Völlig unkontrolliert: Brüssel leistet sich einen eigenen Geheimdienst

Neben der CIA und dem KGB gibt es auch einen eigenen Geheimdienst. Die EU Intelligence Community beschäftigt 1.300 Mitarbeiter und kostet den Steuerzahler 230 Millionen Euro jährlich. Nun regt sich im Europäischen Parlament Widerstand gegen die Truppe. Denn niemand kontrolliert die Spione Brüssels effektiv.

Parallel zu den nationalen Geheimdiensten in Europa leistet sich auch die EU einen eigenen Geheimdienst. Millionen Euro werden dafür jedes Jahr ausgegeben. 1.300 Mitarbeiter versorgen die EU dafür mit wichtigen Informationen. Eine wirklich effektive Kontrolle gibt es nicht. Transparenz gilt unter Geheimdiensten als Todsünde.

Insoweit passt diese Einrichtung gut in das bürokratische Schema in Brüssel.

Brüssel, die Stadt der Lobbyisten, Parlamentarier und – Spione. „Ich denke man kann mit Sicherheit sagen, dass Brüssel eine der größten Spionagehauptstädte der Welt ist“, zitiert der österreichische EU-Abgeordnete Martin Ehrenhauser den Leiter des belgischen Sicherheitsdienstes VSSE in seinem blog. Alain Winants geht davon aus, dass mehrere hundert Spione sich in der EU-Hauptstadt tummeln. Diesem munteren Treiben wollte die EU nicht tatenlos zusehen – und hat mit dem Aufbau eines eigenen Geheimdiensts begonnen.

Insgesamt sechs Einheiten gibt es in Brüssel, die als EU-Geheimdienst zusammengefasst werden können, die EU-Intelligence Community. Neben Europol und Frontex gehören dazu auch vier nachrichtendienstliche Einheiten, sagte Martin Ehrenhauser den Deutschen Wirtschafts Nachrichten. Diese sind das Intelligence Analysis Center, das Satellite Center, das Intelligence Directorate und der Situation Room. Diese gehören dem Auswärtigen Dienst (EAD) an. 230 Millionen Euro jährlich erhalten die sechs Einheiten des EU-Geheimdienstes aus dem EU-Budget. Dieser Etat „ist über die letzten Jahre kontinuierlich gestiegen, selbstverständlich“, so Ehrenhauser. 1.300 Mitarbeiter arbeiten dort. So hat der EU-Geheimdienst in etwa die Größe „eines Geheimdienstes eines kleinen, mittelgroßen Staates wie Österreich“.

Jedoch gibt es eigentlich nur für Europol eine rechtliche Grundlage. Das Problem sei vor allem, so Ehrenauser, dass das EU-Parlament kein wirkliches Mitspracherecht bei den Einheiten des Geheimdienstes habe. Jedoch sei eine „parlamentarische, demokratische Kontrolle durch das Parlament dringend notwendig“. Bei Europol und Frontex sei die parlamentarische Kontrolle „relativ stabil“. Bei den vier nachrichtendienstlichen Einheiten sei dies aber so gut wie gar nicht gegeben. Es gebe eine Art budgetrechtliche Kontrolle, aber beim Personal oder dem genauen Einsatz der EU-Mittel könne das Parlament nicht mitreden, sagte Ehrenhauser. Eine entsprechende Initiative des Parlaments für eine bessere parlamentarische Kontrolle sei jedoch kürzlich abgelehnt worden.

…

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten | 08.05.13, 08:57

Find this story at 8 May 2013

© 2013 Blogform Social Media

EU-Geheimdienst: Schwammige Kooperation

Durch den Sitz der NATO und der EU wurde Brüssel zu einem bedeutenden Schauplatz der Weltpolitik. Die Informationen die in dieser Stadt kursieren sind nicht nur für Frankreich oder Polen von entscheidender Bedeutung, sondern auch für China und den Iran. Die belgische Hauptstadt ist ein europäischer Hotspot für diplomatische Vertretungen, Lobbyorganisationen und Geheimdienste.

„Ich denke man kann mit Sicherheit sagen, dass Brüssel eine der größten Spionagehauptstädte der Welt ist“, so Alain Winants, Leiter des belgischen Sicherheitsdienstes VSSE. Er schätzt die Anzahl der Spione auf „mehrere Hundert“. Oftmals getarnt als Journalisten, Diplomaten, Studenten oder Lobbyisten umfasst ihr Interesse das gesamte politische Themenspektrum, von der Energie- über Handelspolitik bis hin zur Sicherheitspolitik.

Mit den wachsenden sicherheitspolitischen Kompetenzen und Bestrebungen der Europäischen Union, sowohl innerhalb als auch außerhalb Europas, hat auch die EU mit dem Aufbau von eigenen nachrichtendienstlichen Einheiten begonnen.

Die Gründung der „EU-Intelligence Community“ erfolgte ad-hoc und anlassbezogen. Sie folgte keiner Strategie oder einem kohärenten Konzept in Bezug auf Struktur, Methoden und handelnde Personen. Die Gründungsphase begann 1993 mit Europol. Zwischen 2000 und 2004 wurden dann die vier weiteren nachrichtendienstlichen Einheiten aus der Taufe gehoben. Durch Beschluss, Verordnung oder einer gemeinsamen Aktion des Rates. Niemals hatte dabei das EU-Parlament ein Mitspracherecht.

Einen Sonderfall bildet das Lagezentrum (SitCen), der Vorläufer des Intelligence Directorate (IntDir). Denn die Gründung war lediglich eine Initiative von Javier Solana, dem damaligen Hohen Vertreter der GASP und Generalsekretär des Rates. Es gab keinen Ratsbeschluss. Die Gründung stand damit im Widerspruch mit dem damaligen EU-Vertragsrecht. Denn gemäß Artikel 207 (2) EGV entscheidet der Rat über die Organisation des Generalsekretariats.

Ungenaue Grenzziehung

Eine explizite primärrechtliche Grundlage gibt es nur für Europol. Die Gründung wurde im Vertrag über die Europäische Union von 1992 vereinbart und später durch Beschluss des Rates durchgeführt. Die restlichen nachrichtendienstlichen Einheiten finden keine Erwähnung in den Verträgen. Das gilt auch für die Europäisierung der nachrichtendienstlichen Zusammenarbeit. Lediglich in Art. 73 AEUV heißt es: „Es steht den Mitgliedstaaten frei, untereinander und in eigener Verantwortung Formen der Zusammenarbeit und Koordinierung zwischen den zuständigen Dienststellen ihren für den Schutz der nationalen Sicherheit verantwortlichen Verwaltungen einzurichten, die sie für geeignet halten.“ Es existiert somit eine Kooperation ohne klar festgelegte primärrechtliche Grenzen.

Instabile demokratischer Kontrolle

Schwammig ist auch die demokratische Kontrolle. Von offizieller Seite heißt es, dass keine Geheimdienste im klassischen Sinne auf EU-Ebene existieren, da keine verdeckten Einsätze durchgeführt werden. Außerdem werde nur „Finished Intelligence“ von nationalen Diensten an die EU-Institutionen übermittelt. Zuständig für die parlamentarische Kontrolle seien somit die nationalen Instanzen – nicht das EU-Parlament.

Fakt ist, dass die EU-Einheiten immer eigenständiger Informationen sammeln ¬– etwa über die EU-Delegationen oder das Satellite Center (SatCen). Dass die EU zu 100 Prozent von den Informationen der nationalen Behörden abhängig sei, ist damit ein Trugschluss.

Die EU-Einheiten erfüllen zudem eine ähnliche Funktion wie nationale Nachrichtendienste: Sie sammeln und analysieren Informationen und leiten diese an politsche Entschiedungsträger weiter. Die Tatsache, dass eine Methode (Covert Actions) der Informationsgewinnung nicht unmittelbar angewandt wird, reicht nicht aus um gdie Existenz eines Nachrichtendienstes und damit die Notwendigkeit einer europäischen parlamentarischen Kontrolle zu leugnen. In dubio pro democratia!

Hinzu kommt das demokratische Grundproblem von „International Governance“: Immer komplexere Entscheidungsstrukturen mit diffusen Verantwortlichkeiten treffen weitreichende Entscheidungen sehr weit weg vom Wähler. Eine Kontrolle durch das EU-Parlament ist daher zwingend erforderlich, auf allen Ebenen. Strukturell, bei der parlamentarischen Mitsprache über Mandat und Leitung, also darüber, was ein Nachrichtendienst machen soll und machen darf und wer dafür verantwortlich ist. Finanziell, bei der parlamentarischen Mitsprache über Budget und Budgetkontrolle sowie Personalausstattung. Juristisch, im Bezug auf die Zuständigkeit von Gerichten, Strafverfolgungsbehörden sowie notwendige Beschwerdemechanismen. Und nicht zuletzt in Bezug auf Qualitätskontrolle und Art der Leistung.

Mehr Kontrolle? Knapp gescheitert!

Die parlamentarische Kontrolle der EU-Agenturen Europol und Frontex weist zwar einige Lücken auf, ist jedoch in Summe stabil. Problematischer wird es bei den nachrichtendienstlichen Einheiten im Auswärtigen Dienst (EAD). Unsere Initiative für eine bessere parlamentarische Kontrolle wurde erst kürzlich im Haushaltskontrollausschuss bei Stimmengleichstand knapp abgelehnt. Gefordert hatten wir unter anderem, dass für die vier Einheiten des EAD eine eigene Budgetlinie im Haushalt des EAD eingeführt werden soll. Damit wäre eine konkrete Mitbestimmung und mehr Transparenz möglich geworden. Schließlich ist bisher nicht klar, wie hoch die einzelnen Budgets sind.

Die einzelnen Abteilungen im Überblick

Das Kooperationsnetz, das bisher etabliert wurde, umfasst derzeit vier Abteilungen des Europäischen Auswärtigen Dienstes (EAD) und zwei EU-Agenturen, Europol und Frontex. Insgesamt 1300 Mitarbeiter sind beschäftig und ein Jahresbudget von 230 Millionen Euro steht zur Verfügung:

Intelligence Analysis Center (IntCen)
Der Vorgänger des IntCen war das Gemeinsame Lagezentrum (SitCen) der Westeuropäischen Union (WEU). Dieses wurde im Jahr 2000 gemeinsam mit dem Militärstab in die EU eingegliedert und ist seit Jänner 2011 Teil des EAD. Sein Budget ist Teil des EAD-Budgets und somit nicht transparent ausgewiesen. Rund 100 Mitarbeiter arbeiten in Brüssel unter der Leitung des Finnen Ilkka Salmi. Überwiegend EU-Beamte und Zweitbedienstete, jedoch auch nationale Nachrichtendienstexperten.
Die priviligierten Mitgliedstaaten Frankreich, Deutschland, Italien, Niederlande, Schweden, Spanien und Großbritanien entscheiden, welches Land Experten entsenden darf und welches nicht. Die Hauptaufgaben sind die Frühwarnung über externe Bedrohungen und die Risikobewertung für GSVP-Missionen. IntCen ist der Dreh- und Angelpunkt für militärische und zivile nachrichtendienstliche Informationen. Informationen liefern Europol, Frontex, EU-Mission, EU-Delegationen, EU-Sonderbeauftragte, IntDir und viele mehr. Auch nationale Nachrichtendienste liefern auf freiwilliger Basis „Finished Intelligence“. Darüber hinaus reist das Personal selbst in Krisengebiete, zum Beispiel 2011 nach Lybien. Jährlich werden etwa 200 strategische Lagebeurteilungen, Sonderberichte und Briefings ausgearbeitet. Diese Produkte sind klassifiziert bis zur Geheimhaltungsstufe EU TOP SECRET. Darüber hinaus werden Präsentationen und Briefings für Entscheidungsträger angefertigt. Die Produkte werden auch an Europol und Frontex übermittelt.

Satellite Center (SatCen)
Es wurde im Juli 2001 gegründet und hat seinen Sitz in Torrejón de Ardoz in Spanien. Später wurde es in den Europäischen Auswärtigen Dienst (EAD) eingegliedert. Rund 108 Mitarbeiter werten bei einem Jahresbudget von rund 17 Millionen Euro nahe Madrid Satellitenbilder und Geodaten aus. Direktor ist seit 2010 der Slovene Tomaž Lovrenčič. Die Rohdaten werden von kommerziellen Partnern wie Indien, Russland oder den USA ankauft oder von den EU-Mitgliedstaaten an das SatCen übermittelt. Damit werden jährlich rund 700 Dienstleistungsprodukte für Entscheidungsträger der Europäischen Union, der EU-Mitgliedstaaten oder auch der UNO und NATO erstellt. Während des „Arabischen Frühlings“ erhielt das SatCen zahlreiche Aufträge von EUFOR Libya und der NATO.

Intelligence Directorate (IntDir)
Die Gründung der IntDir erfolgte 1999, volle Funktionsfähigkeit wurde 2001 erreicht. Die Einheit ist im EU-Militärstab angesiedelt, dem „Working Muscle“ der Gemeinsamen Europäischen Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik (GSVP). Dieser ist ebenfalls nun Teil des EAD. Die Hauptinformationsquellen sind klassifizierte nachrichtendienstliche Produkte, die von den militärischen Nachrichtendiensten der Mitgliedstaaten freiwillig über entsandte nationale Experten in der IntDir zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Die Abteilung unterstützt damit die GSVP bei der Entwicklung von strategischen Leitlinien, der Frühwarnung sowie der Planung und Leitung von GSVP-Mission. Derzeit arbeiten 41 Personen in der Abteilung. Der Chef war bis vor Kurzem Günther Eisl, ein Mitarbeiter des österreichischen Heeresnachrichtenamts. Das Budget ist Teil des EAD-Budgets und somit nicht transparent ausgewiesen.

Situation Room
Der Situation Room wurde mit der Gründung des EAD im Jänner 2011 etabliert. Head of Division ist der Grieche Petros Mavromichalis. Rund 21 Mitarbeiter arbeiten unter seiner Leitung. Das Budget ist Teil des EAD-Budgets und somit nicht transparent ausgewiesen. Der Situation Room ist der erste „Point of Contact“ für alle Informationen zu EU-relevanten Krisen. Die Hauptaufgabe ist das Krisen-Monitoring, 24 Stunden täglich, sieben Tage in der Woche. Die Informationen erhält der Situation Room von den EU-Delegationen, EU-Missionen, EU-Sonderberichterstattern, den Mitgliedstaaten, aber auch von Internationalen Organisationen.

Europol
Die Gründung eines Europäischen Polizeiamts (Europol) wurde 1992 vereinbart. Seit Jänner 2010 ist Europol eine EU-Agentur. Direktor ist seit April 2009 der Waliser Rob Wainwright. Beinahe 800 Personen arbeiten in Den Haag unter seiner Leitung. Rund 85 Millionen Euro beträgt das Jahresbudget. Zu den Aufgaben zählt das Einholen, Speichern, Verarbeiten, Analysieren und Austauschen von Informationen sowie die Koordinierung, Organisation und Durchführung von Ermittlungen und operativen Maßnahmen. Europol analysiert dabei auch personenbezogene Daten, die von nationalen Nachrichtendiensten und Strafverfolgunsbehörden übermittelt werden. Europol verfügt über zwei Datenbanken. Das Europol Information System (EIS) ist für alle nationalen Polizeibehörden zugänglich und enthält Basisangaben über Personen und Gruppierungen. Die Analytical Work Files (AWFs) sind nur für die Europol-Analysten zugänglich und enthalten sensible personenbezogene Daten von verdächtigen Terroristen. Die Produkte werden als „Operative Intelligence“ und „Strategische Intelligence“ an EU-Entscheidungsträger und an jede Organisation übermittelt, die auch Informationen liefert.

Frontex
Die europäische Grenzschutzagentur wurde 2004 gegründet und hat ihren Sitz in Warschau. Unter der Leitung des Finnen Ilkka Laitinen arbeiten 314 Mitarbeiter. 2011 betrug das Budget 118 Millionen Euro. Frontex stellt der EU-Kommission und den Mitgliedstaaten technische Unterstützung und Fachwissen zum Schutz der Außengrenzen zur Verfügung. Die Kernaufgabe ist die Risikoanalyse, inklusive die Bewertung der Kapazitäten, die den Mitgliedstaaten zur Bewältigung von Gefahren zur Verfügung stehen. Die Informationen stammen direkt von den Grenzübergangsstellen oder auch von den Mitgliedstaaten.
Um die Bereitschaft zur Übermittlung von klassifizierten Informationen mit personenbezogenen Daten zu erhöhen, wurde das sogeannte „Frontex Risk Analysis Network“ (FRAN) eingerichtet. Ein Datennetzwerk, dass Frontex mit den nationlen Nachrichtendiensten und EU-Institutionen verbindet. Auch ähnliche regionale Netzwerke außerhalb der EU werden bereits etabliert. Etwa das „Western Balkans Risk Analysis Network“ (WB RAN). Das Frontex-Lagezentrum ist für das Krisenmonitoring zuständig. Rund 500 Lageberichte werden dort jährlich erstellt und täglich werden Newsletter an rund 350 Empfängerkonten übermittelt. Darüber hinaus erstellt Frontex strategische Bewertungen, Vierteljahresberichte und rund 160 Analyseprodukte zur Unterstützung von gemeinsamen Aktionen.

Find this story at 6 May 2013

The EU’s Unofficial Spy Services Are Growing Out-Of-Control

Brussels, the center of gravity of the European Union and seat of NATO Headquarters, not only teems with lobbyists, diplomats, military personnel, bureaucrats, politicians, Americans, and other weird characters from around the world, but also with spies.

“Brussels is one of the largest spy capitals in the world,” said Alain Winants, head of the Belgian State Security Service VSSE. He guesstimated that there’d be “several hundred” plying their trade at any one time, chasing after a broad array of topics, from trade issues to security policies.

Yet officially, the EU itself doesn’t have an intelligence service of its own. It’s dependent on the national intelligence services of the member states that supply it with “finished intelligence.” Officially.

In reality, it has been building an intelligence apparatus of six services so far, some of them brand new, populated already by 1,300 specialists. But because they’re officially not conducting direct covert operations – though they do go overseas, including to Libya during the Arab Spring! – they simply deny being intelligence services.

Thus, four of them have finagled to escape democratic oversight and control by the European Parliament. Even in the US, the Intelligence Community is accountable to the Congress. Not so in the EU.

As everything else in the EU bureaucracy, these services – the newest dating back to 2011 – are constantly growing, assuming more functions, responsibilities, and power, with vast and ever expanding databases at their fingertips, tied into a dense network of other intelligence services. And it’s just the beginning.

Some Members of Parliament are getting antsy and want to rein them in. Martin Ehrenhauser, independent MP from Austria, and member of the Subcommittee on Security and Defense Policy, is one of the ringleaders; and in his blog post, he details some of the issues.

Since its founding, the EU has been building its own spy programs, often triggered by specific needs, in an “ad-hoc” manner “without strategy” and without a “coherent concept” about its structure, methods, and people, he writes. This “EU intelligence community” saw its first steps in 1993 with the founding of Europol, the only intelligence service established by treaty, and thus the only one with a legitimate basis. Between the prolific years of 2000 and 2004, four additional intelligence units were cobbled together by the unelected European Council. And another one in 2011.

Parliament, emasculated by design in the hyper-democratic manner of the EU, was never given an opportunity to be involved. The logic? Since these entities receive only “finished intelligence” from national services, democratic oversight would rest with national parliaments, not with the European Parliament. Alas, these EU intelligence services are gathering their own intelligence to an ever greater degree. Hence, Ehrenhauser writes, the idea that the EU receives 100% of its information from national intelligence services is a “fallacy.”

The EU intelligence services function similarly to their national counterparts: they collect information, often overseas, analyze it, and transmit it to policy makers. These products can be classified EU TOP SECRET. The mere fact that they might not use covert operations directly to obtain the information, Ehrenhauser writes, is “not sufficient to deny the very existence of the intelligence services and therefore the necessity of democratic controls by the European Parliament.”

Of the six services, only Europol (intelligence and law enforcement) and Frontex (external borders) are subject to some parliamentary oversight. The remaining four – the Intelligence Analysis Center (IntCen), the Satellite Center (SatCen), the Intelligence Directorate (IntDir), and the Situation Room (crisis monitoring) – are beyond democratic controls.

All four have been rolled into the European External Action Service (EEAS), which itself was founded in 2011. Some of them don’t even publish their budgets. Though they’re still small, given their youth, they’re destined to grow just like Europol has been growing over its 20 years of existence. They’re already getting tangled up in “ever more complex decision-making structures with diffuse responsibilities,” Ehrenhauser writes, and they’re making “sweeping decisions far away from the voter.”

…

Wolf Richter, Testosterone Pit | May 9, 2013, 12:06 PM | 630 |

Find this story at 9 May 2013

Copyright © 2013 Business Insider, Inc.

Canadian intelligence caught off guard by Arab Spring: government report

OTTAWA — The 2011 Arab Spring uprising in the Middle East came as a surprise to the Canadian government, which risks getting caught off-guard again without a new approach to gathering intelligence, an internal government report says.

Among other developments, analysts underestimated the repercussions of regime change in Tunisia, the Egyptian military’s efforts to control dissent and the duration of the civil war in Libya, says the assessment of how well the Privy Council Office did in keeping an eye on the Middle East two years ago.

The Privy Council Office, or PCO, is the bureaucratic arm of the prime minister’s office and includes an Intelligence Assessment Secretariat, which provides a regular range of reports to senior government officials.

Earlier this year, the research arm of the Department of National Defence published an analysis of how accurate their predictions were as part of a broader look at the state of human analytics.

“With regard to the Arab Spring, the study found that the wave of protests and regime changes that swept the Middle East in 2011 had not been anticipated,” the report concluded.

However, the privy council was no different in that respect than most academics, reports, think-tanks, private sector analysts or even other governments, the report found.

That includes the analysts in the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand, which along with Canada make up the so-called Five Eyes network.

“There is no reason to believe that IAS did any worse than other Five Eyes and allied agencies in its analysis of the Arab Spring, and in a few areas it appears to have done somewhat better,” the report says.

Canadian analysts had a handle on the crises once they were underway, with the report suggesting there was good analysis of the “dogs that barked” — events in the Middle East that were getting press and policy attention.

But they need to look further afield, the report found.

“In general, there has been little attention to the ‘dogs that didn’t bark’ — that is, underlying medium-and long-term trends in countries without ongoing protests or civil violence,” the report said.

“Failure to do so may set the stage for future Arab Spring-type strategic surprises.”

The potential implications of the gaps in Canadian intelligence aren’t discussed in the report, but it recommends a rethink of how intelligence is gathered and shared.

It suggests that a reliance on briefings of just two or three sentences needs to be shelved in favour of more substantial examinations.

“For some time to come there may be a particular need in Middle East assessment to flag wildcards and low probability/high impact developments that could result in rapid and substantial shifts in otherwise apparently stable political trajectories,” the report said.

The 26-page-report had been approved for publication by Defence Research and Development Canada, and was briefly posted online in April by the lead researcher from McGill University.

…

Defence Research and Development Canada did not return repeated calls for comment.

Stephanie Levitz
Mon May 06 2013 18:35:00

Find this story at 6 May 2013

© Copyright 2013 Metroland Media Group Ltd.

Nestlé has nothing to fear from Swiss legal system; No investigation into the murder of Colombian trade unionist

10 May 2013 – Fourteen months after receiving a criminal complaint, the office of public prosecution in the Swiss Canton of Waadt decided on 1 May 2013 not to investigate whether Nestlé and its managers were liable for negligently contributing to the death of Colombian Nestlé trade unionist Luciano Romero. In March 2012 the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) together with Colombian partner organizations lodged a complaint with the prosecution in the German speaking Canton of Zug, who failed to initiate an investigation and instead handed the proceedings over to the Canton of Waadt. Rather than promptly beginning an investigation, the prosecution in Waadt made use of various formalities to delay the proceedings until they could declare that the matter had become time-barred. The victim’s widow, who had lodged her own criminal complaint and who is represented by Zurich lawyers Marcel Bosonnet and Florian Wick, will appeal the decision.

Overall, the proceedings demonstrate that the Swiss judiciary is unwilling to pursue substantiated allegations against corporations. Swiss law makes it effectively impossible for non-European victims of Swiss firms, in particular, to enforce their rights before the courts. The criminal complaint accused senior managers as well as the Nestlé firm itself of negligently contributing to the murder by paramilitaries of Luciano Romero on 10 September 2005 in Vallepudar, Colombia. Despite being informed about the threats made against Romero, they failed to use the resources available to them to prevent the murder. The direct perpetrators of the crime – those who actually carried out the murder – were convicted in Colombia in 2006 and 2007, a rare occurrence in the country with the world’s highest rate of murder and intimidation of trade unionists. At the close of these proceedings in 2007, the Colombian court called for a criminal investigation into the role of Nestlé subsidiary Cicolac as well as the parent company, yet no such investigation was carried out. Despite ample indications of criminal liability, no prosecutor in Switzerland or in Colombia has initiated an investigation. It was left to Colombian lawyers and trade unionists together with the ECCHR to investigate the circumstances of the case and work on behalf of the family of Luciano Romero, work which evidently came too late.

ECCHR General Secretary had the following comment on the prosecution’s decision:

“Even our lowest expectations of the Swiss judiciary have been let down in the Nestlé case. But regardless of how this case proceeds, the problem is clear: Swiss companies have a liability – including a legal liability – for human rights violations committed outside Europe. If current Swiss law prevents the victims of such crimes from enforcing their rights then it – along with the laws of other European countries – must be reformed.”

For further information please contact:

ECCHR, Wolfgang Kaleck, info@ecchr.eu, Tel: ++49 (030) 400 485 90

European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights e.V. (ECCHR)

Zossener Str. 55-58, Aufgang D

D-10961 BERLIN

Phone: + 49 (0)30 – 40 04 85 90

Fax: + 49 (0)30 – 40 04 85 92

E-Mail: info@ECCHR.eu

Nestle under fire over Colombian murder

A Nestle employee and union member in Colombia was murdered by paramilitary forces seven years ago. Human rights organizations say Nestle shares the blame, but investigations have stalled for years.

Over three months ago, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin (ECCHR) and Sinaltrainal, the Colombian trade union for the food industry, teamed up to press charges against food giant Nestle with the public prosecutor in the Swiss canton of Zug.

The groups accused Nestle of responsibility for the murder of Luciano Romero in 2005, due to neglect of safety precautions. However, investigation into the case has yet to begin.

It looks like the complaint is a hot one for the Swiss prosecution to handle. The case would set a new precedent. It would be the first time that a Swiss business had been held legally responsible for a breach of law abroad.

Nestle, which is the biggest food company and one of the most multinational companies in the world, is also the biggest taxpayer in Switzerland. The company has 328,000 employees in more than 150 countries, with revenue last year of 70 billion euros ($87.6 billion) and a net profit of eight billion euros.

Union members threatened
Columbians protest ties between president and paramilitaries

Nestle has been active in Colombia since 1944, where it has grown to be one of the biggest purchasers of milk. The town of Valledupar is home to the Cicolac factory, a subsidiary which buys up most of the milk in the region and is an important economic force.

In the 1990s, Romero was one of 191 employees at Cicolac. Nestle planned a joint venture with another company, and Romero became an active opponent of the move.

“Romero became one of the most important union activists in the region,” said legal expert Claudia Müller-Hoff, who is working on the case for the ECCHR. “Because of his active involvement, local paramilitaries often threatened to kill him.”

Romero was unable to stop Nestle’s plans.

“During the process of restructuring, all employees were let go and replaced by new staff with worse contracts,” said Michel Egger of Alliance Sud, one of the biggest development aid organizations in Switzerland.

Tortured to death
Müller-Hoff says Nestle did not do enough to protect its employee

In the face of serious threats, Romero temporarily went into exile in Spain through an organized protection program. Once that expired, he returned to Colombia in 2005 and filed a complaint against the termination of his contract.

“At the same time, he prepared for a public witness hearing in Switzerland regarding working conditions at Nestle’s Colombian subsidiary,” Müller-Hoff said.

But he was never able to testify. Shortly before the hearing, Romero was abducted by members of a paramilitary death squad and tortured to death.

The paramilitaries were caught and sentenced by a Colombian court. In his verdict, the judge concluded it was impossible that the group acted on its own.

The judge ordered the state prosecutor to “investigate leading managers of Nestle-Cicolac to clarify their likely involvement and/or planning of the murder of union leader Luciano Enrique Romero Molina.”

The Colombian prosecution has drawn out the investigation up to today.

Dangerous terrain for unions

Colombiais “one of the most dangerous countries for union activities,” the International Trade Union Confederation said in a 2010 report. Since 2000, 60 percent of all murders of union members have happened there. Most remain unsolved to this day. More than 20 members of Sinatrainal have been murdered since 1986. Thirteen of them had, like Romero, worked for Nestle.

After Romero’s murder, Alliance Sud initiated a process of dialogue with Nestle to discuss the conflicts in Valledupar, sending people to Colombia to speak with locals involved in the case. The results left much to be desired.

“The corporate culture is very technocratic and profit-oriented,” Egger said. “That’s something we strongly criticized.”

In its final report, Alliance Sud said Nestle is lacking in conflict sensitivity, including when it comes to dealing with past events that left the union traumatized.

No comment from Nestle

In the eyes of ECCHR, Nestle and its managers share considerable responsibility for Romero’s death.

“After all, despite being well-informed about continuing threats against the Cicolac employee’s life, they failed to do anything to protect him,” Mueller-Hoff said.
Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe: the company won’t talk

So far, Nestle has rejected all allegations of responsibility and fails to answer requests for an interview. Allegations about the company’s operations up to 2005 evidently do not jibe with positions Nestle has taken since then.

An example is Nestle’s 2008 sustainability report, which claims that every employee should have the opportunity “to develop his potential in a safe and fair work environment where he is listened to, respected and appreciated.” The report describes employee safety as “non-negotiable.”

A company brochure from 2006 states, “especially in a war-torn country like Colombia, after consultations with both authorities and the unions, we have undertaken great efforts to protect our union leaders, workers and managers.”

Delays after unclear jurisdiction

The complaint against Nestle is also backed by the German-based Catholic relief agency Misereor.

…

Date 27.08.2012
Author Andreas Zumach / ag, srs
Editor Michael Lawton

Find this story at 27 August 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

MI5 allegedly applies for secret court session after informant sues for being denied protection

Former IRA mole accuses Home Office of cover-up and claims he was denied medical treatment after being shot by IRA hit team

MI5 has allegedly applied for a controversial secret court hearing after being sued by a former IRA mole who claims he has been denied medical treatment after being shot in a reprisal attack.

Martin McGartland, originally from west Belfast, has been credited with saving the lives of 50 police officers and soldiers in Northern Ireland as a spy within the IRA providing intelligence to the special branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

He is suing MI5 and the Home Office for failing to support him after he was attacked and repeatedly shot by an IRA hit team who tracked him to a safe house in North Tyneside in 1999.

Mr McGartland has told The Independent that solicitors acting for the Home Office, the government department responsible for the Security Service, have applied to have the matter dealt with by a Closed Material Procedure (CMP) hearing.

At CMPs, due to come into force shortly with the introduction of the Justice and Security Act 2013, claimants must be represented before the judge by special advocates who have been cleared for security. Such a hearing would mean that neither Mr McGartland or his lawyers were able to attend.

Labour, which says CMPs deviate from the “tradition of open and fair justice”, has called for the use of such closed proceedings to be limited unless a judge agrees a fair verdict cannot be reached by any other means.

The Law Society president, Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, has also raised objections to CMPs on the grounds that they undermine the essential principle of justice that all parties are entitled to see and challenge all the evidence placed before the court.

CMPs are seen by the Government as a way of bringing before a judge information which, for security reasons, cannot be revealed in open court.

Mr McGartland said that funding for treatment he was receiving for the post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered after the assassination attempt had been stopped. He claimed the secret hearing was designed to cover up the Home Office’s failure to meet its duty of care, rather than to protect genuine state secrets.

“This is being done despite my legal case against them being related to their removing funding for my medical treatment, which they were funding after my 1999 shooting,” he told The Independent. “They removed the medical funding even after they were supplied two medical reports stating that I required a further three to five years of treatment. That resulted in a serious deterioration in my condition and it also led to my now requiring round-the-clock care, help and support. In other words MI5 are going to use CMP solely to cover up their own embarrassment and wrongdoing and not, as the Government has been claiming, in cases that relate to ‘National Security’.”

…

Ian Burrell
Monday, 6 May 2013

Find this story at 6 May 2013

© independent.co.uk

A Bet on Peace for War-Torn Somalia

Michael Stock is pursuing an extreme version of that basic investor’s principle: Get in early. He’s just finished building a resort on the coast of war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia. WSJ’s Christopher S. Stewart reports. (Photo: Dominic Nahr/WSJ)

MOGADISHU, Somalia—Michael Stock sees things that others don’t. “Imagine this,” he says one recent afternoon, standing on the sunny second-floor deck of his new oceanside hotel in Somalia’s war-battered capital. “There are banana trees where there’s desert now, and there’s this view.”

The banana trees haven’t grown in yet, but International Campus, as he calls the complex, is the closest thing to a Ritz for many miles. A fortified compound sprawled across 11 acres of rocky white beach, it offers 212 rooms including $500-a-night villas, several dining rooms, coffee and snack shops, and a curving slate-colored pool where sun-seekers can loll away Somali afternoons.

“It’s going to be ridiculous!” Mr. Stock said, just weeks before residents began arriving for April’s opening.

A few hours later, the jittery sound of gunfire split the warm February air not far from his new hotel—a reminder that the country is still muddling through a decades-old conflict and that there are still bullets flying, bombs detonating.
Bananas in the Desert

Most Western countries have avoided Somalia, leaving a void to be filled by contractors like Michael Stock’s Bancroft Global Development. He envisions ‘banana trees where there is desert.’

Dominic Nahr/Magnum Photos for The Wall Street Journal

Here, Mr. Stock, left, outside Mogadishu, Somalia’s war-battered capital, with an employee, Richard Rouget.

Mr. Stock isn’t just anyone gambling on a far-fetched idea in a conflict zone. In an unusual twist of the war business, the 36-year-old American is deeply involved in the conflict itself. In addition to being a real estate developer, his company also helps train Somalis in modern military techniques.

His security company, Bancroft Global Development, has supported African troops since 2008 as they fought al-Shabaab, the Somali Islamic group tied to al Qaeda, which the U.S. views as a terrorist threat. The United Nations and the African Union, with U.S. State Department money, pay Bancroft to support soldiers in everything from counterinsurgency tactics to bomb disposal, sniper training, road building and, as Mr. Stock puts it, “bandaging shot-off thumbs.”

Security companies have, of course, been rushing into war zones forever, sometimes controversially. A recent congressional study on wartime contracting estimated that the U.S. spent some $206 billion on outside contracts and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2011.

Most Western countries have stayed out of Somalia. Contractors like Bancroft partly fill that void. The U.S., which pulled its troops after American soldiers died in the 1993 Black Hawk Down tragedy, has spent more than $650 million since 2006 on supporting the African Union Mission in Somalia, known as Amisom, and its more than 17,000 soldiers.

Unlike many security contractors, Mr. Stock’s company, based in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit not primarily concerned with making money on military support services. In fact, it actually sustains stretches of multimillion-dollar losses, Mr. Stock says. Meanwhile its sister company, Bancroft Global Investment, chases profits by pouring money into war-zone real estate.

Dominic Nahr/Magnum Photos for The Wall Street Journal

Michael Stock develops real estate in Somalia and Afghanistan.

Mr. Stock’s gamble: The security outfit will help guide the country toward peace, turning his investments into big money. “It’s like getting in at the bottom of the stock market,” says Mr. Stock. His unusual war operation is making him into a kind of ultimate gentrifier, a mini mogul of Mogadishu, perhaps.

His first properties went up in Afghanistan. But Somalia represents his latest push. Along with the new place, Mr. Stock says he has invested more than $25 million in various for-profit ventures, including a “trailer park” hotel built out of shipping containers at the airport, a compound of prefabricated buildings fronting the city’s old port and a cement factory.

Bancroft is the only contractor supplying military training to Amisom soldiers in the country. Mr. Stock estimates that his team of 100 or so people in Somalia works with roughly a third of the 17,000 Amisom forces at any given time.

After more than two decades of violence in Somalia, there are glimmers of hope. African troops, with Bancroft’s support, have pushed the insurgents to more rural areas. In January, the U.S. recognized the Somali government for the first time since 1991 and last month a U.S. Agency for International Development official urged at a news conference, “Get in on the ground floor.”

A new president leads Somalia. Expats are returning to rebuild and there are even people on the beaches. “We swim here all the time,” said a Russian helicopter operator, as a friend floated on an inner tube along a bullet-littered stretch of ocean near the airport. “The water’s good!”

With dwindling war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, other American contractors are moving in, too. A Virginia company, Atlantean, is setting up an airport hotel in the south. Among its board members, according to its website, is former Maj. Gen. William Garrison, who led the mission associated with Black Hawk Down. In the movie version, he was played by Sam Shepard. Maj. Gen. Garrison couldn’t be reached for comment.

‘Will we get shot at the first day?’ a colleague asked as they flew into Somalia. ‘Probably,’ Mr. Stock laughed.

“There are infinite possibilities in a country that has to be literally built from the ground up,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. These possibilities, however, also include the worst: a return to a hell-ripped Somalia. That reality loomed only weeks ago when militants bombed the capital’s main courthouse, killing more than two dozen people.

Contracting out security has its perils. An investigation by the U.N.’s Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea last summer found companies “operating in an arguably paramilitary fashion.” The investigation found a “growing number” of foreign private security companies working in Somalia with diplomatic missions, international companies and individuals.

According to one person familiar with the confidential part of the report and unaffiliated with Bancroft, the report found that Bancroft was “very transparent about the way they operated,” whereas some other companies were “more deceptive.”

Mr. Stock has attracted some big-name attention. In November, he flew in Warren Buffett’s son Howard to look at potential agricultural projects—part of Mr. Stock’s interest in creating a farming operation to service his hotels, among other things.

“He was the only one who would bring me into the country,” said Mr. Buffett, who has been involved in philanthropy around the Horn of Africa.

Almost monthly, Mr. Stock commutes here from Washington, D.C. This time his “fast plane,” a 10-seat jet, was in the shop so he borrowed a five-seater Cessna in Kenya from a friend.

Accompanying him was a new Bancroft recruit. He had been a part of an Army Delta Force squad that chased al Qaeda in Iraq.

“Will we get shot at the first day?” the former soldier asked at one point.

“Probably,” Mr. Stock said, laughing. “I promised you some spice!”

Bancroft says it employs about 200 men around the world. About half work in Somalia. Some have roots in elite military forces including the Navy SEALs, French Foreign Legion and British Special Air Service, the employees say. “It’s like an extreme sport,” says one, Richard Rouget, a South African resident and former French soldier.

The idea for the business came during a summer job in 1998 with the U.S. embassy in Morocco, where Mr. Stock visited a refugee camp in the Sahara ringed by land mines. “Why hasn’t someone shown them how to remove the mines?” he recalls thinking.

A year later, after graduating from Princeton, he started a mine-removal company. “Like a dot-com,” is how Mr. Stock describes the early days. He had no full-time staffers and spent months meeting people in the field. There was only sporadic mine-removal work, for little money, in some of the world’s most unstable places: Mali, Chad, and Iraq.

His family’s wealth helped. His great-grandfather, Lewis Strauss, made tens of millions as partner at the investment firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In time, Mr. Stock borrowed some $8 million from different banks and invested about $2 million of his own money.

As the U.S. military went after the Taliban in 2002, Mr. Stock’s company landed in Afghanistan and offered services through a local partner, Mine Pro. He invested in the company and built a group to train bomb-detecting dogs and do anything from plumbing to car repair.

But his company operated at a loss, he says. It didn’t make money for about two years, the time it took to get his local Afghan partner up to speed and wait for it to win contracts.

A more profit-minded security contractor might have called it quits. Mr. Stock, however, had another idea. “My thinking was that you could lose money on security to bet on development,” he says.

Afghanistan certainly lacked decent, secure accommodation. Initially he built an eight-bedroom compound in Kabul and another, bigger residence in Herat, the country’s third-largest city. He started a car rental service, too.

Eventually, security began paying off, Mr. Stock says. He started receiving a share of his partner company’s contracts, with that revenue peaking at about $1.8 million in 2005.

But the bigger money was in his properties. Today, the original two have been expanded into protected city blocks of multiple buildings. They house tenants associated with the World Bank and the International Development Law Organization, among others.

Over the past eight years, the real estate and other commercial services like car rental in Afghanistan have brought in about $32 million in net revenue, according to financial documents provided by Bancroft. Much of that money is now being invested in Somalia.

“It was like Stalingrad in 1942,” Mr. Stock says of the day in late 2007 when he flew into Mogadishu. The city was a smoky battlefield of bomb explosions and firefights between the Shabaab and the African troops, who had arrived earlier in the year.

But that was the point, he says. “We wanted get in at the worst time, when it’s really bad.”

The Shabaab, Arabic for “The Youth,” had taken over much of the capital. They built power over years, though the bloodshed had begun long before, in 1991, when armed clans forced out Somalia’s military-run government.

His team set up tents at the airport and struck a deal with the African troops, he says. “We said we’ll help you, if you keep us from getting killed.”

Some worry that contractors like Bancroft face little scrutiny—an issue of “accountability,” as one Western intelligence analyst put it. “Who works for them?” he said. “What are they doing?”

“The pro side,” he said, “is that they were here when no one else would come.”

A person familiar with the U.S. State Department’s policy on Somalia said that the company had helped create an “effective fighting force.” A U.N. official, meanwhile, noted that Bancroft’s training in roadside bombs had reduced deaths among African soldiers.

Mr. Stock winces at the terms “mercenary” and “hired guns,” which he considers inaccurate. He calls his men “mentors” who train people rather than fight.

Even though they don’t carry weapons, working closely with soldiers, medics and others means that they are in the line of fire. “If the African forces are overrun, we’re all dead,” he says.

Dressed in body armor and a helmet one morning, Mr. Stock says he had never considered joining the military himself. “I don’t take orders well,” he joked, riding along in a convoy of armored carriers in downtown Mogadishu, gunners manning the roof hatches. It was part of a sweep Burundi and Somali soldiers for insurgents.

The streets alternated between bombed-out buildings and stretches of fresh paint. Soon, a sniper was spotted. Later, a gunfight broke out. Then, an exploded roadside bomb brought the convoy to a halt. By the end, six suspected militants were detained and Bancroft took the bomb for analysis.

“Danger comes and goes quickly here,” says Mr. Stock. “It’s like lightning. If it hits, it hits.”

It was nearly three years of free security training in Somalia, and $6 million out of pocket, according to financial filings, before he landed his first contract with the U.N. Various U.N. agencies have paid the company some $15 million since then and the African Union, with the U.S. State Department money, will have paid Bancroft a total of about $25 million by the end of the year.

All along, though, he expanded into real estate. In 2011, he created the for-profit side of the company, Bancroft Global Investment. That year, he sold an 18% stake, just under $1 million, in the Somali properties to a Washington, D.C., developer, Michael Darby.

“When you hear Somalia, you think of the most dangerous place on earth,” says Mr. Darby. “But I’m prone to take more risks than others.”

Making real-estate deals in Somalia wasn’t easy, Mr. Stock says. It took “dozens” of meetings with government officials, clan leaders and neighbors of the properties. “You have to spend a lot of time figuring out who is who,” he says. There is no formal contract for the land, but rather “consensus building,” he says, that results in a verbal go-ahead from the collective parties.

Mr. Stock made a similar land deal, a public-private partnership with the Somali government for some beach property near the port, but didn’t work out as well.

…

A version of this article appeared April 27, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Bet on Peace for War-Torn Somalia.

Updated April 26, 2013, 10:37 p.m. ET

By CHRISTOPHER S. STEWART

Write to Christopher S. Stewart at christopher.stewart@wsj.com

Find this story at 26 April 2013

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Private Army Formed to Fight Somali Pirates Leaves Troubled Legacy

WASHINGTON — It seemed like a simple idea: In the chaos that is Somalia, create a sophisticated, highly trained fighting force that could finally defeat the pirates terrorizing the shipping lanes off the Somali coast.

But the creation of the Puntland Maritime Police Force was anything but simple. It involved dozens of South African mercenaries and the shadowy security firm that employed them, millions of dollars in secret payments by the United Arab Emirates, a former clandestine officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, and Erik Prince, the billionaire former head of Blackwater Worldwide who was residing at the time in the emirates.

And its fate makes the story of the pirate hunters for hire a case study in the inherent dangers in the outsourced wars in Somalia, where the United States and other countries have relied on proxy forces and armed private contractors to battle pirates and, increasingly, Islamic militants.

That strategy has had some success, including a recent offensive by Kenyan and African Union troops to push the militant group Al Shabab from its stronghold in the port city of Kismayu.

But with the antipiracy army now abandoned by its sponsors, the hundreds of half-trained and well-armed members of the Puntland Maritime Police Force have been left to fend for themselves at a desert camp carved out of the sand, perhaps to join up with the pirates or Qaeda-linked militants or to sell themselves to the highest bidder in Somalia’s clan wars — yet another dangerous element in the Somali mix.

A United Nations investigative group described the effort by a company based in Dubai called Sterling Corporate Services to create the force as a “brazen, large-scale and protracted violation” of the arms embargo in place on Somalia, and has tried to document a number of grisly cases in which Somali trainees were beaten and even killed. In one case in October 2010, according to the United Nations group, a trainee was hogtied with his arms and feet bound behind his back and beaten. The group said the trainee had died from his injuries, an accusation disputed by the company.

Sterling has portrayed its operation as a bold private-sector attempt to battle the scourge of piracy where governments were failing. Lafras Luitingh, a senior manager for the project, described the October 2010 occurrence as a case of “Somali-on-Somali violence” that was not indicative of the overall training program. He said that the trainee had recovered from his injuries, and that “the allegations reflect not the professional training that occurred but the fact that professional training was needed,” he said.

A lawyer for the company, Stephen Heifetz, wrote an official response to the United Nations report, calling it “a collection of unsubstantiated and often false innuendo assembled by a group with extreme views regarding participants in Somali politics.”

Sterling officials have pointed out that in March, a United Nations counterpiracy organization — a separate entity from the investigative group that criticized Sterling — praised the semiautonomous Somali region of Puntland for creating the program. Moreover, the company argues, Somalia already is a playground for clandestine operations, with the C.I.A. now in the midst of an extensive effort to arm and equip Somali spies. Why, they ask, is Sterling Corporate Services singled out for criticism?

Concerned about the impact of piracy on commercial shipping in the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates has sought to take the lead in battling Somali pirates, both overtly and in secret by bankrolling operations like Sterling’s.

American officials have said publicly that they never endorsed the creation of the private army, but it is unclear if Sterling had tacit support from parts of the United States government. For instance, the investigative group reported in July that the counterpiracy force shared some of the same facilities as the Puntland Intelligence Service, a spy organization answering to Puntland’s president, Abdirahman Farole, that has been trained by C.I.A. officers and contractors for more than a decade.

With the South African trainers gone, the African Union has turned to a different security contractor, Bancroft Global Development, based in Washington, to assess whether the pirate hunters in Puntland can be assimilated into the stew of other security forces in Somalia sanctioned both by the United States and the African Union. Among those groups are a 10,000-man Somali national army and troops of Somalia’s National Security Agency, based in Mogadishu, which is closely allied with the C.I.A.

Michael Stock, Bancroft’s president, said a team of his that recently visited the camp where the Puntland force is based witnessed something out of the Wild West: nearly 500 soldiers who had gone weeks without pay wandering the main compound and two other small camps, an armory of weapons amassed over two years at their disposal.

Although the force is far from the 1,000-man elite unit with helicopters and airplanes described in the United Nations report, Mr. Stock and independent analysts said the Puntland soldiers still posed a potential threat to the region if left unchecked.

“Sterling is leaving behind an unpaid but well-armed security force in Puntland,” said Andre Le Sage, a senior research fellow who specializes in Africa at the National Defense University in Washington. “It’s important to find a way to make them part of a regular force or to disarm them and take control of them. If that’s not done, it could make things worse.”

Mr. Stock, whose company trains soldiers from Uganda and Burundi for counterinsurgency missions in Somalia under the African Union banner, said Bancroft would not take over Sterling’s counterpiracy mission.

The Sterling operation was shrouded in a degree of secrecy from the time Mr. Luitingh and a small group of South Africans traveling in a private plane first touched down in Bosasso, Puntland’s capital, in 2010. The men worked for Saracen International, a South African private military firm hired by the emirates and composed of several former members of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, the feared paramilitary squad during the apartheid era.

The following year, after The New York Times wrote about the operation, Saracen hired a prominent Washington law firm to advocate for the mission at the State Department and the Pentagon, and a rebranding campaign began. A new company, Sterling Corporate Services, was created in Dubai to oversee the training in Puntland. It was an attempt to put distance between the Somalia operations and Saracen’s apartheid-era past, but some of the officers of the two companies were the same.

Two well-connected Americans were also involved in the project. Michael Shanklin, a former C.I.A. station chief in Mogadishu, was hired to tap a network of contacts both in Washington and East Africa to build support for the counterpiracy force. More significant was the role of Mr. Prince, who had become an informal adviser to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

At the time, Mr. Prince was also involved in a project to train Colombian mercenaries at a desert camp in the emirates to carry out missions at the behest of the Emirati government.

But the emirates’ refusal to publicly acknowledge their role in the operation, or to make a formal case to the United Nations Security Council to receive permission to build the army under the terms of the Somalia arms embargo, drew the ire of United Nations arms monitors, who repeatedly pressed the emirates to shut down the mission.

Lawyers for Sterling gave extensive briefings on the program to the State Department, the Pentagon and various United Nations agencies dealing with piracy.

Yousef Al Otaiba, the emirates’ ambassador to Washington, declined to comment for this article.

American officials said they had urged Sterling’s lawyers, from the firm of Steptoe & Johnson, to have the operation approved by the Security Council. Mr. Heifetz, the company’s lawyer, said Puntland and other Somali authorities did receive permission to build the police force. A spokeswoman for the State Department said the United States government never approved Sterling’s activities.

“We share the monitoring group’s concerns about the lack of transparency regarding the Saracen and Sterling Corporate Services’ train-and-equip program for the Puntland Maritime Police Force, as well as the abuses alleged to have occurred during the training,” said Hilary Renner, a State Department spokeswoman, referring to the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, the investigative arm.

…

October 4, 2012
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT

Find this story at 4 October 2012

© 2012 The New York Times Company

Private Security Companies in Somalia are in violation of the arms embargo – UN

The United Nations is concerned that member states are failing to uphold the arms embargo on Somalia by allowing private security companies (PSCs) to operate in the country. South Africa, Uganda, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates were singled out in a UN report.

In its Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, the United Nations said that the provision of security assistance, in the absence of UN authorisation, “constitutes a violation of the general and complete arms embargo on Somalia.” It added that the Monitoring Group was concerned that member states “routinely fail to fulfil their obligations” which require them to prevent “the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer of weapons and military equipment and the direct or indirect supply of technical assistance or training, financial or other assistance” to Somalia.

The report highlights several of the numerous security companies operating in Somalia, notably Sterling Corporate Services/Saracen International Lebanon. In late 2011, the assets, personnel and operations of Saracen International Lebanon were transferred to Sterling Corporate Services (SCS), reportedly a Dubai registered company, which resumed large-scale military training, technical assistance and support to the Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF).

“Established in May 2010, with the involvement of Erik Dean Prince, the American founder of Blackwater U.S.A., this externally-financed assistance programme has remained the most brazen violation of the arms embargo by a PSC,” the report said. “In 2011, Saracen’s training camp near Bosaaso became the best-equipped military facility in Somalia after AMISOM’s bases in Mogadishu. The SCS base today includes a modern operational command centre, control tower, airstrip, helicopter deck and about 70 tents, which can host up to 1,500 trainees.”

“Thanks to this massive initiative, the Puntland Maritime Police Force is now a well-equipped elite force, over 1,000 strong, with air assets used to carry out ground attacks, that operates beyond the rule of law and reports directly to the President of Puntland. This private army disingenuously labeled a ‘counter-piracy’ force, has been financed by zakat [Muslim charity] contributions mainly from high-ranking officials from the United Arab Emirates, including Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The UAE government, however, has officially denied any involvement in the project,” the UN reports.

The Monitoring Group stated that SCS was characterised by a lack of transparency, accountability or regard for international law and this was unlikely to change without intervention from its state sponsor.

Another private security company mentioned in the report was the South African-based Pathfinder, which in August 2011 was contracted by Africa Oil, via its local subsidiaries, to provide security advice and risk analysis. Pathfinder personnel on the ground liaise with local authorities in charge of security and oversee the Exploration Security Unit (ESU), a special branch of the Puntland security forces established to protect oil exploration and exploitation.

The UN report noted that Pathfinder’s transparency and its efforts to comply with the sanctions regime arguably represent ‘best practices’ for private security companies in Somalia. “However, its ‘temporary issue’ of military equipment and the direct funding of the ESU by Africa Oil (via its subsidiary, Canmex) constitute violations of Security Council resolution 733 (1992).”

Also singled out in the report was the Washington DC-based charity Bancroft Global Development, operating in Somalia under the auspices of AMISOM. The report said it is currently the only private company providing assistance to Somali security sector institutions that complies with UN resolutions.

Other security providers form part of a growing network of private contractors that provide security details for individuals, foreign companies, diplomatic missions, international non-governmental organisations and international organizations in Somalia. They supervise local militias, provide armed escorts and static guards, often importing armoured vehicles, personal protective equipment (PPE) and operating in an arguably paramilitary fashion, according to the United Nations report.

Apart from organisations based in Somalia, private security companies are also used to provide protection to diplomats, international NGO workers, journalists, foreign contractors and businessmen visiting Mogadishu. Since November 2011, even the United Nations has also engaged a private local militia in Mogadishu to protect the movements of its staff.

…

Written by defenceWeb
Wednesday, 08 August 2012 14:28

Find this story at 8 August 2012

© defenceweb

MI6 ‘ghost money’ sent to Hamid Karzai amid massive Afghan corruption

Following reports the CIA gave millions of dollars to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, MI6 has said it sent “ghost money” to the country’s government. The donations have sparked claims the funds fuel corruption and are used to appease Afghan warlords.

UK Intelligence said the “bundles” of cash were channeled into special projects aimed at rebuilding the troubled nation, reported UK newspaper the Telegraph. However, Karzai previously stated the handouts from the CIA are an “easy source of petty cash.”

Karzai addressed claims of corruption over the weekend, categorically denying the handouts went to militant leaders and maintaining “the major part of this money was spent on government employees such as our guards.”

Money from the UK government was just a small portion of the multi-million dollar payouts sent by the CIA since 2001.

UK MPs have voiced their concern over the lack of regulation of funds that are channeled into the war-torn nation.

“Every effort towards a political fix in Afghanistan must be made and those efforts welcomed but whether or not the money is well spent is a matter that must also be considered,” Conservative MP and member of the Defense Select Committee told the Daily Telegraph. He added there “is plenty of evidence that Karzai and his clique do not have an interest in a peace settlement but instead have an interest in continuing the conflict.”

Furthermore, Karzai said some of the funds had gone towards bribing the country’s political elite, something that he described as “nothing unusual.”

The reports have given rise to accusations that funds have lined the pockets of Afghanistan’s warlords, given that many are believed to number among the country’s upper political classes.

AFP Photo / Aref Karimi

“It has been paid to individuals, not movements…we give receipts for all these expenditures to the US government,” Karzai said to press on Saturday. He has urged the CIA to continue the monetary aid that “has helped us a lot, it has solved lots of our problems.”

Both the CIA and US State Department have refrained from commenting on the reports.

The Afghan government has hitherto not specified the exact quantity of cash it receives from the CIA and MI6 every month because they are not permitted to disclose the figure. However, officials speaking to the New York Times said that the donations from the CIA amounted to tens of millions of dollars since they began following alliance force intervention in the country a decade ago.

Karzai received a barrage of criticism after reports of the foreign donations emerged, many fellow politicians regarding it as a betrayal to Afghanistan.

…

Published time: May 06, 2013 08:14
Edited time: May 06, 2013 20:21

Find this story at 6 May 2013

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

MI6 ‘handing bundles of cash to Hamid Karzai’

British intelligence is handing “bundles” of cash over to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai for special peace projects despite warnings that handouts are promoting corruption at the heart of his regime.

MI6 officials have acknowledged that the organisation has made direct cash payments to their Afghan counterparts periodically over the 12 years Britain has been at war in Afghanistan.

Mr Karzai declared handouts from the CIA and MI6 are an “easy source of petty cash” for his government as it attempts to seal alliances with powerful regional warlords and secure defections from the Taliban.

The CIA support is believed to have amounted to tens of millions of dollars since 2001 while Britain has channelled a smaller fraction of that amount into “special projects” undertaken by Karzai’s officials.

MPs expressed concern that by simply handing over so-called “ghost money” to President Karzai and his lieutenants, British spies could not be sure that the money would not be lost to corruption.

Adam Holloway, a Conservative MP and member of the Defence Select Committee, warned that they could not be trusted even if the payments could be justified on the grounds that Taliban and other insurgents must be rewarded if they give up the fight against Nato troops.
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Soldiers’ deaths ‘a hammer blow’ 02 May 2013

“Every effort towards a political fix in Afghanistan must be made and those efforts welcomed but whether or not the money is well spent is a matter that must also be considered,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “There is plenty of evidence that Karzai and his clique do not have an interest in a peace settlement but instead have an interest in continuing the conflict.”

As Britain draws down troop numbers before withdrawing at the end of next year, there are fears that the pressure to seek a deal with insurgents to stop or reduce attacks will see increasing amounts of secret cash spent in Afghanistan.

“We also need to know more about how and where any cash from the UK is being used – how it is being monitored, and what benefits it is actually bringing to the people of Afghanistan,” said Angus Robertson, the SNP MP and party defence spokesman. “It is enormously important to ensure that Afghanistan is as peaceful as it can be in the build up to withdrawal. The terrible roadside attack on Royal Regiment of Scotland personnel last week shows the terrorist threat is still a very real one.”

The revelation that Mr Karzai’s office is awash with cash from his allies has caused a furore in the Afghan parliament where Mr Karzai’s government has faced a barrage of corruption allegations.

“Accepting such money is a big insult to Afghanistan. All those who accepted the cash payments have betrayed the nation,” said Hidayatullah Rihaee, an MP from Bamyan province.

But Mr Karzai said the cash flow was vital to his grip on power and said he had begged the CIA station chief to continue making payments despite US political criticism.

“This is nothing unusual,” he said. “I told him because of all these rumours in the media, please do not cut all this money, because we really need it.”

He admitted that the money had been passed on to potential allies.

…

By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent

5:39PM BST 05 May 2013

Find this story at 5 May 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

Decades of distrust restrain cooperation between FBI and Russia’s FSB

Shortly after FBI agent Jim Treacy arrived in Moscow in early 2007 as the new legal attache at the U.S. Embassy, he turned around outside a Metro station and saw a man photographing him. Treacy had no doubt his shadow was an agent with the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, and that he wanted to be seen — the officer, after all, was standing 15 feet away, clicking ostentatiously with a long-range lens.

“I just assumed it was the FSB welcoming me back to Moscow,” said Treacy, who did a tour in the Russian capital in the late 1990s.

For much of the past decade, cooperation between the FSB and the FBI has been guarded and pragmatic at best. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, and the identification of ethnic Chechen suspects with potential ties to an Islamist insurgency in the Russian Caucasus, the White House and the Kremlin have been talking up greater cooperation on counterterrorism.

“This tragedy should motivate us to work closer together,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a news conference late last month. “If we combine our efforts, we will not suffer blows like that.”

President Obama echoed those remarks, and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III visited Moscow this week for what were described as productive meetings. FBI agents have been working closely with the FSB to determine whether suspected Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police four days after the blasts, received any training when he visited Dagestan for six months in 2012. Dagestan, which borders fellow Russian republic Chechnya, has been plagued by a bloody Islamist insurgency.

Russia has provided more information since the April 15 bombing, including details about intercepted telephone conversations involving Tsarnaev’s mother that were the basis of Moscow’s initial concern about his possible extremist leanings. But U.S. counterterrorism agencies have not seen evidence to substantiate reports in Russia that Tsarnaev met with militants in Dagestan.

Deep mutual suspicion, which stretches back to the Cold War and is periodically inflamed by cases such as the sleeper agents busted by the FBI in 2010, means there are significant limits to U.S.-Russian security cooperation, according to former and current law enforcement officials and scholars of the countries’ relationship. Putin once named the United States as the “main opponent,” and the United States and Europe are the targets of aggressive high-tech and industrial espionage by Russia, according to intelligence officials.

“There is a broad culture of mistrust that is going to be very hard to change,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “That’s a huge obstacle to moving forward on counterterrorism. It’s the same sets of people who have to cooperate.”

Hill said that “for real counterterrorism cooperation, as you have with the Brits or the Europeans, you have to be able to share operational information.”

Beyond slivers of intelligence in cases with some mutual interest, neither side appears prepared to risk its secrets. That has limited potential cooperation ahead of Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Hill said.

For their part, Russians are no more sanguine about the true state of the bilateral security relationship.

“The key word is trust,” Nikolai Kovalyov, the former director of the FSB, said in a telephone interview. “Trust between people, trust between our politicians and trust between security services. Because we have this mistrust, ordinary Americans now suffer, and some of them had to sacrifice their lives.”

The limit on any broad collaboration does not mean that the agencies cannot work together productively on specific cases — as they appear to be doing on the Boston bombing. “It’s gotten better,” said a U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. Before the bombing, the official added, “It was obviously zero.”

During Treacy’s tenure in Moscow, each side sent the other about 800 requests annually for information or assistance on financial crimes, cyberattacks and organized crime, as well as terrorism.

“Cooperation certainly still existed, because the Russians are nothing if not pragmatic,” said Treacy, who retired in 2009 after 24 years with the FBI. “They look at their relations with the U.S. agencies as a resource that they can mine, and they certainly attempt to do that — at an arm’s length.”

The Russians formed a similar impression of American willingness to take without giving much in return after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when Russia cooperated with U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. But Putin believed that he was repaid for his assistance with NATO’s eastward expansion and U.S. meddling in post-Soviet republics. And the Kremlin views U.S. information sharing as equally self-interested.

…

Michael Birnbaum and Anne Gearan in Moscow and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

By Peter Finn, Published: May 8

Find this story at 8 May 2013

© The Washington Post Company

Hearing on bombings exposes failures in intelligence sharing

The House Committee on Homeland Security’s hearing on the Boston Marathon bombings on Thursday amounted to more than the usual political posturing: It exposed clear deficiencies in communications among intelligence- and law-enforcement agencies. In their testimony, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis and Massachusetts undersecretary for homeland security Kurt Schwartz offered significant insights into how federal and local authorities might address the deficiencies that apparently allowed Tamerlan Tsarnaev to plan and execute the attack despite concerns by the FBI and Russian intelligence agencies about his growing radicalism.

At the hearing, Davis said that the Boston police had no knowledge of those reports. A few hours later, the FBI issued a statement saying that the 2011 assessment of Tsarnaev was in a database that was available to a Boston-area terrorism task force — one that includes Boston police. Just seeing the assessment might not have stopped the attack, as Davis pointed out. But whatever the cause of the breakdown, the failure to share the information — and the continued finger-pointing between agencies yesterday — shows the need to improve coordination.

The hearing also provided another chance to reflect on the instances when Tamerlan Tsarnaev expressed radical views, or indicated a tendency toward violence. No church, mosque, school, or community group bears specific responsibility for identifying potential terrorists, but local and state officials should provide clear channels for people within those institutions to voice concerns. The “see something, say something” message doesn’t seem to have taken root. Even when clear photos of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were released, no one from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where Dzhokhar was a student, reported any similarities.

State and local governments need to do more to create a culture, backed by structures and mechanisms, in which everyday citizens understand that they are part of the effort to guard against terrorism. The need for authorities to enlist the help of institutions such as mosques and churches and schools, rather than infiltrate them, was a key message of the hearing.

…

May 10, 2013

Find this story at 10 May 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Why FBI and CIA didn’t connect the dots

Editor’s note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive.”

It’s an old song by now, one we heard after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and after the Underwear Bomber’s failed attack in 2009. The problem is that connecting the dots is a bad metaphor, and focusing on it makes us more likely to implement useless reforms.

Connecting the dots in a coloring book is easy and fun. They’re right there on the page, and they’re all numbered. All you have to do is move your pencil from one dot to the next, and when you’re done, you’ve drawn a sailboat. Or a tiger. It’s so simple that 5-year-olds can do it.

But in real life, the dots can only be numbered after the fact. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to draw lines from a Russian request for information to a foreign visit to some other piece of information that might have been collected.

Opinion: Agencies often miss warning signs of attacks

In hindsight, we know who the bad guys are. Before the fact, there are an enormous number of potential bad guys.

How many? We don’t know. But we know that the no-fly list had 21,000 people on it last year. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, also known as the watch list, has 700,000 names on it.

We have no idea how many potential “dots” the FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies collect, but it’s easily in the millions. It’s easy to work backwards through the data and see all the obvious warning signs. But before a terrorist attack, when there are millions of dots — some important but the vast majority unimportant — uncovering plots is a lot harder.

Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other. Or a random-dot stereogram. Is it a sailboat, a puppy, two guys with pressure-cooker bombs or just an unintelligible mess of dots? You try to figure it out.

It’s not a matter of not enough data, either.

Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through.

The television show “Person of Interest” is fiction, not fact.

There’s a name for this sort of logical fallacy: hindsight bias.

First explained by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, it’s surprisingly common. Since what actually happened is so obvious once it happens, we overestimate how obvious it was before it happened.

We actually misremember what we once thought, believing that we knew all along that what happened would happen. It’s a surprisingly strong tendency, one that has been observed in countless laboratory experiments and real-world examples of behavior. And it’s what all the post-Boston-Marathon bombing dot-connectors are doing.

Before we start blaming agencies for failing to stop the Boston bombers, and before we push “intelligence reforms” that will shred civil liberties without making us any safer, we need to stop seeing the past as a bunch of obvious dots that need connecting.

…

By Bruce Schneier , Special to CNN
May 2, 2013 — Updated 1437 GMT (2237 HKT) CNN.com

Find this story at 2 May 2013

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bruce Schneier.
© 2013 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Secret US court approved every single domestic spying request in 2012

The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court quietly rubber stamped nearly 2,000 government requests to search or electronically monitor people in the United States last year, according to a Justice Department report published this week.

The agency, which oversees requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents on US soil, released the report to Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), showing that by approving the 1,856 inquiries “for foreign intelligence purposes,” it had granted every single government request in 2012. The FISC’s approval rating actually jumped by five per cent from 2011 – when it also approved every application.

The FISC was instituted as part of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, expanded under the George W. Bush administration, and then reauthorized by Congress for another five years in December of 2012.
The act, commonly referred to act the “warrantless wiretapping” law, authorizes the government to monitor US citizens’ phone calls and emails without first proving probable cause as long as they’re believed to be corresponding with an individual overseas.

“The 1,856 applications include applications made solely for electronic surveillance, applications made solely for physical search, and combined applications requesting authority for electronic surveillance and physical search,” the report read. “Of these, 1,789 applications included requests for authority to conduct electronic surveillance.”

David Kris, a former top anti-terrorism attorney at the Justice Department, wrote in the 2012 edition of National Security Investigations and Prosecutions that the FISA Amendments Act also gives the government domestic spying power while stripping away accountability.

Reuters / Jeremy Papasso

“For example, an authorization targeting Al-Qaeda – which is a non-US person located abroad – could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about Al-Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with Al-Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with Al-Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone,” Kris wrote, as quoted by Wired.

…

Published time: May 02, 2013 22:57
Reuters / Jessica Rinaldi

Find this story at 2 May 2013

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

Prosecutors Raid South Korean Spy Agency in Presidential Election Inquiry

SEOUL, South Korea — State prosecutors raided the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service of South Korea on Tuesday to investigate accusations that the spy agency used its agents and hired bloggers to influence the presidential election in December.

The raid, which started on Tuesday morning and continued into the evening, was highly unusual, dealing a blow to the reputation of the spy agency. Such a raid would have been unthinkable decades ago when the agency had served as the main tool of political control for South Korea’s military dictators.

Even after South Korea was democratized in the early 1990s, prosecutors raided the secretive agency only once — in 2005, when it was revealed that the agency illegally ran an extensive operation of bugging the telephones of politicians, businessmen, journalists and others.

Although the intelligence agency has repeatedly vowed not to meddle in politics, accusations of wrongdoing by its agents resurfaced during the campaign for the Dec. 19 presidential election. The main opposition, the Democratic United Party, and government critics accused the agency of trying to influence online debates in favor of President Park Geun-hye, the governing party’s candidate at the time. Ms. Park beat her opposition rival, Moon Jae-in, by a million votes.

Last month, the police said that at least two agents from the National Intelligence Service illegally posted comments online criticizing the political opposition ahead of the election. But they said they could not determine whether the two were part of a much bigger operation by the leadership of the agency to influence the election, as the opposition party alleged.

A chief police investigator, who had been replaced in the middle of the investigation, said in interviews with domestic news media that her bosses had intervened in an effort to whitewash the inquiry. The National Police Agency denied the accusation.

Prosecutors have since taken over the investigation.

They themselves faced a long-running accusation from the political opposition and other critics that they shied away from offending the top political power. Because of that mistrust, the political parties have agreed to begin a separate parliamentary investigation.

On Tuesday, prosecutors raided the psychological intelligence bureau in the spy agency’s sprawling compound in the southern edge of the South Korean capital, Seoul.

Their action came a day after prosecutors summoned the former intelligence service director, Won Sei-hoon, a close ally of former President Lee Myung-bak, for questioning. Two other senior intelligence officials were questioned in the past few days.

The spy agency had no comment on the raid, a spokesman said by telephone. But it had earlier denied interfering in the election. The agency said its officers’ online activities had been part of its normal psychological operations aimed at North Korea.

…

April 30, 2013
By CHOE SANG-HUN

Find this story at 30 April 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Korean spy’s deportation reveals web of intrigue

ASIO headquarters in Canberra … reports say the agency alleges Yeon Kim, a senior agricultural trade specialist, was involved in “foreign interference” by the Korean spies. Photo: Katherine Griffiths

Relations between Australia and South Korea have been strained after the east Asian economic powerhouse was caught soliciting sensitive information from public servants, and the deportation of a South Korean spy for espionage in 2009 was disclosed.

New details of South Korean espionage in Australia were revealed in an unfair dismissal case before the Fair Work Commission brought by a former intelligence officer with the Australian Federal Police, Bo-Rim “Bryan” Kim.

The commission this week rejected an unfair dismissal appeal by Mr Kim, who previously worked part-time at the South Korean consulate-general in Sydney. He then worked as an information technology staffer for the AFP in Sydney before transferring to criminal intelligence for Sydney Airport.

A Fair Work judgment released this week said Federal Police management terminated his employment in August 2012 after the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation recommended revoking his security clearance.

Commissioner Geoff Bull said ASIO alleged Mr Kim had committed an “act of foreign interference” by passing sensitive information to the intelligence services of a foreign government.

“Mr Kim attempted to diminish the complaints made against him on the basis that he had not attempted to gain any benefit from his conduct and some of the allegations made against him were not accurate.

“In any event, Mr Kim was remorseful and recognised his mistakes,” he said in the judgment.

Mr Bull said Mr Kim told ASIO a consular employee who had sought information from him in January 2009 on terrorism responses at Sydney Airport was understood to be an intelligence officer or “secret squirrel”.

“This consulate employee was deported from Australia in March 2009 for espionage,” his judgment said. “Mr Kim had also been invited to and attended a dinner at this consulate employee’s apartment, which Mr Kim did not consider an important enough contact to report.”

In a separate case, an immigrant and senior trade specialist at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, Yeon Kim, lost his job after an adverse ASIO security assessment against him in 2011.

A Federal Court judgment this year said Dr Kim was alleged to have provided information to an intelligence officer working for what was then described as “country X”.

The information concerned negotiations between Australia and country X on an “important bilateral trade agreement” and its disclosure was alleged to have been an act of foreign interference under the ASIO Act.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal last year rejected an appeal by Dr Kim over his adverse assessment, but there has been subsequent litigation in the Federal Court on a planned appeal.

In March, Federal Court judge Lindsay Foster refused to extend non-publication orders on details of the case that were sought by the head of ASIO, David Irvine, ruling the information did not go to issues of national security or defence.

Dr Kim, the main author of an ABARES study on the South Korean beef market, is alleged to have met a South Korean diplomat in mid-2010 who was a known officer of that country’s National Intelligence Service.

…

Mark Skulley and John Kerin

PUBLISHED: 02 May 2013 09:11:00 | UPDATED: 03 May 2013 08:12:40

Find this story at 2 May 2013

© Copyright 2011 Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd

Spies caught in Canberra

South Korean spies have been caught cultivating public servants in Canberra to obtain trade secrets, with one Australian official sacked for disclosing sensitive information.

Previously suppressed information released by the Federal Court reveals that South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) had sought “to obtain sensitive information” on trade negotiations between Canberra and Seoul.

A senior Australian agricultural trade specialist, Dr Yeon Kim, has lost his security clearance and employment with the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation alleged Dr Kim was involved in the “foreign interference” by the South Korean intelligence operatives.

The revelation of economic espionage is embarrassing to Seoul and Canberra as Australia has strongly backed South Korea in its stand-off with North Korea. Last month Australian troops took part in joint military exercises with South Korea and the United States for the first time.

Although engaged in what ASIO described as “inappropriate activities” harmful to Australia’s interests, no South Korean spies have been expelled from Australia. Instead, in an effort to maintain good relations with the NIS, ASIO took legal action to prevent disclosure of the incident and protect the identities of the South Korean agents so they might continue their clandestine careers.

In mid-2010 ASIO learnt Dr Kim had been meeting a South Korean diplomat declared to the Australian government as an NIS liaison officer. Dr Kim, the principal author of an ABARES study of the Korean beef market, had taken part in free trade agreement negotiations between Australia and South Korea in December 2009.

ASIO officers interviewed Dr Kim in October 2010. On September 15, 2011, ASIO director-general David Irvine issued an adverse security assessment of Dr Kim “after finding that he had had contact with successive NIS officers who he had not reported as required by Australian government policy”.

ASIO alleged Dr Kim had been involved in clandestine contact with and provided sensitive information to an NIS officer, South Korean embassy minister-counsellor Hoo-Young Park.

ASIO determined that Dr Kim had been “successfully cultivated” by the NIS; that he had been “deceptive” in his responses to questioning; and there was a “specific threat” to Australian government information. ASIO recommended his secret-level security clearance be revoked, effectively ending his career as a public servant.

Dr Kim has said his contact with South Korean diplomats was purely social and any discussion of trade issues was confined to publicly available information.

…

Philip Dorling
Published: May 2, 2013 – 7:57AM

Find this story at 2 May 2013

© 2013 Fairfax Media

South Korean spies sought Australian trade secrets

Australia’s foreign minister says issue has caused no diplomatic tension with Seoul

Agents from South Korea’s national intelligence service have tried to get secret information about Australian trade, triggering the dismissal of an Australian public servant over his links to the agency.

The spy case dates back to 2010 and relates to efforts by South Korea to find out about Australian agricultural trade when the two nations were in early negotiations on a free-trade agreement.

Australia’s foreign minister, Bob Carr, refused to comment on details of the case on Thursday, citing “matters of security or intelligence”, but said the issue had caused no diplomatic tension with Seoul, a strong ally and key trading partner.

“I believe the relationship with the Republic of Korea is so strong, so robust, that this will have no effect on it,” Carr said.

South Korea is Australia’s fourth biggest trade partner, with bilateral trade worth more than A$32bn (£21bn). The two countries launched free-trade talks in 2009, but have yet to clinch a deal.

…

Reuters in Canberra
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 May 2013 08.14 BST

Find this story at 2 May 2013

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

Exclusive: Allan Nairn Exposes Role of U.S. and New Guatemalan President in Indigenous Massacres

In 1982, investigative journalist Allan Nairn interviewed a Guatemalan general named “Tito” on camera during the height of the indigenous massacres. It turns out the man was actually Otto Pérez Molina, the current Guatemalan president. We air the original interview footage and speak to Nairn about the U.S. role backing the Guatemalan dictatorship. Last week, Nairn flew to Guatemala where he had been scheduled to testify in the trial of former U.S.-backed dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. Ríos Montt was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s decades-long campaign against Maya indigenous people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The trial took a surprising turn last week when Guatemala President Gen. Otto Pérez Molina was directly accused of ordering executions. A former military mechanic named Hugo Reyes told the court that Pérez Molina, then serving as an army major and using the name Tito Arias, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage a Maya Ixil area in the 1980s. Click here to hear our live update of the trial from Nairn in Guatemala City. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We continue our coverage of the historic trial of former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Allan Nairn joined us in our studio last week before he flew to Guatemala. I began by asking him to describe just who Ríos Montt is.

ALLAN NAIRN: Ríos Montt was the dictator of Guatemala during 1982, ’83. He seized power in a military coup. He was trained in the U.S. He had served in Washington as head of the Inter-American Defense College. And while he was president, he was embraced by Ronald Reagan as a man of great integrity, someone totally devoted to democracy. And he killed many tens of thousands of civilians, particularly in the Mayan northwest highlands. In this particular trial, he is being charged with 1,771 specific murders in the area of the Ixil Mayans. These charges are being brought because the prosecutors have the names of each of these victims. They’ve been able to dig up the bones of most of them.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how this campaign, this slaughter, was carried out and how it links to, well, the current government in Guatemala today.

ALLAN NAIRN: The army swept through the northwest highlands. And according to soldiers who I interviewed at the time, as they were carrying out the sweeps, they would go into villages, surround them, pull people out of their homes, line them up, execute them. A forensic witness testified in the trial that 80 percent of the remains they’ve recovered had gunshot wounds to the head. Witnesses have—witnesses and survivors have described Ríos Montt’s troops beheading people. One talked about an old woman who was beheaded, and then they kicked her head around the floor. They ripped the hearts out of children as their bodies were still warm, and they piled them on a table for their parents to see.

The soldiers I interviewed would describe their interrogation techniques, which they had been taught at the army general staff. And they said they would ask people, “Who in the town are the guerrillas?” And if the people would respond, “We don’t know,” then they would strangle them to death. These sweeps were intense. The soldiers said that often they would kill about a third of a town’s population. Another third they would capture and resettle in army camps. And the rest would flee into the mountains. There, in the mountains, the military would pursue them using U.S.-supplied helicopters, U.S.- and Israeli-supplied planes. They would drop U.S. 50-kilogram bombs on them, and they would machine-gun them from U.S. Huey and Bell helicopters, using U.S.-supplied heavy-caliber machine guns.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to a clip of you interviewing a soldier in the highlands. This is from a Finnish documentary—is that right? And when was this done? When were you talking to soldiers there?

ALLAN NAIRN: This was in September of 1982 in the Ixil zone in the area surrounding the town of Nebaj.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip of this interview.

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] This is how we are successful. And also, if we have already interrogated them, the only thing we can do is kill them.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] And how many did you kill?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] We killed the majority. There is nothing else to do than kill them.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] So you killed them at once?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Yes. If they do not want to do the right things, there is nothing more to do than bomb the houses.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Bomb? With what?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Well, with grenades or collective bombs.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] What is a collective bomb?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] They are like cannons.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Do you use helicopters?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Yes.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] What is the largest amount of people you have killed at once?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Well, really, in Sololá, around 500 people.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] And how do they react when you arrive?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Who?

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] The people from the small villages.

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] When the army arrives, they flee from their houses. And so, as they flee to the mountains, the army is forced to kill them.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] And in which small village did the army do that kind of thing?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] That happened a lot of times.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Specifically, could you give me some examples where these things happened?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] In Salquil, Sumal Chiquito, Sumal Grande, Acul.

AMY GOODMAN: When did you interview this soldier, Allan?

ALLAN NAIRN: This was in September of ’82.

AMY GOODMAN: What were you doing there?

ALLAN NAIRN: Making a documentary for Scandinavian television.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have soldiers talking about killing civilians, the brutal interrogations that they were engaged in. Why would they be telling you this? You’re a journalist. They’re talking about crimes they’re committing.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, because this is their everyday life. They do this all the time. They do it under orders from the top of the chain of command, at that time Ríos Montt. And they had hardly ever seen journalists at that time. It was very rare for an outside journalist or even a local journalist to go into that area.

AMY GOODMAN: So let’s take this to the current day, to the president of Guatemala today, because at the same time you were interviewing these soldiers, you interviewed the Guatemalan president—at least the Guatemalan president today in 2013.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, the senior officer, the commander in Nebaj, was a man who used the code name “Mayor Tito,” Major Tito. It turns out that that man’s real name was Otto Pérez Molina. Otto Pérez Molina later ascended to general, and today he is the president of Guatemala. So he is the one who was the local implementer of the program of genocide which Ríos Montt is accused of carrying out.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a huge charge. I mean, right now, it’s an historic trial when it’s 25 years after a past president is now being charged. Let’s go to a clip of Otto Pérez Molina, the current president of Guatemala, but this is 1982 in the heartland area of Quiché in northwest Guatemala, northwest of Guatemala City. In this video clip, Otto Pérez Molina is seen reading from political literature found on one of the bodies. This is your interview with him.

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] “The poor artisan fights alongside the worker. The poor peasant fights alongside the worker. The wealth is produced by us, the poor. The army takes the poor peasants. Together, we have an invincible force. All the families are with the guerrilla, the guerrilla army of the poor, toward final victory forever.” These are the different fronts that they have.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] So here they are saying that the army killed some people.

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is astounding. This is the current president of Guatemala standing over these bodies. Tell us more.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, as one of the soldiers says in the sound in the background, the—Pérez Molina interrogated these men. And soon after, they were—they were dead. And one soldier told me off camera that in fact after Pérez Molina interrogated them, they finished them off.

AMY GOODMAN: This man, Pérez Molina, the president, actually was going by a code name at the time. When was it clear that this is Pérez Molina? Though we have a very clear shot of him.

ALLAN NAIRN: For a long time, Pérez Molina was trying to obscure his past and apparently hide the fact that he played this role in a supervisory position during the highland massacres. During the Guatemalan presidential campaign, which Pérez Molina eventually won, about two years ago, I got calls while I was in Asia from the Guatemalan press, from The Wall Street Journal, asking whether I could vouch for the fact that Mayor Tito, the man in the video who I encountered in the northwest highlands in the midst of the massacres—whether I could vouch for the fact that Mayor Tito was in fact General Otto Pérez Molina, the presidential candidate. And I said that I couldn’t, just from looking at the current videos. You know, people can change a lot visually over 30 years, so I said I couldn’t be sure. It turns out that—and during the campaign, when reporters would ask the Pérez Molina campaign, “Is Pérez Molina Mayor Tito?” they would dodge the question. They would evade. They were running from it. It turns out, though, we just learned this week, that Pérez Molina had admitted back in 2000 that he was Mayor Tito. But then, apparently afterward, he thought better of it and was trying to bury it. And now, this is potentially trouble for him. He’s currently president, and so, under Guatemalan law, he enjoys immunity. But once he leaves the presidency, he could, in theory, be subject to prosecution, just as Ríos Montt is now being prosecuted.

AMY GOODMAN: That could be a serious motivation for him declaring himself president for life.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Ríos Montt seized power by a coup, but one of the important facts about the situation now is that the military men don’t have the power that they used to. The fact that this trial is happening is an indication of that. This trial is happening because the survivors refused to give up. They persisted—the survivors have been working on this for decades, pushing to bring Ríos Montt and the other generals to justice. They refused to give up. They got support from international—some international human rights lawyers. And within the Guatemalan justice system, there were a few people of integrity who ascended to positions of some authority within the prosecutorial system, within the judiciary. And so, we now have this near-political miracle of a country bringing to trial its former dictator for genocide, while the president of the country, who was implicated in those killings, sits by.

AMY GOODMAN: Allan, this video that we have of you interviewing Pérez Molina—again, as you said, he admitted to the Guatemalan newspaper, Prensa Libre, in 2000 that he used the nickname Tito—is quite astounding. So let’s go to another clip, where you’re talking to him about the kind of support that he wants.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] The United States is considering giving military help here in the form of helicopters. What is the importance of helicopters for all of you?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] A helicopter is an apparatus that’s become of great importance not only here in Guatemala but also in other countries where they’ve had problems of a counterinsurgency.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Like in Vietnam?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] In Vietnam, for example, the helicopter was an apparatus that was used a lot.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Can you also use it in combat?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, of course. The helicopters that are military types, they are equipped to support operations in the field. They have machine guns and rocket launchers.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] What type of mortars are you guys using?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] There’s various types of mortars. We have small mortars and the mortars Tampella.

ALLAN NAIRN: Tampella.

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, it’s a mortar that’s 60 millimeters.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Is it very powerful? Does it have a lot of force to destroy things?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, it’s a weapon that’s very effective. It’s very useful, and it has a very good result in our operation in defense of the country.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Is it against a person or…?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, it’s an anti-personnel weapon.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Do you have one here?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] It’s light and easy to transport, as well.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] So, it’s very light, and you can use it with your hand.

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Exactly, with the hand.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Where did you get them?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] These, we got from Israel.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] And where do you get the ammunition?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] That’s also from Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this is, again, the current president, Pérez Molina, of Guatemala, the general you met in the highlands in 1982, asking for more aid. Talk about the relationship between Guatemala then and the United States.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the U.S. was the sponsor of the Guatemalan army, as it had been for many decades, as the U.S. has and continues to sponsor dozens and dozens of repressive armies all over the world. In the case of Guatemala, if you go into the military academy and you see the pictures of the past presidents of military academy, some of them are actually Americans. They’re actual American officers there who were openly running the Guatemalan military training. By the ’80s, when the Ríos Montt massacres were being carried out, the U.S. Congress was under the impression that they had successfully stopped U.S. military aid to Guatemala. But in fact it was continuing. The CIA had an extensive program of backing the G-2, the G-2, the military intelligence service, which selected the targets for assassination and disappearance. They even—they even built a headquarters for—a secret headquarters for the G-2 near the Guatemala City airport. They had American advisers working inside the headquarters. Out in the field, Guatemalan troops were receiving from the U.S. ammunition, weapons.

And most importantly, the U.S., beginning under the Carter administration but continuing under Reagan and after, asked the Israelis to come in and fill the gap that was caused by congressional restrictions. So Israel was doing massive shipments of Galil automatic rifles and other weapons. And Pérez Molina, as you saw in the video, actually had one of his subordinates come over and show me an Israeli-made mortar. That mortar and the helicopters he was asking for from the U.S., those were the kind of weapons they would use to bomb villages and attack people as they were fleeing in the mountains. In listening to the testimony in the trial up to this moment, I was struck by the fact that almost every witness mentioned that they had been attacked from the air, that either their village had been bombed or strafed or that they were bombed or strafed as they were fleeing in the mountains. This testimony suggests that the use of this U.S. and Israeli aircraft and U.S. munitions against the civilians in the Ixil highlands was actually much more extensive than we understood at the time.

Beyond that, beyond the material U.S. support, there’s the question of doctrine. Yesterday in the trial, the Ríos Montt defense called forward a general, a former commander of the G-2, as an expert witness on the defense side. And at the end of his testimony, the prosecution read to this general an excerpt from a Guatemalan military training document. And the document said it is often difficult for soldiers to accept the fact that they may be required to execute repressive actions against civilian women, children and sick people, but with proper training, they can be made to do so. So, the prosecutor asked the Ríos Montt general, “Well, General, what is your response to this document?” And the general responded by saying, “Well, that training document which we use is an almost literal translation of a U.S. training document.” So this doctrine of killing civilians, even down to women, children and sick people, was, as the general testified, adopted from the U.S. Indeed, years before, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala, Colonel John Webber, had said to Time magazine that the Guatemalan army was licensed to kill guerrillas and potential guerrillas. And, of course, the category of potential guerrillas can include anyone, including children.

And the point of guerrilla civilians is actually very important to understanding this. Those bodies that Pérez Molina was standing over in Nebaj in 1982 in the film we saw, those were actually an exception to the rule, because the truth commission which investigated the massacres in Guatemala found that 93 percent of the victims were civilians killed by the Guatemalan army. But there was also some combat going on between the army and guerrillas. And in that case, in the video we saw, the bodies Pérez Molina was standing over were guerrillas, guerrillas that the army had captured. And one of them in captivity had set off a hand grenade as a suicide act, but apparently, from what I saw and what the soldiers told me, apparently they survived the blast, and they were then turned over to Pérez Molina for interrogation. He interrogated them, and then, as we saw, they turned up dead. But in the vast majority of cases, they were civilians, completely unarmed people, who were targeted by Ríos Montt’s army for elimination.

And I asked Ríos Montt about this practice on two different occasions, first in an interview with him two months after he seized power in 1982, and then later, years later, after he had been thrown out of power. And when I asked him in ’82 about the fact that so many civilians were being killed by the army, he said, “Look, for each one who is shooting, there are 10 who are standing behind him,” meaning: Behind the guerrillas there are vast numbers of civilians. His senior aide and his spokesman, a man named Francisco Bianchi, who was sitting next to him at this interview, then expanded on the point. Bianchi said the guerrillas—well, the indigenous population—he called them “indios,” which is a slur in Guatemalan Spanish—

AMY GOODMAN: For Indians.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes—were collaborating with the guerrilla, therefore it was necessary to kill Indians. “And people would say,” Bianchi continued, “‘Oh, you’re massacring all these innocent Indians”—”innocent Indios,” in his words. But Bianchi then said, “But, no, they are not innocent, because they had sold out to subversion.” So this is the—this is the doctrine of killing civilians, and particularly Mayans, because the army saw them collectively as a group. They didn’t view them as individuals, but they saw them collectively as a group as sold out to subversion. And this was a doctrine that the U.S. supported.

AMY GOODMAN: Journalist Allan Nairn. The interview we did was recorded last week just before he left for Guatemala to testify in the trial against the Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. But at the last minute, his testimony was canceled late yesterday. The trial was canceled. We’ll continue with the interview in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Mercedes Sosa, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we continue our coverage of the historic trial of former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Allan Nairn joined us in our studio last week before he flew to Guatemala. His testimony was canceled. The trial was canceled last night. But I asked Allan to talk about how he managed to interview the Guatemalan dictator, Ríos Montt, two months after he seized power in the 1980s.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, he was—he was giving press interviews. This was an interview in the palace. I was there with a couple of other reporters. Ríos Montt was very outspoken. He would go on TV and say, “Today we are going to begin a merciless struggle. We are going to kill, but we are going to kill legally.” That was his style, to speak directly. And it’s in great contrast to what he’s doing today. I mean, it’s very interesting from point of view of people who’ve survived these kind of generals who live on the blood of the people, not just in Guatemala but in Salvador, in East Timor, in Indonesia, in countless countries where the U.S. has backed this kind of terror. You have the spectacle now of this general, who once made poor people tremble at the sight of him, at the mention of him, now he’s hiding. In the trial, he refuses to talk. He will not defend himself. He’s like a common thug taken off the streets who invokes his Fifth Amendment—invokes his Fifth Amendment rights. But back then, when he had the power, when no one could challenge him, he would speak fairly openly. In fact, the second time I spoke to him, a number of years after, I asked Ríos Montt whether he thought that he should be executed, whether he should be tried and executed because of his own responsibility for the highland massacres, and he responded by jumping to his feet and shouting, “Yes! Put me on trial. Put me against the wall. But if you’re going to put me on trial, you have to try the Americans first, including Ronald Reagan.”

AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, at the time in Guatemala, you not only were interviewing, well, now the current president, Pérez Molina, who was in the highlands at the time standing over dead bodies, but you were also talking to U.S. officials, and I want to go to this issue of U.S. involvement in what happened in Guatemala. Tell us about U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth, a man you got to interview at the time during the Ríos Montt years.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Bosworth was, at the time, an important player in U.S. Central American policy. And he, along with Elliott Abrams, for example, attacked Amnesty International when Amnesty was trying to report on the assassinations of labor leaders and priests and peasant organizers and activists in the Mayan highlands. And he also was denying that the U.S. was giving military assistance to the Guatemalan army that was carrying out those crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to the interview you did with then U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth.

STEPHEN BOSWORTH: Well, I think the important factor is that there has been, over the last six months, evidence of significant improvement in the human rights situation in Guatemala. Since the coming into power of the Ríos Montt government, the level of violence in the country, politically inspired violence, particularly in the urban areas, has declined rather dramatically. That being said, however, I think it’s important also to note that the level of violence in the countryside continues at a level which is of concern to all. And while it is difficult, if not impossible, to attribute responsibility for that violence in each instance, it is clear that in the countryside the government does indeed need to make further progress in terms of improving its control over government troops.

AMY GOODMAN: You also, Allan Nairn, asked the then-U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth precisely what was the U.S. military presence and role in Guatemala. This is how Bosworth responded.

STEPHEN BOSWORTH: We have no military presence or role. We have, as a part of our diplomatic establishment, a defense attaché office and a military representative. But that is the same sort of representation that we have in virtually all other countries in the world. We do not have American trainers working with the Guatemalan army. We do not have American military personnel active in Guatemala in that—in that sort of area.

ALLAN NAIRN: There are no American trainers there?

STEPHEN BOSWORTH: No.

ALLAN NAIRN: None performing the types of functions that go on in El Salvador, for instance?

STEPHEN BOSWORTH: No, there are not.

AMY GOODMAN: That was then-U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth. Respond to what he said, and tell us who he later became, who he is today in the U.S. government.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, first, just about everything that Bosworth said there was a lie. He said that the killings were down. In fact, they increased dramatically under Ríos Montt. He said, quite interestingly, that it was impossible to know and attribute responsibility for what was happening. Well, the Conference of Catholic Bishops had no difficulty knowing and attributing responsibility. They said that the killings have reached the extreme of genocide. They were saying this at the moment that the massacres were happening and at the moment that Bosworth was denying it. And they and the survivors and the human rights groups were all clearly blaming it on the army.

And then, finally, he said that the army has to be careful to maintain control over its troops. Well, there was a very strict control. In fact, the officers in the field in the Ixil zone that I interviewed at the time said they were on a very short leash and that there were only three layers of command between themselves in the field and Ríos Montt. And, in fact, a few weeks earlier, there had been only two layers of command between themselves and Ríos Montt.

Then, Bosworth went on to say that the U.S. was not giving any military assistance to Guatemala, but I guess it was a couple weeks after that interview when we went down to Guatemala, I met a U.S. Green Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia, who was training the Guatemalan military in combat techniques, including what he called how—in his words, “how to destroy towns.” This was apart from the weapons and U.S. munitions that I mentioned before, apart from the CIA trainers who were working in the CIA-built headquarters of the G-2, the military intelligence service that was doing the assassinations and disappearances.

AMY GOODMAN: The G-2 being the Guatemalan G-2. Now, today Stephen Bosworth is the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. But before that, in 2009, well, he played a key role in the Obama administration.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, rather than being—you know, in what you might consider to be a normally functioning political system, if a high government official lied like that about matters of such grave, life-and-death importance and was involved in the supply of arms to terrorists, in this case the Guatemalan military, you would expect him at the minimum to be fired and disgraced, or maybe brought up on charges. But Bosworth was actually promoted. And under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton chose him as the special envoy to North Korea. He’s been in the news a great deal in recent times because of his very prominent role there.

AMY GOODMAN: In 1995, Allan Nairn was interviewed on Charlie Rose about his piece in The Nation called “CIA Death Squad,” in which he described how Americans were directly involved in killings by the Guatemalan army. He was interviewed alongside Elliott Abrams, who challenged what he was saying. Abrams had served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from 1981 to 1985. This clip begins with Elliott Abrams.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: Wait a minute. We’re not here to refight the Cold War. We’re here to talk about, I thought, a specific case in which an allegation is being made that—of the husband of an American and, another case, an American citizen were killed, and there was a CIA connection with—allegedly with the person allegedly involved in it. Now, I’m happy to talk about that kind of thing. If Mr. Nairn thinks we should have been on the other side in Guatemala—that is, we should have been in favor of a guerrilla victory—I disagree with him.

ALLAN NAIRN: So you’re then admitting that you were on the side of the Guatemalan military.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: I am admitting that it was the policy of the United States, under Democrats and Republicans, approved by Congress repeatedly, to oppose a communist guerrilla victory anywhere in Central America, including in Guatemala.

CHARLIE ROSE: Alright, well, I—

ALLAN NAIRN: A communist guerrilla victory.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, I—

ALLAN NAIRN: Ninety-five percent of these victims are civilians—peasant organizers, human rights leaders—

CHARLIE ROSE: I am happy to invite both of you—

ALLAN NAIRN: —priests—assassinated by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army. Let’s look at reality here. In reality, we’re not talking about two murders, one colonel. We’re talking about more than 100,000 murders, an entire army, many of its top officers employees of the U.S. government. We’re talking about crimes, and we’re also talking about criminals, not just people like the Guatemalan colonels, but also the U.S. agents who have been working with them and the higher-level U.S. officials. I mean, I think you have to be—you have to apply uniform standards. President Bush once talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity, Nuremberg-style tribunal. I think that’s a good idea. But if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed. If we look at a case like this, I think we have to talk—start talking about putting Guatemalan and U.S. officials on trial. I think someone like Mr. Abrams would be a fit—a subject for such a Nuremberg-style inquiry. But I agree with Mr. Abrams that Democrats would have to be in the dock with him. The Congress has been in on this. The Congress approved the sale of 16,000 M-16s to Guatemala. In ’87 and ’88—

CHARLIE ROSE: Alright, but hold on one second. I just—before—because the—

ALLAN NAIRN: They voted more military aid than the Republicans asked for.

CHARLIE ROSE: Again, I invite you and Elliott Abrams back to discuss what he did. But right now, you—

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: No, thanks, Charlie, but I won’t accept—

CHARLIE ROSE: Hold on one second. Go ahead. You want to repeat the question, of you want to be in the dock?

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: It is ludicrous. It is ludicrous to respond to that kind of stupidity. This guy thinks we were on the wrong side in the Cold War. Maybe he personally was on the wrong side. I am one of the many millions of Americans who thinks we were happy to win.

CHARLIE ROSE: Alright, I don’t—

ALLAN NAIRN: Mr. Abrams, you were on the wrong side in supporting the massacre of peasants and organizers, anyone who dared to speak, absolutely.

CHARLIE ROSE: What I want to do is I want to ask the following question.

ALLAN NAIRN: And that’s a crime. That’s a crime, Mr. Abrams, for which people should be tried. U.S. laws—

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: Why don’t you—yes, right, we’ll put all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Elliott Abrams—he served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from ’81 to ’85—debating investigative journalist Allan Nairn on the Charlie Rose show. Actually, Congressmember Robert Torricelli, then from New Jersey, before he became senator, was also in that discussion at another point. Allan, the significance of what Mr. Abrams was saying? He went on, Abrams, to deal with the Middle East.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes. Well, he—when I said that he should be tried by a Nuremberg-style tribunal, he basically reacted by saying I was crazy, that this was a crazy idea that you could try U.S. officials for supplying weapons to armies that kill civilians. But people also thought that it was crazy that Ríos Montt could face justice in Guatemala. But after decades of work by the survivors of his Mayan highland massacres, today, as we speak, Ríos Montt is sitting in the dock.

AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning journalist Allan Nairn, speaking last week before he flew to Guatemala. On Thursday, a landmark genocide trial against former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt was suspended after the trial threatened to implicate the current president of Guatemala in the mass killings of civilians. Allan reports Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala’s president, General Otto Pérez Molina. Some of the video footage used in the show comes from a 1983 documentary directed by Mikael Wahlforss. We’ll link to it at democracynow.org and to Allan Nairn’s website, allannairn.org.

That does it for our show. Juan González will be speaking tonight in Chicago at 8:15 at the Gene Siskel Film Center at North State Street and tomorrow at noon at Wayne State University [in Detroit] at noon.

Friday, April 19, 2013

Find this story at 19 April 2013

Guatemala confronts a dark chapter

Guatemala City (CNN) — The soldiers killed Jacinto Lopez’s teenage daughter Magdalena by repeatedly stabbing her in the neck.

His in-laws were not spared. Barely anyone in the village was.

These atrocities, which took place in the remote Guatemalan town of Santa Maria Nebaj in July of 1982, have never been described in a courtroom.

Until now.

For the first time, Lopez has shared his terrifying story in the nation’s highest court.

And for the first time “anywhere in the world,” according to the United Nations, a former head of state is being tried for genocide by his own nation’s justice system. That man is Efrain Rios Montt, an ex-military dictator who ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983.

“They killed my family and destroyed our crops,” Lopez testified. “They took even my cows.”

The attack against the Lopez family was just one of countless assaults in the early 1980s during the war between the Guatemalan government and leftist rebels.

The military used the rebel threat as a guise to exterminate rural Ixil Mayan villages accused of harboring insurgents, prosecutors say. According to prosecutors, the campaign led to the genocide of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayans.

Previous accusations of genocide, such as in Rwanda or against Serbia, have been presided over by international judges. The Guatemala attacks are considered by many experts as the only incident of genocide in the Western Hemisphere during the modern era.

Map: Guatemala
Map: Guatemala

Map: Guatemala

The trial reignites debate over the United States’ controversial pro-government policies in the region during the 1980s. It also offers a fascinating look in real time at how a nation is choosing to face its own demons. Painful public testimony could help heal the national betrayal reflected in the faces of many Mayan victims.

Lopez, now 82 years old, is among dozens of witnesses who have testified at the trial being heard by the nation’s three-judge Supreme Court.

Guatemala begins first genocide trial

Rios Montt, 86, is accused of authorizing a military strategy so brutal that it was labeled “scorched earth.” His attorneys say the former dictator did not order any of the atrocities.

The genocide charges rest on the assertion that the army, under Rios Montt’s orders, specifically targeted the Ixil because of their ethnicity, and not just because they were suspected of harboring rebels. The charge has been made before, but not in court. A 1999 report by a Guatemalan truth commission concluded that “agents of the state committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people.”

During the opening remarks of the trial, an attorney for Rios Montt laid the foundation for the argument that no such ethnic targeting took place.

“I never heard a speech that said ‘kill the Ixil, exterminate the Ixil,'” defense lawyer Francisco Garcia Gudiel said. Rios Montt “never gave an order, written or spoken, to exterminate a single Ixil in this country.”

The United States stands accused in the court of public opinion. Critics say Washington turned a blind eye to the abuses, and worse. The Reagan administration claimed violence was decreasing during Rios Montt’s tenure, and in 1983, lifted a U.S. arms embargo. But there are bookends for this dark chapter of Central American history. More recently, the United States has pushed for Guatemalan judicial reform that has made this trial possible.

Horrific memories

For generations, the Ixil have lived in mountainous villages in the country’s northwest, mostly isolated from the rest of Guatemala and the world. According to the country’s 2002 census, Guatemalan Ixil number around 95,000, less than 1% of the nation’s population.

They still speak primarily the Ixil language, and most of the witnesses called to the stand so far have spoken through a translator. The horrific stories that more than 70 prosecution witnesses have revealed so far have been hard to hear in any language.

“I was 12 years old,” said one woman, whose identity was protected by the court. “They took me with the other women and they tied my feet and hands. They put a rag in my mouth … and they started raping me … I don’t know how many took turns. … I lost consciousness … and the blood kept running. … Later I couldn’t even stand or urinate.”

Stories about rape were so widespread that the trial set aside an entire day of testimony just for rape victims.

Their shocking stories prompted many of the hundreds of Guatemalans sitting in the courtroom to use their hands to cover their mouths. The powerful proceedings often wrapped the courtroom in profound silence, only to be broken by the sound of sobbing.

Pedro Chavez Brito was 6 or 7 years old when the military attacked his village in November 1982. Soldiers killed his mother, he told the court. In a frantic bid to escape, he hid with his pregnant sister and her two children among the family’s chickens.

It didn’t work.

When soldiers found them, they lashed Chavez’s sister to the stairs of their home, he testified. The soldiers then set the house on fire, killing her and her two children, Chavez testified. Seven other family members may have died in the fire, he said.

Chavez, like many other survivors, lived to share his story because he fled into the unforgiving mountains.

That’s how Maria Cruz Raymundo and her family escaped, too. But conditions there were so harsh that her husband, daughter and son starved to death, she told the court.

More than 100 witnesses have taken the stand so far — a marathon of gruesome stories.

Another witness, Nicholas Bernal, testified that he, too, escaped to the mountains.

Bernal told the court he had watched soldiers kill his neighbors and then rip out their hearts and burn their bodies.

Each passing day of the trial reveals similar nightmarish stories. Human rights organizations such as the Center for Legal Action in Human Rights and Association for Justice and Reconciliation are broadcasting the trial live on the Internet. In addition, the U.S.-based Open Society Justice Initiative is providing daily summaries on a dedicated website. Testimony in this report is culled from all these sources and state news media.

Shifting U.S. behavior

When Rios Montt assumed power in a coup in 1982, Guatemala was already in the throes of a violent civil war that would last 36 years. The insurgency, and extrajudicial killings by the military, had been going on for two decades as part of the broader conflicts between leftist rebels and hardline governments across the region.

By the time a peace accord was reached in 1996, an estimated more than 200,000 had perished.

Photos: Searching for the ‘disappeared’ in Guatemala

Rios Montt faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity connected to his 16 months as dictator. He is being tried together with his then-chief of military intelligence, Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez.

Sanchez is accused of designing and executing the army’s strategy.

When Rios Montt became president, human rights violations had already prompted the United States to cut off aid to the Guatemalan government. But a political scandal in the U.S. in the 1990s revealed that in fact the CIA continued to provide money to Guatemalan military intelligence sources for years during the civil war.

Now-declassified secret CIA cables indicate that the United States had knowledge of the atrocities being committed against the Ixil Mayans, but did little about them, according to Victoria Sanford, director of the Center for Human Rights & Peace Studies at the City University of New York.

“At best they chose to look away, but often they were covering it up,” Sanford said.

In one CIA document, from February 1983, the agency reports to Washington that an increase in violence against civilians is because of “right-wing violence.”

But the U.S. ambassador at the time added a note to the same memo with a distinct explanation: “I am firmly convinced that the violence described … is government of Guatemala ordered and directed violence.”

Another CIA memo shows the U.S. government may have had knowledge of the violent tactics being used against the Ixil Mayans.

“When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed,” the 1982 document states. “The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is (pro-rebel) has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.”

Critics blame the United States, in its anti-communist zeal, of standing by during these atrocities by denying them and lifting the arms embargo. Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan went as far as to say that Rios Montt was being given a “bum rap” by critics. At the same time, the United States was backing other strongmen in Latin America against leftists.

But if the United States deserves criticism for openly supporting Rios Montt’s rule, it also should be credited for supporting Guatemalan efforts to put the former dictator on trial, said Anita Isaacs, a professor of political science at Haverford College whose research focuses on Guatemalan politics.

She is a fierce critic of the U.S. role in the 1980s, but adds that “this trial wouldn’t be occurring were it not for the role played by the United States pushing for reform in Guatemala’s judicial system.”

In her view, the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala from 2008 to 2011, Stephen McFarland, was “single-handedly” responsible for shifting the country’s perception of the United States from meddling to supportive.

McFarland listened to survivors’ stories of the civil war and attended hearings in support of the victims, she said.

The trial

The historic nature of the trial isn’t lost on the nation’s public, although some say too much time has passed for the process to be fair.

Even current President Otto Perez Molina, a former general who once commanded troops in the Ixil lands, has said he believes there was no genocide. Instead, some see the attacks as a kind of national defense campaign.

The Guatemalan military viewed the Ixil Mayans as rebel collaborators who threatened the government.

This view is shared by protesters with military ties who have stood outside the courthouse, holding signs demanding respect for the military and a fair trial. One demonstrator, Victor Manuel Argueta, told the state-run AGN news agency that the soldiers are “proud of what we did during the civil war.”

The army in the early 1980s, he said, “was dedicated to defending the people from those who wanted to usurp power.” The trial, he said, is nothing more than a “political lynching.”

Declassified U.S. documents repeated the Guatemalan military’s assertion that the Ixil were protecting the rebels.

But dozens of studies by anthropologists have indicated that it was much more complex than that, said Kate Doyle, director of the Guatemala Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, a leading research institute.

Some Ixil Mayans joined the guerrillas as combatants and others provided food or protection, but still others were not connected to the rebels. Some even actively opposed the rebels, she said.

Since the trial began, Rios Montt has fired his attorneys and then rehired them.

Defense attorneys have argued there’s no evidence proving that Rios Montt ordered any of the abuses.

His lawyers have repeatedly and unsuccessfully demanded that the chief judge recuse herself. They say the judge violated Rios Montt’s rights by pressing on with the trial when his attorneys were not prepared.

A victory, no matter the outcome?

The victims’ stories are haunting, and the desire for justice strong, but the task of proving genocide isn’t easy.

Prosecutors must prove the attacks targeted a specific ethnic group with the intention of destroying it, said Naomi Roht-Arriaza, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law.

To convict Rios Montt, prosecutors must also convince the judges that he was responsible.

What’s at stake is less clear. The genocide charges are without precedent. If Rios Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez are convicted, their maximum possible sentences are unknown.

In 2011, a Guatemalan court sentenced four soldiers to 6,060 years in prison each for their role in the 1982 massacre at Dos Erres, a village where 201 people were killed. Thirty years for each death. A fifth soldier was sentenced to the same last year. The unheard-of sentences were for crimes against humanity, not genocide.

Given Rios Montt’s age, many assume that he will serve little, if any, time in prison if convicted.

For the moment, legal observers say the trial itself stands as a huge triumph.

A national conversation

…

CNN’s Mariano Castillo reported and wrote this story from Atlanta. Journalist Miguel Salay contributed from Guatemala City.

April 11, 2013 — Updated 1243 GMT (2043 HKT) CNN.com

Find this story at 11 April 2013

© 2013 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Act of Terror: arrested for filming police officers – video

When police carried out a routine stop-and-search of her boyfriend on the London Underground, Gemma Atkinson filmed the incident. She was detained, handcuffed and threatened with arrest. She launched a legal battle, which ended with the police settling the case in 2010. With the money from the settlement she funded the production of this animated film, which she says shows how her story and highlights police misuse of counterterrorism powers to restrict photography.

Find this story at 29 April 2013

Ochtendgloren: Nachtelijke politionele phishing acties

Bestrijding van de criminaliteit door het afsluiten van snelwegen lijkt een uitvloeisel van de aanpak van nodale controle en informatiegestuurde politie. De redenering is eenvoudig. Boeven en andere slechteriken in de woorden van overheidsfunctionarissen gebruiken snelwegen als aan- en afvoerroutes van criminele waar. Door de snelweg af te sluiten en iedereen te controleren wordt de criminaliteit bestreden. Deze ongerichte controle acties gericht tegen niet verdachte burgers lijken proeftuinen voor het samenwerken van tientallen opsporingsdiensten en meer dan honderd functionarissen. Het denken binnen het opsporingsapparaat is duidelijk gekanteld. Iedereen is verdachte op de rijkswegen. Het Kwaad beweegt zich. In het verleden vooral in het oosten van het land, waar de operatie Ochtendgloren zijn oorsprong kent, maar de laatste jaren ook in het westen en zuiden, waar inmiddels vergelijkbare operaties onder de naam Avondlicht worden gehouden.
Kritische kanttekeningen, vragen, evaluaties, analyses, het is allemaal niet nodig. Twijfelaars van de maatregel worden net zolang onder druk gezet tot ze instemmen en een kritische beschouwing van dit zware middel is nergens in de stukken te vinden. Dat is verontrustend in een rechtstaat waar politie en justitie steeds meer middelen en mogelijkheden krijgen. Zonder nuances worden rechten van burgers alleen maar meer ingeperkt.

Meerdere keren per jaar worden snelwegen in Nederland door meer dan honderd functionarissen afgesloten om vele honderden automobilisten systematisch te controleren. Alhoewel het formeel om verkeerscontroles gaat blijkt de werkelijke motivatie de bestrijding van de middencriminaliteit te zijn; inbrekers en overvallers die zich per auto verplaatsen. Analyse van deze criminaliteit en de effectiviteit van de kostbare operaties ontbreekt echter. Cijfers laten duidelijk zien dat er aan de veiligheid in de gemeenten langs de snelwegen weinig verandert. De incidentele successen die er tijdens de operaties worden geboekt lijken meer op toevalstreffers dan serieus politiewerk. Waarom er gemikt wordt op grote logge operaties die dagen van te voren en van kilometers afstand zijn te zien, roept vooral vragen op. In de woorden van iemand die post op flitsservice.nl onder de nick-name ‘vw-driver’: “Vanavond weer een actie Ochtengloren langs de A1 bij parkeerplaatsen Boermark en De Hop nabij Holten. Hoezo? Staat er weer het bekende materiaal opgesteld op de parkeerplaatsen?” En een andere bijdrage is van een persoon die zich uitgeeft als ‘classpool’ voegt er aan toe dat er ruime ervaring is bij het omzeilen van de controles: “Het blijft werkelijk een amateuristisch opgezette actie. In beide richtingen kon je voor de controle de snelweg af, stukje binnendoor van 5 minuten en de snelweg weer op.”
Ondertussen leveren de operaties volgens de betrokken instanties zelf een dusdanig risico voor ambtenaar en burger op dat de locaties als veiligheidsrisicogebied moeten worden aangemerkt. Deze aanmerking biedt gelijk de juridische basis om automobilisten nog eens extra te verwennen door ze preventief te fouilleren. Gestart als reactie op een schietpartij van bekenden van de politie worden nu duizenden Nederlanders onderworpen aan criminaliteitscontroles, terwijl zij niet verdacht zijn van het plegen van een misdrijf. En het resultaat. Cijfers van het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek laten vooral zien dat het aantal diefstallen en inbraken stijgt. Rijssen-Holten, de gemeente die het fanatiekst is bij het inzetten van Ochtendgloren vertoont een stijging van het aantal inbraken met 25%. Als de politie na het ochtendgloren huiswaarts keert, hebben de “slechteriken uit het westen” in alle rust de huizen van brave burgers leeg kunnen halen. Niet de samenleving verhardt, maar het ongerichte optreden van overheidsdiensten gericht op 100% repressief optreden laat zien wie er nu werkelijk verhardt in zijn standpunt. Of het veiliger wordt is allang geen issue meer.

Find this story at 24 November 2010

Operatie Ochtendgloren – Buro Jansen & Janssen

 

 

Actie preventief fouilleren A2 en camping was misbruik van bevoegdheid

24 april 2013 – De Nationale ombudsman, Alex Brenninkmeijer, is van oordeel dat de politie Oost Nederland misbruik van haar bevoegdheden heeft gemaakt bij acties van preventief fouilleren langs de A2 bij Geldermalsen en op een camping in Kerkdriel. De gemeente Geldermalsen en het OM hebben geen oog gehad voor de waarborgen voor de burger. In beide gevallen was geen sprake van een veiligheidsrisico waarbij preventief fouilleren zou kunnen worden ingezet. Brenninkmeijer: ‘Ik kan me niet aan de indruk onttrekken dat uit opportunisme is geprobeerd om preventief fouilleren aan het reeds beschikbare arsenaal opsporings- en controlemogelijkheden toe te voegen.’

De ombudsman deed een onderzoek uit eigen beweging naar een grootschalige preventief fouilleeractie in de nacht van 25 op 26 oktober 2012 op twee locaties langs de A2 bij Geldermalsen. Ook onderzocht hij een preventief fouilleeractie op de camping ‘Maaszicht’ in Kerkdriel. De actie langs de A2 werd gerechtvaardigd onder verwijzing naar een groot aantal inbraken. En de actie in Kerkdriel had als achtergrond de politiemensen te beschermen bij hun zoekactie. Allebei geen reden waarvoor preventief fouilleren is toegestaan, want preventief fouilleren is gericht op openbare orde en niet op opsporen van strafbare feiten.

Gelet op wat in het voortraject van beide acties is gebeurd, komt het de ombudsman voor dat de burgemeester en de officier van justitie marionetten van de politie Oost Nederland (voorheen politiekorps Gelderland-Zuid) zijn geweest. Brenninkmeijer: ‘Ik ben bezorgd over het gemak waarmee de bestuurders en de officieren van justitie in beide gevallen aan de waarborgen voor de burger voorbij zijn gegaan.’ De Nationale ombudsman doet de aanbeveling om het middel preventief fouilleren niet meer in combinatie met andere controleacties in te zetten, dit om misbruik van het middel preventief fouilleren te voorkomen.
In een eerder rapport (2011/252) waarschuwden de Nationale ombudsman en de gemeentelijke ombudsmannen van Amsterdam en Rotterdam voor het gevaar dat preventief fouilleren oneigenlijk wordt gebruikt voor de opsporing van strafbare feiten.

Find this story at 24 April 2013

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald on “War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State”

A new film directed by Robert Greenwald looks at four whistleblowers who had their lives practically destroyed after they went to the press with evidence of government wrongdoing. They are Michael DeKort, Thomas Drake, Franz Gayl and Thomas Tamm. Whistleblowers have come under unprecedented attack by the Obama administration. Evoking the Espionage Act of 1917, the administration has pressed criminal charges against no fewer than six government employees, more than all previous presidential administrations combined. In the film, Greenwald also interviews government oversight experts and investigative journalists who warn about the chilling effect prosecutions may have on potential whistleblowers and the journalists who help them. Click to watch Part 2 of the interview. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to whistleblowers and the unprecedented attack they’ve come under during the Obama administration. Evoking the Espionage Act of 1917, the administration has pressed criminal charges against no fewer than six government employees, more than all previous presidential administrations combined.

AMY GOODMAN: A new film directed by Robert Greenwald looks at four whistleblowers who had their lives practically destroyed after they went to the press with evidence of government wrongdoing. They are Michael DeKort, Thomas Drake, Franz Gayl and Thomas Tamm. In the film, Greenwald also interviews government oversight experts and investigative journalists who warn about the chilling effect prosecutions may have on potential whistleblowers and the journalists who help them. This is the trailer of the film, War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State.

FRANZ GAYL: I had to do something. If not me, then who? I said, “This needs to be fixed.”

THOMAS DRAKE: I thought about various investigative reporters that I would try and contact.

THOMAS TAMM: Once I put the phone down, I was pretty confident that my life would never be quite the same.

MICHAEL DEKORT: I mean, at the end of the day, right, when you make a decision like this, if you’re not prepared to have the worst happen, then really don’t do it at all.

JANE MAYER: These people face a terrifying situation.

REPORTER: Thomas Drake, accused of leaking classified information. Agents raiding his home in Howard County.

THOMAS DRAKE: Eighteen agents, some of them in body armor, had been banging on our front door.

UNIDENTIFIED: Any time anyone takes a step like that, you know that they’ve probably got something important to say, because they are basically wiping away their career.

DANA PRIEST: There are close to a million people who have top-secret clearance.

MICHAEL DEKORT: The Obama administration had cracked down on whistleblowers.

WILLIAM KELLER: They have indicted more people for violating secrecy than all of the previous administrations put together.

UNIDENTIFIED: The number of people who indicated to us they wish they could talk, but they can’t, because they’re so afraid of what could happen to them, it’s a terrible thing for our democracy.

THOMAS DRAKE: So speaking truth to power is now a criminal act.

AMY GOODMAN: Some of those voices, Thomas Drake and William Keller of The New York Times, as well as Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. This is Democracy Now! The trailer of the new documentary, War on Whistleblowers is what you just watched. We’re joined now by its director, Robert Greenwald, and founder and president of Brave New Films, producer, director and activist.

Why did you make this film? You’ve looked at so many other issues. Why whistleblowers, Robert?

ROBERT GREENWALD: Well, there were a few things that came together. What we always try to do in our films is connect the dots and explore how the system is working. So we had the crackdown on whistleblowers, number one, but it wasn’t without reason. It’s very deeply connected to the growth and power of the national security state, which believes completely in secrets. So we had the whistleblowers. We had the national security state. And then we had some incredible investigative journalists being attacked, investigated, threatened, their careers at stake also. So we put all three of those together and made a film which allows people to understand what’s going on and how deeply threatening it is to us, in a kind of drip-drip way, where you don’t always see or understand what’s happening.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Bob, I want to turn to the case of Franz Gayl, a former marine. While working at the Pentagon as a science adviser for the Marine Corps, Gayl volunteered to deploy to Iraq. Upon his return, he alerted the office of the secretary of defense, and later the Congress and the media, to critical equipment shortages. These included mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs. Gayl’s public outcry exposed the fact that the corps had failed to provide marines in Iraq with life-saving technologies. Yet Gayl has been the target of years of retaliatory investigations, workplace harassment, including the elimination of meaningful duties and extended suspension of his security clearances. In this clip, Gayl explains why he made the fateful decision to save lives by requesting MRAPs to replace Humvees in Iraq. Journalist Seymour Hersh is also in this clip.

FRANZ GAYL: I had to do something. If not me, then who? And if not now, then when? It was one of those situations. And I just said, “No, no, no, no. It doesn’t matter what the consequences are, personal or otherwise, right?” I said, “This needs to be fixed.”

SEYMOUR HERSH: Whistleblowers are just people who say there’s something more important here than my boss or the general or the admiral or the president.

FRANZ GAYL: The most common vehicle used was the Humvee. They were never built to withstand weapons that the insurgents were using, these IEDs.

UNIDENTIFIED: The estimates are that about a third of the casualties in Iraq were due to Humvees.

FRANZ GAYL: Hundreds of Marines were tragically lost, probably thousands maimed, unnecessarily. So I said, “Let’s replace the Humvees with what are called MRAPs, mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles.” The MRAP was bound to save lives.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Franz Gayl in the clip from War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. Robert Greenwald, he was one of the few whistleblowers who actually was able to keep his job, where some of the others have had really terrible times after they did their exposés. Could you talk about that, as well?

ROBERT GREENWALD: Yeah. One of the things that was a common denominator with all the whistleblowers we interviewed is the terrible personal price they paid—even Franz. He was saving lives, literally saving hundreds of lives. He was fired initially. But this is where organizing makes such an incredible impact. Organizations, POGO/GAP got behind him. They worked. People called. They took action. And it really worked. It got him his job back. And it’s important to keep that in mind.

The other cases were horrific. And what is happening over and over again is the Obama administration and previous administrations are literally shooting the messengers—punishing the whistleblowers, trying to pass laws that make it harder for whistleblowers. And look, the only way we find out about the national security state is by these people coming forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Greenwald, part two of this conversation, as we go through the whistleblowers, we’ll post online at democracynow.org. The new film is called War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State.

As we wrap up, Juan, you’re headed out after tomorrow’s show to Chicago and Detroit to speak about Harvest of Empire?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, the film is premiering there at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday night, and I’ll be there after the 8:15 showing for a Q&A with the audience, and then at Wayne State University at noon on Saturday.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’ll put all the details at our website at democracynow.org.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Find this story at 18 April 2013

Undercover Activist Details Secret Filming of Animal Abuse & Why “Ag-Gag” Laws May Force Him to Stop

An animal rights investigator details how he has spent over a decade secretly filming animal abuse and why that work is now imperiled by a wave of laws sweeping the country. Speaking on the condition we conceal his identity, “Pete” has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses after applying to work at the location. He has released video footage to law enforcement and activist groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against the abusers. His investigations and footage have led to at least 15 criminal cases and have been used in several documentaries. But now Pete’s work is under threat. A dozen or so state legislatures have introduced bills that target people who covertly expose farm animal abuse. Nicknamed “ag-gag” laws, they would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms or apply for a job at one without disclosing affiliations with animal rights groups. They also require activists to hand over undercover videos within 24 hours, preventing them from amassing a trove of material and publicizing their findings on their own. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

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

AARON MATÉ: In recent years, activists and investigators have gone undercover to reveal shocking cases of animal cruelty at some of the nation’s largest plants and farms. In many cases, they have made secret videos of the abuses, leading to prosecutions, closures, recalls and vows from the offenders to change their practices. In 2008, this undercover investigation by the Humane Society exposed wrongdoing by a California meat processor. A warning to our viewers, some of the images are very graphic.

HUMANE SOCIETY INVESTIGATION: An investigation by the Humane Society of the United States uncovers abuse of downed dairy cows, cows too sick or too injured to stand, at a California slaughterhouse. What’s more, the meat is being served to children through the National School Lunch Program.

AARON MATÉ: That undercover investigation by the Humane Society resulted in the largest meat recall in U.S. history. In the last two years, activists have also caught on camera employees of a Tyson Foods supplier in Wyoming flinging piglets into the air, workers at Bettencourt Dairies in Idaho shocking cows, and the searing of beaks off of young chicks at Sparboe Farms in Iowa. In the case of Tyson and Bettencourt, the employees were charged with cruelty to animals. In the case of Sparboe Farms, the company lost one of its biggest customers: the fast food giant McDonald’s.

AMY GOODMAN: But the videos have also sparked a reaction in the oppose direction: criminalizing those who blow the whistle. A front-page article in The New York Times this weekend noted that a dozen or so state legislatures have introduced bills that target people who covertly expose farm animal abuse. These so-called “ag-gag” bills, as they’re known, make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms or apply for a job at one without disclosing affiliations with animal rights groups. They also require activists to hand over undercover videos immediately, preventing them from publicizing findings and sparking public outcry or documenting trends.

Five states already have ag-gag laws in place. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining a list that includes Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Many of these bills have been introduced with the backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a mechanism for corporate lobbyists to help write state laws.

In a moment, we’ll host a debate on the so-called “ag-gag” laws, but first we’re joined by one of the activists whose undercover work has sparked their passage. The activist agreed to join us today on the condition he could use a pseudonym and conceal his identity. He asked us to refer to him simply as “Pete.” Pete is an undercover animal rights investigator who has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses for the past 11 years. He has released footage to groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against the abusers. His investigations have led to at least 15 criminal cases, and his videos have been used in a number of documentaries.

Pete, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what it is that you do?

PETE: Sure. Thank you for having me.

What I do is go undercover to work for an extended period of time, maybe two weeks, maybe longer, maybe six weeks or so, at farms, ranches and slaughterhouses. And the main thing that I do is focus on any and all criminal activity that exists at a facility. So, an undercover investigator’s job is to show everything that occurs, whether it’s legal or illegal. There’s a lot of standard practices that may look cruel, but they’re legal. And that is up to a campaigns department and lobbyists and the public to decide if they want to change that.

For an investigator, the main objective is to document all illegal activity and get that information to the authorities. And every single facility, whether it is a corporate facility or a family farm, whether it has a couple hundred animals or whether it has a million chickens on it, every one that I’ve worked at has been breaking the law. And because we keep finding illegal activity, and because we’re getting more cooperation from law enforcement now, I believe that has fueled some of these ag-gag laws in an attempt to try to stop us.

AARON MATÉ: And Pete, how do you go about doing it? Obviously, here we’re calling you Pete, not your real name. Do you give your real name when you’re applying for these jobs?

PETE: Yes, I do. I give—you know, because I have to fill out a W-2, and so I’m obligated to put my real name. You know, these investigations are done legally, so we don’t use fake IDs. You know, we don’t use fake names. And the most critical point is that when we’re hired, we do everything how they tell us to do it, so, you know, we try to fit in. We generally—you know, an investigator’s—part of the job is to always make sure that if you’re doing a good job, you get them to note that and let you know you are in fact doing your job: They can’t blame any problems on you.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about your time working at the Ohio hog farm in 2006. You captured this footage showing hundreds of impregnated pigs crammed into gestation crates that restrict their movement. They’re held in these crates, standing up or collapsed on the floor, for up to 116 days. The investigation was featured in the HBO documentary Death on a Factory Farm. Let’s go to a clip.

PETE: It’s a large farm. Basically, their operation is to birth and raise the pigs, then send them off to become hogs ready for slaughter. They use gestation crates and farrowing crates, just like most other hog farms in America. Gestation crates are where sows are impregnated in those crates, and they’re waiting while they’re pregnant.

How do they know which ones are pregnant? How do you know on a pig?

HOG FARMER: Huh?

PETE: You just see on the belly?

HOG FARMER: All these are pregnant.

PETE: You can just tell on the belly?

HOG FARMER: Yeah.

PETE: They are totally confined, shoulder to shoulder so they can’t move, for about 113 to 116 days. If they lie down, they have to plop straight down.

AMY GOODMAN: That is an excerpt of the HBO documentary. Pete, what happened here? How did you document it? And what resulted from your findings?

PETE: So, in that investigation, that was a little bit different. And in that, we actually had a whistleblower complaint that they were hanging crippled sows to death. They would—they would wait until they had too many sows, the female hogs, that were downed, and they started to become a nuisance. And so then they would be dragged out. They’d put a chain around their necks, then hang them from a front loader. And it would take about four to five minutes for them to be hanged to death.

Normally in an investigation, the targets are actually chosen randomly, and we consistently find violations of the law, regardless. But in this case, I went in because there was a whistleblower who complained about that specific act. However, a judge determined that hanging hogs to death was a legal means of euthanasia, and so they were not prosecuted for that act.

AARON MATÉ: Pete, I just want to clarify, you said earlier that you find cruelty 100 percent of the time?

PETE: One hundred percent of the time. You know, I mean, it would stand to reason that there has to be a farm out there, at least one, that’s not breaking the law. That would stand to reason. The only thing I can tell you is that I have not found it yet.

So, I have worked at a—for example, just with the dairies alone, I’ve worked at Bettencourt Dairy in Idaho, which at the one site that I was at, one of their numerous sites, there were about 6,000 cows, and, you know, people were breaking the law every day there. I’ve worked at the Conklin Dairy Farm in Ohio. It was a family-owned farm, had about 200 cows, the most sadistic animal abuse that I’ve ever seen. And I’ve worked at the E6 Cattle Ranch in Texas, also family-owned, and the owner was convicted for cruelty to animals. Another MFA investigator worked at a large dairy in New York, and he worked alongside a mechanic. And it just so happened that the one worker that he was working alongside was also convicted for breaking the law for cruelty to animals.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about one of the dairies, Pete. You recently infiltrated Bettencourt Dairies in Idaho and released some shocking footage. The video shows a cow being dragged on the floor by a chain attached from her neck to a moving tractor. It also shows dairy workers viciously beating and shocking cows and violently twisting their tails. Additionally, your hidden camera captured unsafe and unsanitary conditions, including feces-covered floors that cause cows to regularly slip, fall and injure themselves. There were also sick and injured cows suffering from open wounds, broken bones and infected udders left to suffer without veterinary care. Now, Bettencourt Dairies is Idaho’s largest dairy operation and cheese supplier for Kraft and Burger King. Three of the dairy workers were charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty due to your investigation. Tell us exactly what happened, how you got the video out, how you made it public, and who these people were who were convicted.

PETE: Absolutely. So, the entire purpose behind the Bettencourt investigation was that—I guess I should start by saying that my identity has been made public by the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and they’ve been trying to prevent me from getting undercover at farms and slaughterhouses. So the whole reason that I went to Idaho is specifically because Mercy for Animals hired me to just work at any facility that I could. And so I went to Idaho because I’ve never been there, and I chose the dairy industry because I hadn’t worked at a dairy in over two years. On that alone, I decided to go apply at Bettencourt. They were the first place to hire me.

And within 45 minutes of arriving on my first day, there was the—I filmed the incident that you discussed of someone putting a chain around a downed cow’s neck and dragging her out of a stall. The manager, Felipe, of that site, the Dry Creek Dairy site, he shocked the downed cow about 50 times with a hand-held device. He was the one who put the chain around her neck. I still don’t understand why he was not charged for that crime. But there it was, on my first day, that management was involved in the most hideous act of abuse that I saw while I was there.

The investigation lasted three weeks, and there were acts of unnecessary cruelty, of people beating and punching cows in the face and punching them in the eyes, and so forth, throughout that time. Once we felt that we had established a pattern of abuse and showed everyone who was involved in it, though no cow during that time had an imminent threat to their so that we felt we needed to cut the case immediately, we then went to law enforcement.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to these people? Are they still working in the plant, though they were charged with misdemeanor? And the companies that use Bettencourt, the largest plant in the state?

PETE: Right. So, I guess first I should say Felipe, to my knowledge, is still running that site. He was not charged. There were three workers that were charged. Two fled. One was convicted. And the company itself was not charged.

So, the Bettencourts said that, you know, they’re going to put up cameras and that they’re going to have people sign a policy saying, “Don’t abuse animals.” I want to make this very clear: Most facilities that I’ve worked at, you have to sign a form that says you will not abuse animals. I have worked at more than one facility that has cameras that are operating there. I don’t know who’s behind the camera, but certainly they’ve never uncovered anything that I’ve been able to find with my hidden cameras. So I don’t believe that that’s going to actually do anything to minimize the amount of illegal cruelty at Bettencourt.

AARON MATÉ: Pete, I also want to ask you about what you uncovered at the Martin Creek Kennel in Arkansas. Your investigation was featured in the 2006 HBO documentary called Dealing Dogs. Let’s go to a clip. And again, a warning to our viewers: These images are very graphic.

PETE: Up at the trench, there’s a table sitting right next to the trench with a bloody knife on top. And the whole table is just covered in dried blood. The area around the table is just littered with dog organs.

These are lines of trenches. Started out here, and he keeps digging new trenches as he fills them up. More dogs, whole dogs. OK, this dog here had been cut open.

AARON MATÉ: That’s a clip from the 2006 HBO documentary Dealing Dogs. Pete, talk about what you found there.

PETE: Sure. So, that facility, they had been suspected for a long time of abusing animals. And it was a place that was licensed by the USDA to sell random-source dogs and cats to research labs. That’s called a Class B license. A few of those still exist, and most of them now buy their dogs and cats from pounds. So they go to the local shelter and then—or animal control facility, and then they’ll resell them to research. That facility was the largest in operation, having over 600 dogs at a time, over 100 cats at a time. And they would sell to universities for research all over the country. Not only were they abusing the dogs on a daily basis, but they were also getting a lot of stolen pets.

That facility was eventually shut down. The U.S. attorney’s office got involved, because they were also involved in a felony fraud. They had a veterinarian pre-signing their interstate health certificates without checking the dogs. And so, for every one of those that crossed state lines, it was a felony. It’s kind of like hitting Al Capone for tax evasion. But anyway, all of the animals were rescued once the U.S. attorney’s office raided the facility, and they were permanently shut down.

That said, there’s an interesting point about that case, which is that, you know, you look at—you look at a facility like that, it’s licensed by the government, and you wonder how can they be doing these things. Like, how can all of these farms and slaughterhouses be breaking the law, and no one but undercover activists finds out about it? Well, at Martin Creek Kennel, I watched a USDA inspection. I watched two federal inspectors walk through the facility, and they did not find a single dog that was dying of open wounds that I was able to document that day at that facility. I’ve seen federal inspections at several facilities that I’ve worked at, and they don’t find any of the crimes that I’ve uncovered while I’m there. So, I applaud the USDA for all of the action that they take, and I’m not trying to—I’m not trying to come down on them. But what I’m trying to say is that an inspection alone or third-party verification does not find the kind of criminal activity that an undercover investigation will find. And there is no law enforcement agency that exists in this country to do undercover work of puppy mills, factory farms and slaughterhouses.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete—

PETE: It’s up to nonprofit groups.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the so-called ag-gag bills that would criminalize the undercover work you do? Republican State Senator David Hinkins of Utah told his local station, KSL-TV, he doesn’t understand opposition to the so-called ag-gag bills. Hinkins said, quote, “If a wife were abusing her husband, we wouldn’t sneak into their living room and set up a hidden camera. We don’t want people mistreating animals. … There are authorities they can contact. They don’t need to be detectives or the Pink Panther sneaking around.” Your response?

PETE: Two things. Number one, animals cannot speak for themselves. So, of course, domestic violence is a complicated issue, but ultimately, you can question a battered spouse and try to get the truth from them. You cannot ask an animal, “Who kicked you?” or “Who’s neglecting you?”

The second thing—and I hesitate to say this because I have so much respect for law enforcement, and we’ve seen so much cooperation from law enforcement especially in the last few years, but corruption and apathy from law enforcement still is a big problem that we find when we’re dealing with animal cases. And if you’re a cop, and if you hear that, and that shocks you, it’s because you’re a good cop. But I can’t tell you how many times it is that we find clear violations of the law, and the local authorities won’t do anything. And it’s tough. You know, it’s very hard, if you’re a police officer in a rural county, you go to church with, and you live alongside, or you’re involved in the same business as the people who some activist comes in and starts showing conditions that, you know, they point out are illegal, but that you may—you may do yourself, or your friends may do themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete, how would the ag-gag bills—

PETE: So that makes it a very complicated issue.

AMY GOODMAN: —affect you and your work?

PETE: They would make it illegal for me to do my job.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

PETE: It’s pure and simple. Well, so, the ag-gag laws generally say that if you document conditions at a facility, if you take a photograph or video of an animal agriculture facility, you’re breaking the law.

What they’ll also say—and this is the most clever—is they’ll say that if you see an act of illegal abuse, you have to report it within 24 hours. That’s misleading. It’s misleading because if you just show illegal activity from one individual, you can’t then show who else is involved in that illegal activity. And when one person is busted—and I absolutely swear to this—they’re not going to—it’s not going to stop other people from breaking the law. It’s going to let everyone else know they need to be more careful about how they do it, or they just need to make sure that they’re more careful about who they hire.

The second thing is that it’s not always clear what is illegal. The first dairy that I worked at, I saw someone kick a cow right in the side of her head to try and get her to stand. I documented it, thought it was illegal. Turns out, it’s perfectly normal to try to do to a cow to make her stand, that the first thing you should do is kick her right in the side of the head or the neck. When I saw people hanging crippled sows to death in Ohio, I assumed that surely that’s illegal. In fact, it looked sadistic. Turns out that’s perfectly legal. So you don’t always know.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what happens when you get to continue to record? What is your point that when you turn it in after 24 hours, it hurts what you do?

PETE: Well, so let’s say that you go to a facility, and you believe that someone has—in fact, let’s set it up as best we can. Let’s say you see an act that you believe is illegal, someone admits that it’s illegal, and you have an attorney standing by within 24 hours to tell you it’s illegal. You’re very unlikely to meet all three of those conditions. You are then missing out on any pattern of abuse to determine if this is a one-off incident. You’re then missing out on an opportunity to determine if anyone else is involved in breaking the law. And you’re missing out on an opportunity to find out if management at that facility is aware of this, to see if it’s more of a systemic problem, like we found at Bettencourt and like we found at multiple facilities when we do these investigations. So it really hinders—it prevents you from working a criminal case.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete, you wanted to be a police officer when you were young?

PETE: Yes, absolutely. That’s the reason that I started doing this. I wanted to go into law enforcement, but, you know, I realized there’s a lot of people that are going into law enforcement, and there’s very few people doing this. And there is just no such thing as a cop whose sole job is to go undercover to look out for farmed animals or for dogs in puppy mills. So I decided to combine my two passions, since I was an animal rights activist and I wanted to be a cop, and try and do this job.

AARON MATÉ: And, Pete, since these ag-gag laws have been passed, have you stopped your work in any of the states where they have gone into effect?

PETE: Yes, I have. The main group that I work for is Mercy for Animals. They are an extremely gutsy group. They are extremely professional. And they are very, very focused on not only campaigning for animal welfare, but for finding illegal activity on farms and slaughterhouses. It’s why I love working for them. And they do everything completely legally. So, any states where the ag-gag laws have passed, it’s a no-go to work there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you for being with us. Pete is the name he asked us to use; it’s not his real name, though he does use his real name when he goes undercover; is an undercover animal rights investigator who has secretly captured animal abuse on farms and slaughterhouses. He has released the footage to groups such as Mercy for Animals, helping spark national outcry and charges against abusers. He’s using the pseudonym to conceal his identity, not disclosing his whereabouts, so he can continue to get hired by unknowing slaughterhouses, farms and other facilities suspected of animal abuse. HBO and others have used his video in their documentaries.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll have a debate on the so-called ag-gag bills. Stay with us.

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Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Find this story at 9 April 2013

Debate: After Activists Covertly Expose Animal Cruelty, Should They Be Targeted With “Ag-Gag” Laws?

So-called “ag-gag” bills that criminalize undercover filming on farms and at slaughterhouses to document criminal animal abuse are sweeping the country. Five states, including Missouri, Utah and Iowa, already have such laws in place. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining a list that includes Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Many of these bills have been introduced with the backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a mechanism for corporate lobbyists to help write state laws. We host a debate on the ag-gag laws with two guests: independent journalist Will Potter, and Emily Meredith, communications director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

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

AARON MATÉ: We turn now to a debate on the so-called ag-gag bills that would criminalize undercover filming on farms and at slaughterhouses. Five states have already passed ag-gag laws. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont.

AMY GOODMAN: For a discussion on these so-called ag-gag laws, we’re joined by two guests. Will Potter, freelance reporter who’s been covering the bills and ALEC for years, the American Legislative Exchange Council, he runs the blog GreenIsTheNewRed.com. He’s also the author of Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege. And we’re joined by Emily Meredith, the communications director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance. The group’s annual summit will be held next month with a heavy focus on the undercover animal cruelty videos and the ag-gag laws trying to block them. The summit’s theme is “Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food & Consumer Confidence.” Both guests are joining us from Washington, D.C.

Let us begin with Emily Meredith. Can you talk about the—

EMILY MEREDITH: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Morning. It’s good to have you with us—the Animal Agriculture Alliance and what these laws are that are being often successfully passed around the country?

EMILY MEREDITH: Sure. Well, the Animal Agriculture Alliance is the largest national coalition of individual farmers and ranchers, veterinarians, processing facilities and a host of national organizations representing basically every protein group. And we work to make sure that there’s a unified voice communicating and engaging with consumers and helping them understand where their food comes from.

And this farm protection legislation, which has been termed ag-gag legislation by the activist community, is extremely important because these undercover videos are harmful to the farm owners where these videos are taped, the farm families that work those farms day in and day out, and the animal agriculture industry truly as a whole. And these videos damage their reputations. They bring harsh criticism. And many of these videos have found no legitimate instances of abuse, but rather use manipulated footage. They show false narrative of the images that are being shown. And they’re meant to shock and awe consumers and to really highlight conduct that the animal activist groups want to put an end to the entire industry. They want to end the animal agriculture industry. And that’s what these videos are about. And that’s why legislation like this is so important. It is because this legislation is meant to protect the right of these people to continue to operate their farms and ranches and to continue to provide food to this hungry country and the world.

AARON MATÉ: Will Potter, you’ve covered this issue extensively. Your thoughts on what are called the ag-gag laws or farm protection laws?

WILL POTTER: Well, there is certainly a lot of truth to what you just said. I mean, these undercover investigations have created a lot of distrust with the industry and really questioned where people are getting their meat and animal products from. It’s important to point out, though, that these investigations have also led to criminal charges across the country. They’ve led to the largest meat recall in U.S. history. They’ve led to ballot initiatives across the country in which consumers are speaking out.

And to frame this as something by animal welfare groups who are seeking to abolish animal agriculture is just disingenuous. The people that are opposed to these bills are people like the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Press Photographers Association. These are not radical extremist animal rights activists; these are everyone who cares about where their food comes from and whether or not they have a right to know about what they’re buying.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Meredith, your response?

EMILY MEREDITH: Well, I would say that these videos are—they’re showing families, they’re showing farms and slaughterhouses, and they’re basically making them guilty without ever giving them the opportunity to address the allegations that are levied in those videos. They’re not giving them the opportunity to take corrective action. I know that Pete mentioned that they often turn the videos over to the authorities. That is completely—I think that’s disingenuous, when in fact they actually release these videos direct to the media. They send them direct to companies. One of the farms where—that Pete mentioned, they sent the video direct to CNN and to Burger King. And it was in fact the farm owners that turned that footage over to the state prosecutor and took responsibility, fired five of his employees, at least five of his employees, and turned that footage over. And I think that’s—that’s disingenuous.

If you truly care about animal welfare, you’re not going to wait even a minute to report animal abuse. You’re going to see it, you’re going to stop it, and you’re going to say something. And I think that’s very important to note. This footage is taken for weeks or months. It’s held, and it’s released at a politically opportune or strategically conceived time. And it’s used—these videos are used for these groups’ fundraising purposes. I know Pete mentioned Mercy for Animals. Yes, they release these videos, and they release them under a big “donate now” button. And I think that’s really and truly disingenuous. And that’s why this legislation is so crucial.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, your response?

WILL POTTER: I think it’s interesting to say something like the activists are making people who abuse animals and are facing felony animal cruelty charges, in many cases, making them guilty. I mean, it completely restructures the debate away from the people who are actually committing the abuses.

And I think it’s important to point out also that we can’t limit this discussion to what’s being described as criminal activity. Although these investigations have certainly led to criminal charges across the country, much of what these investigators are documenting are actually standard industry practices. I think most people would be shocked to learn that there is not one federal law that protects farm animals during their lives. There are some legislation that protects animals as they’re being transported and some legislation that protects animals as they’re being slaughtered, but that exempts poultry, which are about 90 to 95 percent of animals that are killed. So, to put this in another way, there’s about nine billion animals killed every year for food in this country by an industry with virtually no government oversight and no accountability. These undercover investigators are really the only meaningful way that American consumers have a right to know how their food is produced and to have a check and balance on a multibillion-dollar industry.

AARON MATÉ: Emily, does the industry have safeguards in place that you think counter what Will is saying is needed, which is people investigating and doing monitoring of these farms?

EMILY MEREDITH: Oh, for sure. I mean, I think the last thing that the industry needs is activist groups that really wish to see a vegan world, quote-unquote, “policing” them. Some of the measures that are in place are every employee that is hired on a farm or ranch is required to sign a document saying if they see abuse, they will report it to managers, to farm owners, and even to local authorities. There are a lot of farms, ranches, processing facilities, that have video cameras in place that run every day, that a quality assurance manager or some sort of manager is reviewing that footage. There’s trainings in place. A lot of these facilities train in multiple languages to make sure that their employees understand how to properly handle animals and care for them.

And I think the bottom line to really note here is that these—98.2 percent of farms and ranches in this country are family-owned. I think that the term “factory farm” gets thrown around a lot, and that’s a completely—again, a term made up by—a very catchy term made up by the activist community, whereas, in reality, the majority of farms and ranches in this country are family-owned. And these farm families, they truly care about their animals. And they want—it’s not in their best interest to have abuse allegations levied against them. They want to make sure that every one of their employees is doing the right thing, that they’re doing the right thing, and that they can continue to do what they love to do and what has been in their families for generations. Some of these farms and ranches have been in operation for a hundred years. They don’t want to have any allegations against them that would allege animal cruelty, because that is—A, it’s bad for business, but, B, it goes against what they were raised to do. And I think that that’s really important to note. And we need to remember that these people are producing our food every day.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, what about Emily Meredith’s points that the vast majority of farms are family farms and that they successfully monitor themselves?

WILL POTTER: It’s completely nonexistent. Old MacDonald’s farm just does not exist anymore. We’re talking about nine to 10 billion animals raised for food every year. These are not little red barns dotting the countryside. These are industrial operations, in some cases with a million birds on a single farm. To say that this is a family business is just misrepresenting how the entire animal agriculture industry functions. This is a multibillion-dollar industry that, as I said, has virtually no safeguards, no oversight from the government. And a handful of activists and whistleblowers have really rattled the industry to its core.

And I think what that really represents is that as these investigations are exposed, they not only lead to criminal charges, but they’ve really changed the nature of the public debate. Most people have been led to believe exactly what Ms. Meredith said, that there are these little red barns and Old MacDonald raising animals for American consumption. But that just doesn’t happen. So people, when they see this footage, when they become aware of how this industry operates, they’re appalled. And I think that really reflects the sea change in the national dialogue right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, I want to ask you about how journalists will be impacted by these bills, but first let’s turn to this 2011 report by ABC’s Brian Ross on McDonald’s dropping a large McMuffin egg supplier. The fast food chain fired Sparboe Farms following allegations of animal cruelty.

BRIAN ROSS: In the wake of an ABC News investigation, McDonald’s has fired Sparboe Farms, citing undercover video made by an animal rights group, Mercy for Animals, showing mindless animal cruelty, most of which is too graphic to broadcast.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, can you comment on this?

WILL POTTER: I mean, particularly what concerns me as a journalist is exactly what you just described. I mean, these bills are so broad that they wrap up, in some cases, photography and video documentation. They wrap up anyone who distributes or possesses that footage. And even the reformed bills, as they’ve been presented, which focus on misrepresenting yourself in job application or the mandatory reporting provisions, those still put reporters at risk.

I think people need to understand that there’s a long history of investigative journalism in this country, I mean, dating back to Nellie Bly, who pretended to be insane in order to expose systemic abuses in insane asylums across the country, for reporters to document these types of abuses in this way. In addition to that, not everyone who is exposing and making the news has congressional press credentials. We’re in a climate right now where some of the national headlines are made not by investigative journalists, but by people that are taking it upon themselves to document this kind of corruption.

AMY GOODMAN: Give us examples of what has been exposed that has led to the closing of factories, changes in policy.

WILL POTTER: I think it’s really reflective of this national climate to see what happened in North Carolina this last week. A fifth person, a fifth employee of Butterball pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges. And on that same day, the North Carolina Legislature introduced a new bill that criminalizes the very investigation that led to those criminal charges, and also led to the ousting of a top Ag official in North Carolina on obstruction of justice. I think that really wraps up, you know, the totality of what we’re talking about, that the mechanisms in place that are meant to be safeguards in many ways themselves are corrupt. And it’s taken undercover investigators to expose that and to allow for this dialogue of what needs to happen to reform.

AMY GOODMAN: And a point that Emily Meredith made about if you see abuse, if you do get in there and you do film it, you should have to turn the film over within 24 hours, what is your response to that, Will Potter?

WILL POTTER: I think there are a couple things to point out. One is that this doesn’t allow for a systemic or a multi-abuse pattern to be exposed. For instance, no one would go to the FBI or to the police and say that they should bust the mob after catching one illegal activity. And I think that’s really the same situation here. Do we want to see one aberrant behavior, or do we want to see what is happening every single day on these farms to get a complete picture of what’s happening and how our food is being processed?

I think the second thing to think about is that many of the people who work on these facilities are some of the most vulnerable populations in the country. These are people that in many cases are not native English speakers, that are not familiar and don’t have access to an attorney within 24 hours. So for them to make the decision to report this information and put their livelihood on the line cannot be forced on them in such a short amount of time. That really places an unfair burden on the workers. And that’s why groups like the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO have opposed this, as well.

AARON MATÉ: Emily Meredith, many points to respond to here. Will Potter’s point that forcing this quick disclosure puts an unfair burden on workers?

EMILY MEREDITH: I think that’s blatantly untrue. I think that it’s easy for the activist community to sit there and say it puts an unfair burden on workers, when, in reality, I think it puts an equal burden when they cut and run after obtaining the footage that they want and release it to the mainstream media. I mean, you’re showing workers there that are most—in most cases, not doing anything wrong, are complying with standard industry practices, and you’re releasing that footage direct to the public. So, where are the activists in doing what Mr. Potter just suggested, in helping those workers get attorneys and making sure that they’re represented? They’re not doing that.

And I think it’s easy for them to sit there and say that—you know, make all these excuses why their videos are necessary; however, I think we need to remember that these videos play a huge part in their bottom lines. They’re a huge part to their fundraising campaigns, and it’s how these organizations, like Mercy for Animals, like the Humane Society, like PETA—that’s how these organizations stay in business and continue to operate.

And I would also say that there’s nothing in the Constitution that would give you a right to videotape on private property. In fact, there’s many states that have—that prohibit videotaping in any sort of business, not just on farms and ranches, not just in agriculture. And I think that that—that’s a very crucial point, because just because you’re an undercover activist doesn’t give you the right to go onto someone’s private property. And in many cases, these are family farms, as I’ve mentioned before. Animals are 100 feet from the family home. It doesn’t give you a right, just because you want to—you think you want to expose something, to go onto that private property and to videotape.

And these farms and ranches, they do need protection. In fact, I will say one more thing, if I may, which is that the first of these bills which—the first of these recent bills was actually written at the kitchen table of former Iowa Representative Annette Sweeney. This bill, she had farm—she’s a farmer herself. She raises animals. And she had other farm families coming to her, saying, “What’s our recourse? You know, these videos are spreading misinformation. They’re using false footage. They’re using footage that wasn’t even obtained in our facility. And we don’t have a recourse, and we need to do something about it.” And so, she sat down with other legislators at her kitchen table and drafted the first one of these bills to protect families like hers. And I think that that’s what we really need to remember, is that—

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go—let’s go to who is writing the legislation. And here I want to ask you about the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, in pushing these state bills. ALEC spokesperson Bill Meierling told the Associated Press, quote, “At the end of the day it’s about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy. You wouldn’t want me coming into your home with a hidden camera.” Let’s put this question to Will Potter, because Emily Meredith raised it, as well, that people don’t have a right to go onto private property and film.

WILL POTTER: Well, if I were keeping pigs in my home their entire lives and not allowing them to turn around, keeping chickens in battery cages and debeaking them, or docking pigs’ tails without anesthesia, I probably wouldn’t want anyone coming into my home and documenting that, either.

I think what is missing the point here is that the American Legislative Exchange Council is behind a coordinated effort, dating back to about 2003, in which they’ve drafted model legislation criminalizing a wide range of activity, from nonviolent civil disobedience to the undercover investigations of animal welfare groups as terrorism. And over the next 10 years, they’ve used that legislation around the country. And in—the recent attempts of ag-gag bills are really an extension of that. This is a concerted effort by corporations to silence their opposition, and it’s bankrolled by some of the most powerful industries on the planet.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does ALEC fit into this picture, this organization where corporate heads and legislators get together and write legislation?

WILL POTTER: So, I think most of your listeners are familiar with ALEC, because Democracy Now! has reported on it quite a bit. But the way the group functions is by taking thousands of dollars of donations from corporations, and in exchange for that money, these corporations are allowed to draft model legislation. And these model bills are introduced around the country without any fingerprints tying them to the industries that crafted or are attempting to craft the law, so most people have no idea where these bills are actually coming from. Meanwhile, ALEC mobilizes lawmakers around the country. For instance, in Utah, my reporting on the ag-gag bill there showed that the Senate, as it—the Utah Senate that passed the bill, over half of the supporting votes came from ALEC members. I mean, we really have no idea of the true scope of this organization, but it’s clear, especially with this wave of ag-gag bills, that ALEC bills has been a driving force behind these attempts to criminalize activists.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Meredith, how involved is ALEC in the legislation that’s passing in state after state, most recently this week introduced in North Carolina?

EMILY MEREDITH: Well, I’ll go back to what I said earlier, which was the first recent one of these bills was really written around the kitchen table by someone who is a farmer herself, who has a vested interest in this, and who was approached by other farm families, and looking for a recourse for these videos, looking for someone to help them protect themselves, really. And I think that it doesn’t matter where the impetus is coming from, and I would—I would strive to say that the impetus is coming from farm families themselves.

But the true point is that, you know, as Will Potter pointed out, well, I—you know, I don’t think you would want me videotaping that. Well, you know, I think that that is—that is untrue. I think that there’s a lot of farmers’ and ranchers’ organizations, like the Animal Agriculture Alliance, who are striving to be transparent and to help consumers understand where their food comes from. However, we’re running up against staunch opposition and activist organizations, like Mercy for Animals, activists, journalists, who are going in and who are really mistreating this video footage, who are taking footage for weeks and months, they’re holding it, then they’re releasing it, as I said before, at a politically opportune time. And this video footage is often spliced together from footage from 10, 20 years ago that they use in these videos. They’re running a false narrative with a lot of these images. And even—

AMY GOODMAN: Will Potter, that’s a serious charge that Emily Meredith is making, that most of it is false, the videotape.

WILL POTTER: Yeah, it is a serious charge, and I would love to see any evidence of that. I’m sure prosecutors would, as well, as they’ve brought criminal charges in these cases, not from footage from 10 or 20 years ago, but of things that happened months ago, that have immediately led to criminal investigations. If there are allegations of any of this footage being manipulated or staged or doctored in any way, I would love to see it, from anyone in the industry. But they continue to make these claims without any evidence as to what is actually happening.

To talk about transparency in this way is really interesting to me, because this industry is behind attempts to keep consumers in the dark, and then the Animal Agriculture Alliance, for example, is holding a conference about those attempts, and then, at the same time, denying access to reporters such as myself—my credentials were refused—who are trying to attend and learn about their efforts. So at every step of the way, they’re trying to keep the public in the dark, they’re trying to keep consumers in the dark, and they’re trying to make all of us unaware of what’s actually happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Meredith, your response? And the significance of the meeting that you’ll be having in Virginia, coming up on May 1st to 2nd at the Westin Arlington Gateway, “Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food & Consumer Confidence”?

EMILY MEREDITH: Well, I want to say first that the industry is not trying to keep consumers in the dark. They have made a lot of efforts to be more transparent, to communicate about things. And in fact, these bills—I want to emphasize this point—mandate reporting. They want you to see it, they want you to stop it, and they want you to say something. They don’t want you to hold the footage. As I said before, a lot of this footage is never even turned over to prosecuting authorities, until the farm families and the owners of these facilities turn it over themselves. And that has happened in numerous cases.

The second thing I want to make a point about is that after a lot of these videos are released, these farms themselves are going to independent review panels—excuse me—and having these videos reviewed by known humane handling experts, like, for instance, Dr. Temple Grandin. And I want to make this point very clear. When that review panel asks for the full footage—let’s say that the activist organization was in a facility for three weeks or three months—when that review panel, which—

AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.

EMILY MEREDITH: —which includes experts, they ask for the full footage, they’re not turned that full footage over. The activist community does not want that review panel to see the full footage. And in my mind, that’s because there really is—

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. Emily Meredith, I want to thank you for being with us, of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and Will Potter, freelance reporter, author of Green is the New Red. We will look at the case of Daniel McGowan after our show, and we’ll post it at democracynow.org.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Find this story at 9 April 2013

The lost Briton of Guantanamo: He’s been cleared – but had a devastating secret about MI6 and the Iraq invasion which means he can never be freed

Shaker Aamer, 44, has been a prisoner for more than 11 years
He has been cleared twice for freedom but still not released
The US says he can only leave Guantanamo for Saudi Arabia
Aamer says he witnessed torture that led to bogus intelligence for Iraq

Guantanamo prisoner: Shaker Aamer with two of his children

The last UK prisoner at America’s infamous terror jail camp at Guantanamo Bay is guarding a devastating secret: he witnessed the torture of another detainee in an Afghan interrogation unit which led to the crucial, bogus ‘intelligence’ that sparked Britain and America’s invasion of Iraq.

Shaker Aamer, 44, a father of five from Battersea, South London, has been a prisoner for more than 11 years even though he has never been charged – and has twice been cleared for freedom by the US.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that America wants to silence him permanently by saying he can only leave Guantanamo for Saudi Arabia, the country he left at the age of 17. But his lawyers say if he goes there he would be forbidden from speaking in public or seeing his British wife and children – and would end up in another jail.

Aamer’s case is so explosive the Commons is set to hold an emergency debate on his case on Wednesday. A Mail on Sunday investigation has revealed:
Aamer has told his lawyer how British MI6 officers were present when he was brutally assaulted and interrogated at Bagram air base in Afghanistan – where he was known as ‘Prisoner No  5’.
He said MI6 officers were also in attendance when similar treatment was meted out to Ibn Shaikh al-Libi – who was then ‘rendered’ to Egypt and tortured into claiming Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was training Al Qaeda terrorists how to use chemical weapons. That was the vital confession used by President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to justify war – and which persuaded Tony Blair that Saddam had to be toppled. If Aamer’s allegation that British officials witnessed Al-Libi’s ill-treatment is true, it would imply MI6 either knew about or was directly involved in his rendition to Egypt – one of the darkest episodes of the so-called ‘war on terror’.

Imprisoned: A US Army MP holds down the head of a detainee at Guantanamo so he is not identified
The Guantanamo detention facility is close to meltdown. Last week dozens of soldiers in riot gear stormed its minimum-security section, Camp 6. They fired on inmates with rubber bullets because mutineers had blocked the lenses of CCTV cameras with towels, sprayed guards with urine, and refused to allow their cells to be searched. The inmates involved are now all in solitary confinement.
A hunger strike started before the action has now spread through the entire jail. Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale said 63 of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners are now refusing food, up from 45 on Tuesday.

Aamer joined the strike in early February and has already lost several stone. Fifteen men are being force- fed through tubes inserted into their stomachs via their nostrils and four have been hospitalised.

Aamer’s back story is similar to those of many of the other nine British citizens and eight British residents who ended up at Guantanamo. Like them, he was caught in the chaos which followed the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Like them, he has paid a heavy price.

But there is a difference. All the others were released years ago, the first batch in March 2004.

Born in Medina, Saudi Arabia, Aamer studied in America and worked as a US Army translator during the first Gulf War. He moved to London where he continued translating and met and married Zin Siddique, a British Muslim woman.

They had already had four children and Zin was pregnant with their fifth when they went to Afghanistan – where Aamer worked for a charity – in the summer of 2001.

Prison life: Detainees at Camp Delta exercising. Shaker Aamer claims he has been abused by US soldiers during his detention at Guantanamo bay

Like other British Guantanamo detainees, he was captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance and handed over to the Americans – who were paying thousands of pounds in bounties for supposed Al Qaeda members.

After a short time at Bagram and Kandahar, he reached Guantanamo on February 14, 2002.

He has since become a high- profile figure – partly because of his fluent English – and he acts as a spokesman for the prisoners and led earlier protests and hunger strikes.

His lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, of human rights organisation Reprieve, says his actions as a figurehead cannot account for his failure to be released. Other such prisoners have been freed – including Ahmed Errachidi, a former chef in London. Errachidi was even dubbed ‘the General’ by his captors because of how he organised protests and resistance at the camp.

And the second of two tribunals which cleared Aamer was exhaustive. Established soon after Barack Obama became US President in 2009, its remit was to review all remaining Guantanamo cases. It involved not only extensive interviews between Aamer and officials from Washington, but input from all the US intelligence and security agencies as to whether he might be dangerous.

Mr Stafford Smith said their conclusion was unequivocal – he wasn’t a danger.

Yet neither Aamer nor his lawyers were told he had been cleared for release only to Saudi Arabia. Official disclosure of this critical fact emerged only six weeks ago when, after further talks with the Americans, Foreign Secretary William Hague wrote to Mr Stafford Smith.

Detainees wear orange jump suits at Guantanamo Bay in 2002, the year after Aamer was detained there. They cannot hear, see or smell anything

‘We remain committed to securing Mr Aamer’s release and return to the UK,’ he said. ‘However, it is our understanding Mr Aamer has only ever been cleared for transfer to Saudi Arabia.’

Even before the current wave of hunger strikes and protests, Aamer’s situation was wretched. In the high-security wing known as Camp 5, inmates spend 23 hours a day in cells measuring 6 ft by 10 ft, containing nothing but a toilet with a small built-in sink, a metal shelf bed with a thin mattress, and a few possessions such as a Koran and toothbrush.

Their recreation takes place in isolation – in a small unroofed area in the middle of the block. There is no association between prisoners: the only way they can communicate is by yelling down the corridor.

Now, however, conditions are much worse, with 24-hour solitary confinement. When Aamer asks for anything – even a bottle of water – he becomes a victim of what is known as ‘the Forcible Cell Extraction team’.

The team of six soldiers shackle his feet and arms behind his back and then lift him ‘like a potato sack’ – so that he cannot cause any trouble. It is a process Aamer finds ‘excruciatingly painful’ because of a long-term back injury.

Prisoner: Shaker Aamer has been a prisoner at Guantanamo for more than 11 years even though he has twice been cleared for freedom by the US

Jane Ellison – the Aamer family’s Conservative MP in Battersea who has been instrumental in securing this week’s Commons debate – said the US insistence on sending him to Saudi Arabia was ‘completely illogical’.

She said: ‘It would be disastrous for his family if he were sent to Saudi Arabia. Obama may not have been able to close Guantanamo, but I don’t understand why he can’t at least solve one small part of a very big problem by letting Shaker return to Britain.

‘It just doesn’t stack up. My feeling is they won’t let him go because he knows too much and if he spoke out it would just be too embarrassing – for some people in America, and perhaps also in Britain.’

So what does Aamer know that other prisoners don’t? Mr Stafford Smith believes it is linked to what was happening in Bagram in January 2002, just before Al-Libi was taken away by CIA agents from military custody and sent to Egypt. Aamer’s lawyer’s notes record he arrived in Bagram on Christmas Eve, 2001, and from the beginning, ‘British intelligence officers were complicit in my torture’.

There were, he has said, always at least two UK agents based there, and they witnessed the abuse he suffered: ‘I was walled – meaning that someone grabbed my head and slammed it into a wall. Further, they beat my head. I was also beaten with an axe handle. I was threatened with other kinds of abuse. People were shouting that they would kill me or I would die.’

Aamer told Mr Stafford Smith: ‘I was a witness to the torture of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi in Bagram. His case seems to me to be particularly important, and my witnessing of it particularly relevant to my ongoing detention  .  .  .  He was there being abused at the same time I was.

‘He was there being abused when the British came there. Indeed, I was taken into the room in the Bagram detention facility where he was being held. There were a number of interrogators in the room.’
GRIM REGIME OF US TERROR JAIL – AND KAFKAESQUE TIMELINE THAT DOOMED SHAKER AAMER

The Guantanamo prison in Cuba today bears little resemblance to the collection of open cages – known as Camp X-Ray – where prisoners were held when it opened in 2002.

Both they and their successor, Camp Delta, a collection of prefabricated sheds with hard roofs, have long been disused.

Instead, prisoners are held in three large, concrete two-storey buildings – each ringed by concentric security fences, along Recreation Road, which leads along the Cuban coast to a beach.
Camp 5 and Camp 6 are for ‘ordinary’ prisoners, guarded by the US military.

The super-secret Camp 7 is run by the CIA and reserved for prisoners formerly held in its ‘black site’ jails in countries such as Poland and Thailand. They include some of the world’s most notorious terrorists – including Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who face military trial as the alleged architects of 9/11.

Most of the remaining 166 detainees are said to be much less dangerous.

According to a survey by US lawyers, more than three-quarters of them were not captured ‘on the battlefield’ by Americans – but sold for huge bounty payments by the Afghan Northern Alliance or Pakistani tribesmen.

1996 – US-educated Saudi translator Shaker Aamer settles in London, marries Briton Zin Siddique.

Summer 2001 – Aamer takes family to Kabul and works for Saudi charity.

September 11, 2001 – Al Qaeda terrorists attack America.

November 2001 – Taliban regime falls.

December 18, 2001 – Ibn Shaikh al-Libi captured, taken to Bagram.

December 24, 2001 – Aamer handed to US troops by Northern Alliance; taken to Bagram.
Early January 2002 – Aamer allegedly abused with UK officials present and witnesses abuse of Al-Libi.

Mid January 2002 – Al-Libi sent by CIA to Egypt for torture.

February 14, 2002 – Aamer flown to Guantanamo.

October 2002-February 2003 – Bogus claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in WMD, based on Al-Libi’s tortured confessions, made by Bush and Powell.

2004–09 – All 17 other UK-based Guantanamo detainees freed – but Aamer kept at camp.
October 2006 – Al-Libi flown to Libya and jailed.

November 2008 – Obama pledges to close Guantanamo.

July 2009 – Al-Libi allegedly murdered in Libyan jail.

2007 and 2009 – Aamer cleared by US tribunals as safe to release but he is not freed.

February 2013 – Foreign Secretary reveals US will only allow Aamer’s transfer to Saudi Arabia, not UK.

April 2013 – Guantanamo close to meltdown with mass hunger strike and riot.

…

By David Rose

PUBLISHED: 00:04 GMT, 21 April 2013 | UPDATED: 10:24 GMT, 21 April 2013

Find this story at 21 April 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

U.S., Russian Spies’ ‘Trust Deficit’ May Have Clouded Boston Case

WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities have long cast a wary eye on counterterrorism intelligence from Russia, Obama administration officials say, raising questions about whether a “trust deficit” clouded efforts to determine if Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev posed a danger.

Any intelligence disconnect between the United States and Russia could have broader repercussions, complicating plans to cooperate on security for the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, not far from Russia’s restive north Caucasus region.

U.S. officials said they considered counterterrorism information emanating from Moscow’s bitter conflict with Islamist militants in Chechnya and other parts of the volatile north Caucasus especially suspect.

What little is known about how the FBI and other U.S. agencies handled a 2011 tip from Russia’s FSB spy service that Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, had become a follower of radical Islam suggests they dealt with it professionally, although not as a top-priority matter.

But it would not have been out of character for the U.S. government to take a jaundiced view of such information. In Tsarnaev’s case, Moscow provided few details, U.S. officials have said.

“The Russians typically file spurious requests on people that are not really terrorists, and that’s why somebody might have discounted it,” a senior State Department official said. “One wouldn’t automatically take what the Russians say at face value. You’d always have to look for a second corroboration.”

Russian “watch lists” often include political dissidents and human rights activists mixed together with militants, the senior official said.

The Russian Embassy in Washington declined to comment for this story. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly warned of the dangers of militancy from the Caucasus, may feel vindication by the Chechen connection to the Boston bombing.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper touched on U.S. unease at Moscow’s intelligence-sharing in a speech to a Washington conference on Thursday, in which he expressed pique at growing criticism over intelligence and law enforcement handling of the case.

“Whenever the Russians say something about arms control issues, well, we’re very suspicious. We’re supposed to trust but verify, not accept what the Russians say. But in this case, we accept it, whatever they say without question?” Clapper said with a shrug.

The FBI said it questioned Tsarnaev and found nothing to suggest he was a security threat. The bureau said it sought further details from the FSB, the post-Cold War successor to the KGB, but none were forthcoming.

Tamerlan, 26, was killed last week in a gun battle with police after the deadly April 15 Boston attack. His younger brother and alleged accomplice, Dzhokhar, 19, was later captured, wounded and hiding out in a suburban neighborhood.

More than two decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the United States and Russia continue spying on each other. It was less than three years ago that they arranged a spy swap after the FBI arrested a cell of “sleeper agents.”

Though Russia was quick to rally behind the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, tangible actions such as regular sharing of deep intelligence have proven harder.

The question now is whether the two countries can put distrust aside for the sake of better security.

One senior U.S. official insisted that both sides are committed, especially now that the Boston bombing has reminded everyone of the security risks ahead of the Sochi games.

“Our intelligence services are always conflicted between the need to share and the need to protect sources and methods,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But we have a mutual interest as two countries that have been victims of terrorism … . This will keep us focused.”

In the lead-up to Sochi, Putin’s pet project, the attack’s Chechen link may give the Kremlin more leverage in its attempts to get the Americans to expand information on those whom Moscow brands “extremists,” even in cases where U.S. intelligence does not assess a real threat, the senior State Department official said.

The Obama administration is already debating whether to exchange terrorist “no-fly” lists as the Russians have requested and “act like everything they give us is legit,” the official added.

Washington and Moscow have sometimes seen eye to eye on the Caucasus. In 2011, President Barack Obama and then-President Dmitry Medvedev agreed that the Caucasus Emirate militant group was a terrorist organization with al-Qaida ties. The United States offered a $5 million reward for the group’s Chechen leader, Doku Umarov, the Kremlin’s most-wanted man.

More recently, Putin has bristled at the Obama administration’s criticism of what it sees as a heavy-handed response to a long-running Muslim insurgency in the Caucasus. Many analysts say the unrest has been fueled by Moscow’s brutal repression.

A common view inside and outside of the Obama administration is that clashing assessments like these and disputes over intelligence clouded U.S. handling of the Tsarnaev tip.

…

29 April 2013
Reuters

Find this story at 29 April 2013

© Copyright 2013. The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.

The Official Tsarnaev Story Makes No Sense

We are asked to believe that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was identified by the Russian government as an extremist Dagestani or Chechen Islamist terrorist, and they were so concerned about it that in late 2010 they asked the US government to take action. At that time, the US and Russia did not normally have a security cooperation relationship over the Caucasus, particularly following the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. For the Russians to ask the Americans for assistance, Tsarnaev must have been high on their list of worries.

In early 2011 the FBI interview Tsarnaev and trawl his papers and computers but apparently – remarkably for somebody allegedly radicalised by internet – the habitually paranoid FBI find nothing of concern.

So far, so weird. But now this gets utterly incredible. In 2012 Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who is of such concern to Russian security, is able to fly to Russia and pass through the airport security checks of the world’s most thoroughly and brutally efficient security services without being picked up. He is then able to proceed to Dagestan – right at the heart of the world’s heaviest military occupation and the world’s most far reaching secret police surveillance – again without being intercepted, and he is able there to go through some form of terror training or further Islamist indoctrination. He then flies out again without any intervention by the Russian security services.

That is the official story and I have no doubt it did not happen. I know Russia and I know the Russian security services. Whatever else they may be, they are extremely well-equipped, experienced and efficient and embedded into a social fabric accustomed to cooperation with their mastery. This scenario is simply impossible in the real world.

…

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

By Craig Murray

April 23, 2013 “Information Clearing House” – There are gaping holes in the official story of the Boston bombings.

Find this story at 22 April 2013

© 2005-2013 GlobalResearch.ca

Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI ‘entrapment’ questioned

Critics say bureau is running a sting operation across America, targeting vulnerable people by luring them into fake terror plots

The FBI has drawn criticism over its apparent use of ‘entrapment’ tactics. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

David Williams did not have an easy life. He moved to Newburgh, a gritty, impoverished town on the banks of the Hudson an hour or so north of New York, at just 10 years old. For a young, black American boy with a father in jail, trouble was everywhere.

Williams also made bad choices. He ended up going to jail for dealing drugs. When he came out in 2007 he tried to go straight, but money was tight and his brother, Lord, needed cash for a liver transplant. Life is hard in Newburgh if you are poor, have a drug rap and need cash quickly.

His aunt, Alicia McWilliams, was honest about the tough streets her nephew was dealing with. “Newburgh is a hard place,” she said. So it was perhaps no surprise that in May, 2009, David Williams was arrested again and hit with a 25-year jail sentence. But it was not for drugs offences. Or any other common crime. Instead Williams and three other struggling local men beset by drug, criminal and mental health issues were convicted of an Islamic terrorist plot to blow up Jewish synagogues and shoot down military jets with missiles.

Even more shocking was that the organisation, money, weapons and motivation for this plot did not come from real Islamic terrorists. It came from the FBI, and an informant paid to pose as a terrorist mastermind paying big bucks for help in carrying out an attack. For McWilliams, her own government had actually cajoled and paid her beloved nephew into being a terrorist, created a fake plot and then jailed him for it. “I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone,” she told the Guardian.

Lawyers for the so-called Newburgh Four have now launched an appeal that will be held early next year. Advocates hope the case offers the best chance of exposing the issue of FBI “entrapment” in terror cases. “We have as close to a legal entrapment case as I have ever seen,” said Susanne Brody, who represents another Newburgh defendant, Onta Williams.

Some experts agree. “The target, the motive, the ideology and the plot were all led by the FBI,” said Karen Greenberg, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, who specialises in studying the new FBI tactics.

But the issue is one that stretches far beyond Newburgh. Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities, hang out in mosques and community centres, and talk of radical Islam in order to identify possible targets sympathetic to such ideals. Or they will respond to the most bizarre of tip-offs, including, in one case, a man who claimed to have seen terror chief Ayman al-Zawahiri living in northern California in the late 1990s.

That tipster was quickly hired as a well-paid informant. If suitable suspects are identified, FBI agents then run a sting, often creating a fake terror plot in which it helps supply weapons and targets. Then, dramatic arrests are made, press conferences held and lengthy convictions secured.

But what is not clear is if many real, actual terrorists are involved.
The homes of the Fort Dix Five were raided by the FBI. Photograph: Joseph Kaczmarek/AP

Another “entrapment” case is on the radar too. The Fort Dix Five – accused of plotting to attack a New Jersey army base – have also appealed against their convictions. That case too involved dubious use of paid informants, an apparent over-reach of evidence and a plot that seemed suggested by the government.

Burim Duka, whose three brothers were jailed for life for their part in the scheme, insists they did not know they were part of a terror plot and were just buying guns for shooting holidays in a deal arranged by a friend. The “friend” was an informant who had persuaded another man of a desire to attack Fort Dix.

Duka is convinced his brothers’ appeal has a good chance. “I am hopeful,” he told the Guardian.

But things may not be that easy. At issue is the word “entrapment”, which has two definitions. There is the common usage, where a citizen might see FBI operations as deliberate traps manipulating unwary people who otherwise were unlikely to become terrorists. Then there is the legal definition of entrapment, where the prosecution merely has to show a subject was predisposed to carry out the actions they later are accused of.

Theoretically, a simple expression, like support for jihad, might suffice, and in post-9/11 America neither judges nor juries tend to be nuanced in terror trials. “Legally, you have to use the word entrapment very carefully. It is a very strict legal term,” said Greenberg.

But in its commonly understood usage, FBI entrapment is a widespread tactic. Within days of the 9/11 terror attacks, FBI director Robert Mueller issued a memo on a new policy of “forward leaning – preventative – prosecutions”.

Central to that is a growing informant network. The FBI is not choosy about the people it uses. Some have criminal records, including attempted murder or drug dealing or fraud. They are often paid six-figure sums, which critics say creates a motivation to entrap targets. Some are motivated by the promise of debts forgiven or immigration violations wiped clean. There has also been a relaxing of rules on what criteria the FBI needs to launch an investigation.

Often they just seem to be “fishing expeditions”. In the Newburgh case, the men involved met FBI informant Shahed Hussain simply because he happened to infiltrate their mosque. In southern California, FBI informant Craig Monteilh trawled mosques posing as a Muslim and tried to act as a magnet for potential radicals.

Monteilh, who bugged scores of people, is a convicted felon with serious drug charges to his name. His operation turned up nothing. But Monteilh’s professed terrorist sympathy so unnerved his Muslim targets that they got a restraining order against him and alerted the FBI, not realising Monteilh was actually working on the bureau’s behalf.

Muslim civil rights groups have warned of a feeling of being hounded and threatened by the FBI, triggering a natural fear of the authorities among people that should be a vital defence against real terror attacks. But FBI tactics could now be putting off many people from reporting tip-offs or suspicious individuals.

“They are making mosques suspicious of anybody. They are putting fear into these communities,” said Greenberg. Civil liberties groups are also concerned, seeing some FBI tactics as using terrorism to justify more power. “We are still seeing an expansion of these tools. It is a terrible prospect,” said Mike German, an expert at the American Civil Liberties Union and a former FBI agent who has worked in counter-terrorism.

German said suspects convicted of plotting terror attacks in some recent FBI cases bore little resemblance to the profile of most terrorist cells. “Most of these suspect terrorists had no access to weapons unless the government provided them. I would say that showed they were not the biggest threat to the US,” German said.

“Most terrorists have links to foreign terrorist groups and have trained in terrorism training camps. Perhaps FBI resources should be spent finding those guys.”

Also, some of the most serious terrorist attacks carried out in the US since 9/11 have revolved around “lone wolf” actions, not the sort of conspiracy plots the FBI have been striving to combat. The 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, only came to light after his car bomb failed to go off properly. The Fort Hood killer Nidal Malik Hasan, who shot dead 13 people on a Texas army base in 2009, was only discovered after he started firing. Both evaded the radar of an FBI expending resources setting up fictional crimes and then prosecuting those involved.

Yet, as advocates for those caught up in “entrapment” cases discover, there is little public or judicial sympathy for them. Even in cases where judges have admitted FBI tactics have raised serious questions, there has been no hesitation in returning guilty verdicts, handing down lengthy sentences and dismissing appeals.

The Liberty City Seven are a case in point. The 2006 case involved an informant, Elie Assaad, with a dubious past (he was once arrested, but not charged, for beating his pregnant wife). Assaad was let loose with another informant on a group of men in Liberty City, a poor, predominantly black, suburb of Miami. The targets were followers of a cult-like group called The Seas of David, led by former Guardian Angel Narseal Batiste.

The group was, perhaps, not even Muslim, as its religious practices involved Bible study and wearing the Star of David. Yet Assaad posed as an Al-Qaida operative, and got members of the group to swear allegiance. Transcripts of the “oath-taking” ceremony are almost farcical. Batiste repeatedly queries the idea and appears bullied into it. In effect, defence lawyers argued, the men were confused, impoverished members of an obscure cult.

Yet targets the group supposedly entertained attacking included the Sears Tower in Chicago, Hollywood movie studios and the Empire State Building. Even zealous prosecutors, painting a picture of dedicated Islamic terrorists, admitted any potential plots were “aspirational”, given the group had no means to carry them out.

…

Paul Harris in New York
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 November 2011 17.33 GMT

Find this story at 16 November 2011
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The FBI’s synagogue bomb plot; The ethics of a sting operation to foment a terror plot are dubious enough, but its government-sponsored antisemitism is revolting

James Cromitie in police custody in May 2009, after his arrest by the FBI in a sting operation involving a bomb plot against a Jewish community centre in Riverdale, New York. Photograph: AP Photo/Robert Mecea Photograph: Robert Mecea/AP

On Wednesday, a much-publicised FBI terrorism sting concluded when three of four men from Newburgh, New York were sentenced to 25 years in prison (a fourth will be sentenced next Tuesday). The four men had, along with an FBI informant who led the plot, planted a bomb at a Jewish community centre just outside New York City and procured a Stinger missile with which to attack the army’s Stewart air base.

At first glance, it was the perfect homegrown terrorism trial. All the crucial ingredients were there: a group of suspects allegedly linked to a foreign terrorist organisation; the placement of explosives; and targets that were bound to arouse fear in discreet communities. The only problem, as Judge Colleen McMahon pointed out at sentencing, was that this was not really a typical terrorism case but “sui generis … unique and troubling”.

The reason, the judge explained, was that “there would never have been any case if the government had not made one up.” But this was only part of the troubling story.

The real problem began not with the suspects, but with the government’s confidential informant. Shahed Hussain, a 53-year-old Pakistani citizen who has reportedly lived in the United States for several years, served as the point person in a sting operation in which, as the judge explained, “no one except the government instigated, planned and brought [the plot] to fruition.”

Throughout the sentencing, Judge McMahon remained firm: this case was a government invention. The men in question did not agree to carry out the crime due to ideology. They had no allegiance to, or even knowledge, of the terrorist group Jaish-i-Mohammed, in whose name they allegedly acted. They were not motivated to criminal behaviour by their allegiance to Allah. They were motivated, purely and simply, by money; as such, they were criminals deserving punishment, but not terrorists. As Judge McMahon repeatedly stated, these men were not equivalent to the 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shazad, or other ideologically motivated terrorists.

Still, McMahon could find no valid legal precedent for overturning the jury conviction of the defendants on trial for terrorism-related charges. She sentenced all three men to the mandatory minimum of 25 years, rejecting the prosecution’s request for life sentences. But the question remains: why did she uphold even the mandatory minimums when she repeatedly said that the government had dreamed up the whole case? Why did she decide this way when she expressed her disappointment repeatedly with the government’s conduct in the case? Was it because, as the lead prosecutor David Raskin declared, “The fact that it was all fake really doesn’t matter.” Was it because the defendants placed what they thought to be a live bomb outside a Jewish community centre in Riverdale, and were thus willing to kill many innocent people?

The rationale for McMahon’s harsh sentence was the most pronounced and least discussed element of this sting: the blatant antisemitism at the heart of it. In dozens of hours of taped conversation, Cromitie had expounded in graphic terms about his hatred for Jews and his desire to get back at those who he felt were biased against his Muslim practices.

On Thursday, as during the trial, Judge McMahon reminded the court just how appalling were those expressions of loathing. She excoriated Cromitie for his vile views, exhibiting to her mind “a hatred that is particularly horrifying to members of my generation whose fathers and grandfathers and friends and neighbours helped liberate the concentration camps from the Nazis”. She quoted from one of the more unpleasant passages of the trial itself, denouncing the sentiment that “all the evil in the world is due to the Jews”.

…

• Research for this piece was contributed by Susan Quatrone and Camilla MacFarland

 

Boston Marathon suspects planned New York attack, says Mayor Bloomberg – video

25 Apr 2013

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg says Boston marathon bombing suspects planned to use remaining explosives to launch an attack on Times Square

25 Apr 2013

Boston suspects planned attack on New York City, Mayor Bloomberg says

22 Apr 2013

Bostonians share moment of silence for marathon bombing victims

21 Apr 2013

FBI faces questions over previous contact with Boston bombing suspect

One suspect dead, one on the run after night of violence and fear in Boston

19 Apr 2013

Ambush of a university police officer set in chain a high-speed chase and a bloody shootout with the two bombing suspects – and led to a panicked city being placed on lockdown. Ed Pilkington reports

Karen Greenberg
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 June 2011 20.30 BST

 

Find this story at 30 June 2011

 

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

Former CIA officer: ‘Absurd’ to link uncle of Boston suspects, Agency

Retired CIA officer Graham Fuller confirmed to Al-Monitor Saturday that his daughter was previously married to an uncle of the suspects in the Boston Marathon attacks, but called rumors of any links between the uncle and the Agency “absurd.”

Graham Fuller’s daughter, Samantha A. Fuller, was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (now Tsarni) in the mid-1990s, and divorced in 1999, according to North Carolina public records. The elder Fuller had retired from the agency almost a decade before the brief marriage.

“Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and they lived in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for Price Waterhouse on privatization projects,” Fulller, a former CIA officer in Turkey and vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, told Al-Monitor by email Saturday. “They also lived in our house in [Maryland] for a year or so and they were divorced in 1999, I believe.”

“I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as a senior political scientist for RAND,” Fuller continued.

Fuller said his former son in law was interesting but homesick, and moved back to Central Asia after the divorce.

“Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land, but I saw no particular involvement in politics, [although] he did try to contact other Chechens around,” Fuller continued. “He also felt homesick and eventually went back to Central Asia after the divorce. His English was shaky. (We always spoke Russian together).”

A story on the Internet implying “possible connections between Ruslan and the Agency through me are absurd,” Fuller said.

“I doubt [Ruslan] even had much to say of intelligence value other than talking about his own family’s sad tale of deportation from Chechnya by Stalin to Central Asia,” Fuller said. “Every Chechen family has such stories.”

Fuller said he had made several visits to Central Asia to do research on post-Soviet political developments, and visited his daughter and Tsarni there. “Our visit is briefly mentioned in my recent memoir, Three Truths and a Lie, as well as their marriage celebration in [Maryland],” he wrote.

A former Russian history and literature major at Harvard, Fuller said he had a long interest in Soviet minorities, and found Ruslan interesting.

Ruslan Tsarni has said in media interviews that his family was estranged from his brother Aznor’s, over what Ruslan described as the growing religious fanaticism of Aznor’s wife, Zubeidat, and that the families had not spoken for several years. Aznor and Zubeidat’s sons Tamerlan, 26, and Dzhokhar, 19, are accused of carrying out the April 15th Boston Marathon bombings.

Fuller said he thinks he met Aznor Tsarnaev once, fleetingly, in Kazakhstan. His daughter, he said, knew the family better, but when Tamerlan was just a toddler, and Dzhokhar not yet born.

…

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Laura Rozen

Find this story at 27 April 2013

© 2013 AL-MONITOR

Boston terror suspects uncle was married to CIA officer’s daughter and even shared a home with the agent

An uncle of the Boston bombers was previously married to a CIA officer’s daughter for three years, it emerged today.

Ruslan Tsarni, who publicly denounced his two terrorist nephews’ actions and called them ‘Losers’, even lived with his father-in-law agent Graham Fuller in his Maryland home for a year.

Mr Fuller was forced to explain the relationship today as news of the family link emerged online.

Son-in-law: Former CIA agent Graham Fuller, left, explained his relationship to the two Boston terror suspects’ uncle today. Ruslan Tsarni, right, was married for three years to his daughter, Samantha

He told Al-Monitor that his daughter, Samantha, was married to Ruslan, whose surname was then Tsarnaev, for three to four years in the 1990s.

The couple divorced in 1999 more than ten years after he left the agency in 1987.

‘Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and they lived in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for Price Waterhouse on privatization projects,’ Mr Fuller said.

‘They also lived in our house in [Maryland] for a year or so and they were divorced in 1999, I believe.

‘I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as a senior political scientist for RAND.’

He said his son-in-law showed no interest in the agency or politics but spoke generally about his family in Chechnya.

He said any attempts to portray the relationship as a link between the security agency and the two terrorists was ‘absurd’.

‘Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land, but I saw no particular involvement in politics,’ Fuller told Al-Monitor.

‘I doubt he even had much to say of intelligence value other than talking about his own family’s sad tale of deportation from Chechnya by Stalin to Central Asia. Every Chechen family has such stories.’

Nephews: Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could at one time count a CIA agent’s daughter as their aunt

Outraged: Ruslan Tsarni made his feelings against his nephews actions known to the media in the aftermath of the Boston attacks

Fuller visited his daughter and her husband in Bishek, as a former Russian history graduate himself interested in ‘Soviet minorities’.

He said he may have met the terror suspects’ father, Aznor, there once and his daughter knew the Tsarnaev family when Tamerlan was a toddler and before his younger brother was born.

‘I for one was astonished at the events, and to find myself at two degrees of separation from them,’ he added.

Ruslan Tsarni, who lives in Montgomery Village, Maryland, was thrust into the spotlight as the names of his two nephews emerged in connection to the Boston terror attack.

He stood on his driveway and attacked the two men calling them ‘Losers’.

He has since reported a rift between his family and that of his brother Aznor’s and said his older nephew Tamerlan had become increasingly extreme in his religious views.

…

By Katie Davies

PUBLISHED: 23:34 GMT, 27 April 2013 | UPDATED: 05:55 GMT, 28 April 2013

Find this story at 27 April 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Anti-terror task force was warned of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s long trip to Russia

Nine months before the Boston Marathon bombing, a U.S. counterterrorism task force received a warning that a suspected militant had returned from a lengthy trip to Russia, U.S. officials said.

The warning was delivered to a single U.S. Customs and Border Protection official assigned to Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a cell of specialists from federal and local law enforcement agencies. The task force was part of a network of multi-agency organizations set up across the country after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to make sure that clues and tips were shared.

But officials said there is no indication that the unidentified customs officer provided the information to any other members of the task force, including FBI agents who had previously interviewed the militant.

The man whose return from Russia went largely unnoticed was one of the two brothers who would later be accused of carrying out the April 15 bombing that killed three people and injured more than 250 others near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

The apparent failure to alert the FBI has emerged as a significant, if slender, missed opportunity to scrutinize Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s activities ahead of the Boston attack.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there would not have been reason to scrutinize Tsarnaev further, even if the information on his travels had been shared more widely.

“The FBI investigation into the individual in question had been closed six months prior to his departure from the United States and more than a year before his return,” the official said. “Since there was no derogatory information, there was no reason to suggest that additional action was warranted.”

The disclosure — one of several to cause lawmakers to express concern about persistent gaps in U.S. counterterrorism procedures — came as U.S. officials revealed that the bombing suspects may have intended to carry out a follow-up attack in New York’s Times Square.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who is still recovering at a Boston hospital from gunshot wounds, told FBI interrogators that he and his brother came up with the Times Square plan spontaneously three days after the marathon bombings, officials said. Investigators, however, have not found any evidence that operational plans were ever set in motion.

The New York plot was derailed when the Tsarnaev brothers became the target of a manhunt by law enforcement. The older brother was killed, and the younger one captured, after a chaotic pursuit through neighborhoods of Watertown, Mass.

“We don’t know if we would have been able to stop the terrorists had they arrived here from Boston,” New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) said during a news conference at which the plot was outlined. “We’re just thankful that we didn’t have to find out that answer.”

The criminal charges filed against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev indicate that the two brothers had at least a half-dozen explosive devices in addition to the two pressure-cooker bombs they are accused of detonating near the finish line of the marathon course.

U.S. officials said that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has ceased cooperating with authorities since being read his Miranda rights during an unusual, makeshift court session at his hospital bedside on Monday. Before that, investigators had questioned him for about 16 hours.

The FBI opened an investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 at the behest of Russian officials who expressed concern that he was becoming radicalized and could be planning an attack in Russia.

The bureau set the inquiry aside after concluding that Tsarnaev posed no threat. But notice that he had returned from a seven-month trip to Russia might have provided the FBI with new reasons to question him. He had traveled to the strife-torn region of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus, where rebels have adopted the tactics and language of militant Islamists.

After he returned to Boston, Tamerlan Tsarnaev began assembling an online library of jihadist videos and voiced anger in conversations with neighbors over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, U.S. officials said it is not clear that the FBI would have reopened its inquiry after Tsarnaev’s return from Russia because no new information had surfaced to indicate he was a threat. A member of an anti-terrorism panel in Dagestan said in an interview this week that he wasn’t being observed there during his visit and had done nothing to attract notice.

U.S. officials also said that the customs officer in Boston may have mentioned Tsarnaev’s return to FBI agents serving on the task force without creating a computer file to record the information had been shared.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said during an appearance at a conference in Washington on Thursday that he has seen no evidence that U.S. agencies failed. “The dots were connected,” he said. He also called on the public “not to hyperventilate for a while before we get all the facts.”

…

By Greg Miller,

Find this story at 25 April 2013

© The Washington Post Company

FBI probed bomb suspect in 2011 after a warning from Russian intelligence

THE Russian FSB intelligence security service told the FBI in early 2011 about information that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers suspected in the Boston marathon bombings, was a follower of radical Islam, two law enforcement officials say.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout, and his younger brother Dzhokhar, 19, was captured alive.

They were identified by authorities and relatives as ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who had been in the US for about a decade.

According to an earlier FBI news release, a foreign government said that based on its information, Tsarnaev, 26, was a strong believer and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the US for travel to a region in that country to join unspecified underground groups.

The FBI did not name the foreign government, but the two law enforcement officials identified the FSB as the provider of the information to one of the FBI’s field offices and also to FBI headquarters in Washington DC.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak on the record about the matter.

The FBI said that in response, it interviewed Tsarnaev and relatives, and did not find any domestic or foreign terrorism activity.

The FBI said it provided the results in the summer of 2011.

The FBI also said that it requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government.

The bureau added that in response to the request, it checked US government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans and education history.

Meanwhile a doctor involved in treating the fatally wounded Tamerlan Tsarnaev says he had injuries from head to toe but all limbs intact when he arrived at hospital.

Dr David Schoenfeld said 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was unconscious and had so many penetrating wounds when he arrived at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre after a shootout with police that it isn’t clear which ones killed him, and a medical examiner will have to determine the cause of death.

The older Tsarnaev’s clothes had been cut off by emergency responders at the scene, so if he had been wearing a vest with explosives, he wasn’t by the time he arrived at the hospital, the doctor said.

…

AP

Find this story at 21 April 2013

© The Australian

Ghost money from MI6 and CIA may fuel Afghan corruption, say diplomats

Failure of peace initiatives raises questions over whether British eagerness for political settlement may have been exploited

Hamid Karzai with the Finnish prime minister, Jyrki Katainen, in Helsinki. Photograph: Lehtikuva/Reuters

The CIA and MI6 have regularly given large cash payments to Hamid Karzai’s office with the aim of maintaining access to the Afghan leader and his top allies and officials, but the attempt to buy influence has largely failed and may have backfired, former diplomats and policy analysts say.

The Guardian understands that the payments by British intelligence were on a smaller scale than the CIA’s handouts, reported in the New York Times to have been in the tens of millions, and much of the British money has gone towards attempts to finance peace initiatives, which have so far proved abortive.

That failure has raised questions among some British officials over whether eagerness to promote a political settlement may have been exploited by Afghan officials and self-styled intermediaries for the Taliban.

Responding to the allegations while on a visit to Helsinki on Monday, Karzai said his national security council (NSC) had received support from the US government for the past 10 years, and the amounts involved were “not big” and were used for a variety of purposes including helping those wounded in the conflict. “It’s multi-purpose assistance,” he said, without commenting on the allegations that the money was fuelling corruption.

Yama Torabi, the director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan said that the presidency’s low-key response to the reports had “outraged people”.

“As a result, we don’t know what was the amount of money that was given, what it was used for and if there was any corruption involved. Money when it is unchecked can be abused and this looks like one. In addition, it can be potentially used to corrupt politicians and political circles, but there is no way to know this unless there is a serious investigation into it,” Torabi told The Guardian.

Kabul sources told the Guardian that the key official involved in distributing the payments within the NSC was Ibrahim Spinzada, a close confidant of the president known as Engineer Ibrahim. There is, however, no evidence that Spinzada personally gained from the cash payments or that in distributing them among the president’s allies and sometimes his foes he was breaking Afghan law.

Officials say the payments, referred to in a New York Times report as “ghost money”, helped prop up warlords and corrupt officials, deepening Afghan popular mistrust of the Kabul government and its foreign backers, and thereby helped drive the insurgency.

The CIA money has sometimes caused divisions between the various branches of US government represented in Kabul, according to diplomats stationed in Kabul, particularly when it helped give the CIA chief of station in Kabul direct access to Karzai without the US ambassador’s knowledge or approval.

One former Afghan budgetary official told the Guardian: “On paper there was very little money that went to the National Directorate of Security [NDS, the Afghan intelligence service], but we knew they were taken care of separately by the CIA.

“The thing about US money is a lot of it goes outside the budget, directly through individuals and companies, and that opens the way for corruption.”

Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York Times: “We called it ‘ghost money’. It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

One American official told the newspaper: “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States.”

Sources said the MI6 aid was on a smaller scale, and much of it was focused on trying to promote meetings between Karzai’s government and Taliban intermediaries, as was embarrassingly the case in 2010 when MI6 discovered a would-be Taliban leader in talks with Karzai was an impostor from the Pakistani city of Quetta.

The British payments have also been designed to bolster UK influence in Kabul, in what a source described as “an auction with each country trying to outbid the other” in the course of an often fraught relationship with the Karzai government.

Vali Nasr, a former US government adviser on Afghanistan, said: “Karzai has been lashing out against American officials and generals, so if indeed there has been funding by the CIA, you have to ask to what effect has that money been paid. It hasn’t clearly brought the sort of influence it was meant to.”

…

 

Karzai’s CIA cash has long precedent in Afghanistan – and a simple solution

30 Apr 2013

Nushin Arbabzadah: Afghans would have to back their own state in order to change foreign powers’ century-old system of buying leaders’ loyalty

29 Apr 2013

Afghanistan’s web of intrigue is a poor basis on which to rebuild a nation

27 Apr 2013

Small Wars, Far Away Places by Michael Burleigh – review

25 Apr 2013

Senator accuses US of ‘intelligence failings’ in tracking Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Hamid Karzai orders ban on ‘un-Islamic’ shows on Afghan TV

25 Apr 2013

President issues vague decree after clerics complain that many stations air programmes that are ‘counter to Islamic values’

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The Guardian, Tuesday 30 April 2013

Find this story at 30 April 2013

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

With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”

The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.

At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.

American and Afghan officials familiar with the payments said the agency’s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralized government. The officials spoke about the money only on the condition of anonymity.

It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.

Over Iran’s objections, he signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States last year, directly leading the Iranians to halt their payments, two senior Afghan officials said. Now, Mr. Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the C.I.A. to target operatives of Al Qaeda and insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of the Obama administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year.

But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials.

Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.

The cash does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or even the C.I.A.’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies. And while there is no evidence that Mr. Karzai has personally taken any of the money — Afghan officials say the cash is handled by his National Security Council — the payments do in some cases work directly at odds with the aims of other parts of the American government in Afghanistan, even if they do not appear to violate American law.

Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan since the start of the war. During the 2001 invasion, agency cash bought the services of numerous warlords, including Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the current first vice president.

“We paid them to overthrow the Taliban,” the American official said.

The C.I.A. then kept paying the Afghans to keep fighting. For instance, Mr. Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was paid by the C.I.A. to run the Kandahar Strike Force, a militia used by the agency to combat militants, until his assassination in 2011.

A number of senior officials on the Afghan National Security Council are also individually on the agency’s payroll, Afghan officials said.

While intelligence agencies often pay foreign officials to provide information, dropping off bags of cash at a foreign leader’s office to curry favor is a more unusual arrangement.

Afghan officials said the practice grew out of the unique circumstances in Afghanistan, where the United States built the government that Mr. Karzai runs. To accomplish that task, it had to bring to heel many of the warlords the C.I.A. had paid during and after the 2001 invasion.

By late 2002, Mr. Karzai and his aides were pressing for the payments to be routed through the president’s office, allowing him to buy the warlords’ loyalty, a former adviser to Mr. Karzai said.

Then, in December 2002, Iranians showed up at the palace in a sport utility vehicle packed with cash, the former adviser said.

The C.I.A. began dropping off cash at the palace the following month, and the sums grew from there, Afghan officials said.

Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures. The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations.

Much of it also still goes to keeping old warlords in line. One is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose militia served as a C.I.A. proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a month from the palace, two Afghan officials said. Other officials said the amount was significantly lower.

Mr. Dostum, who declined requests for comment, had previously said he was given $80,000 a month to serve as Mr. Karzai’s emissary in northern Afghanistan. “I asked for a year up front in cash so that I could build my dream house,” he was quoted as saying in a 2009 interview with Time magazine.

Some of the cash also probably ends up in the pockets of the Karzai aides who handle it, Afghan and Western officials said, though they would not identify any by name.

That is not a significant concern for the C.I.A., said American officials familiar with the agency’s operations. “They’ll work with criminals if they think they have to,” one American former official said.

…

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the job title that Khalil Roman held in Afghanistan from 2002 until 2005. He was President Hamid Karzai’s deputy chief of staff, not his chief of staff.

April 28, 2013
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

Find this story at 29 April 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Hamid Karzai seeks to curb CIA operations in Afghanistan

President believes battle in which 10 children and a US agent died was fought by illegal militia working for spy agency

Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s campaign against CIA operations sets up a heated showdown with the US government. Photograph: S Sabawoon/EPA

President Hamid Karzai is determined to curb CIA operations in Afghanistan after the death of a US agent and 10 Afghan children in a battle he believes was fought by an illegal militia working for the US spy agency.

The campaign sets the Afghan leader up for another heated showdown with the US government, and will reignite questions about the CIA’s extensive but highly secretive operations in the country.

Karzai’s spokesman Aimal Faizi said the CIA controlled large commando-like units, some of whom operated under the nominal stamp of the Afghan government’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), but were not actually under its control.

“Some of them are said to be working with the NDS, but they are not armed by the NDS, not paid by the NDS, and not sent to operations by the NDS. Sometimes they only inform the NDS minutes before the operation,” Faizi said. “They are conducting operations without informing local authorities and when something goes wrong it is called a joint operation.”

One of these groups was involved in a battle with insurgents in a remote corner of eastern Kunar province in early April that left several Afghan children dead, Faizi said. Karzai has fired the provincial head of intelligence in connection with the incident.

The US citizen who died during the battle was advising the Afghan intelligence service, and the airstrike that killed the children is believed to have been called in after he was fatally injured.

The US embassy declined to comment on CIA issues, but sources with knowledge of the battle said he was an agent, and his name has not been released, usually an indication of intelligence work.

Bob Woodward in his 2010 book Obama’s Wars described a 3,000-strong Afghan militia working for the CIA, and Faizi said the Afghan government had little information about the teams. “There is a lack of clarity about their numbers and movement,” he said when asked how many men the CIA had on their payroll, or where these large teams might be based.

Woodward said the unofficial commando units were known as counter-terrorism pursuit teams, and described them as “a paid, trained and functioning tool of the CIA”, authorised by President George W Bush.

They were sent on operations to kill or capture insurgent leaders, but also went into lawless areas to try to pacify them and win support for the Afghan government and its foreign backers. Woodward said the units even conducted cross-border raids into Pakistan.

In the wake of the Kunar battle, Karzai has also ordered his security officials to step up implementation of a presidential decree issued in late February abolishing “parallel structures”. Faizi said this order was aimed primarily at dismantling CIA-controlled teams.

“The use of these parallel structures run by the CIA and US special forces is an issue of concern for the Afghan people and the Afghan government,” he said.

…

Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul
The Guardian, Friday 19 April 2013 10.19 BST

Find this story at 19 April 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.