[DEA agent Kiki] Camarena knew all about those operations.”

Plumlee attempted to blow the whistle on the arms-and-drugs transshipment operations in the early 1980s, prior to Camarena’s death.

The following excerpts are from a February 1991 letter written by former US Sen. Gary Hart and sent to US Sen. John Kerry, then chairman of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications.

In March of 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and met with Mr. Bill Holen of my Senate Staff. During the initial meeting, Mr. Plumlee raised certain allegations concerning U.S. foreign and military policy toward Nicaragua and the use of covert activities by U.S. Intelligence agencies.

… Mr. Plumlee also stated that Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador were providing U.S. military personnel access to secret landing field and various staging areas scattered throughout Central America.

He specifically cited the Mexican government’s direct knowledge of illegal arms shipments and narcotic smuggling activities that were taking place out of a civilian ranch in the Veracruz area which were under the control and sponsorship of Rafael Caro-Quintero and the Luis Jorge Ochoa branch of the Medellin Escobar Cartel.

… Mr. Plumlee raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to raise funds for covert military operations against the government of Nicaragua. …

Heads in the Sand

Even prior to Caro Quintero’s surprise prison release on Aug. 9, it appears he was being allowed to carry out his narco-business from a comfortable jailhouse condo with little interference from authorities in Mexico. As evidence of that fact, in June of this year DEA announced that the US Department of the Treasury had “designated 18 individuals and 15 [business] entities” as being linked to Rafael Caro Quintero.

“Today’s action,” the DEA press release states, “pursuant to the Kingpin Act, generally prohibits US persons from conducting financial or commercial transactions with these designees, and also freezes any assets they may have under US jurisdiction.”

In other words, the US government is alleging that even while he was incarcerated, Caro Quintero continued to run his drug empire through third parties who were laundering millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains on his behalf.

How is that possible, unless Caro Quintero continues to have extremely good connections within the Mexican government that have an interest in assuring his drug money is laundered?

If that’s the case, why would those same government officials have any interest in extraditing him to the US to stand trial?

Similarly, why would those with any real juice in the US government want to put Caro Quintero on trial, at least in an open court, if he has the knowledge to expose corrupt covert US operations that played a role in the murder of a US DEA agent?

The only way to hide that complicity would be to shield Caro Quintero’s trial from public view under a national-security cloak — even though the charges against him are criminal in nature (drug-trafficking and murder) and should not implicate national security. As further evidence of that fact, the CIA has already told the media that the allegations about the Agency’s involvement in Caro Quintero’s Veracruz ranch are bogus.

”The whole story is nonsense,” CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield told the Associated Press in 1990. ”We have not trained Guatemalan guerrillas on that ranch or anywhere else.”

But its worth noting that since the CIA issued that statement, a UN-sponsored truth commission found that the US, through agencies like the CIA, did play a role in training the death squads responsible for murdering or disappearing some 200,000 Guatemalans – most of them civilians – during the course of that nation’s bloody 34-year civil war. Some 626 massacres played out in the 1980s alone, when the CIA-sponsored Veracruz, Mexico, “Guatemalan Guerrilas” training operation was allegedly underway.

From a 1999 Washington Post story on the truth commission’s findings:

… The commission found that the “government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations.”

… Documenting the atrocities, the report found the army “completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their dwellings, livestock and crops” and said that in the northern part of the country, where the Mayan population is largest, the army carried out a systematic campaign of “genocide.”

Given that backdrop, it appears Caro Quintero, now 61, is clearly a man who may well know too much about US national security operations.

The DEA issued a statement after Caro Quintero was ordered released from prison, making it clear, at least from a public-relations perspective, that the agency still very much wants to track him down and put him behind bars in the US.

The Drug Enforcement Administration is deeply troubled to learn of the decision by a Mexican court to release infamous drug trafficker Rafael Caro-Quintero from a Mexican prison. Caro-Quintero had been serving a 40 year prison sentence in connection with the kidnapping, torture and murder of DEA Special Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in February 1985.

Caro-Quintero was the mastermind and organizer of this atrocious act. We are reminded every day of the ultimate sacrifice paid by Special Agent Camarena and DEA will vigorously continue its efforts to ensure Caro-Quintero faces charges in the United States for the crimes he committed.

But why stop with Caro Quintero? Why not go after everyone who had a hand in the drug-war corruption that led to Camarena’s death? Why isn’t DEA clamoring for that outcome?

I think we all know the answer to that question. And you can bet Caro Quintero does as well, and will do everything in is power to assure he isn’t held up as the lone scapegoat in some drug-war fairy tale.

So what are our drug-war warriors to do when faced with such a house of mirrors? Well, that’s what rival narco-traffickers and shadowy intelligence-agency assets are used for in the Big Game, no?

Posted by Bill Conroy – August 10, 2013 at 10:17 pm

Find this story at 10 August 2013

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The NSA-DEA police state tango; This week’s DEA bombshell shows us how the drug war and the terror war have poisoned our justice system

So the paranoid hippie pot dealer you knew in college was right all along: The feds really were after him. In the latest post-Snowden bombshell about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division – so secret that nearly everything about it is classified, including the size of its budget and the location of its office — has been using the immense pools of data collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to go after American citizens for ordinary drug crimes. Law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, have been coached to conceal the existence of the program and the source of the information by creating what’s called a “parallel construction,” a fake or misleading trail of evidence. So no one in the court system – not the defendant or the defense attorney, not even the prosecutor or the judge – can ever trace the case back to its true origins.

On one hand, we all knew more revelations were coming, and the idea that the government would go after drug suspects with the same dubious extrajudicial methods used to pursue terrorism suspects is a classic and not terribly surprising example of mission creep. Both groups have been held up as bogeymen for years, in order to scare the public into accepting ever nastier and more repressive laws. This gives government officials another chance to talk to us in their stern grown-up voices about how this isn’t civics class, and sometimes they have to bend the rules to catch Really Bad People.

On the other hand, this is a genuinely sinister turn of events with a whiff of science-fiction nightmare, one that has sounded loud alarm bells for many people in the mainstream legal world. Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor who spent 18 years as a federal judge and cannot be accused of being a radical, told Reuters she finds the DEA story more troubling than anything in Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. It’s the first clear evidence that the “special rules” and disregard for constitutional law that have characterized the hunt for so-called terrorists have crept into the domestic criminal justice system on a significant scale. “It sounds like they are phonying up investigations,” she said. Maybe this is how a police state comes to America: Not with a bang, but with a parallel construction.

By Andrew O’Hehir
Saturday, Aug 10, 2013 06:30 PM +0200

Find this story at 10 August 2013

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Exclusive: IRS manual detailed DEA’s use of hidden intel evidence

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news agency.

As Reuters reported Monday, the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Monday’s Reuters report cited internal government documents that show that law enforcement agents have been trained to conceal how such investigations truly begin – to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up the original source of the information.

DEA officials said the practice is legal and has been in near-daily use since the 1990s. They have said that its purpose is to protect sources and methods, not to withhold evidence.

NEW DETAIL

Defense attorneys and some former judges and prosecutors say that systematically hiding potential evidence from defendants violates the U.S. Constitution. According to documents and interviews, agents use a procedure they call “parallel construction” to recreate the investigative trail, stating in affidavits or in court, for example, that an investigation began with a traffic infraction rather than an SOD tip.

The IRS document offers further detail on the parallel construction program.

“Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects,” the IRS document says. “SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations.”

The 2005 IRS document focuses on SOD tips that are classified and notes that the Justice Department “closely guards the information provided by SOD with strict oversight.” While the IRS document says that SOD information may only be used for drug investigations, DEA officials said the SOD role has recently expanded to organized crime and money laundering.

According to the document, IRS agents are directed to use the tips to find new, “independent” evidence: “Usable information regarding these leads must be developed from such independent sources as investigative files, subscriber and toll requests, physical surveillance, wire intercepts, and confidential source information. Information obtained from SOD in response to a search or query request cannot be used directly in any investigation (i.e. cannot be used in affidavits, court proceedings or maintained in investigative files).”

The IRS document makes no reference to SOD’s sources of information, which include a large DEA telephone and Internet database.

CONCERN IN CONGRESS

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, expressed concern with the concept of parallel construction as a method to hide the origin of an investigation. His comments came on the Mike Huckabee Show radio program.

“If they’re recreating a trail, that’s wrong and we’re going to have to do something about it,” said Rogers, a former FBI agent. “We’re working with the DEA and intelligence organizations to try to find out exactly what that story is.”

Spokespeople for the DEA and the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, a member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said he was troubled that DEA agents have been “trying to cover up a program that investigates Americans.”

“National security is one of government’s most important functions. So is protecting individual liberty,” Paul said. “If the Constitution still has any sway, a government that is constantly overreaching on security while completely neglecting liberty is in grave violation of our founding doctrine.”

Officials have stressed that the NSA and DEA telephone databases are distinct. The NSA database, disclosed by Snowden, includes data about every telephone call placed inside the United States. An NSA official said that database is not used for domestic criminal law enforcement.

The DEA database, called DICE, consists largely of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. DICE includes about 1 billion records, and they are kept for about a year and then purged, DEA officials said.

(Research by Hilary Shroyer of West, a Thomson Reuters business. Additional reporting by David Lawder. Edited by Michael Williams)

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Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.

Wed, Aug 7 2013
By John Shiffman and David Ingram

Find this story at 7 August 2013

© Thomson Reuters

DEA and NSA Team Up to Share Intelligence, Leading to Secret Use of Surveillance in Ordinary Investigations

UPDATE: Add the IRS to the list of federal agencies obtaining information from NSA surveillance. Reuters reports that the IRS got intelligence tips from DEA’s secret unit (SOD) and were also told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to recreate the information obtained from SOD. So that makes two levels of deception: SOD hiding the fact it got intelligence from the NSA and the IRS hiding the fact it got information from SOD. Even worse, there’s a suggestion that the Justice Department (DOJ) “closely guards the information provided by SOD with strict oversight,” shedding doubt into the effectiveness of DOJ earlier announced efforts to investigate the program.

A startling new Reuters story shows one of the biggest dangers of the surveillance state: the unquenchable thirst for access to the NSA’s trove of information by other law enforcement agencies.

As the NSA scoops up phone records and other forms of electronic evidence while investigating national security and terrorism leads, they turn over “tips” to a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency (“DEA”) known as the Special Operations Division (“SOD”). FISA surveillance was originally supposed to be used only in certain specific, authorized national security investigations, but information sharing rules implemented after 9/11 allows the NSA to hand over information to traditional domestic law-enforcement agencies, without any connection to terrorism or national security investigations.

But instead of being truthful with criminal defendants, judges, and even prosecutors about where the information came from, DEA agents are reportedly obscuring the source of these tips. For example, a law enforcement agent could receive a tip from SOD—which SOD, in turn, got from the NSA—to look for a specific car at a certain place. But instead of relying solely on that tip, the agent would be instructed to find his or her own reason to stop and search the car. Agents are directed to keep SOD under wraps and not mention it in “investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony,” according to Reuters.

“Parallel construction” is really intelligence laundering

The government calls the practice “parallel construction,” but deciphering their double speak, the practice should really be known as “intelligence laundering.” This deception and dishonesty raises a host of serious legal problems.

First, the SOD’s insulation from even judges and prosecutors stops federal courts from assessing the constitutionality of the government’s surveillance practices. Last year, Solicitor General Donald Verilli told the Supreme Court that a group of lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates who regularly communicate with targets of NSA wiretapping under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) had no standing to challenge the constitutionality of that surveillance. But Verrilli said that if the government wanted to use FAA evidence in a criminal prosecution, the source of the information would have to be disclosed. When the Supreme Court eventually ruled in the government’s favor, finding the plaintiffs had no standing, it justified its holding by noting the government’s concession that it would inform litigants when FAA evidence was being used against them.

Although the government has been initially slow to follow up on Verrilli’s promises, it has begrudgingly acknowledged its obligation to disclose when it uses the FAA to obtain evidence against criminal defendants. Just last week DOJ informed a federal court in Miami that it was required to disclose when FAA evidence was used to build a terrorism case against a criminal defendant.

Terrorism cases make up a very small portion of the total number of criminal cases brought by the federal government, counting for just 0.4 percent of all criminal cases brought by all U.S. Attorney offices across the country in 2012. Drug cases, on the other hand, made up 20 percent of all federal criminal cases filed in 2012, the second most prosecuted type of crime after immigration cases. If the government acknowledges it has to disclose when FAA evidence has been used to make a drug case—even if it’s a tip leading to a pretextual traffic stop—the number of challenges to FAA evidence will increase dramatically.

SOD bypasses the Constitution

Even beyond the larger systemic problem of insulating NSA surveillance from judicial review, criminal defendants whose arrest or case is built upon FISA evidence are now deprived of their right to examine and challenge the evidence used against them.

Taken together, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee a criminal defendant a meaningful opportunity to present a defense and challenge the government’s case. But this intelligence laundering deprives defendants of these important constitutional protections. It makes it harder for prosecutors to comply with their ethical obligation under Brady v. Maryland to disclose any exculpatory or favorable evidence to the defense—an obligation that extends to disclosing evidence bearing on the reliability of a government witness. Hiding the source of information used by the government to initiate an investigation or make an arrest means defendants are deprived of the opportunity to challenge the accuracy or veracity of the government’s investigation, let alone seek out favorable evidence in the government’s possession.

Courts must have all the facts

The third major legal problem is that the practice suggests DEA agents are misleading the courts. Wiretaps, search warrants, and other forms of surveillance authorizations require law enforcement to go to a judge and lay out the facts that support the request. The court’s function is to scrutinize the facts to determine the appropriate legal standard has been met based on truthful, reliable evidence. So, for example, if the government is using evidence gathered from an informant to support its request for a search warrant, it has to establish to the court that the informant is reliable and trustworthy so that the court can be convinced there is probable cause to support the search. But when law enforcement omits integral facts—like the source of a tip used to make an arrest—the court is deprived of the opportunity to fulfill its traditional role and searches are signed off without the full knowledge of the court.

Ultimately, if you build it, they will come. There’s no doubt that once word got out about the breadth of data the NSA was collecting and storing, other law enforcement agencies would want to get their hands in the digital cookie jar. In fact, the New York Times reported on Sunday that other agencies have tried to get information from the NSA to “curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement.”

Teaming up to play fast and loose with criminal defendants and the court, the DEA and NSA have made a mockery of the rule of law and the legal frameworks intended to curb abuses.

August 6, 2013 | By Hanni Fakhoury

Find this story at 6 August 2013

© www.eff.org

A Domestic Surveillance Scandal at the DEA? Agents Urged to Cover Up Use of NSA Intel in Drug Probes

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun reviewing a controversial unit inside the Drug Enforcement Administration that uses secret domestic surveillance tactics — including intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency — to target Americans for drug offenses. According to a series of articles published by Reuters, agents are instructed to recreate the investigative trail in order to conceal the origins of the evidence, not only from defense lawyers, but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. “We are talking about ordinary crime: drug dealing, organized crime, money laundering. We are not talking about national security crimes,” says Reuters reporter John Shiffman. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, says this is just the latest scandal at the DEA. “I hope it is a sort of wake-up call for people in Congress to say now is the time, finally, after 40 years, to say this agency really needs a close examination.”
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The Justice Department has begun reviewing a controversial unit inside the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration that uses secret domestic surveillance tactics, including intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency, to target Americans for drug offenses. According to a series of articles published by the Reuters news agency, agents are instructed to recreate the investigative trail in order to conceal the origins of the evidence—not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. DEA training documents instruct agents to even make up alternative versions of how such investigations truly begin, a process known as “parallel construction.”

On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked about the Reuters investigation.

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: It’s my understanding, our understanding, that the Department of Justice is looking at some of the issues raised in the story. But for more, I would refer you to the Department of Justice.

AMY GOODMAN: The unit of the DEA that distributes the secret intelligence to agents is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. The unit was first created two decades ago, but it’s coming under increased scrutiny following the recent revelations about the NSA maintaining a database of all phone calls made in the United States. One former federal judge, Nancy Gertner, said the DEA program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the NSA has been collecting domestic phone records. She said, quote, “It is one thing to create special rules for national security. Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”

For more, we’re joined by the reporter who broke this story, John Shiffman, correspondent for Reuters, which published his exclusive story Monday, “U.S. Tells Agents to Cover Up Use of Wiretap Program.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, John. Why don’t you start off by just laying it out and what exactly this cover-up is.

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Thanks very much for having me.

Well, my colleague Kristina Cooke and I spoke with about a dozen or two dozen agents and obtained some internal documents that showed that what federal agents, not just DEA agents but other agents who work with the DEA and do drug investigations—what they’re doing is, is they are starting—they are claiming that their investigations start, say, at step two. They are withholding step one from the investigations. And, I should say, it’s not just NSA intercepts. It’s informant information, information obtained from court-ordered wiretaps in one case, and using those for information in a second case. They also have a large database of phone records. Whenever the DEA subpoenas or does a search warrant and gets phone records for someone suspected of involvement in drugs or gang involvement, they put all those numbers into one giant database they call DICE, and they use that information to compare different cases. All of the collection is—seems perfectly legitimate, in terms of being court-ordered. What troubles some critics is the fact that they are hiding that information from drug defendants who face trial. The problem with that is that—is that these defendants won’t know about some potentially exculpatory information that may affect their case and their right to a fair trial.

AMY GOODMAN: So explain exactly how this information is being hidden from judges, prosecutors and sometimes defense attorneys, as well.

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Sure. Well, just to give an example, through any of these four different ways, including the NSA intercepts, the DEA’s Special Operations Division will send the information to a DEA agent in the field or a FBI agent or an ICE agent or state policeman, and they’ll give him the information. Then they’ll say, “Look, you know, we understand that there will be a truck going to a certain park in Texas at a certain time. It’s a red truck. It’ll be two people involved.” And the state trooper or the DEA will find you reason to pull the truck over, say for a broken tail light or for speeding, that sort of thing. And, lo and behold, inside the trunk they’ll find, you know, a kilo of cocaine. The people who have been arrested will never know that—why the police or the DEA pulled them over. They’ll think it’s just luck. And that’s important because if those people try to go to trial, there are pieces of information about how that evidence was obtained and what it shows and what other pieces of it show—might affect their trial.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, I spoke with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald just after your story broke about how the DEA is using material gathered in part by the NSA in its surveillance of Americans. Glenn Greenwald has, of course, broken several major stories about the NSA’s domestic activity. This was his response.

GLENN GREENWALD: So this should be a huge scandal for the following reason. The essence of the Constitution is that the government cannot obtain evidence or information about you unless it has probable cause to believe that you’ve engaged in a crime and then goes to a court and gets a warrant. And only then is that evidence usable in a prosecution against you. What this secret agency is doing, according to Reuters, it is circumventing that process by gathering all kinds of information without any court supervision, without any oversight at all, using surveillance technologies and other forms of domestic spying. And then, when it gets this information that it believes it can be used in a criminal prosecution, it knows that that information can’t be used in a criminal prosecution because it’s been acquired outside of the legal and constitutional process, so they cover up how they really got it, and they pretend—they make it seem as though they really got it through legal and normal means, by then going back and retracing the investigation, once they already have it, and re-acquiring it so that it looks to defense counsel and even to judges and prosecutors like it really was done in the constitutionally permissible way. So they’re prosecuting people and putting people in prison for using evidence that they’ve acquired illegally, which they’re then covering up and lying about and deceiving courts into believing was actually acquired constitutionally. It’s a full-frontal assault on the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments and on the integrity of the judicial process, because they’re deceiving everyone involved in criminal prosecutions about how this information has been obtained.

AMY GOODMAN: John Shiffman, if you could elaborate on that and also talk about the differences between what the DEA is doing and what Glenn Greenwald exposed around the NSA?

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Sure. These are two very—I think they’re different topics, for one main reason, which is that the NSA revelations by Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Snowden are related to terrorism—or at least that’s what we’re told by the government. And the DEA, what the DEA is doing is only—very rarely do they get involved in terrorism. I mean, they do some narcoterrorism, but inside the United States we’re talking about ordinary crime. We’re talking about drug dealing, organized crime, money laundering. We’re not talking about national security crimes.

The one thing I would say is that the defense analysts I’ve spoken with, meaning defense attorney analysts, they emphasize less the probable cause aspect of it than they find—they don’t find that as troubling. What they find really troubling is the pretrial discovery aspects of this and a prosecutor’s, you know, obligation to turn over any exculpatory evidence. What they really have a problem with is that this program systematically excludes or appears to systematically exclude all evidence obtained, you know, that’s hidden from view, so the defense doesn’t know to request it. They find that a lot more troubling than the probable cause aspects of it. The Supreme Court has given a pretty wide pro-police interpretation of when probable cause can be obtained, and there are a variety of exceptions. But it’s really the pretrial discovery part of it that seems to trouble a lot of the former judges and defense attorneys and prosecutors.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the two slides Reuters obtained that were used to train agents with the Drug Enforcement Agency instructs them in the use of parallel construction. According to the slide, this is, quote, “the use of normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by the [Special Operations Division],” such as subpoenaed domestic telephone calls. A second slide instructs agents that such evidence, quote, “cannot be revealed or discussed.” The slide is titled “Special Operations Division Rules.” Describe what you uncovered about those rules and this concept of parallel construction, which until now had not been publicly discussed in writing.

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Well, what really surprised me was talking to agents, current and former agents, who said, “Sure, we do that.” They—half of them said, “Yeah, you know, I could see how people might have a problem with that.” The other half said, “You know, look, this is a hard job that we do, and we’re going after criminals and drug dealers.” The people that got the most offended, I think, were the lawyers, the prosecutors and the—you know, and the judges and the former judges. One current prosecutor told me that he had a case where—in Florida, where a DEA agent came to him with a case and said that it began with an informant. So they were proceeding with the case, and the prosecutor asked the DEA agent more information. He said, you know, “I need to know more about your informant.” Turns out, ultimately, that he found out that there was no informant. It was an NSA wiretap. And what—overseas. And that really upset the prosecutor, because he said that it really offended his sense of fair play and honesty. And he said, “It’s just a bad way of starting an investigation, if you’re going to start with a lie.”

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Ethan Nadelmann into this discussion, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Ethan, why is—are the revelations by Reuters, John Shiffman’s investigation, so significant for your work?

ETHAN NADELMANN: Well, I think what it plays into, Amy, is that there’s been this remarkable lack of oversight of DEA by Congress, by other federal oversight agencies, for decades now. I mean, this year marks the 40th anniversary of the DEA, which Nixon created as a merger of police agencies, of drug enforcement agencies, back during the—one of the earlier drug wars. And what you see is an organization with a budget of over $2 billion. You see an organization getting involved in all sorts of shenanigans, hiring informants who land up to be tied up with murderers, you know, locking up some poor drug—you know, I don’t think even drug dealer, drug—low-level offender, and forgetting about him in a prison cell in this case of Daniel Chong, who was left in a prison cell for five days and forgotten. But beyond that, you have the agency serving as a propaganda agency, with no—with none of its statements being compared or held to any sort of scientific standards. You have an administrator who testifies before Congress and is almost a laughing stock when it comes to talking about drugs. So I think that this report by Reuters and by John Shiffman—I hope it’s a sort of wake-up call for people in Congress to say, “Now is the time, finally, after really 40 years, to say this agency really needs a close examination.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ethan, the Drug Enforcement Administration has agreed to pay $4.1 million in a settlement to a San Diego college student who nearly lost his life after being left handcuffed in his cell for more than four days without food or water. He ultimately drank his urine as he lay there, yelling out to agents right outside. His name was Daniel Chong. He was arrested for a 420 celebration of marijuana culture. He was never charged with any crime, and ultimately he was released.

ETHAN NADELMANN: You know, I think—I mean, that’s the case I was mentioning before. I mean, part of—you know, one can say, “Oh, this is just an accident, and accidents happen.” But, of course, accidents like that should never happen when you’re talking about a police agency, much less a federal police agency, being allowed to just sort of forget about somebody. And in the end, what happens? The taxpayers bail out the DEA for almost killing somebody for no cause whatsoever. So, you know, each year the DEA goes through its own little, you know, appropriations hearings in Congress. Each year it gets approved. And each year they just sort of get a ride. I think these things are piling up in a way that can no longer be sustained—should no longer be sustained.

AMY GOODMAN: So what has been, John Shiffman, the response to your investigation by the DEA, by the NSA, by the FBI and others?

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Well, they say it’s perfectly legal, what they do. And they say that—one DEA official told us that, you know, “This is a bedrock principle, parallel construction. We use it every day.” They’re pretty unabashed about it and said that—you know, that they’ve been doing this since the late ’90s, and there’s really nothing wrong with it. Yesterday the Justice Department said they are going to review it. But DEA has said, you know, there’s no problem with this.

AMY GOODMAN: How many people does this impact?

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Well, it would impact—I would think it would impact everyone, because, you know, it’s—we’re talking about a principle of law here. Not to get too legal, but, I mean, if you’re arrested, one of the fundamental rights that you have is to see the evidence against you. You know, when I was at the DEA and doing the interview, they cited the Ted Stevens case, which involved prosecutorial misconduct, which had—in which the senator’s charges were thrown out, because evidence was concealed. They said that after that there had been a review of all of the discovery procedures throughout the Justice Department, including at Special Operations Division. But they said that—and so I asked, I said, “Great, can I see a copy of the review?” And they said, “No.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, Ethan Nadelmann, it’s all legal.

ETHAN NADELMANN: Well, you know, that’s what happens when any agency gets to just do what it wants to do for years and years and years without anybody looking over its shoulder. You know, I mean, Amy, this agency has also done things in the areas of medical marijuana, scientific research, the scheduling process of drugs, whereby they will go through an entirely legal process, through their own administrative law process hearings. It will have an internal judge, an administrative law judge, come down with recommendations that are scientifically based, that are credible, and then they will have the politically appointed head of this agency overrule those recommendations for no purpose whatsoever.

Once again, Congress is not asking any questions. It’s their job to look at the—I mean, obviously, it’s the Obama administration’s job, as well, and Eric Holder’s job, as well, but it’s ultimately Congress, as well, that has to care about these things. And I’m hoping that it’s not just Democrats in the Senate, but also Republicans in the House, who will say, “This agency has gone too far.” Republicans have never been great friends of overextensions of federal police power, and I hope they can find some common cause with Democrats, saying, “Wait a second. Let’s call the DEA in here. Let’s look at what—you know, what John Shiffman has found with his investigative report. Let’s look at all these other patterns of abuse and misbehavior.”

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us, John Shiffman, for your reporting at Reuters, and Ethan Nadelmann. Thanks so much for joining us. We’ll link to the story at democracynow.org.

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. When we come back, we’re going to Richmond, California, to speak with the mayor. Stay with us.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Find this story at 6 August 2013

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‘Everyday Racism’; Turkish Community Responds to NSU Report

The Turkish Community in Germany has published a report responding to a series of racist murders authorities failed to detect for years. The paper is intended to complement recommendations put forward by a parliamentary committee.

In response to recommendations published last week by a committee in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, the Turkish Community in Germany (TGD) has put out its own report on the crimes of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) — the murderous neo-Nazi terrorist cell uncovered nearly two years ago.

The 80-page report, presented by TGD chairman Kenan Kolat at a Berlin press conference on Tuesday, calls for Germans to develop “a new sensitivity for hidden forms of everyday prejudice”. It also advocates a complete overhaul of the country’s domestic security operations.

The NSU is believed to have committed 10 murders between 2000 and 2007, and eight of the victims were of Turkish origin. Rather than looking into racial motivations for the murders, police in a number of the slayings immediately suspected the victims were involved in organized crime and drug trafficking.

Time For Change

The TGD report, which was researched and co-authored by Hajo Funke — a well-known political scientist with a focus on right-wing extremism in Germany — suggests a fundamental overhaul of the country’s domestic security operations is necessary.

It recommends that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — the body tasked with gathering intelligence on racially motivated crimes in Germany — be disbanded. A new, independent and fully financed investigative body, as well as a series of new recruits with fresh ideas would be the only way to institute change, said Kolat.

Also notable among the Turkish Community’s recommendations is a proposed ban on racial profiling by police and other security officials, the elimination of the government’s large network of undercover informants within the far-right scene and the introduction of a permanent parliamentary committee tasked with overseeing racially motivated crime investigations. The report also suggests erecting a memorial site in the German capital to commemorate the victims.

An Institutional Problem

The news comes in response to a report issued last week by a committee of German lawmakers, detailing how members of the NSU were able to commit dozens of crimes without arousing the suspicion of law enforcement.

The report, which lays out 47 recommendations on how to improve the German state security system, has been heavily criticized. In addition to the fact that its suggestions are non-binding, critics also argue they would be difficult to implement on a nationwide basis. In Germany’s decentralized system of federal states, any kind of affirmative action program would face immense challenges.

The report also came under fire from lawyers representing the families of those murdered by the NSU for not addressing what they view as the “decisive problem” in the investigation into the slayings — namely “institutional racism” within the German police and government authorities. Sebastian Edathy, chairman of the parliamentary committee with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), was quick to dismiss the criticism. “I wouldn’t refer to it as institutional racism,” he said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper last week. “There were isolated cases of racists in our police force who do not belong there.”

‘Structural Racial Prejudices’

Although the Bundestag report does include one recommendation stating that “German society is diverse — and that this diversity should be reflected by the police authorities, who must also be able to competently deal with this diversity,” it does not make any explicit mention of the possibility of institutionalized racism within the police or government agencies. The only such comments come at the end of the report, where individual political parties provided responses.

Neither Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, her government’s junior coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, nor the Green Party said anything in the report on the possibility of institutionalized racism. However, the opposition SPD and Left Party both commented extensively on the phenomenon — at least as it pertains to the NSU investigation.

The SPD wrote that “structural racial prejudices had been a major cause of the lack of openness in the investigation into the murders and bombing attacks committed by the NSU.” The party also lamented “prejudiced routines in the police’s work” that led to “routine prejudicial structures against people with immigrant backgrounds,” although the party said it was a “structural” rather than intentional problem. Such routines, it said, were often racist. The Left Party lamented that “structural and institutional racism had been a trait of the” police work relating to the NSU series of murders. The Green Party does, however, call in the report for regular “anti-racism training” for police, prosecutors and judges.

Kenan Kolat, meanwhile, has been more explicit in his assertions. The aim of the Turkish Community’s efforts, Kolat said at Tuesday’s press conference, was to eliminate “everyday racism, which also exists within institutions.”

08/28/2013 04:38 PM

Find this story at 28 August 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

Neonazi Kai-Uwe Trinkaus; Der V-Mann und die Brandstifter

Der Thüringer Verfassungsschutz setzte den Neonazi Kai-Uwe Trinkaus als Informanten ein – und verstieß damit einem Gutachten zufolge massiv gegen Dienstvorschriften. Und dann kündigte der ehemalige NPD-Spitzenfunktionär einen Gewaltakt an. Doch niemand reagierte.

Kai-Uwe Trinkaus bot seine Dienste selbst an. Der berüchtigte Neonazi und NPD-Funktionär rief am 31. Mai 2006 beim Thüringer Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz an und sagte, er wäre bereit, Informationen aus der Szene und der Partei auszuplaudern. Der Geheimdienst zögerte nicht lange: Es gab Gespräche und Stichproben und ab dem 8. März 2007 bekam Trinkaus den Namen “Ares” verpasst und wurde offiziell als Quelle des Verfassungsschutzes geführt – für 1000 Euro im Monat, wie Trinkaus behauptet. Für 41 Berichte soll er 16.200 Euro erhalten haben. Mit dem Geld habe er Aktivitäten der NPD bezahlt, später wechselte er zur DVU.

Trinkaus als Spitzel einzukaufen war ein Fehler – zu dem Ergebnis kommt das sogenannte Engel-Gutachten. Norbert Engel, ehemaliger Abteilungsleiter im Thüringer Landtag, hat seit Beginn des Jahres die Affäre Trinkaus im Auftrag der Parlamentarischen Kontrollkommission (PKK) untersucht. Sein 80-seitiges Gutachten wurde nun nach Informationen von MDR Thüringen am Dienstag hinter verschlossenen Türen in einer geheimen PKK-Sitzung vorgelegt. Es belegt schwere Versäumnisse von Geheimdienst und der Fachaufsicht im Thüringer Innenministerium.

Demnach hatten die Verfassungsschützer von Trinkaus’ vormaligen politischen Aktivitäten keinen blassen Schimmer: “Dies gilt insbesondere, weil klar sein musste, dass aufgrund seines politischen Werdegangs Herr Trinkaus persönliche Kontakte zu führenden Mitgliedern der Linkspartei.PDS hatte. Obwohl solche Kontakte für die Zuverlässigkeit zur Verwendung als V-Mann von hoher Bedeutung sind, wurde […] nach ihnen nicht einmal gefragt.” Engels Fazit an dieser Stelle: Ein ehemaliger Funktionär der Linkspartei, der in die NPD wechselte und sich selbst beim Verfassungsschutz anbietet, hätte nicht als V-Mann eingesetzt werden dürfen.

Die Behörde hat laut Gutachter damals unter großem Druck gestanden: Eine weitere Quelle im Bereich der NPD – besonders im regionalen Bereich von Erfurt und Mittelthüringen – sei “unbedingt” nötig gewesen, “lieber ein problematischer Zugang als gar keine Quelle”.

Und offensichtlich galt auch: lieber viele Informationen als gute. Denn laut Engel hat Trinkaus dem Verfassungsschutz zwar eine “beachtliche” Menge an Informationen gegeben, diese seien jedoch nicht so profund gewesen, dass sie die Nachteile der “Verwendung von Herrn Trinkaus gerechtfertigt hätten”. Das sei vor allem darauf zurückzuführen, dass Trinkaus nie in den wirklich vertraulichen Runden des Landesvorstandes der Thüringer NPD mitgemischt habe.

Wer legte Feuer im Haus “Topf & Söhne” in Erfurt?

Einmal habe Trinkaus eine Aktion von gewaltbereiten Neonazis verraten: Einen Angriff auf das besetzte Haus “Topf & Söhne” in Erfurt. Laut den Bewohnern legten Brandstifter im April 2007 in dem Gebäude Feuer, etwa 40 Menschen hielten sich zu dem Zeitpunkt darin auf. Bis heute wurden keine Täter ermittelt.

Damals spekulierten die Besetzer über einen rechtsextremen Hintergrund der Tat – Tattag war der Geburtstag Adolf Hitlers. Trinkaus soll laut Mitgliedern des Ausschusses seinem V-Mann-Führer berichtet haben, dass Neonazis einen Angriff auf das Hausprojekt gemeinsam mit sächsischen Kameraden trainierten. Ob vor oder nach der Tat, ist unklar. Aus weiteren Unterlagen, die dem Ausschuss vorliegen, finden sich keine Hinweise über die Weitergabe dieser Informationen an das Landeskriminalamt (LKA) oder die örtliche Polizei.

Dabei soll Trinkaus auch davon gesprochen haben, dass es nicht ausgeschlossen sei, dass das Gebäude abgebrannt werde, wie SPIEGEL ONLINE von Ausschussmitgliedern erfuhr. Damals erlosch das Feuer von selbst, es gab keine Verletzten.

Trinkaus ging auf in seinem Doppelleben als Neonazi und V-Mann: Er gründete oder unterwanderte Vereine, die nach außen hin unscheinbar wirkten, in denen sich aber tatsächlich Rechtsextremisten organisierten. Laut Gutachten hatte der Thüringer Verfassungsschutz auch davon keine oder nur ansatzweise Ahnung.

Auch habe Trinkaus die Anweisung seiner V-Mann-Führer, Provokationen gegenüber der Linkspartei und anderen politischen Parteien zu unterlassen, ignoriert. Erst im September 2010 wurde Trinkaus abgeschaltet, als durch einen MDR-Bericht bekannt geworden war, dass Trinkaus einen getarnten Neonazi als Praktikanten in die Linksfraktion eingeschleust hatte.

Gab der Verfassungsschutz Interna an Trinkaus weiter?

Trinkaus’ doppeltes Spiel sei “einmalig” im Verfassungsschutz, resümiert Engel. Ermöglicht habe dies auch die mangelnde Kontrolle des zuständigen Referats im Verfassungsschutz. Der Grund: Der verantwortliche Mitarbeiter war ein Jahr lang krank, Ersatz für ihn gab es keinen.

Engels Vorwürfe richten sich auch gegen das Thüringer Innenministerium, dem die Fachaufsicht für den Verfassungsschutz untergeordnet ist. Das Verhalten des Innenministeriums sei “nicht akzeptabel”. Der damalige Abteilungsleiter ist der heutige Innenstaatssekretär Bernhard Rieder, der von Beginn an in den kompletten Fall Trinkaus eingebunden war. Aber auch der damalige Innenminister Karl-Heinz Gasser soll informiert gewesen sein: Die Informationen erhielt er vom ehemaligen Verfassungsschutzchef Thomas Sippel.

Das Gutachten rückt den Thüringer Verfassungsschutz zudem in den Verdacht, Trinkaus mit polizeilichen Ermittlungsunterlagen versorgt zu haben: Im Juni 2007 hatten Linksautonome einen Neonazi-Treff in Erfurt überfallen. Die interne Polizeiliste mit den Namen und Adressen der Verdächtigen tauchte im Oktober 2007 auf der Internetseite der Thüringer NPD auf.

Laut Engel deuten “gewisse Indizien” darauf hin, dass Trinkaus die Liste aus dem Thüringer Verfassungsschutz bekommen hat. Engel hatte die Originalliste der Polizei mit der damaligen Internetveröffentlichung verglichen. Dabei stellte er fest, dass auf der NPD-Homepage drei Namen fehlten. Laut Gutachten waren diese drei Personen in einer geheimen Datenbank des Verfassungsschutzes als Rechtsextremisten eingestuft. Die Einstufung sei nur dem Geheimdienst bekannt gewesen. Weil exakt diese drei Namen auf der NPD-Internetseite fehlten, kommt Engel zu dem Schluss, das Trinkaus “diese Information nur aus dem TLfV haben” konnte.

Trinkaus hatte bei seiner Enttarnung im Dezember 2012 MDR Thüringen gesagt, dass er die Liste von seinem V-Mann-Führer abgeschrieben habe. Der Verfassungsschutz bestreitet entschieden, die Namen an Trinkaus gegeben zu haben. Die Staatsanwaltschaft Erfurt hatte erfolglos versucht zu klären, wie die Liste auf die NPD-Internetseite gekommen war.

27. August 2013, 19:08 Uhr
Von Maik Baumgärtner und Julia Jüttner

Find this story at 27 August 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

Prozess in München; Hat ein V-Mann den NSU radikalisiert?

Überraschung im NSU-Prozess: Wenn Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Mundlos und Uwe Böhnhardt mit Weggefährten über den Einsatz von Gewalt diskutierten, war ein V-Mann des Thüringer Verfassungsschutzes dabei. Das Bundeskriminalamt geht davon aus, dass Tino Brandt zu denen gehörte, die Gewalt befürworteten.
Aus dem Gericht von Annette Ramelsberger

Möglicherweise hat ein V-Mann des Verfassungsschutzes die Mitglieder des NSU überhaupt erst in die Gewalt getrieben. Wie nun überraschend im NSU-Prozess vor dem Oberlandesgericht in München bekannt wurde, hat Tino Brandt, der langjährige V-Mann des Thüringer Landesamtes für Verfassungsschutz in der rechten Szene, mitdiskutiert, wenn Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Mundlos und Uwe Böhnhardt mit ihren Weggefährten in den neunziger Jahren darüber redeten, ob man Gewalt anwenden müsse oder nicht. Das Bundeskriminalamt geht davon aus, dass Brandt zu denen gehörte, die Gewalt befürworteten.

Bisher war nur bekannt gewesen, dass es solche Diskussionen zwischen Zschäpe, Mundlos und Böhnhardt auf der einen und dem früheren NPD-Funktionär Ralf Wohlleben und dem wegen Beihilfe angeklagten Holger G. auf der anderen Seite gab. Dass Brandt bei diesen Debatten dabei war, davon war bisher nie die Rede gewesen. Ein BKA-Beamter sagte nun vor Gericht: “Wir sind davon ausgegangen, dass Tino Brandt auf der Seite der Gewalt war.”

Holger G. habe immer nur betont, wer nicht für Gewalt gewesen sei – nämlich er selbst und der Mitangeklagte Wohlleben. Die anderen seien für Gewalt gewesen. Im Umkehrschluss ging das BKA davon aus, dass Brandt auch zu denen gehörte, die Gewalt befürworteten.

Herausgearbeitet hat diesen Zusammenhang die Anwältin von Ralf Wohlleben. Der Verteidigung ist daran gelegen, den Einfluss des Staates auf die Szene deutlich zu machen. Brandt gilt dabei als Dreh- und Angelpunkt. Er hat quasi im Auftrag des Staates den Thüringer Heimatschutz, ein rechtsradikales Sammelbecken, gegründet – und sich damit gebrüstet, seinen Spitzellohn für den Aufbau rechter Netzwerke verwendet zu haben.

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Wenn er nun auch noch zur Radikalisierung der mutmaßlichen NSU-Mitglieder beigetragen hat, könnte sich das auf die Bewertung der Schuld der Angeklagten und auf das Strafmaß auswirken.

Bundesanwalt Herbert Diemer bestätigte am Abend am Rande des Prozesses, dass es eine Stelle in den Vernehmungen von Holger G. gibt, wo der Angeklagte darauf hinweist, dass der später als V-Mann enttarnte Brandt bei den Theoriedebatten des rechten Zirkels über Gewalt dabei war. Allerdings wertete die Bundesanwaltschaft diesen Hinweis nicht als Beitrag des V-Manns zur Radikalisierung der Gruppe. “Nach unseren bisherigen Ermittlungen gib es keine Anhaltspunkte, dass Brandt die drei radikalisiert oder unterstützt hat. Wäre es so, dann säße er hier auf der Anklagebank”, sagte Bundesanwalt Diemer.

Annette Ramelsberger
18. Juli 2013 17:17

Find this Story at 18 July 2013
© 2013 Süddeutsche.de

Döner-Morde: Aufklärung verhindert; Offenbar hat ein Informant angeboten, die Tatwaffe der „Döner-Morde“ zu liefern. Weil die Ermittler seine Bedingungen nicht akzeptierten, soll er untergetaucht sein.

Eine mit der Mordwaffe baugleiche Pistole wird im Polizeipräsidium in Dortmund vor eine Bilderwand mit den Porträts von Opfern einer deutschlandweiten Mordserie, der so genannten Döner- Morde

Der Schlüssel zu einer der unheimlichsten Mordserien Deutschlands ist eine tschechische Pistole, Marke Ceska, Typ 83, Kaliber 7,65 Millimeter. Mit dieser Waffe wurden von 2000 bis 2006 neun Männer umgebracht. Der Münchner Gemüsehändler Habil K. zum Beispiel. Oder die beiden Nürnberger Opfer: Enver S., ein Blumenhändler, und Ismayl Y., Inhaber einer Dönerbude. Zuletzt wurde im April 2006 der 21-jährige Betreiber eines Internetcafés in Kassel erschossen. Acht der Opfer waren Türken, eines ein Grieche, sie alle wurden in ihren kleinen Läden erschossen, mitten ins Gesicht, am helllichten Tag.

Warum sie sterben mussten, ist ungeklärt. Möglicherweise sind kriminelle Geschäfte der Hintergrund. Die Soko „Bosporus“, die ihren Sitz in Nürnberg hatte, ist inzwischen aufgelöst – endgültig zu den Akten sind die Fälle aber noch nicht gelegt. Jetzt waren die Ermittler offenbar ganz nah dran, die sogenannten Döner-Morde aufzuklären – doch laut einem „Spiegel“-Bericht hat die Staatsanwaltschaft einen wichtigen Informanten verprellt.

Wie das Magazin in seiner aktuellen Ausgabe berichtet, hatte ein Mann Ende 20 den Ermittlern angeboten, die mögliche Mordwaffe zu liefern. Der Informant namens Mehmet stamme aus dem Milieu mafiöser türkischer Nationalisten und arbeite seit längerem mit dem Verfassungsschutz zusammen – auch, um aus der Organisation auszusteigen. Mehmet, so schreibt der „Spiegel“, wollte die Ermittler zu einer Schweizer Villa nahe des Bodensees führen, „hinter deren Mauern sich angeblich der Schlüssel zur Lösung“ verberge. Tatsächlich gehen die Ermittler davon aus, dass die Tatwaffe in den Döner-Morden zu einer Lieferung von 24 Pistolen desselben Typs gehörte, die 1993 von dem tschechischen Hersteller an einen Schweizer Waffenimporteur verschickt wurde. Die meisten Pistolen aus dieser Lieferung konnten die Beamten aufspüren und als Tatwaffe ausschließen. Bis Frühjahr dieses Jahres waren acht Waffen noch nicht auffindbar.

Der Informant hatte also eine heiße Spur geliefert – und stellte dafür auch seine Bedingungen. Mehmet soll laut „Spiegel“ 40 000 Euro und die Umwandlung seiner drohenden zweijährigen Gefängnisstrafe in eine Bewährungsstrafe gefordert haben – der vorbestrafte Mann war mit einem gefälschten Führerschein Auto gefahren. Mit der Belohnung seien die Ermittler einverstanden gewesen, die andere Forderung schlugen sie aus. Man könne höchstens Mehmets Mitarbeit dem Richter gegenüber loben. Die Ermittler wollten den Mann laut Bericht dazu überreden, die Waffe selbst zu holen, über die Grenze nach Deutschland zu bringen und sie an einem Rastplatz zu deponieren. Sollte er dabei bei zufälligen Kontrollen erwischt werden, wolle man „nur zum Schein“ gegen ihn ermitteln, heißt es in dem Bericht. Die Staatsanwaltschaft Nürnberg bestätigte dem „Spiegel“, dass es Verhandlungen mit dem V-Mann gegeben hatte, erklärte jedoch, eine Einflussnahme auf Gerichte komme nicht in Frage.

Dem Informant wurde der Fall offenbar zu heiß. Er beendete die Zusammenarbeit mit der Polizei. Und die Aufklärung der rätselhaften Döner-Morde rückt möglicherweise wieder in die Ferne.

Carina Lechner
Nürnberg – 21.08.11 Bayern

Find this story at 21 August 2013

© www.merkur-online.de

Libya — the Benghazi Attacks Chronology

News about Libya — the Benghazi Attacks, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, and his spy chief Abdullah al-Senoussi are among those charged with murder in relation to country’s 2011 civil war.MORE »
Aug. 21, 2013

Four midlevel State Department officials placed on administrative leave after deadly 2012 attack on United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, have been reinstated by Sec of State John Kerry and given new assignments; Republican Rep Darrell Issa of California accuses State Department of shirking accountability.MORE »
Aug. 7, 2013

Federal law enforcement authorities have filed murder charges against Ahmed Abu Khattala, prominent militia leader in Benghazi, Libya, in connection with Sept 11, 2012, attacks on diplomatic mission there that killed Ambassador J Christopher Stevens and three other Americans; apprehending suspects is likely to prove both diplomatically and practically difficult.MORE »
Jul. 28, 2013

More than 1,000 prisoners escape from Libyan prison amid protests over wave of political assassinations and attacks on political offices across country.MORE »
Jul. 11, 2013

Libyan government takes back control of its Interior Ministry from an armed group that had besieged building for a week.MORE »
Jun. 28, 2013

Libyan Defense Min Mohammed al-Bargathi will be removed from his post after clashes between rival armed militias in Tripoli leave 10 people dead and more than 100 wounded.MORE »
Jun. 22, 2013

Weapons formerly in Col Muammar el-Qaddafi’s stockpile are making their way to antigovernment forces in Syria, financed largely by Qatar, which has strong ties with Libyan rebel groups; Libya’s former fighters sympathize with Syria’s rebels.MORE »
Jun. 16, 2013

Six Libyan soldiers are killed in Benghazi in overnight attacks believed to be retaliation for expulsion from city of powerful militia Libya Shield.MORE »
Jun. 15, 2013

Libya’s first independent television channel Libya Al-Hurra says that hand grenade was hurled at its building in Benghazi, injuring one employee.MORE »
Jun. 12, 2013

Salem al-Gnaidy, Libya’s new army chief of staff, calls for militias to put themselves under command of the Libyan Army after clashes in which 31 people were killed.MORE »
Jun. 11, 2013

Op-Ed article by Frederic Wehrey, former United States military attache in Libya, criticizes plan by Libyan Prime Min Ali Zeidan to establish general-purpose military force, consisting entirely of ‘nonmilitia’ recruits; argues plan is highly risky and could throw country deeper into strife.MORE »
Jun. 10, 2013

Massacre of 30 civilian protesters by powerful Libyan militia threatens to provoke backlash that could finally cow country’s freewheeling brigades into submitting to central government; militia leaders argue that weak transitional government still badly needs their superior firepower, but violence against civilians is beginning to erode their political power.MORE »
Jun. 9, 2013

At least dozen people are killed and many more wounded in Benghazi, Libya, when powerful militia known as Libya Shield fires on protesters surrounding group’s headquarters.MORE »
Jun. 5, 2013

NATO is sending team of experts to Libya to assess how alliance can provide security assistance, notably military training, to help nation combat Islamist militants claiming allegiance to Al Qaeda and other threats.MORE »
Jun. 1, 2013

International Criminal Court orders Libya to hand over Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, son of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi.MORE »
May. 30, 2013

Susan E Rice and Victoria Nuland, two high-ranking diplomats, are facing different fates amid political tempest over deadly attacks on American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya; internal roles of both were put on display in emails released by administration, but Nuland has escaped kind of harsh criticism leveled against Rice.MORE »
May. 29, 2013

Mohammed al-Megarif, speaker of Libyan Parliament who served under Col Muammar el-Qaddafi before becoming opposition leader in exile, resigns just weeks after lawmakers passed bill banning former Qaddafi officials from senior posts.MORE »
May. 23, 2013

Editorial holds Central Intelligence Agency’s role in attack on United States consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and its aftermath needs to be examined to understand what happened and how to better protect Americans.MORE »
May. 18, 2013

Rep Darrell Issa, chairman of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issues subpoena to Thomas R Pickering, chairman of independent panel that investigated attacks on American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.MORE »
May. 18, 2013

White House press secretary Jay Carney, first full-time reporter to make jump to White House in a generation, fully embraces his role as spokesman in dealing with number of controversies, like attack on American mission in Benghazi, Libya, and Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups.MORE »
May. 14, 2013

Visit to Libya by Rep Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, shortly after 2012 attack on American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, is believed to have prompted concerns in State Department that Republicans were looking to use attack as political club against Pres Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.MORE »
May. 14, 2013

Editorial holds that Republican obsession with Obama administration’s inept initial talking points in wake of attack in Benghazi, Libya, is ultimately an act of political vengeance; argues that focus on talking points and baseless allegations of administration coverup are distractions from serious issues surrounding attack that need to be addressed.MORE »
May. 14, 2013

David Brooks Op-Ed column defends record of State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, arguing that she is being made into scapegoat by Republicans critical of Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials who want to shift blame for Benghazi onto State Department.MORE »
May. 14, 2013

Op-Ed article by Ethan Chorin, former Foreign Service officer in Libya, argues that diplomatic security lapses that led to fatal 2012 attack on embassy in Benghazi are negligible when compared to flawed reasoning behind American military intervention there; holds that United States underestimated regional importance of Libya, and that lack of plan for reconstruction and reconciliation has fostered an environment in which terrorists can thrive.MORE »
May. 14, 2013

Car explodes on a busy street in Benghazi, Libya, killing at least four people; attack stirs new anger at failure of country’s transitional government to fill security vacuum left by ouster of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi.MORE »
May. 14, 2013

Pres Obama, facing re-energized Republican adversaries and new questions about administration’s conduct, dismisses furor over handling of 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya; does, however, join bipartisan chorus of outrage over disclosures that Internal Revenue Service had singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny.MORE »
May. 13, 2013

Thomas R Pickering, who led State Department board’s inquiry into the attack on United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, says there had been no need to interview then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, because it had already decided responsibility lay below her level.MORE »
May. 12, 2013

Maureen Dowd Op-Ed column examines controversy surrounding attack on consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and way in which competing fiefs, from Republicans to Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s supporters, are protecting mythologies they have created.MORE »
May. 11, 2013

Disclosure of e-mails show White House was more deeply involved in revising talking points about attack in Benghazi, Libya, than officials have previously acknowledged; e-mails, which administration turned over to Congress, show White House coordinating an intensive process with the State Department, CIA, FBI and other agencies to obtain final version of the talking points, used by Susan E Rice, ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances after the attack.MORE »
May. 11, 2013

Bombs explode outside two police stations in Libya’s eastern city Benghazi, prompting Britain to temporarily cut staff at its embassy in Tripoli.MORE »
May. 10, 2013

House Republicans intensify their criticism of Obama administration for its handling of the assault on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, with Speaker John A Boehner calling for release of an e-mail that he says shows State Dept officials believed from the start that ‘Islamic terrorists’ were linked to attack but have declined to say so publicly.MORE »
May. 10, 2013

Editorial criticizes Republicans in Congress for their relentless effort to discredit Pres Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with hearings on attack on American consulate in Benghazi, Libya; contends that hearings have not proved an administration cover-up or other hysterical allegations, and asserts that real scandal is that serious follow-up on security in Libya is going unaddressed.MORE »
May. 9, 2013

Veteran diplomat Gregory Hicks, testifying before Congress, gives riveting minute-by-minute account of lethal terrorist attack on diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, then describes its contentious aftermath; says that after raising questions about the account of what happened, he felt distinct chill from State Department superiors.MORE »
May. 8, 2013

Congressional Republicans are anticipating official testimony of State Department official Gregory Hicks as damning indictment of White House response to attacks on American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.MORE »
May. 6, 2013

Libya’s transitional General National Congress, bowing to pressure from armed Islamists and other militiamen, passes law to exclude former officials of Qaddafi era from public office; text is so broadly written that it could force out many top officials but will certainly exclude from power Mahmoud Jibril, politician who leads main coalition in congress opposed to Islamists.MORE »
May. 2, 2013

FBI releases photos of three men wanted for questioning in connection with attacks on United States diplomatic mission and CIA outpost in Benghazi, Libya.MORE »
Apr. 29, 2013

Gunmen surround Libya’s Foreign Ministry in Tripoli, calling for a law banning officials who worked for deposed dictator Col Muammar el-Qaddafi from senior positions in the new administration.MORE »
Apr. 24, 2013

Car bomb destroys about half of French Embassy in Libya, in most significant attack against Western interest in the country since September killing of American ambassador J Christopher Stevens; attack is new blow to transitional government’s hope of improving sense of public security after ouster of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011.MORE »
Apr. 4, 2013

Egyptian court rules against extradition to Libya of Ahmed Qaddaf al-Dam, former close aide of ousted dictator Col Muammar el-Qaddafi.MORE »
Mar. 30, 2013

Libyan security officials say they have arrested two men in kidnapping of five British aid workers.MORE »
Mar. 25, 2013

Libya’s transitional government is completing agreement with Egypt to deposit $2 billion in the Egyptian central bank; timing of what amounts to loan comes after at least Qaddafi loyalists in Cairo are rounded up for possible extradition.MORE »
Mar. 14, 2013

Pres Obama names career diplomat Deborah K Jones as new envoy to Libya, filling job that has been vacant since death of Ambassador J Christopher Stevens during attack on diplomatic compound in Benghazi; meets with Libya’s Prime Min Ali Zeidan, emphasizing need for his country’s help in finding attackers who carried out assault.MORE »
Feb. 8, 2013

Judges at International Criminal Court order Libyan government to immediately hand over Col Muammar el-Qaddafi’s former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi, who has been charged with crimes against humanity; order rejects Libya’s request for more time to argue case for trying Senussi in Libya.MORE »
Feb. 1, 2013

British Prime Min David Cameron returns from trips to Algiers and Tripoli, Libya, with promises of further partnerships in fields of defense, counterterrorism and intelligence-sharing, but some worry that he is overextending Britain’s foreign

Aug. 28, 2013

Find this story at 28 August 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Exclusive: US security flaws exposed in Libya

Documents show State Department knew of security problems in Benghazi but failed to fix them.

Creation of an Undersecretary for Diplomatic Security

Exemptions of Security Requirements for Benghazi

Source Document Complete Report of the Benghazi Panel

State Department Memo Recommends Reforms

The US Department of State has known for decades that inadequate security at embassies and consulates worldwide could lead to tragedy, but senior officials ignored the warnings and left some of America’s most dangerous diplomatic posts vulnerable to attack, according to an internal government report obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit.

The report by an independent panel of five security and intelligence experts describes how the September 11, 2012, attack on the US Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, which left Ambassador J Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead, exploited the State Department’s failure to address serious security concerns at diplomatic facilities in high-risk areas.

Among the most damning assessments, the panel concluded that the State Department’s failure to identify worsening conditions in Libya and exemptions from security regulations at the US Special Mission contributed to the tragedy in Benghazi. Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy approved using Benghazi as a temporary post despite its significant vulnerabilities, according to an internal State Department document included with the report.

The panel cataloged a series of failures by State Department officials to address security issues and concluded that many Foreign Service officers are unclear about who is in charge of security.

Among the problems Sullivan’s panel identified in the report:
The State Department’s management of its security structure has led to blurred authority and a serious lack of accountability. The undersecretary for management oversees security issues while also handling many other responsibilities. A newly created undersecretary for diplomatic security would allow the State Department to better focus on security issues affecting diplomatic posts around the world, according to the report. Left unaddressed, the control problem “could contribute to future security management failures, such as those that occurred in Benghazi.”
The Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the State Department security arm created following the 1983 bombings of the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, does not have a review process in place to learn from previous security failures. Inexplicably, Diplomatic Security officials never conducted what is known as a “hot wash” debriefing of Benghazi survivors to learn from their experience.
No risk management model exists to determine whether high-threat posts, such as the one in Benghazi, are necessary given the danger to US officials. Risk decisions are made based on “experience and intuition,” not established professional guidelines.
None of the five high-risk diplomatic facilities the panel visited in the Middle East and Africa had an intelligence analyst on staff, described as a “critical” need.
Diplomatic security training is inadequate, with no designated facility available to train agents to work at high-risk diplomatic posts.
Even low-risk diplomatic posts are vulnerable. The Obama administration, concerned about potential attacks, ordered the closure of diplomatic posts in the Middle East and North Africa in August 2013. Of the 19 posts closed, only four were designated as high threat.

Sullivan’s panel noted that its findings and recommendations are not new to State Department officials. A 1999 report by government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton recommended similar reforms, including an undersecretary for security. Madeleine Albright, then the secretary of state, approved the recommendation – but it was never implemented. “This report,” the panel wrote, “was largely ignored by the Department.”

Even when the State Department has enacted security reforms, agency officials have failed to comply with them or otherwise have exempted themselves from the new standards, Sullivan’s panel determined.

Following the 1983 Beirut bombings, for example, the State Department implemented building safety standards for missions in high-risk areas, which became known as Inman standards, developed by a review panel headed by Bobby R Inman, the former director of the National Security Agency.

“Thirty years later, neither the US Embassy chancery in Beirut nor a significant number of other US diplomatic facilities in areas designated as ‘high threat’ meet Inman standards,” Sullivan’s panel wrote.

Security problems at diplomatic posts aren’t isolated, the panel said, pointing out that safety concerns can be found at US facilities worldwide. For decades, the State Department has failed to address these vulnerabilities, the panel said, suggesting that Benghazi was a tragedy that might have been avoided.

Security standards exempted

At best, security at the US Special Mission in Benghazi was porous. The mission took lease of a 13-acre walled compound on June 21, 2011, two months before the ouster of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and after the shuttering of the US Embassy in Tripoli due to increased fighting in the capital.
Explosions target Benghazi judicial buildings

Although the State Department reopened the embassy on Sept. 22, 2011, the Special Mission in Benghazi remained open despite serious security concerns. In December 2011, Undersecretary for Management Kennedy approved a one-year extension of the Benghazi post.

A career diplomat, Kennedy was aware of the security problems in Benghazi. The number of Diplomatic Security officers there ranged from five to as few as one, and security was augmented by the February 17 Brigade, a ragtag group of Libyan militants who at the time of the 2012 attack were working under an expired contract and complaining about poor pay and long hours. In addition, the US Special Mission did not have adequate barriers to slow a ground assault.

“Benghazi has demonstrated yet again the vulnerability of US facilities in countries where there is a willingness to protect US interests, but very little capacity to do so,” the panel wrote.

The Benghazi post’s failure to meet security standards did not prevent its operation. State Department officials effectively waived the security requirements. For years, the State Department has fostered a culture of waiving such requirements when officials choose not to meet them.

“Waivers for not meeting security standards have become commonplace in the Department; however, without a risk management process to identify and implement alternate mitigating measures after a waiver has been given, Department employees, particularly those in high threat areas, could be exposed to an unacceptable level of risk,” Sullivan’s panel wrote.

The panel added: “It is unlikely that temporary facilities, in areas such as Benghazi, will ever meet Inman standards. The Department therefore identifies missions with special terminology to avoid its own high, but unattainable, standards and then approves waivers to circumvent those standards, thus exposing those serving under Chief of Mission authority to an unacceptable level of risk.”

No ‘ground truth’

In the six months leading up to the attack in Benghazi, the warning signs were ominous: security in the city had deteriorated and threats against Western officials were increasing.
Inside Story – The battle for security in Libya

From March through August 2012, 20 significant acts of violence occurred, including a homemade explosive device thrown over the wall of the US Special Mission and an attack on the Benghazi International Committee of the Red Cross with rocket-propelled grenades.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2012, diplomatic security officers issued a report that described Libyan security forces as “too weak to keep the country secure.”

Yet no one at the State Department connected the intelligence dots to offer concerns about worsening security in Benghazi. According to Sullivan’s panel, this oversight occurred because the Benghazi facility did not have an intelligence analyst on site to determine the “ground truth.”

Benghazi wasn’t unique in this. Sullivan’s panel visited high-risk embassies in Nairobi, Kenya; Juba, South Sudan; Cairo; Beirut; and Sanaa, Yemen. None had an intelligence analyst on staff.

By contrast, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the United Nations employ experienced intelligence analysts in country to identify security concerns from the ground.

Training problems

While documenting security problems, Sullivan’s panel said that the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, known as DS, is viewed as the “gold standard” among federal law enforcement and security officials.

The State Department’s security arm protects 35,000 US employees worldwide, as well as 70,000 employee family members and up to 45,000 local civilian staff members.

Sullivan’s panel viewed additional training of security agents as “critical” to addressing the problems identified in the report. But today the Bureau of Diplomatic Security is having difficulty handling its training load.

The reason: the State Department, unlike other agencies, does not have a designated training facility for security agents. The department is now trying to identify a site near Washington, D.C., on which to build a Foreign Affairs Security Training Center.

Until a center is built, the State Department must continue “begging hat-in-hand for use of others’ facilities,” the report stated.

“The establishment of such an integrated, state-of-the-art facility is a best practice adopted long ago by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Secret Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration,” the panel wrote.

Repeated security failures

For the State Department, Benghazi became the latest in a long string of security failures. From 1998 to 2012, 273 significant attacks against US diplomatic facilities and personnel occurred.

In 1998, concerned about increasing threats to the embassy in Kenya, Ambassador Prudence Bushnell and the US Department of Defence asked to be moved to a safer building. State Department officials denied the request, citing budgetary concerns.

On August 7, 1998, simultaneous truck bombs exploded at the United States embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, killing more than 250 people, including 12 Americans.

A State Department review after the attacks found that at least two-thirds of the 262 US diplomatic facilities were so vulnerable to attack that they needed to be rebuilt or relocated.

Ten years after the East Africa bombings, on September 16, 2008, in a diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks, the regional security officer in Sanaa, Yemen, informed his counterparts in Washington about a threat that British officials had intercepted and forwarded.

The threat, written in Arabic, discussed a car bomb targeting American and British interests in Yemen.

The next day, at about 9:15 am, a vehicle with men dressed in military uniforms shot through the gate of the US Embassy in Sanaa and detonated a car bomb. A second car breached the security gates and also exploded.

An al-Qaeda-affiliated group claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 18 people, including one American.

Four years later, Benghazi happened.

Members of Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit contributed to this report.

Trevor Aaronson Last Modified: 04 Sep 2013 16:40

Find this story at 4 September 2013

© www.aljazeera.com

40 Minutes In Benghazi

 

When U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed in a flash of hatred in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, the political finger-pointing began. But few knew exactly what had happened that night. With the ticktock narrative of the desperate fight to save Stevens, Fred Burton and Samuel M. Katz provide answers.
By Fred Burton and Samuel M. Katz

THE INFERNO The U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, in flames, on September 11, 2012. The attackers seemed to have detailed knowledge of the mission’s layout and even to know there were jerry cans full of gasoline near the compound’s western wall, which they would use to fuel the fire.

Adapted from Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi, by Fred Burton and Samuel M. Katz, to be published in September by St. Martin’s Press; © 2013 by the authors.

After the fall of Colonel Qaddafi, in 2011, Libya had become an al-Qaeda-inspired, if not al-Qaeda-led, training base and battleground. In the northeastern city of Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, men in blazers and dark glasses wandered about the narrow streets of the Medina, the old quarter, with briefcases full of cash and Browning Hi-Power 9-mm. semi-automatics—the classic killing tool of the European spy. Rent-a-guns, militiamen with AK-47s and no qualms about killing, stood outside the cafés and restaurants where men with cash and those with missiles exchanged business terms.

It was a le Carré urban landscape where loyalties changed sides with every sunset; there were murders, betrayals, and triple-crossing profits to be made in the post-revolution. The police were only as honest as their next bribe. Most governments were eager to abandon the danger and intrigue of Benghazi. By September 2012 much of the international community had pulled chocks and left. Following the kidnapping in Benghazi of seven members of its Red Crescent relief agency, even Iran, one of the leading state sponsors of global terror, had escaped the city.

But Libya was a target-rich environment for American political, economic, and military interests, and the United States was determined to retain its diplomatic and intelligence presence in the country—including an embassy in Tripoli and a mission in Benghazi, which was a linchpin of American concerns and opportunities in the summer of the Arab Spring. Tunisia had been swept by revolution, and so had Egypt. “The United States was typically optimistic in its hope for Libya,” an insider with boots on the ground commented, smiling. “The hope was that all would work out even though the reality of an Islamic force in the strong revolutionary winds hinted otherwise.”

The United States no longer had the resources or the national will to commit massive military manpower to its outposts in remnants of what was once defined as the New World Order. This wasn’t a political question, but a statement of reality. The fight against terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism was a brand of warfare that would not be fought with brigades and Bradley armored fighting vehicles. The footprint of the United States in this unsettled country and its ever important but dangerous second city would have to be small and agile.

In 1984, Secretary of State George P. Shultz ordered the convening of an Advisory Panel on Overseas Security to respond to critical threats to American diplomats and diplomatic facilities encountered around the world. The panel was chaired by retired admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of the primary findings of what would become known as the Inman Report was the need for an expanded security force to protect American diplomatic posts overseas, and on August 27, 1986, a new State Department security force and law-enforcement agency, the Diplomatic Security Service, an arm of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), was formed. Another important result from the report was a focus on physical-security enhancements for embassies and consulates. These force-protection specifications, unique in the world of diplomatic security, included blast-proofing innovations in architecture to mitigate the devastating yield of an explosion or other methods of attack, including rocket and grenade fire. These new embassies, known as Inman buildings, incorporated anti-ram walls and fences, gates, vehicle barriers, ballistic window film, and coordinated local guard forces to create impregnable fortresses that could withstand massive explosions and coordinated attempts to breach an embassy’s defenses.

For over a decade following the 9/11 attacks, DS managed to contain the fundamentalist fervor intent on inflicting catastrophic damage on America’s diplomatic interests around the world—especially in the Middle East. But the wave of civilian unrest that swept through the Arab world in the Arab Spring took the region—and the United States—by surprise. Governments that had been traditional allies of the United States and that had sent police officers to anti-terrorism-assistance training were overthrown in instantaneous and unexpected popular revolutions. Traditionally reliable pro-American regimes were replaced with new governments—some Islamic-centered.

In Libya, Qaddafi’s intelligence services had prevented al-Qaeda operatives from establishing nodes inside the country, as well as providing information on known cells and operatives plotting attacks in North Africa. With the dictator’s death, the years of secret-police rule came to an end.

J. Christopher Stevens was the foreign-service officer who made sure that American diplomacy in Libya flourished. Chris, as he was called, was a true Arabist; he was known to sign his name on personal e-mails as “Krees” to mimic the way Arabs pronounced his name. Born in Grass Valley, California, in 1960, Chris had developed a passionate love for the Arab world while working for the Peace Corps in Morocco in the mid-1980s. Virtually all of his posts were in the Middle East and in locations that can be best described as dicey. It would be North Africa, however, where Chris Stevens would excel as a diplomat and as a reliable face of American reach. When the United States re-emerged as a political player in Libya, he jumped at the opportunity to work in this new arena for American diplomacy.

Stevens was a greatly admired diplomat, respected by men and women on both sides of the political divide. Personable and self-effacing, he was described, in absolutely complimentary terms, as a “relic,” a practitioner of diplomacy from days past. He achieved agreements and cooperation through interpersonal relationships; he was known to have achieved more over cups of rocket-fuel coffee in a market gathering spot than could ever have been achieved in reams of paperwork or gigabytes’ worth of e-mails.

In April 2011, Chris had been dispatched to Benghazi as a special envoy by then secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton. On this, his second tour to the country, he would be America’s man on the ground in the Arab Spring conflict to oust Qaddafi. Establishing a rapport with the many militias that were battling Qaddafi loyalists required a deft hand and a talent for breaking bread with men in camouflage fatigues who talked about long-standing relationships while walkie-talkies stood on the table next to their plates of hummus and AK-47s were nestled by their feet.

When the civil war was over and Qaddafi’s humiliating end completed, Chris was an obvious choice to become ambassador, President Barack Obama’s personal representative to the new Libya. Stevens was based in the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, which had recently been reopened as the country emerged from the chaos, fury, and joyous hope of the Arab Spring.

But Tripoli wasn’t the sole U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya. The U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, an ad hoc consulate not meeting all of the Inman security requirements, had been hastily set up amid the fluid realities of the Libyan civil war. “Expeditionary Diplomacy” dictated that DS do the best it could without the protections afforded official consulates.

On the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, five DS agents found themselves together in Benghazi protecting the Special Mission Compound and Ambassador Chris Stevens, who planned to be in the city for a week. They were known, as coined so aptly in the field office, as “hump agents.” Inexperienced yet willing to do what they were told and to work the worst shifts, they were the nuts and bolts of the protection backbone. The five men in Benghazi were a mixed bag of over-achievers: former street cops, U.S. Marines, a U.S. Army Iraq-war veteran, and academics. All had under 10 years on the job; some had less than 5.

They will be identified as R., the temporary-duty regional security officer (RSO) who was the senior man among the group; he was on a long-term posting in Libya, borrowed from the RSO’s office in Tripoli. A. and B. were junior agents assigned temporary duty in Benghazi. C. and D. were young agents who constituted Ambassador Stevens’s ad hoc protective detail, and who had flown with him from Tripoli.

In the post-9/11 world, DS men and women on the job no longer learned by being hump agents in a field office and flying from one city to another inside the United States to help out protecting the Dalai Lama on a Monday and a NATO foreign minister taking his family to Disneyland on a Friday. The new DS sent its newest agents into the eye of the storm, in Afghanistan and Kurdistan, where they could learn under fire. Like those locales, Benghazi was an assignment where there were no wrong and right decisions—only issues of reaction and survival. It was an assignment that would require each man to utilize the resourcefulness and think-on-your-feet instincts that DS was so good in fostering in its young agents.

Although trained for every worst-case scenario imaginable, no agent ever expects it to happen, but each knows that when things start to go bad they go bad very quickly. In truth, time stands still for those engaged in the fight, and how quickly things go south is known only to those who have been there and done that. Who lives and dies depends a great deal on training, teamwork, and fate.
2102 Hours: Benghazi, Libya

T
he Libyan security guard at the compound’s main gate, Charlie-1, sat inside his booth happily earning his 40 Libyan dinars ($32 U.S.) for the shift. It wasn’t great money, clearly not as much as could be made in the gun markets catering to the Egyptians and Malians hoping to start a revolution with coins in their pockets, but it was a salary and it was a good job in a city where unemployment was plague-like. The guards working for the Special Mission Compound tried to stay alert throughout the night, but it was easier said than done. To stay awake, some chain-smoked the cheap cigarettes from China that made their way to North Africa via Ghana, Benin, and Togo. The nicotine helped, but it was still easy to doze off inside their booths and posts. Sleeping on duty was risky. The DS agents routinely made spot checks on the guard force in the middle of the night. These unarmed Libyan guards were the compound’s first line of defense—the trip wire.

All appeared quiet and safe. The feeling of security was enhanced at 2102 hours when an SSC (Supreme Security Council—a coalition of individual and divergently minded Libyan militias) patrol vehicle arrived. The tan Toyota Hilux pickup, with an extended cargo hold, decorated in the colors and emblem of the SSC, pulled off to the side of the road in front of Charlie-1. The driver shut off the engine. He wasn’t alone—the darkened silhouette of another man was seen to his right. The pickup sported twin Soviet-produced 23-mm. anti-aircraft guns—the twin-barreled cannons were lethal against Mach 2.0 fighter aircraft and devastating beyond belief against buildings, vehicles, and humans. The two men inside didn’t come out to engage in the usual small talk or to bum some cigarettes from the guards or even to rob them. The Libyan guards, after all, were not armed.

Suddenly the SSC militiaman behind the steering wheel fired up his engine and headed west, the vehicle crunching the gravel with the weight of its tires.

Later, following the attack, according to the (unclassified) Accountability Review Board report, an SSC official said that “he ordered the removal of the car ‘to prevent civilian casualties.’ ” This hints that the SSC knew an attack was imminent; that it did not warn the security assets in the Special Mission Compound implies that it and elements of the new Libyan government were complicit in the events that transpired.

It was 2142 hours.

The attack was announced with a rifle-butt knock on the guard-booth glass.

“Iftah el bawwaba, ya sharmout,” the gunman ordered, with his AK-47 pointed straight at the forehead of the Libyan guard at Charlie-1. “Open the gate, you fucker!” The guard, working a thankless job that was clearly not worth losing his life over, acquiesced. Once the gate was unhinged from its locking mechanism, armed men appeared out of nowhere. The silence of the night was shattered by the thumping cadence of shoes and leather sandals and the clanking sound of slung AK-47s and RPG-7s banging against the men’s backs.

Once inside, they raced across the compound to open Bravo-1, the northeastern gate, to enable others to stream in. When Bravo-1 was open, four vehicles screeched in front of the Special Mission Compound and unloaded over a dozen fighters. Some of the vehicles were Mitsubishi Pajeros—fast, rugged, and ever so reliable, even when shot at. They were a warlord’s dream mode of transportation, the favorite of Benghazi’s criminal underworld and militia commanders. The Pajeros that pulled up to the target were completely anonymous—there were no license plates or any other identifying emblems adorning them, and they were nearly invisible in the darkness, especially when the attackers disabled the light in front of Bravo-1.

Other vehicles were Toyota and Nissan pickups, each armed with single- and even quad-barreled 12.7-mm. and 14.5-mm. heavy machine guns. They took up strategic firing positions on the east and west portions of the road to fend off any unwelcome interference.

Each vehicle reportedly flew the black flag of the jihad.

Some of the attackers removed mobile phones from their pockets and ammunition pouches and began to videotape and photograph the choreography of the assault. One of the leaders, motioning his men forward with his AK-47, stopped to chide his fighters. “We have no time for that now,” he ordered, careful not to speak in anything louder than a coarse whisper. “There’ll be time for that later.” (Editor’s note: Dialogue and radio transmissions were re-created by the authors based on their understanding of events.)

Information Management Officer (IMO) Sean Smith was in his room at the residence, interfacing with members of his gaming community, when Charlie-1 was breached. The married father of two children, Smith was the man who had been selected to assist Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi with communications. An always smiling 34-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran and computer buff, he was ideally suited for the sensitive task of communicator. Earlier in the day, Smith had ended a message to the director of his online-gaming guild with the words “Assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.” He was online when the enemy was at the gate, chatting with his guild-mates. Then suddenly he typed “Fuck” and “Gunfire.” The connection ended abruptly.

One of the gunmen had removed his AK-47 assault rifle from his shoulder and raised the weapon into the air to fire a round. Another had tossed a grenade. The Special Mission Compound was officially under attack.

R. sounded the duck-and-cover alarm the moment he realized, by looking at the camera monitors, that the post had been compromised by hostile forces. Just to reinforce the severity of the situation, he yelled “Attack, attack, attack!” into the P.A. system. From his command post, R. had an almost complete view of the compound thanks to a bank of surveillance cameras discreetly placed throughout, and the panorama these painted for him is what in the business they call an “oh shit” moment. He could see men swarming inside the main gate, and he noticed the Libyan guards and some of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade (a local Benghazi militia hired to protect the mission) running away as fast as they could. R. immediately alerted the embassy in Tripoli and the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) housed in the Annex, a covert C.I.A. outpost about a mile from the mission. The QRF was supposed to respond to any worst-case scenarios in Benghazi with at least three armed members. R.’s message was short and to the point: “Benghazi under fire, terrorist attack.”
Night of Terror

A
. was the agent on duty that night who, according to the Special Mission Compound’s emergency protocols, would be responsible for safeguarding Stevens and Smith in case of an attack. A. rushed into the residence to relieve, or “push,” D., who ran back to the barracks to retrieve his tactical kit, through the access point in the alleyway connecting the two compounds. D. was wearing a white T-shirt and his underwear when the alarm sounded. The terrorists had achieved absolute surprise.

The DS agents ran like sprinters toward their stowed weapons and equipment. Their hearts rushed up their chests, to the back of their throats; their mouths dried up in the surge of adrenaline. The agents attempted to draw on their training and keep their minds focused and fluid as they hoped to avoid an encounter when outnumbered and outgunned. The sounds of guttural Arabic voices, which sounded like angry mumbling to the Americans, grew, and the odd vicious shot was fired into the September sky. The bitter smell of cordite, like a stagnant cloud left behind following a Fourth of July fireworks display, hung in the air. Numerous figures, their silhouettes barely discernible in the shadows, chased the agents from behind, chanting unintelligibly and angrily.

The agents got ready to engage, but hoped that they wouldn’t have to yet. It was too early in the furious chaos to make a last stand. Each agent asked himself the basic questions: How many gunmen were inside the perimeter? What weapons did they have?

But one thing was absolutely certain in the minds of each and every one of the agents in those early and crucially decisive moments: that the U.S. ambassador, the personal representative of President Barack Obama, was the ultimate target of the attack. They knew that they had to secure him and get him out of the kill zone.

A. ran up the landing to round up Ambassador Stevens and Smith and to rush them to the safe haven inside the residence. “Follow me, sir,” A. said in a calming though urgent tone. “We are under attack.”

There was no time to get dressed or to grab personal items, such as a wallet or cell phone; there was no time to power down laptops or even to take them. A. insisted, however, that both Stevens and Smith don the khaki Kevlar body-armor vests that had been pre-positioned in their rooms. It was critical that the three men make it to the safe haven and lock the doors before the attackers knew where they were. A., following the room-clearing tactics he had been taught in his training, carefully turned each corner, his assault rifle poised to engage any threat. He also had a shotgun slung over his shoulder just in case; the shotgun is a no-nonsense tool of ballistic reliability that was an ideal weapon to engage overwhelming crowds of attackers. A.’s service-issue SIG Sauer handgun was holstered on his hip.

A. heard voices shouting outside the walls; these were interrupted only by the sporadic volleys of automatic gunfire. The lights in the residence were extinguished. The gunfire alerted both Stevens and Smith to the immediacy of the emergency, but negotiating the dark path to the safe haven was made more difficult by the restrictive hug of the heavy vests. Every few feet A. would make sure that the two were following close behind him.

When the three reached the safe haven, the mesh steel door was shut behind them and locked. A. took aim with his rifle through the wrought-iron grate over the window. The door, as well as the window, was supposed to be opened only when the cavalry arrived. When that would happen was anyone’s guess.

Ambassador Stevens requested A.’s BlackBerry to make calls to nearby consulates and to the embassy in Tripoli. He spoke in hushed tones so as not to compromise their position to anyone outside. His first call was to his deputy chief of mission, Gregory Hicks, who was in Tripoli at the U.S. Embassy. Soon after, Hicks discovered a missed call on his phone from an unfamiliar number. He returned the call and reached Stevens, who told him of the attack.

Stevens also called local militia and public-security commanders in Benghazi, pleading for help. He had developed a close and affectionate rapport with many of the most powerful men in the city—both the legitimate and the ruthless. For an unknown reason, Stevens didn’t call the Libya Shield Force, a group of relatively moderate fighting brigades that was, perhaps, the closest armed force in the country to a conventional military organization. The Shield of Libya did have an Islamist-leaning ideology, but it wasn’t jihadist. It answered to the Libyan Defense Ministry, and was under the command of Wisam bin Ahmid; Ahmid led a well-equipped and disciplined force in Benghazi called the Free Libya Martyrs. The Free Libya Martyrs fielded ample assets in the city. Reportedly, Wisam bin Ahmid could have responded, but he was never asked.

Perhaps Stevens feared that members of the militia were participating in the attack.

According to a press account, the Libya Shield Force militia had figured in a cable dispatched to the State Department earlier in the day by the ambassador. In the communication, there was mention of how Muhammad al-Gharabi and Wisam bin Ahmid might not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, “a critical function they asserted they were currently providing,” because the United States was supporting Mahmoud Jibril, a candidate for the office of prime minister. The cable discussed the city of Derna and linked it to an outfit called the Abu-Salim Brigade, which advocated a harsh version of Islamic law.

The list of whom Ambassador Stevens phoned that night remains protected, but it is believed to have included militia commanders who were quite proud to parade the president of the United States’ personal representative in front of their ragtag armies, but did not feel it wise or worthy to commit these forces for the rescue of a true friend.

C. had initially rushed back to the Tactical Operations Center (TOC), but then redirected back to the agents’ quarters to grab his gear and back up D. It was procedure—and tactical prudence—for the remaining agents at the compound to work in teams of two. B. and R. were inside the TOC, locked down behind secured fire doors. The TOC was the security nerve center of the facility. Situated south of the residence, it was a small structure of gray cement with little windows sealed by iron bars. Perhaps the most fortified spot on the compound, it was just barely large enough for two or three individuals, as it was filled with communications, video-surveillance, and other emergency gear.

C. and D. rushed out of the barracks, weapons in hand, hoping to reach the residence on the western side of the compound, but the two young agents found themselves seeking cover. Moving slowly, and peering around corners, the two tried to cross the alleyway that separated the two halves of the Special Mission Compound, but they feared the connecting path would turn into an exposed killing zone. There were just too many gunmen racing about and screaming to one another in Arabic. The DS agents realized that they were cut off, so they made their way back to the barracks. Some of the attackers carried R.P.G.’s slung over their shoulder, and the DS agents knew that they were facing superior firepower. C. radioed the TOC of their predicament and waited for the chance to attempt a breakout.

Bad as the situation was, R., the TOC regional-security officer, had things in hand. Like an air-traffic controller, he knew that the stakes were high and that mistakes could lead to disaster. Ambassador Stevens was hunkered down, and so were the agents. Everyone just needed to hold tight until the cavalry arrived—the C.I.A.’s Global Response Staff and the QRF. The TOC had visual surveillance of the “tangos,” slang for terrorists, and could update the agents.

With pinpoint Military Operations on Urban Terrain tradecraft, the terrorists assaulted the February 17 Martyrs Brigade command post, at the western tip of the northern perimeter, by lobbing a grenade inside and then, before the smoke and debris cleared, firing dedicated bursts of AK-47 fire into the main doorway. A number of February 17 Martyrs Brigade militiamen, along with one or two Libyan guards, were seriously wounded in the exchange, though they still managed to use an escape ladder to climb up to the rooftop, where they hid. The command-post floor was awash in blood.

As they watched the attack on the mission unfold in real time on the video monitors, R. and B. attempted to count the men racing through both the Bravo-1 and Charlie-1 gates. However, the attackers had flowed through the northern part of the grounds so quickly and in such alarming numbers that R. and B. could not ascertain their numbers or armaments. It was only later, by reviewing the attack via the high-resolution DVR system, that the DS discovered there were 35 men systematically attacking the Special Mission Compound.

They were not members of a ragtag force. Split into small groups, which advanced throughout the compound methodically, they employed military-style hand signals to direct their progression toward their objectives. Some were dressed in civil-war chic—camouflage outfits, black balaclavas. Some wore “wifebeater” white undershirts and khaki military trousers. A few wore Inter Milan soccer jerseys—Italian soccer is popular in Libya. Some of those who barked the orders wore mountaintop jihad outfits of the kind worn by Taliban warriors in Afghanistan. Virtually all of the attackers had grown their beards full and long. According to later reports and shadowy figures on the ground in Benghazi—organizers and commanders from nearby and far away—foreigners had mixed in with the local contingent of usual suspects. Many were believed to have come from Derna, on the Mediterranean coast between Benghazi and Tobruk. Derna had been the traditional hub of jihadist Islamic endeavors inside Libya and beyond.

It was clear that whoever the men who assaulted the compound were, they had been given precise orders and impeccable intelligence. They seemed to know when, where, and how to get from the access points to the ambassador’s residence and how to cut off the DS agents as well as the local guard force and the February 17 Martyrs Brigade militiamen on duty that night. As is standard procedure, in the days leading up to the arrival of the ambassador, the regional security officer and his team had made a series of official requests to the Libyan government for additional security support for the mission. It appears that the attackers either intercepted these requests or were tipped off by corrupt Libyan officials. According to one European security official who had worked in Benghazi, “The moment notifications and requests went out to the Libyan Transitional National Council and the militias in advance of Stevens’s arrival, it was basically like broadcasting the ambassador’s itinerary at Friday prayers for all to hear.”

The attackers had seemed to know that there were new, uninstalled generators behind the February 17 Martyrs Brigade command post, nestled between the building and the overhang of foliage from the western wall, as well as half a dozen jerry cans full of gasoline to power them. One of the commanders dispatched several of his men to retrieve the plastic fuel containers and bring them to the main courtyard. A gunman opened one of the cans and began to splash the gasoline on the blood-soaked floor of the February 17 command post. The man with the jerry can took great pains to pour the harsh-smelling fuel into every corner of the building before setting fire to one of the DS notices and igniting an inferno.
In the Line of Fire

A
. watched from between the metal bars inside the safe haven as a fiery clap was followed by bright-yellow flames that engulfed the command post. He updated the TOC with what he could see and, more ominously, what he could smell.

“A. here. I see flames and smoke.”

“Roger that, me too,” said R., in the TOC.

R. keyed the microphone again and said, “Backup en route.”

And then there was silence.

Silence on the radio means one of two things: either all is good or things are very bad. There are no in-betweens.

Thick plumes of acrid gray and black smoke billowed upward to cloud the clear night sky. The Special Mission Compound was painted in an eerie orange glow. For added fury, some of the gunmen broke the windshields of several of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade vehicles parked near their command post and doused the interior of the vehicles with gasoline. A lit cigarette, smoked almost to the filter, was tossed in to ignite another blaze.

The men carrying the fuel-filled jerry cans moved slowly as they struggled to slice a path to the ambassador’s villa. The 20 liters of fuel contained in each plastic jerry can weighed about 40 pounds, and the gunmen found them difficult to manage, with the fuel sloshing around and spilling on their boots and sandals. The men in charge barked insults and orders to the jerry-can-carrying crews, but intimidation was pointless.

The survival equation at the Special Mission Compound was growing dim. R. summoned C. and D. over the radio:

“Guys, TOC here. Several tangos outside your door. Stay put. Do not move.”

“Copy,” replied one of the agents.

“Backup on the way.”

In the background, the TOC agent could hear the sound of the angry mob in the hallways, over the agent’s keyed microphone. R. communicated his situation to the C.I.A. Annex, the RSO in Tripoli, and the Diplomatic Security Command Center, in Virginia, via his cell phone. Well over a dozen terrorists were trying to break through the cantina at the residence. C. and D. had shut the main door and moved the refrigerator from inside the kitchen and barricaded the door with it. They hunkered down low, with their assault rifles in hand, prepared for the breach and the ballistic showdown. They were trapped. So, too, were R. and B., in the TOC.

A. leaned upward, glancing out through the murky transparency of his window, peering across the bars at the violence before him. He watched as the fuel bearers inched their way forward toward the residence, and he limbered up the fingers of his shooter’s hand as he laid a line of sight onto the targets closing the distance to the villa. He controlled his breathing in preparation to take that first shot. He found himself relying on his instincts, his experience, and, above all, his training. The purpose of the training that DS agents receive—the extensive tactical and evasive-driving skills that are hammered into each and every new member—is to show them how to buy time and space with dynamic skill and pragmatic thought. The DS trains its agents to analyze threats with their minds and gut instincts and not with their trigger fingers.

In that darkened bunker of the villa’s safe haven, A. faced a life-changing or life-ending decision that few of even the most experienced DS agents have ever had to make: play Rambo and shoot it out or remain unseen and buy time? Buying time takes brains—and, according to a DS agent with a plethora of experiences in counterterrorist investigations, “we hire people for their brains.” But A. found himself in the unforgiving position of being damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. As retired DS agent Scot Folensbee reflected, “When you are faced with immediate life-and-death decisions, you know that ultimately, if you survive, you will be second-guessed and criticized. So, the only thing to do is realize that in these cases of ‘Should I shoot or not shoot,’ you as the agent are the one making the decision and you the agent will have to live with that decision. There wasn’t a right decision here, and there wasn’t a wrong one, either.” As A. scanned the horizon, taking aim at which of the attackers he would have to shoot first, he understood that he would either be congratulated or criticized; dead or alive were mere afterthoughts.

The Special Mission Compound in Benghazi on that night was not a textbook case. No classroom, no training officer, and certainly no armchair general could understand the nuances of those terrifying uncertain moments of the attack. The attackers had managed to cut off and isolate two two-man tandems of armed support, and the local militia, paid to stand and fight, had cut and run. A.’s decision was his and his alone. And he chose to do whatever was humanly feasible to keep Stevens and Smith alive. There was no honor in a suicidal last stand before it was absolutely the time to commit suicide. Every second that the three could hang on was another second of hope that rescue would come.

It was 2200 hours.

The attackers moved quickly into the villa. The front door had been locked, and it took some effort to get it open. Finally, an R.P.G. was employed to blow a hole through the door. As they penetrated the villa the attackers were furious and violent, with an animal-like rage. They happily sated their appetite for destruction on anything before them, ripping the sofas and cushions to shreds. Bookshelves, lighting fixtures, vases were bashed and crushed. TVs were thrown to the ground and stomped on; the kitchen was ransacked. The computers left behind, perhaps containing sensitive and possibly even classified information, were simply trashed.

A. raised his weapon at the ceiling, trying to follow the footsteps of the invaders as they stomped on shards of broken glass above. The TOC was providing him with a play-by-play description of the frenetic orgy of destruction. As the gunmen searched the house, determined to retrieve a captive, either a defiant ambassador or the corpse of one, they headed down toward the safe haven.

All that separated A., Stevens, and Smith from the terrorists was the steel-reinforced security gate, of the kind installed inside the apartments of diplomats serving in “normal” locations in order to prevent criminal intrusions. The metal gate wasn’t a State Department-spec forced-entry-and-blast-resistant door, like the ones used in Inman buildings.

A. knew that unless help arrived soon they were, to use a DS euphemism, “screwed.” Screwed was an understatement. The terrorists would use explosives or an R.P.G. to blast their way into the safe haven; they had, he believed, used one to blast through the doors at the main entrance. R.P.G.’s and satchels of Semtex were virtually supermarket staples in Benghazi, and with one pull of the grenade launcher’s trigger or one timed detonation, the armored door to the safe haven would be a smoldering twist of ruin. But fire was a much cheaper and far simpler solution to a frustrating obstacle.

Burning down an embassy or a diplomatic post was so much easier than blowing it up, and historically, when a diplomatic post’s defenses had been breached, the end result was usually an inferno. As the frenzy of destruction began to simmer down, the roar of fire was loud and ominous. R. radioed A. with the news. “Smoke is seen from the villa’s windows, over.” The message was superfluous. The three men could hear the flames engulfing the building, and they could feel the oven-like heat growing hotter and more unbearable as each moment passed. The lights from behind the door began to flicker. The electricity began to falter, and then it died.

Once the fires began and the gunmen discovered the path to the safe haven, A. moved onto his knees to take aim with his assault rifle in case the attackers made it through this final barrier. The attackers flailed their hands wildly in the attempt to pry the gate open. None fired into the room; the mesh steel made it difficult for them to poke the barrels of their AK-47s to a point where they would be able to launch a few rounds. Stevens, Smith, and A. were safely out of view, crouched behind walls. A. cradled his long gun with his left hand, wiping the sweat from his right. He knew he had to be frugal with his shots. He didn’t know if he had enough rounds to stop 10 men, let alone more. As A. moved his sights from target to target, the fiery orange glow behind them made the dozen or so men look like a hundred.

Just before the fire was set, the gunmen had emerged from the villa, relaxed and joyous. They fecklessly fired their AK-47s into the air and watched the villa erupt in a wild blaze. Whoever was inside the doomed building would most certainly die. Their work for the night was nearly done.

The smoke spread fast as A. ordered Stevens and Smith to drop to their knees and led them in a crawl from the bedroom toward the bathroom, which had a small window. Towels were taken off their fancy racks and doused with water. A. rolled them loosely and forced them under the door to keep the smoke from entering the smaller space the three men had retreated to. Nevertheless, the acrid black vapor was eye-searing and blinded the men in the safe haven. The three, crawling around on the bathroom floor, gasped for clean air to fill their lungs. They couldn’t see a thing in the hazy darkness. The men began to vomit into the toilet. Getting some air was now more important than facing the wrath of the attackers.

The situation inside the safe haven was critical. A. attempted to pry open the window, but in seeking ventilation he exacerbated the situation; the opening created an air gust which fed the intensity of the flames and the smoke. The safe haven became a gas chamber. A. yelled and pleaded with Stevens and Smith to follow him to an adjacent room with an egress emergency window, but he couldn’t see the two through the smoke. He banged on the floor as he crawled, hoping they would hear him. A. found himself in the throes of absolute terror. He was, however, unwilling to surrender to the dire environment. He pushed through toward the window, barely able to breathe. With his voice raw from smoke, he mustered whatever energy he had left to yell and propel Stevens and Smith forward.

The egress window was grilled, and within the grille was a section that could be opened for emergency escape. It had a lock with the key located near the window but out of reach from someone outside. It did not open easily. Using all the strength of his arms and shoulders, A. managed to pry the window slightly ajar. He yelled for Stevens and Smith to follow him as he forced his body through the opening. The taste of fresh air pushed him ahead, and he was determined to get his ambassador and his IMO to safety, no matter what.

Coughing up soot, he reached inside to help Stevens and Smith out. There was no response, though; they had not followed him. A. heard the crackling of AK-47 gunfire in the distance, and he heard the whooshing sound of shots flying overhead. Some of the gunmen, who had by now begun to retreat from the blaze, began firing at him. A. didn’t care at this point. Showing enormous courage and dedication, he went back into the safe haven several times to search for both men. The heat and the intensity of the fire and smoke beat him back each time.

Later, A. could not remember the number of attempts he had made to search for Stevens and Smith, but they were numerous. His hands were severely burned, and the smoke inhalation had battered his body to the point where even minor movements caused excruciating pain. Still, he resolved to get the two men out of the inferno, dead or alive. But at approximately his sixth attempt to go back inside, A. found he couldn’t go back anymore. His body, weakened by a lack of oxygen and severe pain, had been humbled by the hellacious reality. Stoically he gathered himself and made toward an emergency ladder near the egress window. He climbed to the roof as the flames rushed upward from the windows that had exploded. While rounds were flying by him, he tried to pull off a metal grate over a skylight on the top of the roof. The building resembled a funeral pyre.

Atop the building, A. struggled his way toward the wedge-shaped sandbag firing emplacement that the DS Mobile Security Deployment operators had affixed the last time they had been to Benghazi. The sandbags shielded A. from the odd shots still ringing out in the night; greenish beams of tracer fire littered the roofline, as the gunmen still hoped to have a chance to engage some of the Americans in a battle to the end. A. used his radio and weapon to smash open the skylight in the hope of ventilating the building. He prayed this would cause the fire to burn itself out, enabling him to rush down into the labyrinth of destruction and save the lives of the ambassador and Sean Smith.

But, as pillars of fire and smoke surged up through the shattered remnants of the skylight, the collapse of the weakened roof seemed imminent. Struggling with every breath he took, he gathered his strength and pressed down on the talk button of his Motorola handset. “I don’t have the ambassador,” he yelled. “Repeat, over?” B. responded. He couldn’t hear what A. had said. As the flames roared around A., he struggled to speak. He found it excruciating to hold the radio in his burned hands. But they had to know. He took a lung-filling gasp of air. “I don’t have the ambassador!”

By Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters/Landov.

Find this story at august 2013

Vanity Fair © Condé Nast Digital

 

 

 

 

 

 

Revealed: UK Government let British company export nerve gas chemicals to Syria; UK accused of ‘breath-taking laxity’ over export licence for potassium fluoride and sodium fluoride

The Government was accused of “breathtaking laxity” in its arms controls last night after it emerged that officials authorised the export to Syria of two chemicals capable of being used to make a nerve agent such as sarin a year ago.

The Business Secretary, Vince Cable, will today be asked by MPs to explain why a British company was granted export licences for the dual-use substances for six months in 2012 while Syria’s civil war was raging and concern was rife that the regime could use chemical weapons on its own people. The disclosure of the licences for potassium fluoride and sodium fluoride, which can both be used as precursor chemicals in the manufacture of nerve gas, came as the US Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States had evidence that sarin gas was used in last month’s atrocity in Damascus.

Mr Kerry announced that traces of the nerve agent, found in hair and blood samples taken from victims of the attack in the Syrian capital which claimed more than 1,400 lives, were part of a case being built by the Obama administration for military intervention as it launched a full-scale political offensive on Sunday to persuade a sceptical Congress to approve a military strike against Syria.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills insisted that although the licences were granted to an unnamed UK chemical company in January 2012, the substances were not sent to Syria before the permits were eventually revoked last July in response to tightened European Union sanctions.

In a previously unpublicised letter to MPs last year, Mr Cable acknowledged that his officials had authorised the export of an unspecified quantity of the chemicals in the knowledge that they were listed on an international schedule of chemical weapon precursors.

Downing Street insisted today that Britain’s system for approving arms exports to Syria is working even though licences for two chemicals capable of being used in making nerve gas were approved by the Government and blocked only by EU sanctions.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “You see the system working, with materials not exported. The facts are that the licences were revoked and the exports did not take place. The Prime Minister’s view is that that demonstrates that the system is working. There is a sanctions regime, which is a very active part.”

Critics of the Business Secretary, whose department said it had accepted assurances from the exporting company that the chemicals would be used in the manufacture of metal window frames and shower enclosures, said it appeared the substances had only stayed out of Syria by chance.

The shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna told The Independent: “It will be a relief that the chemicals concerned were never actually delivered. But, in light of the fact the Assad regime had already been violently oppressing internal dissent for many months by the beginning of 2012 and the intelligence now indicates use of chemical weapons on multiple occasions, a full explanation is needed as to why the export of these chemicals was approved in the first place.”

The Labour MP Thomas Docherty, a member of the Commons Arms Export Controls Committee, will today table parliamentary questions demanding to know why the licences were granted and to whom.

He said: “This would seem to be a case of breath-taking laxity – the Government has had a very lucky escape indeed that these chemicals were not sent to Syria.

“What was Mr Cable’s department doing authorising the sale of chemicals which by their own admission had a dual use as precursors for chemical weapons at a time when the Syria’s war was long under way?”

The licences for the two chemicals were granted on 17 and 18 January last year for “use in industrial processes” after being assessed by Department for Business officials to judge if “there was a clear risk that they might be used for internal repression or be diverted for such an end”, according to the letter sent by Mr Cable to the arms controls committee.

Mr Cable said: “The licences were granted because at the time there were no grounds for refusal.”

Although the export deal, first reported by The Sunday Mail in Scotland, was outlawed by the EU on 17 June last year in a package of sanctions against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the licences were not revoked until 30 July. Chemical weapons experts said that although the two substances have a variety of uses such as the fluoridation of drinking water, sodium and potassium fluoride are also key to producing the chemical effect which makes a nerve agent such as sarin so toxic.

Western intelligence has long suspected the Syrian regime of using front companies to divert dual-use materials imported for industrial purposes into its weapons programmes. It is believed that chemical weapons including sarin have been used in the Syrian conflict on 14 occasions since 2012.

Mr Cable’s department last night insisted it was satisfied that the export licence was correctly granted. A spokesman said: “The UK Government operates one of the most rigorous arms export control regimes in the world.

“The exporter and recipient company demonstrated that the chemicals were for a legitimate civilian end-use – which was for metal finishing of aluminium profiles used in making aluminium showers and aluminium window frames.”

Cahal Milmo, Andy McSmith, Nikhil Kumar
Monday, 2 September 2013

Find this story at 2 September 2013

© independent.co.uk

UK ‘approved nerve gas chemical exports to Syria’

British companies were given government licences in January 2012 to export chemicals that could have been used to make nerve gas in Syria, ten months after civil broke out in the country, it was revealed Sunday.

The UK government approved licences for British firms in January 2012 to export chemicals to Syria that could have been used to produce nerve gas, it emerged Sunday.

Export licences for potassium fluoride and sodium fluoride were granted ten months after the country descended into civil war, reports first published in the Scottish Sunday Mail revealed.

The licences specified that the chemicals should be used in industrial processes, but fluoride is also a key element in the production of chemical weapons such as sarin – thought to be the nerve gas used in the Assad regime’s alleged August 21 attack in a suburb of Damascus.

Although the licences were revoked six months later, this was due to EU-imposed sanctions on the Assad regime, rather than a decision by the UK government.

The issuing of the licences, by the Department for Innovation, Business and Skills, was confirmed by a little-publicised letter sent in September 2012 by Business Secretary Vince Cable to the House of Commons’ Arms Export Controls Committee.

US Government map of areas reportedly affected by Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack

In the letter, Cable admits that licences were “issued on 17 and 18 January 2012 and authorised the export of dual-use chemicals to a private company for use in industrial processes. The chemicals were sodium fluoride and potassium fluoride”.

The letter stresses that the chemicals “were to be used for metal finishing of aluminium profiles used for making aluminium showers” but admits that “they could also be used as precursor chemicals in the manufacture of chemical weapons”.

UK government ‘has very serious questions to answer’

The revelations come at a time when the US and France are pushing for military action against the Assad regime in response to its alleged use of chemical weapons. Britain, however, ruled itself out of taking part in any armed intervention in Syria following a surprise vote against such a move in the House of Commons last week.

While the August 21 attack, which according to the US killed at least 1,429 Syrians, took place months after the licences were approved, Syria has been suspected of using chemical weapons many times in the past.

Opposition MPs are now calling on the coalition government and Vince Cable in particular to explain the decision to sanction the exports.

“The chair of the joint intelligence committee confirmed last week that their assessment was that the Syrian regime had used lethal chemical weapons on 14 occasions from 2012,” said Labour’s shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna.

“There are, therefore, very serious questions to answer as to why, in January 2012, export licences for chemicals to Syria which could be used in the manufacture of chemical weapons were approved.

“It will be a relief that the chemicals concerned were never actually delivered. But, in light of the fact the Assad regime had already been violently oppressing internal dissent for many months by the beginning of 2012 and the intelligence now indicates use of chemical weapons on multiple occasions, a full explanation is needed as to why the export of these chemicals was approved in the first place,” Umunna added.

Umunna’s statement follows comments made by Vince Cable last Wednesday, after the UK announced it was suspending export licences to Egypt because of the ongoing political turmoil.

Cable insisted that: “The UK position is clear: we will not grant export licences where there is a clear risk that goods might be used for internal repression.

He added: “The government takes its export responsibilities very seriously and operates one of the most rigorous arms export control regimes in the world.”

By Sam Ball (text)

Find this story at 2 September 2013

© AFP

Revealed: Britain sold nerve gas chemicals to Syria 10 months after ‘civil unrest’ began

FURIOUS politicians have demanded Prime Minister David Cameron explain why chemical export licences were granted to firms last January – 10 months after the Syrian uprising began.

BRITAIN allowed firms to sell chemicals to Syria capable of being used to make nerve gas, the Sunday Mail can reveal today.

Export licences for potassium fluoride and sodium fluoride were granted months after the bloody civil war in the Middle East began.

The chemical is capable of being used to make weapons such as sarin, thought to be the nerve gas used in the attack on a rebel-held Damascus suburb which killed nearly 1500 people, including 426 children, 10 days ago.

President Bashar Assad’s forces have been blamed for the attack, leading to calls for an armed response from the West.

British MPs voted against joining America in a strike. But last night, President Barack Obama said he will seek the approval of Congress to take military action.

The chemical export licences were granted by Business Secretary Vince Cable’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills last January – 10 months after the Syrian uprising began.

They were only revoked six months later, when the European Union imposed tough sanctions on Assad’s regime.

Yesterday, politicians and anti-arms trade campaigners urged Prime Minister David Cameron to explain why the licences were granted.

Dunfermline and West Fife Labour MP Thomas Docherty, who sits on the House of Commons’ Committees on Arms Export Controls, plans to lodge Parliamentary questions tomorrow and write to Cable.

He said: “At best it has been negligent and at worst reckless to export material that could have been used to create chemical weapons.

“MPs will be horrified and furious that the UK Government has been allowing the sale of these ingredients to Syria.

“What the hell were they doing granting a licence in the first place?

“I would like to know what investigations have been carried out to establish if any of this
material exported to Syria was subsequently used in the attacks on its own people.”

The SNP’s leader at Westminster, Angus Robertson MP, said: “I will be raising this in Parliament as soon as possible to find out what examination the UK Government made of where these chemicals were going and what they were to be used for.

“Approving the sale of chemicals which can be converted into lethal weapons during a civil war is a very serious issue.

“We need to know who these chemicals were sold to, why they were sold, and whether the UK Government were aware that the chemicals could potentially be used for chemical weapons.

“The ongoing humanitarian crisis in Syria makes a full explanation around these shady deals even more important.”

A man holds the body of a dead child
Reuters

Mark Bitel of the Campaign Against Arms Trade (Scotland) said: “The UK Government claims to have an ethical policy on arms exports, but when it comes down to practice the reality is very different.

“The Government is hypocritical to talk about chemical weapons if it’s granting licences to companies to export to regimes such as Syria.

“We saw David Cameron, in the wake of the Arab Spring, rushing off to the Middle East with arms companies to promote business.”

Some details emerged in July of the UK’s sale of the chemicals to Syria but the crucial dates of the exports were withheld.

The Government have refused to identify the licence holders or say whether the licences were issued to one or two companies.

The chemicals are in powder form and highly toxic. The licences specified that they should be used for making aluminium structures such as window frames.

Professor Alastair Hay, an expert in environmental toxicology at Leeds University, said: “They have a variety of industrial uses.

“But when you’re making a nerve agent, you attach a fluoride element and that’s what gives it
its toxic properties.

“Fluoride is key to making these munitions.

“Whether these elements were used by Syria to make nerve agents is something only subsequent investigation will reveal.”

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: “The UK Government operates one of the most rigorous arms export control regimes in the world.

“An export licence would not be granted where we assess there is a clear risk the goods might be used for internal repression, provoke or prolong conflict within a country, be used aggressively against another country or risk our national security.

“When circumstances change or new information comes to light, we can – and do – revoke licences where the proposed export is no longer consistent with the criteria.”

Assad’s regime have denied blame for the nerve gas attack, saying the accusations are “full of lies”. They have pointed the finger at rebels.

UN weapons inspectors investigating the atrocity left Damascus just before dawn yesterday and crossed into Lebanon after gathering evidence for four days.

They are now travelling to the Dutch HQ of the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons.

It could take up to two weeks for the results of tests on samples taken from victims of the attack, as well as from water, soil and shrapnel, to be revealed.

On Thursday night, Cameron referred to a Joint Intelligence Committee report on Assad’s use of chemical weapons as he tried in vain to persuade MPs to back military action. The report said the regime had used chemical weapons at least 14 times since last year.

Russian president Vladimir Putin yesterday attacked America’s stance and urged Obama to show evidence to the UN that Assad’s regime was guilty.

Russia and Iran are Syria’s staunchest allies. The Russians have given arms and military backing to Assad during the civil war which has claimed more than 100,000 lives.

Putin said it would be “utter nonsense” for Syria to provoke opponents and spark military
retaliation from the West by using chemical weapons.

But the White House, backed by the French government, remain convinced of Assad’s guilt, and Obama proposes “limited, narrow” military action to punish the regime.

He has the power to order a strike, but last night said he would seek approval from Congress.

Obama called the chemical attack “an assault on human dignity” and said: “We are prepared to strike whenever we choose.”

He added: “Our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive. It will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.

“And I’m prepared to give that order.”

Some fear an attack on Syria will spark retaliation against US allies in the region, such
as Jordan, Turkey and Israel.

General Lord Dannatt, the former head of the British Army, described the Commons vote as a “victory for common sense and democracy”.

He added that the “drumbeat for war” had dwindled among the British public in recent days.

By Russell Findlay, Billy Briggs
1 Sep 2013 07:21

Find this story at 1 September 2013

© www.dailyrecord.co.uk

MPs to ask firms to explain how UK taxes helped dictators build arsenals

Among questionable ethical deals was £35m lent to Robert Mugabe and spent on BAE’s Hawk fighter jets

Robert Mugabe bought five BAE systems Hawk jets between 1989 and 1992 and deployed them in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images

Britain’s arms industry and other companies are to be called before MPs to explain why taxpayer funds ended up helping Robert Mugabe to buy five Hawk fighter jets and 1,030 police Land Rovers which he later used to suppress dissent.

The bosses of the world’s biggest multinational defence and oil companies, including BAE Systems and BP, will be asked to account for why hundreds of millions of pounds of government money was used to help military dictators build up their arsenals, and facilitated environmental and human rights abuses across the world.

An official all-party inquiry into the government Export Credits Guarantee Department’s (ECGD) underwriting of the loans will begin to call witnesses next week, the Guardian has learned.

The all-party parliamentary group on international corporate responsibility will investigate more than 40 years of the government’s involvement in supporting dubious practices overseas. The actions of the ECGD have led to it being christened the “department for dodgy deals” by the Jubilee Debt Campaign.

Among the catalogue of ethically questionable deals was £35m lent to Zimbabwe to buy five Hawk fighter jets from BAE Systems between 1989 and 1992.

Zimbabwe, which was already heavily indebted at the time of the loans, spent £49m repaying the cost of the Hawks, according to a response to a freedom of information request from the Jubilee Debt Campaign seen by the Guardian.

Mugabe’s government deployed the jets in the 1998-2002 war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s most deadly conflict in modern history, which led to 5.4m deaths.

At the time of deployment the British government approved Zimbabwe’s purchase of spare parts worth £5m-£10m despite concerns the aircraft were being used in the deadly Congo war, according to the journal Africana Bulletin.

The department also supplied Mugabe with £21m of loan guarantees to help him import 1,030 police Land Rovers and other military equipment. The vehicles were sent to Zimbabwe after Mugabe promised that they would be used “with due respect for human rights”. He specifically pledged not to use them for riot control, but Amnesty International said they were used to crush demonstrations.

The Land Rovers were sent to Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, before Mugabe began taking over white farmers’ land in 1999. Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, later banned the shipments.

The ECGD also supported the notorious al-Yamamah “oil for arms” deal with Saudi Arabia, for which BAE Systems was investigated by the Serious Fraud Office amid allegations of bribery and corruption. The inquiry was eventually dropped following the intervention of the then prime minister, Tony Blair.

The government loans also allowed the former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, and his predecessor Anwar Sadat, to buy arms, including helicopters and missiles, and helped Argentina buy two Type 42 Destroyers and two Lynx helicopters, which were later used in the invasion of the Falklands.

As well as arms, the department has provided funds for the world’s largest and riskiest oil-drilling project, in the Atlantic Ocean, and a 1,760km BP joint venture oil pipeline through the Caucasus.

The inquiry will this week begin asking arms and oil industry executives to provide evidence to parliament after pressure for the ECGD to clean up its act. The cross-party group of MPs will also call on former politicians to explain why they signed the deals. More than 100 MPs signed an early day motion calling for the ECGD to commit itself to transparent and open dealings in the future.

The ECGD, which is part of the business department and has changed its name to UK Export Finance (UKEF), was often used by arms companies to get a state-backed guarantee to recompense their banks if the deal fell through or the debtor failed to make repayments. In the 1980s the ECGD had 4,000 staff in branches across the country and offered backing for 40% of Britain’s exports.

Lisa Nandy, a Labour MP and chair of the all party group, said the department had committed “billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money” to projects that had been the subject of “countless criticisms” for human rights and environmental abuses.

“It is vital that we bring together all stakeholders and interested parties through this inquiry to look seriously at the allegations levelled at this department,” she said.

“This Department commits billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money each year. It has a responsibility to spend that money in a way that is ethical and effective. In the past it appears that this responsibility has not been taken seriously enough.”

“In a time of recession, business needs support from government but that support must be of long-term benefit for everyone: safeguarding human rights, protecting the environment and, at the very least, not exacerbating poverty.”

Tim Jones, policy officer at Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: “We welcome the launch of this inquiry. Vince Cable’s ‘Department for Dodgy Deals’ has a notorious track record of backing loans for undemocratic and damaging projects. UK Export Finance claims it is owed £2.3 billion. This includes loans for General Mubarak’s Egyptian army to buy British defence equipment, Argentina’s 1970s military dictatorship to buy British warships, and Robert Mugabe’s police to buy British Land Rovers. Vince Cable needs to implement Liberal Democrat policy and audit the debt, cancel that which is unjust, and reform UK Export Finance so no more dodgy deals are backed in the future.”

The inquiry has no legal power to force industry executives or former politicians to provide evidence.

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Former head of MI6 threatens to expose secrets of Iraq ‘dodgy dossier’

A former head of MI6 has threatened to expose the secrets of the ‘dodgy dossier’ if he disagrees with the long-awaited findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s role in the Iraq War.
Sir Richard Dearlove has threatened to expose secrets behind the Iraq ‘dodgy dossier’. Photo: JOHN TAYLOR

Sir Richard Dearlove, 68, has spent the last year writing a detailed account of events leading up to the war, and had intended to only make his work available to historians after his death.

But now Sir Richard, who provided intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) that was apparently ‘sexed up’ by Tony Blair’s government, has revealed that he could go public after the Chilcot Inquiry publishes its findings.

Sir Richard is expected to be criticised by the inquiry’s chairman, Sir John Chilcot, over the accuracy of intelligence provided by MI6 agents inside Iraq, which was used in the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’.

Now the ex-MI6 boss, who is Master at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, has said: “What I have written (am writing) is a record of events surrounding the invasion of Iraq from my then professional perspective.

“My intention is that this should be a resource available to scholars, but after my decease (may be sooner depending on what Chilcot publishes).
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“I have no intention, however, of violating my vows of official secrecy by publishing any memoir.”

Sources close to Sir Richard said that he insists Chilcot should recognise the role played by Tony Blair and the Prime Minister’s chief spokesman Alastair Campbell in informing media reports which suggested Saddam could use chemical weapons to target British troops based in Cyprus, a claim which led to Britain entering the war in Iraq.

Sir Richard is said to remain extremely unhappy that this piece of intelligence, which his agents stressed only referred to battlefield munitions which had a much shorter range, led to media reports that UK bases were under threat.

However, he accepts that some of MI6’s information on the WMDs was inaccurate, the Mail on Sunday reported.

Mr Blair and Mr Campbell have repeatedly denied making misleading statements about WMD.

Last week it was revealed that Sir John had written to Prime Minister David Cameron informing him of his intention to write personally to those individuals he intends to criticise, with Tony Blair reported to be among those on Sir John’s list.

Sir Richard has taken a sabbatical from his duties at Cambridge University to research and write his record of events, and is expected to resume his Master’s role at the start of the new academic year.

A security source told The Mail on Sunday: “This is Sir Richard’s time-bomb. He wants to set the record straight and defend the integrity of MI6. And Sir Richard has taken a lot of personal criticism over MI6’s performance and his supposedly too-cosy relationship with Mr Blair.

“No Chief of MI6 has done anything like this before, but the events in question were unprecedented.

“If Chilcot doesn’t put the record straight, Sir Richard will strike back.”

Last night the committee’s chairman, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was appointed in 2010, offered Sir Richard his support, saying: “I have never heard of a former MI6 chief putting something out there in these terms but I would be interested in what Sir Richard has to say in response to the Chilcot Inquiry which is clearly going to have some meat in it.

“I know Sir Richard and worked with him in the Foreign Office many years ago. He is a very able man of the highest character and a man of his own opinions. We shall have to wait to see what he says.”

Last night, Alastair Campbell and the office for Tony Blair declined to comment on Sir Richard’s account.

By Melanie Hall
8:48AM BST 21 Jul 2013

Find this story at 21 July 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013