US plan to improve Afghan intelligence operations branded a $457m failure

Pentagon’s use of taxpayers’ money under scrutiny after special watchdog finds contracts to train and mentor Afghan soldiers fell short of stated objectives

A $457m (£345m) Pentagon-funded programme to develop the intelligence capacity of Afghan defence and security forces has failed to meet its aims, according to a US watchdog.

The claim comes weeks after a scathing report found the US government had wasted $28m on Afghan uniforms with “forest” camouflaged patterns rather than the desert pattern better suited to 98% of the country’s terrain.

The report, by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) said there was “no indication of improvement in overall intelligence operations” as a result of five contracts for training and mentoring, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, run by Legacy Afghanistan R&D and Afghanistan Source Operations Management (Asom). Only 47% of intelligence sites are ready to transfer to the Afghan government.

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The watchdog’s audit of training and mentoring contracts awarded to the Afghanistan national defence and security forces (ANDSF) between 2010 and 2013 said it was “almost impossible” to gauge the US government’s return on investment. This was due to a lack of performance metrics to track progress, said the report. Sigar found that neither Imperatis, the contractor, nor New Century Consulting, the subcontractor operating the programme, retained complete training records.

The watchdog also noted that Imperatis billed, on average, more than $1.8m a month under the Legacy contract for the period from March to December 2011, even though the training courses were cancelled in February 2011.

Using the records available, Sigar concluded that a “significant portion” of Afghan trainers and instructors failed to meet the minimum standards. Only 10 of the 24 police intelligence student trainees completed all nine courses required to be an interior ministry trainer; none of the four student trainees completed all six courses required to be a defence ministry trainer; and five out of six did not complete any of the four courses required to be a defence instructor.

The US Department of Defense had also met costs it was “not legally responsible to pay” as a result of failed monitoring by Imperatis, the report said.

Sigar’s January 2016 quarterly report to Congress, based on Afghan assessments, found defence and interior ministry intelligence capabilities were rated as high as “partially capable” but none as “fully operational”.

It recommended the US defence secretary conduct a review both of the award and oversight of the Legacy and Asom contracts, and of the ongoing ANDSF intelligence training and mentoring contracts, in order that they be better monitored.

Sigar has long criticised the Pentagon for wastefulness during the US’s longest war. In January, it told a Washington thinktank there was evidence that Taliban leaders had told their commanders to buy fuel, ammunition and weapons from Afghan soldiers because it was cheaper.

The office of the undersecretary of defence for policy, which was given a draft of the report, said it concurred with both Sigar’s recommendations.

A Department of Defense report, which followed the conclusion of Legacy and Asom contracts, noted that persistent capability gaps in the Afghan security forces’ intelligence collection and dissemination, along with other shortcomings, “have hampered more rapid development in their ability to maintain security and stability”.

In June, Donald Trump gave the Pentagon complete authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan, after his defence secretary, James Mattis, suggested the war was being lost.

Karen McVeigh
Wednesday 2 August 2017 14.03 BST Last modified on Wednesday 2 August 2017 14.11 BST
Find this story at 2 August 2017

© 2017 Guardian News

Defence contractor run by Colonel Tim Collins OBE under investigation for fraud in Afghanistan

Exclusive: He is also facing questions over a £116m US contract to train Afghan security forces in counterinsurgency

A defence contractor run by one of Britain’s best-known military figures is under criminal investigation by the US government’s watchdog against fraud and waste in Afghanistan, The Independent can reveal.

It can also be revealed that the company founded by Colonel Tim Collins OBE – who is best known for delivering a powerful speech to his men on the eve of the Iraq war – is facing questions over a $176m (£116m) US contract to train Afghan security forces in counterinsurgency.

His firm, New Century Consulting, is the subcontractor in a Pentagon contract held by the US company Jorge Scientific, now known as Imperatis. A financial audit of Imperatis, carried out on behalf of the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), identified $130m “unsupported” and “questioned” costs paid to New Century, to which most of the work was subcontracted.

John F Sopko, head of Sigar, said in a statement: “This is a classic example of a prime contractor not knowing how its subcontractors are spending hard-earned American taxpayer dollars.”

Last night Sigar, a US federal agency, told The Independent that it had an ongoing criminal investigation involving both New Century and Imperatis. The investigation began before the audit was carried out, and it is not known if they are connected.

Both New Century and Imperatis deny any wrongdoing and disagree with the findings of the audit, which include concerns about the $130m in “unsupported” costs. Col Collins said: “New Century has no knowledge of the criminal investigation which you allege.”

Sigar has the job of overseeing reconstruction projects and activities, conducting audits and investigations to “promote efficiency” and “detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse”.

Auditors tasked by Sigar examined $175,873,361 in expenditure between October 2011 and March 2014 and found that Imperatis “did not retain sufficient supporting documentation for a subcontractor’s [New Century Consulting] costs.” This amounted to $129,707,328 in “questioned costs” – part of an overall total of $134,552,665 of unsupported costs racked up by Imperatis over its “Legacy East” contract with the Pentagon.

Sigar recommended that US Army Contracting Command should “determine the allowability of and recover, as appropriate, $134,552,665 in questioned costs identified in the report”. Its auditors warned of “material weakness and non-compliance” over the documentation held by Imperatis of New Century’s costs and said that “the government may have been charged for costs that were unallowable to the Legacy East project”.

Under the contract, New Century (NCC) has sent counterinsurgency advisers, many of them British, to Afghanistan, to run what amounts to an intelligence mentoring and training programme for the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF). The aim is to take tactics developed and used during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and apply them in Afghanistan, to help the country’s soldiers and police recruit and use informants from within the Taliban.

In a statement yesterday, an Imperatis spokesperson said: “Imperatis and NCC maintain extensive records to evidence the costs incurred. These records were repeatedly offered to the auditors for their inspection, and remain available for review.”

Imperatis added: “Throughout performance of the Legacy East contract, NCC provided Imperatis with supporting documentation for every invoice submitted by NCC for payment as required by the terms of the contract.”

The company also claimed that the auditors based their findings on a sample of documents and did not seek to extend the sample size.

It added: “We are confident that further audit of the documentation would provide Sigar with complete assurance that all of the expenditures billed to the US government were incurred and claimed in accordance with the Legacy East contract, and in each case comply with all applicable cost principles.”

New Century also challenged the results of the audit, insisting it had provided all necessary documentation.

When The Independent first contacted him for his response, Col Collins responded: “Publish! I dare you!”

Yesterday, he said: “New Century was the subcontractor to Legacy East. Apart from that we have no privileged access to the matter mentioned nor have we been approached by the US government to assist or comment on the matter.

“The US government has now contracted directly with New Century to deliver these services based on the excellence of our performance and not least our administration and accounting which have been audited by the USG to their satisfaction.” Col Collins said he was unaware of any criminal investigation, and added: “Sigar’s concerns are not with my company.”

Lee Hess, division chief of Army Contracting Command, which runs the US Army’s outsourcing contracts, also challenged the Sigar audit. Speaking to The Independent yesterday at the request of New Century, he said that “the financial audit was not complete”. He added: “We are engaged with Sigar to try to complete the audit because it wasn’t properly completed when it was released.”

But last night a Sigar spokesman insisted the audit was complete. Referring to a meeting held last October to discuss the audit, attended by Mr Hess, the Sigar spokesman added: “He was fully aware of the findings and raised no objections.”

Whether or not the audit into New Century and Imperatis is complete, it emerged yesterday that both firms are the subjects of a criminal investigation by Sigar.

Referring to the British sub-contractor, a Sigar spokesperson told The Independent: “Sigar has an ongoing investigation of the company” and that the investigation began before the audit was carried out. When pressed for details, they said, “The investigation is criminal in nature”, but would not elaborate.

It is not known whether the investigation is connected to the issues raised in the recent audit. The investigation “is related to both companies”, said the spokesperson.

An Imperatis spokesperson said: “We have not been informed of any criminal investigation, nor do we have knowledge of one.”

When approached, a US Department of Defence spokesperson said: “It is the Department’s policy to first respond to Sigar on their recommendations before responding to your request.”

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The Pentagon’s Legacy programme is part of a wider effort which has seen billions spent in trying to create an Afghan army and police force capable of fighting the Taliban.

But the latest assessments of the Afghan National Security Force, released by Sigar earlier this year, show that only 11 out of 43 units are judged as being “fully capable”.

And the US Department of Defence’s latest progress report on Afghanistan, released six months ago, admitted: “Within the ANSF, reports of corruption range from Afghan National Police extortion at illegal checkpoints to higher-level corruption in the Afghan security institutions (eg pay-for-position schemes, taking bribes from contractors, and ‘land grabbing’).”

This comes amid mounting concern over the fate of funds spent in Afghanistan. Last week it emerged that US Department of Defence was unable to provide financial data on $890m spent on emergency reconstruction and humanitarian projects over the past decade.

Last Thursday, Sigar reported that the Afghan government was unable to account for $100m given to help fill a shortfall in its budgets.

Colonel’s reaction ‘Publish! I dare you!’

When first approached by The Independent, on the evening of 26 April, Colonel Collins went on the offensive. Within 10 minutes of being emailed, he responded: “Publish! I dare you!”

Five minutes later, he emailed again: “For completeness, this is a back [sic] slur you have alleged against myself and my company. I double dare you!”

In a third email, sent at 7.43pm, Colonel Collins wrote: “I am assuming your allegation is carried in the Tuesday edition? [Referring to his chief of staff] Greg, can we make sure someone buys a few copies in the Republic of Ireland as well as NI.”

Jonathan Owen Monday 27 April 2015 19:58 BST0 comments

Find this story at 25 April 2017

Copyright http://www.independent.co.uk/

Claims by ex-CIA contractor shake Pakistan; Explosive allegations by Raymond Davis raise questions about Pakistan’s judicial, intelligence services, says analyst

A memoir by a former CIA operative that details the broad daylight killing of two Pakistanis and the alleged government role in spiriting him away from murder charges is stirring outrage in this politically polarized country.

The startling revelations by Raymond Davis have proven to be a major embarrassment for many in the government and intelligence communities who, according to the former contractor, worked to secure his release and quell extended political turbulence between Washington and Islamabad.

Davis was contracted by the CIA and stationed in Pakistan when he fatally shot two Pakistanis in January 2011 — triggering a diplomatic crisis between the two countries.

He also killed a third person in a hit-and-run before being arrested.

Two of Davis’ victims, Mohammad Faheem and Faizan Haider, were reportedly agents of Pakistan’s top intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who were pursuing him. There has been no official confirmation regarding their alleged association with the spy agency.

Following a flurry of backdoor efforts involving top Pakistani and U.S. officials, Davis, facing murder charges, was released in March 2011 after the victims’ families were paid a collective “compensation” sum of $2.4 million after being “coerced” by Pakistani officials, according to Davis.

In The Cont­ractor: How I Landed in a Pakistani Prison and Ignited a Diplomatic Crisis, which recently hit bookstores, Davis provides insight into his experience in Pakistan, and especially the series of events that placed him at the center of a diplomatic controversy.

Official help for release claimed

Davis explosively claims that Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership at the time — including President Asif Zardari, Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani, Punjab’s Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and ISI head Gen. Shuja Pasha — were “on board,” and “helpful” in arranging his release from prison by exploiting a feature of Islamic law that permits paying blood money to victims’ families.

Neither Pasha nor Leon Panetta — who led the CIA from February 2009 to June 2011 — could not be reached for comment.

Adding fuel to the fire, Qamar Zaman Kaira, former information minister and current Punjab head of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the ruling party at time of Davis’ arrest and release, told local Geo TV on Saturday that the U.S. had used its influence over the government and army for Davis’ release. He claimed that the intelligence agencies had pressured the victims’ families to accept the blood money, which was provided by the federal government.

For his release, Davis gives special credit to Pakistani intelligence.

“ISI … orchestrated my exit. Several guards led me out of the courtroom through a back entrance,” he writes about the last hearing in the triple-murder case against him in Lahore.

“One of the men opened the door, stepped out into a courtyard, and scanned the horizon … once he’d cleared the area, I was waved through door and directed to the SUV idling in the courtyard,” he says in the final chapter of his tell-all memoir.

Davis writes that just a few political parties, particularly Jamat-e-Islami (JI) — the country’s main Islamic party — were opposed to his release, and had arranged huge protests demanding his conviction and execution.

The book’s cover shows a photo of JI demonstrators carrying a banner with the words “HANG RAYMOND DAVIS” emblazoned in red.

Government denial

The government has rejected Davis’ sensational claims as nothing more than “fiction”.

“What should I comment on that,” Mussadiq Malik, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, told Anadolu Agency.

“He has framed each and every institution of Pakistan, whether it is the government, judiciary, army or intelligence agencies without any cogent proof. I don’t think this book deserves even a contradiction,” he said.

‘Shameful’

Despite the denials, opposition parties and the media have reacted sharply to Davis’ claims and demanded an inquiry and action against those who allegedly brokered his release.

“A shameful account of how our top political and military leadership collaborated to let a cold-blooded killer, responsible for four deaths, go scot-free,” tweeted Imran Khan, a former cricket hero and head of the Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), Pakistan’s second-largest opposition party. (The fourth death he refers to may be the widow of Davis victim Faizan Haider, who committed suicide, fearing justice would not be done.)

“This book should be read by Pakistanis to understand why we are treated with so little respect internationally,” he added.

“This is one of the most shameful chapters in Pakistan’s history. It shows that Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership is so much under U.S. influence that they even dare to exploit Sharia law to appease America,” Jamat-e-Islami spokesman Amir-ul-Azeem told Anadolu Agency in a telephone interview.

“We already knew the whole story, but Raymond Davis has formally confirmed that,” he added.

Opposition Pakistan Peoples Party leader Khursheed Shah — whose former chairman, former President Asif Zardari, and vice chairman, Yousaf Raza Gilani, Davis implicates in his release — has called for an inquiry.

“Helping an American spy is tantamount to treachery. Stern action should be taken against all those who were instrumental in his release,” Shah was quoted as saying by Pakistani daily Dunya.

Social media outrage

Heated debate over Davis’ allegations has not only erupted in Pakistan’s electronic and print media but led hundreds of thousands of social media users to express their anger.

“This is one of the most disgraceful moment(s) in Pakistan history and I feel ashamed of this decision he should have been charged for murder and shame on the victims of the family this case let our nation down. Our blood cannot be replaced with money,” one user wrote.

In a July 1 editorial, right-wing Urdu daily Nawa-I-Waqt raised the question if convicted Indian spy Kalbushan Jhadav — who was sentenced to death this April — would be released in the same manner.

Jadhav, an Indian naval officer, was arrested in the southwestern Balochistan province last year for orchestrating terrorist activities across Pakistan.

Dr. Tauseef Ahmed Khan, a Karachi-based political analyst, told Anadolu Agency that he believes Davis’ disclosures raise serious questions about Pakistan’s judicial system and the inner working of its intelligence agencies.

“If his claim that the victims’ families were forced to take blood money is true, then it is a shame for all of us, especially the judicial system,” he said.

02.07.2017
By Aamir Latif
KARACHI, Pakistan

Find this story at 2 July 2017

© Anadolu Agency 2017

CIA contractor who shot two Pakistani robbers then feared death at the hands of mob breaks silence to tell of real-life Homeland plot which became diplomatic crisis

CIA contractor Raymond Davis was held captive in Lahore, Pakistan after killing Faizan Haider, 22, and Faheem Shamshad, 26, in self-defense January 2011
The former security contractor had been driving in the city area when two men in a motorbike brandished a gun at him and in fear he fired back
He was followed an angry mob of locals, thje window in his car broke, and he was only saved when two Pakistani soldiers came to his help – but then arrested him
He was kept in Pakistan’s Kot Lahkpat jail – which is notorious for its brutal regime, murders, and beatings of prisoners
Davis was eventually released from prison in March 2011 in a controversial $2.4million blood-money deal – known as Diya under Islamic law
Incident inspired start of Homelands fourth series
Now he breaks his silence in exclusive DailyMail.com interview

A CIA contractor, a double killing in a hail of bullets on a crowded Pakistani street and a diplomatic crisis that set US-Pakistan relations back years.

It could easily be the plot line of Homeland – and in fact helped inspire a key incident in the CIA spy drama.

But for Raymond Davis – who shot two men in self-defense on a busy Lahore street on January 25, 2011 – it was a dramatic episode in his life that he’s not likely to forget.

Now he is breaking his silence at last in an exclusive DailyMail.com interview.

Speaking for the first time about the incident that made worldwide headlines and sparked a diplomatic nightmare for the U.S., Davis recounts his ‘hell’ of being jailed and ’tortured’ in a Lahore prison for 49 days and how he was accused of being a spy and interrogated by agents from Pakistan’s feared Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

He recalls in detail the harrowing moment he feared being stoned to death.

And in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com Davis also discusses the emotional toll his incarceration took revealing that, at his lowest point, he believed his country had abandoned him, leaving him to rot in a Pakistani hell-hole jail for the rest of his days.

Davis said: ‘I shot two men in self-defense, was almost dragged out of a car and beaten by an angry crowd, I was thrown in prison for 49 days and accused of being a CIA spy – it was as close to hell as I ever want to get.

‘I had lost my liberty and there were times I thought I’d never see my son again.’

I shot two men in self-defense, was almost dragged out of a car and beaten by an angry crowd, I was thrown in prison for 49 days and accused of being a CIA spy – it was as close to hell as I ever want to get
Davis was eventually released from prison in March, 2011 in a controversial $2.4million blood-money deal – known as Diya under Islamic law – and he believes that if it weren’t for the US Government’s secret plan to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan just months later he may not have made it home.

That Tuesday in January was like any other for Davis.

The former special forces soldier, who was working as a security contractor for the US Consulate in Lahore, woke up, ate hard boiled eggs and drank orange juice before heading out of the secure consulate compound on to the streets of Pakistan’s second most populous city.

The sun was out and the streets of Lahore – a city of some six million people – were as bustling as usual.

Davis, whose call sign was Jinx, wanted to recce a route for a journey he needed to take someone on – a routine security job.

But before he set off he made a decision he now lives to regret.

‘It was a normal, quiet day so I asked for a vehicle,’ he recalls. ‘But all of the hard cars, the armored vehicles that we had, were already taken so ‘I chose to take a soft skin car, just a normal car we drive every day.’

He says it wasn’t a decision he took lightly but Davis had no choice but to drive the white Honda Civic made available to him that morning.

‘I remember I was driving and there was nothing out of the ordinary,’ says Davis. ‘Heading up the road there was a song that came on the radio, it was Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl’.

‘It was very funny because she gets to the part where she says, ‘I Kissed a Girl’, but a man’s voice cuts in and says ‘person’ instead of girl. I always got a chuckle out of that every time I heard it.

‘The traffic was bumper to bumper, all the lanes were full, motorcycles, tuk-tuks, everyone is riding in between lanes and racing as they take off from a red light, it is a sight to see.’

But things quickly turned sour for Davis, who says he was always on ‘yellow alert’ while in Pakistan.

‘I’m approaching an intersection in traffic,’ he recalls.

‘I’m sitting there, checking my mirrors, making sure everything is alright, when in front of me I saw a gun come out and begin to rack.’

As Davis waited in traffic at the junction known as Mozang Chowk, two men on a motorbike pulled up in front of him.

The pillion passenger removed a pistol from under his shirt and ‘racked’ the weapon – the action taken to put the first round in the chamber.

Davis says what happened next went down in the blink of an eye.

His Special Forces marksman training kicked in and he removed his own gun from his holster, a brand new semi-automatic 9mm Glock 17 pistol, and opened fire on the two men.

‘It happens very, very quickly,’ he explains. ‘The moment you see threat, the adrenaline dump hits, everything happens in microseconds and you go from there, there’s no time to second guess and make decisions. It’s a ground view perspective.’

Davis fired ten shots in rapid succession hitting the men in the head, chest and legs with expert precision – they both died.

Davis, who has cropped gray hair, says he has no regrets.

He said his training and experience led him to believe that the men posed a threat to his life and he acted in self-defense.

‘In war zones everyone has a gun, but (in this instance) the gun goes from a concealed position to an open position, this happens in microseconds.

‘The next actions you see is, he charges the gun, that tells me he knows how to use it and there’s an intent there, why would you rack a gun on someone if you are not going to use it?

‘The gun is racked and it starts to be aimed. You could say he didn’t have ammunition, he was just trying to scare you, but in that moment you don’t have the luxury to second guess, you have to make a choice, make a decision.’

Davis says there were multiple threats in Pakistan during that time from various terror groups keen to kill westerners, especially US Government targets.

‘Western male, usually has tattoos, well-built, generally wears sunglasses or a ball cap. They automatically assume you are contractor and if they can kill or capture you, there’s a bounty for that,’ he says.

‘Do I feel I acted appropriately given the situation? Absolutely.

‘I don’t regret pulling my gun and defending myself. At the end of the day I had a two-and-a-half year old son at the time, I’m going to work, then I’m coming home to see him.’

In the moments after the shooting the situation escalated rapidly.

Davis got out of his car to check for any further threats before putting his gun away.

But crowds of people began to gather around him – and the air thickened with tension.

HOW BLOOD-MONEY WORKS

Raymond Davis was eventually released from prison in March 2011 in a controversial $2.4million blood-money deal – known as Diya under Islamic law.

The law requires the assailant to compensate the family of victims in cases of murder or property damage
The fines completely protect the offender, and his family, from the vengeance of the injured family.
The Islamic term for the money is a Qisa
The payment goes hand in hand with the idea of ‘blood feuds’ and honor killings, where aggrieved families descend into a spiral of revenge attacks in order to uphold family honor
It was initially believed the money had come from the U.S., but thenSecretary of State Hillary Clinton said America had not paid the grieving families
Instead, the U.S. agreed to reimburse Pakistan after Pakistani officials urged the victims’ families to accept cash and drop the case
Davis got back in his car but in doing so the vehicle accidentally rolled forward because he hadn’t pulled the parking brake.

He said: ‘That’s when they thought I was leaving and they started beating on the car and trying to pull me out,’ Davis recalls. ‘Up until that point there was no mob, but after the car rolled they busted out the window and started pulling me out. I decided I had to leave.’

Davis began moving off through the traffic but he kept getting held up – and the mob followed.

‘There was about 200-300 people there and a motorcyclist came up to my car and started yelling, this whipped the crowd up into a frenzy, it became very intense, very quickly.’

Members of the crowd started reaching into the car trying to open the doors and pull Davis out – he frantically fought them off, kicking and punching every arm that reached in.

It wasn’t until a local police officer and two Punjabi Rangers arrived and got into Davis’ car.

They took over and managed to guide him away from the crowd.

‘At that point I thought we’re going to spend some time at the police station, we’ll call the Regional Security Officer and then I’ll be able to leave,’ he said.

‘But it drastically changed because they didn’t call the consulate or get the RSO there. It was just a barrage of questions and very chaotic.’

Rather than let Davis make contact with consulate officials the police decided to move him to the Lahore military police training college in a bid to keep him out of U.S. control.

It was the beginning of a dark period for Davis – 49 days of confinement that would test his character and resolve.

Once at the training college Davis was confined in a bunk room and questioned some more by police before being taken to court the next morning, where he had no lawyer or representation.

Pakistani authorities wanted to charge Davis with murder, but the Obama administration insisted he was an ‘administrative and technical official’ attached to its Lahore consulate and had diplomatic immunity.

What followed was a complex battle of wills between the Pakistan and US governments during which Davis became a high value political pawn.

Pakistani prosecutors accused Davis of excessive force, saying he fired 10 shots and jumped out of his car to shoot one man twice in the back as he fled. The man’s body was found 30 feet from his motorbike, it was claimed.

The two men Davis killed were later identified as Faizan Haider, 22 and Faheem Shamshad (also known as Muhammad Faheem), aged 26. Both men had been arrested more than 50 times in connection with street robberies.

To add to the mess a third entirely innocent man, motorcycle rider Ibad-ur-Rehman, was crushed by an American Toyota Land Cruiser as it rushed to Davis’s aid.

The two men in it were contractor colleagues Davis had summoned to help him.

After the accident, the vehicle fled the scene and headed without stopping to the US Consulate, jettisoning items outside Faletti’s Hotel in the city.

Police say they included four ammunition magazines containing 100 bullets, various battery cells, a baton, scissors, a pair of gloves, a compass with knife, a black colored mask/blindfold, and a piece of cloth bearing the American flag.

Pakistani officials believed the men were CIA and the U.S. refused their demands to interrogate them, saying they had already left the country.

It also later transpired that the grieving widow of one of the men Davis shot had taken her own life.

With four deaths linked to the incident, the pressure on both countries mounted.

Davis became subject to widespread speculation in Pakistani media, with reports that he was a CIA spy on a mission, that he was somehow involved with America’s controversial drone program or that he was an assassin and the two men were his intended targets.

Such was the suspicion surrounding Davis’ role in Pakistan that he was interrogated several times by agents of Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA.

Davis’ background and training helped him get through the interrogations but his history also led many to come up with wild conclusions.

Born in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, Davis spent ten years in the US Army, first as an infantryman before joining the special forces for the last six.

But after sustaining an injury to his right lung during special forces training that got worse as the years past, he was discharged from the Army in 2003 before joining the private sector.

‘I wanted to do more for the war on terror so I joined up as a contractor, a group of guys with a special skill set that’s needed in war zones,’ he explains.

Davis worked as a private contractor providing operational security in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

His work took him to Lahore in 2011 where he provided protection for CIA operatives and political figures.

But now he was a prisoner – held at a military police training college and watched by four guards wielding AK47 machine guns.

His future looked bleak.

‘You don’t allow your mind to think about how long it will be before you get out, you live day to day, moment to moment,’ says Davis.

‘You always hope every time for that couple of hours that the embassy personnel shows up that they’re going to put you in the car and take you with them.

Inspiration: The first episode of Homeland’s fourth season was partly inspired by what happened to Davis, with a CIA operative dragged from a car by a baying mob +13
Inspiration: The first episode of Homeland’s fourth season was partly inspired by what happened to Davis, with a CIA operative dragged from a car by a baying mob

‘There’s always hope but you can never be disappointed when they leave without you.’

Davis had pinned his hopes that the staff at the US Consulate, who were working tirelessly to get him out, would have him released in a matter of days.

But after two weeks and another court hearing he was placed on physical remand and thrown into Lahore’s tough Kot Lakhpat jail.

The notorious jail is rammed with more than four times its 4,000-prisoner capacity and it has a reputation for its brutal regime, murders and beatings, especially mistreatment of Indian prisoners held there.

Davis says because he was a high profile prisoner the Pakistani authorities gave him a whole wing of the prison to himself.

But while he says he wasn’t physically harmed during his incarceration, he was ’tortured’ – by the definition of the term – in several other ways.

Sleep deprivation was the worst, with guards keeping the lights on 24/7 and the Islamic call to prayer pumping out through a loud speaker all day long.

Davis says the cell was basic and he was fed chicken curry every day, twice a day, which in itself he found tortuous.

There was no hot water or heating, leaving him freezing on the cold winter nights.

The guards also played mind games with Davis, depriving him of items he had been given just to exert their power and mess with his head.

‘All of these things you could say was torture, but I was never beaten,’ says Davis.

‘I think because of my having a diplomatic passport I think if they did put their hands on me it wouldn’t look good for either government.

‘But if that’s what hell looks like I’m not going back.’

The experience began to weigh on Davis’ mental health.

He said: ‘Initially my mindset was this is easier than I thought, but when they put you in a jail cell, the closing of the door echoes. You’ve lost your liberty, you can’t leave.’

Davis said he even began talking with small animals that would wonder into his cell.

‘Two birds would come in, I called them my snowbirds and they would visit and fly around the room. I called them Margaret and George.

‘I also had a lizard, Larry the lizard, who would show up and we’d chat a little bit.

‘I wouldn’t say I was going insane but with no one else there it was my way of coping.’

Towards the end the strain began to show.

Sick of the power struggle with the guards who would constantly toy with Davis, he went on a three-day hunger strike.

He explained: ‘The game was that they wanted to show me that they controlled everything about me, ‘You are owned by us’.

‘I went on hunger strike, I wanted to show them that I didn’t need anything from them, that they couldn’t control me.’

Consulate staff eventually persuaded Davis to eat again.

‘Emotionally there was ups and downs that are hard to describe,’ he says.

‘You think through all of your training if this happens I’m going to do this and I’ll make it, but it gets very cloudy in your mind if you’re going to come through all that unscathed, it’s very difficult the amount of stress that is put on you.’

Asked whether he missed his son while in jail, Davis’ tough exterior begins to crack and his eyes well up.

The thought of not seeing his wife Rebecca and son Braeden for years burdened him.

‘The hardest thing to hear was that I was going to be charged with murder,’ he said.

‘Now I’m charged with a crime all of a sudden they start saying he’s not leaving, he’s here, we’ve already convicted him and now I’m here for five, 10, 15, 20 years and I’ll never see my son grow up. That was the hardest thing to hear.

‘There’s a point in time that you’re sat there in the jail cell and the walls are closing in and you’re thinking, ‘I’m never going to get out of here, my country has turned its back on me and I’m never going to see my son again’.

‘My dad died when I was young I was 14. It starts to pull at you and it has you really hard.’

Unknown to Davis lawyers, working behind the scenes for the US Government had come up with a contingency plan to get him out.

They pushed the court to try his case under Islamic sharia law – Pakistan’s criminal law is similar to that of the United States but regular courts can pass their cases to sharia ones – and Davis was to plead guilty to the double murder.

‘My initial thought was, ‘Oh no, sharia law, I’m going to get stoned, killed, beheaded, they already have a court outside – a tree waiting,’ recalls Davis.

‘All of these things were running through my head until it was all explained.’

The plan was to pay the families of the victims blood-money – known as Diyya under Islamic law.

This didn’t sit well with Davis though.

‘My attorney ran up to me and said, ‘They’re going to accept blood money – we’re going to get you out of here today’.

‘And he leaves – I was shocked. I thought, ‘What does that mean, I don’t understand.’

‘There was a bit of anger because I did nothing wrong, all I did was defend myself but we’re going to pay money to these people – we shouldn’t have to, I did nothing wrong.

‘But Carmela Conroy (US Consul General) turned to me and said, ‘There is no other way, the solution is bigger than anyone in this room, it’s at the presidential level.’

‘It needed to be taken care of so everyone saves face so that a diplomat was not charged with a crime that he shouldn’t have been.’

A sum of $2.4million was paid and distributed to the families of the dead, although the US Government later denied it had paid anything.

It later emerged that the Pakistanis had covered the cost only to retrieve the money later.

After 49 days Davis was released.

‘When they finally told me I was going home, I broke down in tears, I was so relieved this ordeal was soon going to be over,’ he says.

‘The tears were also out of gratitude for all the hard work that everyone did to get me out and it was also because I knew I was going home to see my son and my family.’

Davis believes his release was in part because the US Government had their sights on killing Al-Qaeda boss Osama Bin Laden and didn’t want his situation to in any way disrupt the secret mission they had planned.

Bin Laden was killed two months after Davis’ release in a raid by SEAL Team Six in a CIA-led operation on the 9/11 mastermind’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

‘There was too much at stake,’ says Davis.

‘I also believe the US Government didn’t want to lose face, simple as that.’

When the dust settled Davis learned a lot of the hard work that had gone into getting him released.

But he was also told the higher-echelons of the State Department, run by Hillary Clinton at the time, had actually discussed disavowing him.

He said: ‘I heard that – and it was a hard pill to swallow. I was like ‘Did I just dodge a big bullet?’

‘It was mentioned by high-level people at the State Department, ‘Why don’t we just disavow him and say he’s not ours?’ I think Leon Panetta (the then Secretary of Defense) had the hardest time with that. He was like, ‘He’s got a passport, he wasn’t over there doing nefarious things, we’re not going to disavow anybody, it doesn’t matter who he works for, if he worked for us we protect him.’

‘I thought it was very admirable to have someone who has no vested interest in you to take that stance. That was very comforting to know we had leadership that would do that. It reassured me a great deal.’

He added: ‘There are many things that happened behind the scenes that I have no idea about and probably never will.’

Davis thanks the many people involved in his release, and reserves special praise for former Consul General Carmella Conroy, who he describes as an ‘incredible person and diplomat.’

Davis said his return to America was an emotional time.

‘He didn’t know what was happening he was two-and-a-half years old. It was a good hug when I finally got to hold him in my arms, it was different than anything else I have to admit. It was pretty incredible.’

These days Davis lives a quiet life in Colorado Springs where he works as a firearms instructor, contracting for the US government.

He has separated from his wife Rebecca but they have joint custody of their son Braeden.

Davis has recounted his experience in his book The Contractor, but even that was hard fought.

The co-author of the book Storms Reback and Davis accuse the CIA of political bias by trying to stall it publication in case it damaged Hillary Clinton’s chances of reaching the White House in the November, 2016 election.

The CIA held the book manuscript for several months before demanding a swathe of redactions – even on information that is publicly available – pushing the publication of the book from September 2016 to March 2017 and then to June.

They also accuse the State Department – under Clinton’s rule – of withholding two key interviews carried out for the book, which almost prevented the memoir from being written at all.

The Contractor: How I Landed in a Pakistani Prison and Ignited a Diplomatic Crisis is available on Amazon.com.

By RYAN PARRY, WEST COAST CORRESPONDENT, IN COLORADO, FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and EMMA FOSTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 18:12 BST, 30 June 2017 | UPDATED: 20:22 BST, 30 June 2017

Find this story at 30 June 2017

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

A whistleblower plays by the rules at CIA, and finds ‘nothing gets done’

When wayward contract employees at the CIA began pilfering snacks from vending machines back in 2013, the Office of the Inspector General sprang into action. Surveillance cameras went up, the culprits were nabbed, and all lost their jobs.

From start to finish, the case of the $3,314.40 in stolen snacks lasted two months.

When more serious allegations of wrongdoing arise at the CIA, though, inspectors may be far less speedy, especially when their findings could embarrass the Langley, Va., spy agency.

In one notable case, that of John Reidy, a contractor whose resume shows that he worked with spies deep inside Iran’s mullah-run regime, charges of wrongdoing have sat idle in the hands of CIA inspectors. Details of Reidy’s charges remain highly classified. The case is now seven years old, and seems only to gather dust.

Reidy, 46, anguishes over his charges, angry at the years-long delay in resolving his complaints but also wary of crossing a line and revealing anything classified beyond his allegations of a “catastrophic intelligence failure” overseas.

“I cannot talk about the 2007 incident. It is classified. I risk incarceration. I have a family,” Reidy wrote in an email before meeting with a reporter.

But in addition to his whistleblower case, Reidy presses a larger issue, one that is pertinent to the era of President Donald Trump and his persistent charges that sensitive leaks cripple his six-month-old administration. Leaks may grow worse if intelligence agencies don’t learn how to channel dissent and protect those who offer it in a constructive spirit.

I PLAYED BY THE RULES. THEY ARE BROKEN.

John Reidy, a CIA contractor and whistleblower

“I played by the rules,” Reidy said. “They are broken. … The public has to realize that whistleblowers [like me] can follow all the rules and nothing gets done.” In frustration, Reidy last month sent a 90-page letter and documentation about his case to the chairman of the Senate’s powerful Judiciary Committee, lambasting its lack of resolution.

“They have enough time to look into who is stealing candy from a vending machine but they can’t look into billion-dollar contract fraud?” Reidy asked in an interview.

The CIA refused to comment on Reidy’s case.

“As a general matter, we do not comment on ongoing litigation,” said spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak.

CIA Director says WikiLeaks is a ‘hostile intelligence service’

In his first public remarks since becoming CIA director, Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks a ”non-state hostile intelligence service.”

AP
Even if CIA officials have a far different version of events, perhaps contradicting some of Reidy’s allegations, the secrecy with which the agency operates impedes them from speaking out. CIA Director Mike Pompeo said in a speech Tuesday night that his agency finds it difficult to “push back” against misleading or wrong news reports.

“At CIA we’re often limited in what we can say, given the need to protect classified information. In many cases we can’t set the record straight because doing so could harm national security,” Pompeo told a gathering of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a nonpartisan group in support of the intelligence community.

It took a lawsuit to release the information about the theft from CIA vending machines. The agency released a declassified report about the case as part of hundreds of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in 2015 by BuzzFeed News.

Pilfering from the vending machines began in 2012, and by March 2013, inspectors began looking into the thefts, discovering that the culprits were unplugging a cable linking the machines to a payment system, FreedomPay, letting them obtain snacks at no charge.

“Video footage recovered from the surveillance cameras captured numerous perpetrators engaged in the FreedomPay theft scheme, all of whom were readily identifiable as Agency contract personnel,” the inspectors’ report says.

The vending machine thievery wrapped up neatly. But Reidy still waits for resolution of the seemingly far more significant issues he has raised.

Reidy is more straight arrow than troublemaker. A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, he was educated in Catholic schools, then attended St. Anselm College in New Hampshire and obtained a law degree from the University of San Francisco. Law degree in hand, he dreamed of joining the FBI.

After a stint in the Army, where he worked in a criminal investigations division, Reidy applied for jobs at both the FBI and the CIA. The CIA called more quickly, and Reidy joined in 2003, leaving six months later for a private contractor that dealt in security policy.

Reidy formed his own company in 2006, Form III Defense Solutions, and worked as a subcontractor, piggybacking on contracts won by bigger companies for intelligence collection, tactical targeting guidance and other matters, usually with the CIA.

A resume he gave to McClatchy shows that from 2006 to 2009, Reidy developed an “Iran Study Guide” and worked on “humint” — or human intelligence. Reidy said intelligence community secrecy rules bar him from naming the country where he handled a “complex agency operation,” but he does say he studied some Farsi language. He hasn’t done any classified work since 2012.

Two different issues led Reidy in 2010 to submit a complaint to the CIA’s internal watchdog, the Inspector General’s Office. One issue involved what Reidy alleged was fraud between elements within the CIA and contractors. Another issue involved what he called a “massive” and “catastrophic” intelligence failure due to a bungled foreign operation, according to his 2014 appeal to an office under the director of national intelligence.

Reidy said he sent the Inspector General’s Office 80 emails and 56 documents to back up his complaints.

Legal protections for whistleblowers in the intelligence community grew stronger in 2012, when then-President Barack Obama signed a presidential directive protecting people from various forms of retaliation, including demotions, termination or reassignment. Reidy took heart at the move.

HE WAS THE POSTER CHILD OF THE PERSON THE SYSTEM IS SUPPOSED TO WORK FOR.

Kel McClanahan, former attorney for whistleblower John Reidy

“He was the poster child of the person the system is supposed to work for,” said Kel McClanahan, a Maryland attorney who represented Reidy until 2016.

Despite the Obama directive, experts working in the national security arena say employees still confront obstacles. Employees’ lawyers have no access to classified documents around which a case may rest. Classified matters cannot even be discussed between client and attorney. The CIA sees its Inspector General’s Office as impartial and makes it difficult for employees who hire attorneys, although Reidy did so for years.

Often, CIA employees or contractors find their careers put on hold.

“You will likely find yourself a pariah because nobody likes someone who rocks the boat,” said Bradley P. Moss, a Washington lawyer who handles some national security cases involving whistleblowers.

Employees disgruntled over fraud, abuse or other matters cannot easily look to obtain redress from outside the intelligence community.

IF YOU’RE AN EMPLOYEE WHO SEES SOMETHING EGREGIOUS, THEY DON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING WITH IT.

Kathleen McClellan of Expose Facts, a whistleblower advocacy group

“There’s no outside review of whistleblower cases in the intelligence community,” said Kathleen McClellan, deputy director at Expose Facts, a whistleblower advocacy group. “If you’re an employee who sees something egregious, they don’t have to do anything with it. They can flush it down the toilet for all you know.”

As Reidy found out, an internal investigation can drag on without time limit.

“They can go on for years. They can go on for decades,” said Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department ethics attorney who also works at Expose Facts.

Reidy has also told his story to staffers with security clearances for the House and Senate intelligence committees, and seen his case bounce between the CIA inspector general and the inspector general for the Directorate of National Intelligence.

Desperate for an outcome, Reidy increasingly warns that the failure of whistleblowing channels may lead disgruntled employees and contractors to go public with secrets, posing a danger to national security.

The CIA and the National Security Agency have been hit with numerous cases of leaks since the ground-shaking case of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who in 2013 leaked to the media details of extensive surveillance, including of tens of millions of Americans.

This year, another NSA contractor, Harold T. Martin, was indicted for amassing secret stolen documents and data at his Maryland home over a 20-year period. He awaits trial.

Prosecutors in early June charged another NSA contractor, 25-year-old Reality Winner, with sending a classified report about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections to The Intercept, a national security news outlet. She could face 10 years in prison.

For its part, WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group, began publishing in March a series of cyber-espionage documents that it claimed were taken from the CIA’s elite hacking unit. Speculation rose that a CIA contractor stole the documents and leaked them.

Seeking to spur action in his case, Reidy last month fired off letters to the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, warning that working through the CIA Inspector General’s Office has been a dead end.

THEY JUST DELAY, DELAY, AND DELAY AND HOPE THE PROBLEM GOES AWAY.

John Reidy, a CIA contractor and whistleblower

“They just delay, delay, and delay and hope the problem goes away,” Reidy said in a June 5 letter to Sen. Charles Grassley, the Judiciary panel’s chairman.

Reidy said his own example bodes poorly for those who want to report fraud or abuse.

“If you are contemplating whistleblowing … you’re going to sit there and say, ‘If I go through that system, it will not end well for me. I’m going to lose my career and I’m going to be financially devastated,’” Reidy said.

BY TIM JOHNSON
tjohnson@mcclatchydc.com
JULY 13, 2017 12:06 PM

Find this story at 13 July 2017
Copyright http://www.sacbee.com/

Tamerlan Tsarnaev: Terrorist. Murderer. Federal Informant?

Not long after Tamerlan Tsarnaev bombed the Boston Marathon,
investigative reporter Michele McPhee went looking for answers. What she
discovered, detailed in this exclusive excerpt from her new book,
Maximum Harm, might just change how you think about our government and
law enforcement forever.

As darkness descended over the village of Utamysh, Russia, one mid-July
night in 2012, international soldiers, intelligence agents, and local
police made their way inside a convoy of covered troop carriers to a
carefully hidden encampment. They even brought a light-armored tank,
knowing the men inside were heavily armed.

The hideout, a small farmhouse, was home to seven mujahideen, guerrilla
fighters who had all vowed to bring sharia law back to Russia’s Northern
Caucasus. They flew their own nationalist flag and consistently referred
to Russian authorities as “invaders.” Two of the men, however, Islam and
Arsen Magomedov, were more than mere guerrilla insurgents: They were
notorious terrorists and commanders of the region’s most brutal criminal
gangs. In all, they were suspected of orchestrating dozens of murders
and deadly bombings of police checkpoints, civilian-filled trains, and
Russian Federation television stations. Next to the Magomedovs stood
five other men who ranged in age from 25 to 35, budding jihadists who
had very few prospects when they left their families other than to go,
as they said, “into the forests” to train. After a long day, the men
went to bed—completely unaware that just outside the tiny village, under
the cover of night, forces were preparing a raid that would level their
camp.

Russian Interior Ministry counterterrorism troops wanted to move in
without being seen by the prying eyes of Utamysh villagers, so they
evacuated some women and children living near the camp. Not everyone in
the Muslim village supported the continuing carnage in their region, but
most distrusted Russian Federation law enforcement officials. As in most
military operations, the soldiers moved silently as they carefully
checked their guns and grenades, switched the safeties off their
automatic weapons, and even loaded a small rocket-propelled grenade.
They wore combat gear, and not for aesthetic reasons. Inside the hideout
were some of the most violent men in the Northern Caucasus, an area that
has long been among the most volatile and lawless places in the world.
At that time, it was not unusual for a Russian police officer to be
assassinated weekly. The insurgents inside the Utamysh compound had been
trained to believe that the Russians were invaders who—like
pigs—deserved nothing less than slaughter, and had been taught that
there was no greater honor than to die taking a Russian out.

When the radicals heard the sound of dried dirt and rocks being crushed
under the weight of the tank and the troop movers carrying the enemy to
their front door, according to a video that was later released by the
Russian Interior Ministry, the mujahideen grabbed their own guns, prayed
that Allah would give them strength in battle, and fired.

Tracer rounds and bombs lit up the village for hours. When the sun rose
over the mountains on July 14, 2012, all seven of the Islamic militants
were dead. The Russians photographed their slain bodies lying in the
scrubby grass as proof of their deaths.

The camp was a smoldering shell. Cars belonging to the insurgents were
still burning. The walls of the farmhouse were pitted with gunfire, and
its windows had all been blown out. Russian Federation counterterrorism
coalition forces also lost a man: an officer with the Russian Interior
Ministry. Three other Russian agents had been wounded.

As the farmhouse continued to fume, while militants mourned and the
Russian Interior Ministry prepared to bury its dead agent, one man left
the region, somehow paying 2,050 euros for a one-way Aeroflot ticket
from Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow to John F. Kennedy
International Airport, and then to Logan airport on July 17, 2012. His
name was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Russian expat whose entire family fled the
region a decade earlier for Cambridge, Massachusetts, telling United
States immigration officials that they would be killed because of their
political affiliations if they ever returned home.

It remains unclear how the unemployed 25-year-old on welfare paid for
the flight or exactly what he spent his time in Russia doing, or for
whom. Less than a year later, he and his younger brother, Dzhokhar,
carried out the Boston Marathon bombings, an act of terror so immense it
would paralyze the entire city. Tamerlan would die on April 19, 2013,
not long after a wild firefight with police and a high-speed chase in a
stolen SUV driven by Dzhokhar, who fled the shootout and prompted a
nearly daylong manhunt before being captured.

When Dzhokhar’s trial started nearly two years later, his famed
death-penalty defense attorney, Judy Clarke, startled court spectators
when she flat-out admitted her client was guilty of the bombings. At one
point, she pointed to a photo of older brother Tamerlan and explained,
“There’s little that occurred the week of April the 15th…that we
dispute.” But what about in the months and years before that?

Much is murky about Tamerlan’s life leading up to the deadly attack on
Boylston Street. Four years after the blasts, his case, at first blush,
seems to be an extreme cautionary tale about the shortcomings of the
overbloated war on terror, its divided attentions rendering actual
terrorists invisible. But upon closer inspection, a strange picture
starts to emerge—one that counterterrorism experts and law enforcement
officials have suggested points to Tamerlan having been a federal
informant who went rogue.

During Dzhokhar’s trial, his defense attorneys raised provocative
questions about the FBI’s mysterious involvement with Tamerlan. Had
agents pressured him to be an informant? And if so, did that pressure
play a role in the bombings? “We base this on information from our
client’s family and other sources that the FBI made more than one visit
to talk with [Tamerlan’s parents] Anzor, Zubeidat and Tamerlan,
questioned Tamerlan about his internet searches, and asked him to be an
informant, reporting on the Chechen and Muslim community,” Dzhokhar’s
lawyers stated in court records. “We further have reason to believe that
Tamerlan misinterpreted the visits and discussions with the FBI as
pressure and that they amounted to a stressor that increased his
paranoia and distress. We do not suggest that these contacts are to be
blamed and have no evidence to suggest that they were improper, but
rather view them as an important part of the story of Tamerlan’s
decline. Since Tamerlan is dead, the government is the source of
corroboration that these visits did in fact occur and of what was said
during them.”

The FBI denies that Tamerlan was their informant, but to this day those
questions have not been answered. What is the bureau trying to hide?

***

THE TSARNAEV CONNECTION

2009
Tamerlan Tsarnaev participates in a photo essay titled “Will Box for
Passport.”

March 2011
Russian counterterrorism agents warn the FBI about Tsarnaev.

June 2011
The FBI closes its investigation on Tsarnaev.

September 11, 2011
The bodies of three men with connections to Tsarnaev are found nearly
decapitated in a Waltham apartment.

October 2011
Russian officials warn U.S. intelligence about Tsarnaev’s jihadist
rhetoric; his name is added to two terror watch lists.

January 21, 2012
Despite being watch-listed, Tsarnaev is allowed to fly from New York to
Russia.

July 2012
Radical extremist William Plotnikov and six other rebel fighters are
killed by Russian forces in Dagestan; Tsarnaev leaves Russia, paying
2,050 euros in cash for the flight.

August 28, 2012
Tsarnaev’s naturalized citizen application is reopened.

January 23, 2013
Tsarnaev’s citizenship is delayed once again.

April 15, 2013
Tsarnaev and his brother bomb the Boston Marathon.

***

In 2011, the year before Tamerlan flew from Boston to Moscow, the
Russians were already worried about him and his mother, Zubeidat. So in
an unusual move, the agency shared its concerns with counterterrorism
counterparts in the United States. To say the least, the relationship
between the two countries—both of which were trying to eradicate Islamic
terrorism—was based more on need than trust.

Still, on March 4, 2011, the FSB sent its first message about Tamerlan
and Zubeidat to the FBI’s legal attaché in Moscow. Later, it sent the
same memo to the CIA. While the FBI refuses to release a copy of the
letter, FSB officials read it to a congressional delegation that
included Representative William Keating, a Democrat from Massachusetts
and a former prosecutor. “It was amazing in its detail dealing with
Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” Keating later said.

The letter, according to Keating and others, described intercepted text
messages between Tamerlan, his mother, and Magomed Kartashov, her second
cousin—a former Dagestan police officer who had become a prominent
Islamist and leader of a group called Union of the Just (a Muslim
advocacy group that has been banned in Russia because of its alleged
affiliations with Muslim militants). The organization sympathized with
radical Islamic insurgents who had declared war against Vladimir Putin’s
Russian forces. Zubeidat and Tamerlan, the letter stated, were becoming
adherents of radical Islam.

The FSB also provided full names, addresses, and phone numbers for many
of the members of the Tsarnaev family, including Tamerlan and his
mother. According to the FBI, it warned that Tamerlan “had changed
drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to a part of Russia
“to join unspecified underground groups,” namely, violent radical
Islamists in the Caucasus who formed their own bandit groups, which were
essentially ragtag insurgency gangs. The FBI’s legal attaché in Moscow
sent a translated copy of the FSB’s warning concerning Tamerlan to the
Counterterrorism Division of the FBI’s Boston field office, telling them
“to take any investigative steps deemed appropriate and provide [the
legal attaché in] Moscow with any information derived,” with the promise
that the information would be forwarded to the Russians.

After receiving the FSB’s letter, a special agent in that Boston
Counterterrorism Division, referred to in an Office of the Inspector
General (OIG) report as “the CT Agent,” was assigned to conduct what the
FBI called a threat assessment based on the information that the FSB had
shared regarding Tamerlan’s and his mother’s increasing extremism.

In the months before Tamerlan left Boston for Russia, the CT Agent
interviewed Tamerlan and his parents and reported his findings, the OIG
said. The report concluded that there is no public evidence that the CT
Agent contacted Tamerlan’s then-wife (Katherine Russell, also known as
Karima Tsarnaeva)—at the least, notes about any contact with her never
became part of any official file. Nor did the CT Agent visit the
controversial Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge where
Tamerlan prayed, despite its rumored connections to radical Islamists.
The FBI would later issue a statement that in response to the FSB’s
letter, agents “checked U.S. 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. The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and
family members. The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or
foreign.” And so the bureau closed its case on Tamerlan in June 2011.

As it turned out, the CT Agent’s investigation into the Tsarnaevs was
never shared with the police in Cambridge, where the Tsarnaevs lived,
nor with the Boston police, which ran the Boston Regional Intelligence
Center. The CT Agent, who could not be reached for comment, didn’t even
share the information with his Joint Terrorism Task Force counterparts
from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). When asked about the CT
Agent, the FBI declined to speak about him or any specific agent. As for
the Russians, the Boston FBI field office sent a letter to the FSB dated
August 8, 2011, through its legal attaché in Moscow, stating that its
agents had found “nothing derogatory” about the Tsarnaevs. Months later,
though, Tamerlan flew to Russia, where he would meet the very men the
FSB had warned American counterterrorism officials about: Tamerlan’s
mother’s cousin, Magomed Kartashov, and William Plotnikov, a notorious
extremist.

In a strange twist, evidence would later show that Tamerlan somehow
clandestinely recorded many of the conversations he had with Kartashov
without his relative’s knowledge—recordings that would eventually be
introduced by Dzhokhar’s attorneys during trial to bolster the defense’s
assertion that the younger brother had come under Tamerlan’s corrupting
influence, just as Tamerlan had sought guidance on jihad back in his
homeland.

On January 21, 2012, Tamerlan departed from Boston’s Logan Airport and
connected at JFK for a flight to Moscow. By then he was on two different
terrorist watch lists, though that fact never slowed him down.

The first was the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE)
database, which is the repository of all international terrorist
identifier information shared by the FBI, CIA, and an alphabet soup of
U.S. intelligence agencies. The National Counterterrorism Center
maintains it by adding biographical or biometric identifiers. The second
watch list was TECS, which is not an acronym but takes its name from an
outdated system of identification checks from a now-defunct federal
agency. TECS, aimed at flagging potential terror suspects as they cross
borders, is a system allowing customs agents to file reports about any
“encounter with a traveler, a memorable event, or noteworthy item of
information particularly when they observe behavior that may be
indicative of intelligence gathering or preoperational planning related
to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention,” according to the
DHS. Despite Tamerlan’s being on both of those lists, he still left
Logan without a hitch.

Nearly six months later, upon arrival in the United States after
spending time overseas in a terrorist hot spot, he faced little to no
resistance from U.S. Customs. The purpose of the FBI’s and CIA’s placing
Tamerlan on the watch lists was to create an alert any time he traveled.
But inexplicably, that never happened.

Then there was the question of his passport, which Tamerlan had reported
stolen—or at least that’s what he told his ex-wife, Katherine Russell.
The last valid passport that Tamerlan possessed came from Kyrgyzstan,
where he had grown up, and was slated to expire on November 16, 2012.
Tamerlan applied for a Russian passport to replace the one issued in
Kyrgyzstan that he had used to gain entry into the United States as a
political refugee in 2002. But, as congressional investigators would
discover, he left Russia without ever collecting the new passport.

Still, when Tamerlan landed at Logan on July 17, 2012, he had no problem
whatsoever. A customs agent “scanned Tsarnaev’s Alien Registration Card
into the computer system used during primary inspection. The card was
valid, and as a result, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] took
Tsarnaev’s picture, collected his fingerprints, confirmed his identity,
and admitted him into the country based on his LPR [legal permanent
resident] status,” according to the OIG. However, the report states, the
Customs and Border Protection officer who processed Tamerlan told
investigators he “could not recall” processing Tamerlan or if he alerted
the FBI regarding Tamerlan’s return to the United States without a
passport. He did explain to the inspectors that officers like him
communicate with the FBI about potential terrorist watch list suspects’
travel with “email, orally, or via ‘sticky note.’”

Stranger still was the testimony from then–Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on
immigration policy on April 23, 2013—just days after Tamerlan died—that
the name on his airline ticket did not match the name on his green card,
saying, “there was a mismatch.” She publicly declined to elaborate.

Surely to stop Tamerlan at the airport for additional screening based on
his physical profile alone—he was a Muslim male with a long beard—or
because he was leaving a terrorist hotbed would have been insensitive
racial profiling. But the idea that a man whose name was on two
terrorist watch lists somehow managed to clear customs because,
government officials claimed, his name was misspelled on those lists, is
inconceivable. This is especially true given the multimillion-dollar
computer program the DHS had purchased to prevent that very sort of
thing from occurring. Even after the Russians had inexplicably notified
the United States in writing about his radicalization in 2011, and
despite being on multiple terror watch lists, Tamerlan was allowed to
travel to a terrorist hot spot and return without being questioned.

All of this looks strange—even stupendously negligent—to the casual
observer. But to the trained eye, it might look like something else
entirely. Former Somerville Police Chief Tom Pasquarello, a longtime DEA
agent who has supervised his own confidential informants, had noticed
similarities between Tamerlan’s case and his own use of so-called CIs
during multiple takedowns all over the world. As a longtime law
enforcement official, he says, the seeming coincidences cannot be
ignored. They make no sense—not Tamerlan’s trip to Russia, nor his
return without a passport while on two separate terror watch lists.
Unless, that is, Tamerlan was trying to lure like-minded radicals in an
effort to collect information and report back to U.S. law enforcement.
“You pull a string on Tamerlan’s life,” Pasquarello said, “and all you
get is unanswered questions.”

The use of Muslim informants has been a controversial topic since 9/11.
Not long after the attack on the World Trade Center, former New York
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly turned to retired CIA officer David
Cohen to create the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, a secretive squad that
fell under the department’s Intelligence Division. The unit began
recruiting Muslim police officers to go undercover, as well as Muslim
confidential informants who’d been arrested and were willing to
cooperate with the police. NYPD commanders and detectives assigned to
the unit became among the most lauded and aggressive
domestic-intelligence-collecting agencies in the country, coming up with
the term “raker” to describe informants who infiltrated radical Islamist
plots and raked for information. To this day, Kelly credits the unit
with stopping multiple would-be terror attacks across the country. The
unit’s tactics, however, would raise the ire of organizations including
the ACLU, who accused the police department of abusing its powers to
target mosques and infiltrate them with Muslim officers or informants.

In many ways, what the NYPD created was nothing new. The U.S. Department
of Justice began its relationship with cooperating informants in 1961,
when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy instructed FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover to order every agent in every field office throughout the country
to infiltrate organized crime groups. The FBI knew it needed to access
the dregs of the underworld in order to bring down its targets, and the
way to do that was to tempt bottom feeders up into the light.

Over time, informants started to pay off as the FBI began toppling the
highest levels of organized crime. Eventually, it had informants inside
the Mafia, the KKK, the Black Panthers, and biker gangs throughout the
country. After 9/11, the bureau focused much of its effort on finding
and maintaining Muslim informants to fight the war on terror. More
recently, informants have infiltrated anarchist groups such as Black
Bloc and Occupy Wall Street.

With the resulting arrests came power for FBI case agents. In some
instances, that power brought unfettered authority to offer sweetheart
deals to turncoats, no matter how treacherous the cooperating informant
was. The FBI tracks the productivity of its informants by aggregating
their “statistical accomplishments”—that is, the number of indictments,
convictions, search warrants, and other contributions to investigative
objectives for which the informant gets credit. But what the FBI does
not track are agents who let informants run amok.

Boston has an especially fraught history with this. Entire FBI field
offices have been tainted, as in the case with infamous mobster James
“Whitey” Bulger. Bulger’s FBI handler was John Connolly, who had admired
the rough-and-tumble mobster while growing up in the same South Boston
housing development. Connolly’s boss was John Morris. Both men took
bribes, and Connolly is now serving time in a Florida prison for
allowing Bulger to set up mob-style hits on innocent people, while the
agents made a name for themselves arresting Italian and Italian-American
mobsters whom Bulger was trying to put out of business. Connolly went so
far as to alert Bulger to an indictment pending against him. As a result
of that tip, the mobster went on the lam with his companion, Catherine
Greig, for 16 years. Then there was notorious mob captain Mark Rossetti,
a feared enforcer who ran his criminal enterprise of drugs and
loansharking out of East Boston. It was only after the Essex County
district attorney indicted more than two dozen mobsters that Rossetti’s
secret work as an FBI informant was exposed.

Despite these high-profile scandals, the FBI informant program is still
in widespread use—and Muslim informants make up a large part of it.
During the height of Hoover’s Cointelpro operations in the 1960s and
1970s, for instance, the FBI had roughly 1,500 total informants. In the
1980s and 1990s the drug wars brought that number up to about 6,000.
Then, after 9/11, the FBI recruited so many new informants—including
accused criminals looking for leniency, liars looking for immigration
favors, Muslims looking for revenge on the members of competing Islamic
sects, and narcissistic egomaniacs who wanted to be revered as a Jason
Bourne–type figure—that it had to hire an outside software company to
help agents track their secret spies. Today, there are anywhere from
15,000 to 20,000 snitches on the FBI’s payroll, and many of them inform
on fellow Muslims in the United States and overseas. The vaunted NYPD
Intelligence Division—working alongside members of the NSA, CIA, and
FBI, as well as Muslim patriots—have uncovered jihadi-inspired plots
that led to multiple criminal prosecutions.

In February 2016, Homeland Security alerted 29 “high-target” cities,
including Boston and New York, that their DHS funding would be slashed
by 1.3 percent. Boston, which had received $18 million from the federal
government earmarked for homeland security initiatives in fiscal year
2015, received $17.7 million in fiscal year 2016. Rene Fielding, chief
of Boston’s Office of Emergency Management, explained that the cuts
collected from the cities would be used to fund “nonprofits”—primarily
to provide security to mosques and synagogues.

Privately, though, police officials complained that it was a way for DHS
officials to pay imams at mosques for goodwill. The feds needed to make
nice with angry activists who were part of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, the reasoning went, and grant money goes a
long way with nonprofits.

Sometimes, though, the program backfired and inadvertently turned
informants into radicals. According to a report issued by Human Rights
Watch and the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University Law School,
“Indeed, in some cases the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have
created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by conducting sting
operations that facilitated or invented the target’s willingness to act.
According to multiple studies, nearly 50 percent of the more than 500
federal counterterrorism convictions resulted from informant-based
cases; almost 30 percent of those cases were sting operations in which
the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.”

The ACLU has filed several civil lawsuits against New York City and the
NYPD saying that the Terrorist Interdiction Program started by Kelly
used unconstitutional methods that essentially coerced Muslims to inform
on their neighbors. Both Kelly, a Harvard University graduate, and his
successor, William Bratton, a longtime Boston police commissioner,
insisted the program was essential to stopping planned attacks.
Meanwhile, the NYPD released a 2007 report, titled Radicalization in the
West: The Homegrown Threat, stating that some of the warning signs
someone was becoming radicalized included changes in appearance and
behavior, and cited “wearing traditional Islamic clothing [and] growing
a beard,” abstaining from alcohol, and “becoming involved in social
activism.” In response, the ACLU argued that infiltrating mosques and
hookah bars was illegal and that the NYPD’s “purported rationale for
this unconstitutional surveillance” was nonsense.

Nevertheless, those warning signs had certainly been observed in
Tamerlan.

While living in Cambridge, Tamerlan underwent a transformation from a
womanizing Euro-trash party boy to a pious Muslim, albeit one who first
showed signs of radicalization in 2010. He stopped drinking and doing
drugs. He traded his designer clothes for traditional Muslim robes,
wearing them to pizza parlors and Starbucks shops. He started attending
the Islamic Society of Boston’s Cambridge mosque, which was initially
incorporated in 1982 by Muslim students from MIT, Harvard, and other
area colleges. Its first president listed on state records is Abdurahman
M. Alamoudi, who is currently serving a 23-year federal prison sentence
related to charges of funneling money to Libya. By the time Tamerlan
began attending regularly, the mosque had long faced rumors of ties to
extremists.

Tamerlan had all the traits that comprised the perfect candidate to
infiltrate a mosque that had been in the crosshairs of federal
counterterrorism investigators, law enforcement officials in
Massachusetts say privately. He was multilingual. He had tentacles in
the drug and mixed martial arts worlds. And he was just the type who
could help the fight against terrorism overseas in one of the most
dangerous regions for Islamic extremists: his Mother Russia.

When Tamerlan flew to Moscow in 2012, his name should have been flagged
at Logan airport. After all, he was on the TIDE and TECS terrorist watch
lists. His travel documents included an American permanent resident
alien card that had been issued to him in 2007 and a passport issued in
Kyrgyzstan in 2002 when he was 16, which would expire that year. He
wasn’t stopped at JFK for additional screening, and he wasn’t stopped
when he arrived in Moscow as a suspected terrorist.

Among his Dagestani relatives and members of his Russian mosque,
Tamerlan “looked like an American.” His cousin Magomed Kartashov had
grown up across the street from Tamerlan’s great-grandmother and had
known the Tsarnaev family when Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were young
children. He hadn’t seen either boy in years until Tamerlan showed up in
the Kizlyar region to visit relatives.

Kartashov did not recognize his cousin, but they quickly embraced.
Tamerlan was wearing a long raincoat and glasses, Kartashov later
recalled to the FBI in June 2013 at the FSB offices in Dagestan while he
was being jailed for allegedly supporting terrorism, according to court
records. Kartashov remembered he hadn’t seen Tamerlan since he was about
10, and that he’d grown up to be a “big guy.”

Tamerlan didn’t wait long to ask Kartashov for help achieving the goal
that had brought him to Russia. According to Kartashov, Tamerlan said
that he wanted to go into the forests, and that he wanted to go to
Syria. “I came here to get involved in jihad,” Tamerlan said.

At first, it sounded like boasting from a spoiled westerner. But
Tamerlan told Kartashov that he had followed Islamic teachings that
urged Muslims to follow orders such as “cut their heads and make them
kneel in front of you.” Kartashov said Tamerlan didn’t know what he was
talking about and took these words too literally. However, investigators
believe this is what happened to three men in Waltham months earlier,
all mixed martial arts fighters who called Tamerlan a friend. While the
case led investigators to Ibragim Todashev, a Russian with ties to
Tamerlan who was shot dead by FBI agents under murky circumstances
during an interview in Florida, the murders remain unsolved.

From the outside, Tamerlan’s familial relationship with radicals in
Russia would’ve made him the perfect FBI recruit. As would his
connections to Muslim drug traffickers and budding Islamists who, on the
highest of Muslim holidays in August 2012, posed in front of a black
flag often associated with jihad. Law enforcement officials in
Massachusetts later began to say that Tamerlan was an informant for the
feds, a spy sent to Russia to help track and kill the men with whom he
was in contact. Some believed that he was working for the U.S.
government, motivated by the promise of citizenship.

Tamerlan was desperate to become an American. In 2009, he even posed in
a photo essay that read, “Will Box for Passport.” He’d wanted to compete
in the Olympic Games on the U.S. boxing team, for which only citizens
were eligible, and trained hard. But he destroyed any chance he might
have had when police arrested him on a domestic violence charge—an
offense of moral turpitude that legally made him ineligible for
citizenship for the next five years. And yet, within weeks of his return
from Russia, where many of the men he had been spotted with had been
tracked and killed by Russian counterterrorism forces, Tamerlan’s case
for citizenship was mysteriously reopened.

When Janet Napolitano was grilled about security lapses in Tamerlan’s
case at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on immigration in April
2013, she admitted that the name on his travel document did not match
the name on his identification. Napolitano, clearly frazzled, said that
a misspelling allowed him to leave the country but that redundancies in
the DHS computer system alerted U.S. authorities to be aware of his
return. But, she said, by the time he came back to the United States six
months later, the FBI alert on him had expired, so his reentry was not
noted. “The system pinged when he was leaving the United States,”
Napolitano testified. “By the time he returned, all investigations had
been—the matter had been closed.” The response, many believe, was
laughable. One federal agent not authorized to speak publicly explained
it this way: “His time overseas should have triggered a secondary
inspection for a number of reasons: immigration status, duration out of
the country, area of travel, and the fact that he was watch-listed.”

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, pushed
Napolitano for more answers and was told to wait for a
classified—secret—briefing. Senator Charles Grassley asked Napolitano
how a misspelling could have caused problems in 2012 when the
Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 had
amended certain sections of the Immigration and Naturalization Act
pertaining to the control of foreign nationals’ travel. The 2007 law
reiterated the need for exit data and required that such data be
collected on all foreign nationals who entered the United States under
the visa waiver program with the provision that air carriers are
required to “collect and electronically transmit” passenger “arrival and
departure” data to “the automated entry and exit control system”
developed by the federal government. Clearly, according to Napolitano’s
testimony, that didn’t happen. Inexplicably, once again she was only
willing to answer behind closed doors. It would be better, Napolitano
told the senators at the hearing, if they could discuss the matter in a
classified setting.

Whatever information Tamerlan’s immigration records contained, the DHS
secretary was not at liberty to talk. It was a staggering admission,
especially since DHS would eventually be forced to release Tamerlan’s
alien file pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by
multiple news organizations, including the Boston Globe, in February
2016. Though dozens of pages were completely redacted, including the
names of federal agencies that requested Tamerlan receive U.S.
citizenship (and waive any fees for the application process), the U.S.
Customs file still contained troubling information.

First, Tamerlan had multiple names and dates of birth that he had used.
Then there were the two State Department Medical Examination for
Immigration or Refugee Applicant forms, which had startling
discrepancies. In one, the attached picture was of an unidentified
older-looking man wearing a black-collared polo shirt and contained a
passport number. In the second, the picture was of a teenage Tamerlan
wearing an identical shirt, and the passport number had been redacted.

Another troubling form seemed innocuous at first glance: a notification
instructing Tamerlan to report to 170 Portland Street in Boston on
October 16, 2012, so he could finally take the official oath and become
an American citizen. Even though Tamerlan was legally ineligible,
somehow his naturalization application had been reopened on August 28,
2012. Among other things, the October ceremony would have meant an
impossibly short turnaround for an application opened just months
earlier. It remains unclear whether Tamerlan showed up at 170 Portland
Street and what happened if he did show up. But the document suggests
that someone was pulling strings to help him obtain the very thing he
had been craving so desperately for years.

Tamerlan did not become a citizen on that October day, though the DHS
will not say whether he attended. What is clear, however, is that in the
weeks after that scheduled appearance, the FBI continued to email
immigration officials, prodding them to approve Tamerlan’s citizenship
application, according to the Office of the Inspector General’s report.
Janet Napolitano, though, would not stick around to answer questions.
She quit her job at the DHS months after the Boston Marathon bombings,
right around the same time FBI Director Robert Mueller retired, as did
the Boston FBI special agent in charge, Richard DesLauriers.

On October 22, 2012—days after the scheduled oath ceremony for Tamerlan
was somehow scuttled—an immigration services officer emailed the FBI’s
CT Agent saying that Tamerlan’s name had popped up on a terrorist watch
list and asking if he “represented a national security concern.” The
next day, the CT Agent, who investigated the initial Russian FSB warning
in 2011, assured immigration officials in writing that Tamerlan was not
a risk if he gained full citizenship: “There is no national security
concern related to [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] and nothing that I know of that
should preclude issuance of whatever is being applied for,” he wrote.
The CT Agent would tell officials that he did not remember whether he
searched Tamerlan’s file or public sources before he replied to the
immigration official. To this day, the FBI insists that Tamerlan’s case
file was closed after the CT Agent’s initial investigation in 2011, and
was only reopened after the Boston Marathon attack.

On January 23, 2013, Tamerlan made a second attempt to become a U.S.
citizen. He had an interview with Customs officials to discuss
documentation related to his arrest for domestic violence and fully
expected to walk away with his citizenship. Instead, the officer wrote,
the paperwork relating to the dismissal of charges in his domestic
violence arrest did not arrive and his status was delayed.

Again.

Two weeks later, on February 6, 2013, an angry Tamerlan walked into
Phantom Fireworks in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and asked for the “biggest
and loudest” pyrotechnics in the store.

Michele McPhee’s book Maximum Harm will be released April 4 by ForeEdge,
an imprint of University Press of New England.

By Michele McPhee
Boston Magazine | April 2017

Find this story at 9 April 2017

copyright http://www.bostonmagazine.com/

519: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2014)

Last May, a weird story made the news: the FBI killed a guy in Florida who was loosely linked to the Boston Marathon bombings. He was shot seven times in his living room by a federal agent. What really happened? Why was the FBI even in that room with him? A reporter spent six months looking into it, and she found that the FBI was doing a bunch of things that never made the news. Her Boston Magazine story.

This story was reported by Susan Zalkind in a collaboration with Boston Magazine. Check out Susan’s print story for more about the murders in Waltham, MA, and the investigation into Ibragim Todashev.

PROLOGUE

Ira explains that in May 2013, the FBI shot a guy named Ibragim Todashev in his living room in Florida. Supposedly, right before he died, Todashev implicated himself in a crime, a pretty gruesome one, a triple murder of three drug dealers in Waltham Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Law enforcement officials told reporters that he also named one of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers – Tamerlan Tsarnaev – as his accomplice in the crime. And then, right before he signed a confession, he supposedly freaked out, and an FBI agent shot him. Which is weird in itself. But weirder still is the fact that the FBI has been silent about what happened. They first promised an investigation on this last May. And since then, we’ve heard that it’s coming, but nine months later it hasn’t arrived. So many questions remain: what happened during that interrogation that led to them shooting Ibragim Todashev? If they had such good evidence connecting him to these murders, why didn’t they just arrest him? What evidence did they have? How good is the evidence connecting the alleged Boston bomber to the murders? Do they truly know who committed the triple murders? In the absence of solid information, conspiracy theories sprang up. Some people started to believe the FBI was hiding something. (7 minutes)

ACT ONE

Susan Zalkind spent six months investigating all this for Boston Magazine and This American Life. And she has a personal connection to the 2011 triple murder. She knew one of the three drug dealers who were killed: Erik Weissman was a friend of hers. In this half of the show, she explains what happened when she reached out to people who might have information on Ibragim Todashev, the man killed by the FBI in Florida. First his girlfriend Tatiana Gruzdeva and then his best friend Khusen Taramov are more or less kicked out of the country by federal authorities. Tatiana says she was told she was deported specifically because she spoke with Susan for a story. (17 minutes)
Susan Zalkind

ACT TWO

Susan’s investigation continues, and she tells the story of a third person who was close to Ibragim Todashev who was whisked out of the United States thanks after actions by the FBI. (20 minutes)
Susan Zalkind

ACT THREE

Susan lays out her theory of what the truth is in this case. And she explains what we still don’t know. (14 minutes)

MAR 7, 2014

Find this story at 7 March 2014

© 1995 – 2014 Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass

Did FBI Execute Friend of Boston Bombing Suspect During Interrogation? (2014)

Names you know… Dhovar Tsarnev and Tamerlen Tsarnaev… Two young Chechen born brothers, raised in the United States, radicalized through the internet, and responsible for the deadly Boston Bombing attack.

That is the story media has told you but what about the story they have all but ignored? About another Chechen with a lesser known name. Who is Ibragim Todashev and why was he killed by the FBI during an interrogation over the Tsarnev brothers?

Today, you will hear from the widow of that man, and the questions she is still waiting to have answered.

The first step toward truth is to be informed.

As I said, it is a name most americans don’t know at all Ibragim Todashev. A 34 year-old Chechen, living in Orlando, Florida and friend of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlen Tsarnev.

Here is the story.

On May 22nd of this year, FBI agents and Massachusetts state police officers showed up in Orlando florida to interview Todashev.

Before moving to Orlando, Todashev lived in Massachusetts. He was a mixed martial arts fighter and through that sport, became friends with boston bombing suspect Tamerlen Tsarnev.
That was why, only weeks after the bombings, the FBI went to meet with Todashev. but it was during that interrogation when something went terribly wrong

According to a statement released by the FBI,

“The agent, two Massachusetts State Police troopers, and other law enforcement personnel were interviewing an individual in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation when a violent confrontation was initiated by the individual. During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries.”

So what violent confrontation took place? Media reports were all over the place on what happened. The New York Times claimed that Todashev pulled a knife on the agent. Other media claimed it was a samurai sword and then metal pole, some said a broom stick. That is, until
the Washington Post was told by an unnamed law enforcement source that Todashev had neither a knife or gun, that he was completely unarmed but did lunge at the agent.

Who saw this happen?

Another important question. Because according to the FBI, who is doing an internal investigation, immediately prior to the killing, after hours of interrogation, all of the other interrogators withdrew and left the room, leaving the FBI agent who fired the shots alone with Todashev.

That agent, claims that Todashev was about to sign a confession to his involvement along with Tamerlen Tsarnev in an unsolved triple murder in Massachusetts and it was just before he was going to sign that confession that he attacked.

The ex-wife of Todashev spoke to me via Skype.

Ben: “What do you make of the claim that all the agents left him and only the agent who killed Ibragim remained in the room with him?”

Reni: “We still don’t know what exactly happened, how many were in there when he was shot. It is still not clear, they are not telling us anything. So far we know it was three of them when they started the interrogation of them but who was in there when he was shot, we still don’t know.”

Aside from the very strange details surrounding an FBI agent left alone with a suspect, who then must defend himself and kill that suspect, are these details.

The agent who shot and killed Todashev, reportedly shot him 7 times including in the head and chest. I say reportedly, because on July 8th, the autopsy report on Ibragim Toashev was finalized and ready for release. According to the Orlando medical examiners office forensic records coordinator,

“The FBI has informed this office that the case is still under investigation and not to release this document.”

All of which is not only unusual, but the entire investigation so far has been surrounded by secrecy. Another issue that the FBI has not even addressed is that while the claim was that Todashev attempted to attack the agent, friends and his ex-wife claim that Todashev was recovering from knee surgery.

Ben: “You say that Ibragim was recovering from knee surgery, so what was the injury and how bad was that knee?”

Reni: “He had done his surgery in the middle of march. For a month and a half he was still on crutches. He was still limping, he was still in pain and with a light touch to his knee, he would feel the pain. He was still in pain on the knee, he was still walking and limping on the knee.”

Ben: “Is it true that he was on crutches at the time that he was killed?”

Reni: “Not necessarily. He was on them sometimes and when he would feel the pain he would go and get the crutches.”

Ben: “Obviously it is speculation on your part but why do you believe that Ibragim was killed?”

Reni: “He got 7 shots and one of them was the back of the head. Clearly this was an execution.”

Ben: “How do you know that one was to the back of the head?”

Reni: “Because I saw the body.”

Ben: “How do you know that it was an entry wound and not an exit wound for the bullet?”

Reni: “I can’t tell, I’m not a professional but from what I see and the medical examiner in Orlando says that he had 7 shots, 1 in the back of the head.”

Ben: “The medical examiner told you?”

Reni: “Yes, they have told me from day one when I came to sign for the body and to take it.”

Ben: “And he told you that he was shot in the back of the head? Incredible.”

Reni: “He said that he had 7 shots, 1 in the head, 3 in the heart, 1 in the liver and I believe that 1 was somewhere in the shoulder or in the arm.”

What you need to know, is that while the ACLU has requested an independent investigation in Florida and Massachusetts, both those requests have been rejected by law enforcement, saying that it would be inappropriate.

Meanwhile, CAIR in Florida is reporting that a friend of Todashev, was arrested in September and was denied a lawyer for 6 days. That even though he repeatedly requested to speak with an attorney, the FBI agents allegedly responded, “That is not happening.”

CAIR-Florida Civil Rights Director Thania Diaz Clevenger said in a statement.

“It fits the pattern of abuse and troubling behavior by FBI agents beginning in the days prior to the killing of the unarmed Ibragim Todashev. One can only wonder if Mr. Todashev was denied his rights to legal council during the questioning that ultimately resulted in his death.”

In addition, other Chechen friends of Todashev say they are being pressured by the FBI to spy on friends and neighbors. The story here that media just won’t cover is the incredible secrecy surrounding this young man’s death, the fact that he was killed so brutally during an interrogation and to so many people its not even that big of a deal because he might be connected to a terrorist.

Ben Swann Nov 14, 2013

Find this story at 14 November 2013

© Ben Swann 2014

The Murders Before the Marathon (2014)

Waltham, September 11, 2011: Three men, throats slit, cash and drugs left on the bodies. Two years later, two dead suspects: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and a friend who the FBI says was about to confess. One haunting question: Could solving this case have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings?

waltham-triple-homocide

It’s nearly midnight in a nondescript condo complex a few blocks from Universal Studios in Orlando, and Tatiana Gruzdeva has been crying all day. Though neither of us knows it yet, as she sits on the corner of her bed and sobs in tiny convulsions, the fact that she’s talking to me will lead to her being arrested by federal agents, placed in solitary confinement, and deported back to Russia.

Next to us on the bed are nine teddy bears. Eight of them came with her from Tiraspol, Moldova. The ninth was a gift from her boyfriend, Ibragim Todashev. Today would have been Ibragim’s 28th birthday, but he is not here to see it, because in the early hours of May 22, 2013, a Boston FBI agent shot and killed him in this very apartment, under circumstances so strange that a Florida state prosecutor has opened an independent investigation. According to the FBI, just before Ibragim was shot—seven times, in two bursts, including once in the top of the head—he was about to write a confession implicating himself and alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a brutal triple homicide that took place in Waltham, Massachusetts, in September 2011.

I’m sitting awkwardly at one end of the twin bed. She’s crying quietly, cross-legged at the other end, wearing shorts and a white shirt with sequins. Most of her outfits have sequins or rhinestones. She’s 19. I’m 26. We both have long blond hair. We’ve both been close to men who were in trouble with the law, and lost them violently. We’ve been talking for about an hour, mostly about men, and parties, and moving forward after a tragedy. Ibragim was a good man, she says. He could never have committed a murder.

“I’m here alone,” she cries. “I hope it never can be worse than this.”

I try to comfort her, but it’s complicated. We both want to know why Ibragim Todashev was killed. She wants to clear his name. For me, and for the families of the Waltham murder victims, Ibragim’s shooting may have snuffed out the last chance at finding out what really happened that night. In the back of my mind is this question: Did her dead boyfriend kill my friend Erik?

September 11, 2011 was a Sunday, and at twilight Erik Weissman was looking for somewhere to spend the night. That afternoon he’d visited his younger sister Aria at a diner down the street from their parents’ home, but he didn’t have a place of his own—he’d been couch-surfing since the cops busted him on drug charges back in January. He kept his belongings at his friend Brendan Mess’s apartment on a dead-end street in Waltham, and that’s where he usually stayed. Erik and Brendan were established pot dealers who occasionally worked together and shared an interest in sports, personal fitness, and designer weed. But Erik had cleared out of the apartment while Brendan was going through a dramatic breakup with his live-in girlfriend, Hiba Eltilib. He had recently been staying with a friend in Newton. “That chick is crazy,” Erik had repeatedly told the friend.

That night his friend in Newton was busy, so around 7:30 p.m. Erik drove his Mercedes SUV back to Brendan’s place in Waltham. It was a warm night, cloudless. Brendan and Hiba had finally broken up, and Hiba had split for Florida, so the coast was clear. Brendan had invited another friend, Rafi Teken, to come over, too. Like Erik, Rafi had been avoiding Brendan’s place while Hiba was there. Rafi and Hiba were known to get into arguments of their own.

At 7:30, Erik sent a text to his friend in Newton. Shortly thereafter, all three men stopped answering their phones.

The bodies were found the next day. Erik was 31. Brendan was 25. Rafi was 37.

It was Hiba who found them, of all people. On September 12, she returned unexpectedly from Florida—most of Brendan’s friends were under the impression that she wasn’t coming back—and after she couldn’t reach Brendan on her cell phone, she showed up at the apartment and asked the landlord to open the door. The bodies were inside. One news report says that Hiba left the house and screamed, “They’re all dead!” Another says she went outside, crying, with blood on her feet, and calmly asked for a cigarette.

Their throats had been slashed with such force that their heads were nearly decapitated. A veteran Waltham investigator called it “the worst bloodbath I have ever seen,” and compared the victims’ wounds to “an Al-Qaeda training video.” About a pound and a half of high-grade marijuana covered two of the corpses. Rafi Teken’s face was left untouched. Erik Weissman had a bloody lip. But Brendan Mess, an experienced mixed martial artist who trained in jujitsu, had real fighting wounds. His arms were covered in scratch marks. He had puncture marks on his temple and the top of his head, another mark by his ear, and he was bruised around the lips. It didn’t scan like a robbery: There were eight and a half pounds of pot left in bags and glass jars, and $5,000 dollars left on the bodies—enough for a cheap funeral, for one of them.

Hours later, Middlesex County District Attorney Gerry Leone stood amid a scrum of reporters on the dead-end street outside Brendan’s home at 12 Harding Avenue. State police had found a “very graphic crime scene” in the second-floor apartment, he said. “It does not appear to be a random act.” He told reporters that there was no evidence of a break-in—that it was likely the assailants and dead men knew one another. Assailants, plural? a reporter asked. Leone replied that there were “at least two people who are not in the apartment now, who were there earlier.”

“This is a fluid, ongoing investigation,” he said. “We will have information as we develop the facts.”

But they didn’t.

ibragim-todashev-autopsy
FROM TOP LEFT, PICTURES RELEASED BY IBRAGIM TODASHEV’S FATHER SHOW HIS WOUNDS—BULLET HOLES IN HIS TORSO AND THE TOP OF HIS HEAD—AS WELL AS THE BLOODY SCENE AT HIS ORLANDO APARTMENT.

From the beginning, investigators failed to follow up on seemingly obvious leads. They didn’t visit the gym where Brendan trained, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of Brendan’s best friends, was never questioned—even though several of Brendan’s friends say they gave his name to the police. Ten days after the murders, a state police detective essentially told one victim’s mother that investigators were waiting for the case to solve itself.

It would take 18 months and two homemade bombs before FBI investigators exhumed the case—and once they did, they were able to move with uncanny speed. It took them mere hours to link Tamerlan to the Waltham triple homicide. The day after Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with Watertown police, plainclothes FBI agents detained his friend, Ibragim Todashev, at gunpoint. Although the FBI seems to have initially been looking for evidence of a wider terrorist cell in connection with the marathon bombings, within weeks its agents were questioning Ibragim about the Waltham murders. According to the FBI, agents were able to bring Ibragim to the brink of a written confession by pressuring him with circumstantial evidence.

If you believe the FBI’s account, then you must also believe this: If Waltham police had figured out who hacked three men to death on September 11, 2011, there’s a good chance we would not be talking about the Boston Marathon bombings. Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Ibragim Todashev might be alive and in jail. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might be just another mop-headed, no-name stoner at UMass Dartmouth. There would be no One Fund. Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, and Martin Richard would still be alive. Sean Collier would have graduated from the MIT police department to the Somerville Police Department by now. And for the friends and family of the three men who died in Waltham, perhaps their grief would not still be paired with such haunting questions.

I met Erik Weissman in the summer of 2006, after my freshman year of college. I was 19. He was 26. He’d come to sell us some high-end weed. I was with my friends from high school in a Newton attic, and it felt less like a drug deal than a Tupperware party. Erik had spotless sneakers, wire-rimmed nerd glasses, and a contagious smile. He produced a series of glass jars from a black duffel bag, each filled with a different strain of headies: Blue Dream, Grand Daddy, Alaskan Thunder Fuck. My friends were easily impressed; I teased him for talking game. My father, Norman Zalkind, is a criminal defense lawyer, and I grew up discussing his cases and clients at the kitchen table.

A few days later, Erik picked me up and we drove around in his blue Audi, taking turns playing Lil Wayne and Buju Banton on our iPods and smoking Erik’s Sour Diesel. We did that a few times that summer: driving aimlessly, talking, smoking. He was one of the few friends who encouraged my cheesy freshman-year poetry. He thought of himself as an entrepreneur and a connoisseur of pot; he would fly to Amsterdam regularly to buy seeds of a particular variety that interested him. He talked about selling pot as if it were a community service, and told me repeatedly that he didn’t operate in violent circles. I told him about my father and his clients. I told him his line of work always ends badly. He laughed.

Over time I stopped smoking pot, and we grew apart. The last I heard from him was sometime in January or February of 2011. He wanted my father’s number. He’d been busted when his landlord went into his apartment, saw his stash, and called the cops. Boston police had seized more than $20,000 in cash and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of marijuana from his Roslindale home. He had always told me that he sold only pot, but in the raid police also seized cocaine, Vicodin, and OxyContin.

I gave him the number for my dad’s law firm. He sounded scared.

Soon after my dad took me out for oysters to thank me for the referral. He told me there was a problem with Erik’s warrant, and he didn’t think the case would go to trial.

I never spoke to Erik again.

There was a lot about him I learned only after his death. The drugs and money he lost when he was arrested left him $50,000 in debt to his Sour Diesel connection in California, his friends told me. He’d invested in a California bong company called Hitman Glass, but his money woes kept him from moving out West. In the months before they died, Erik and Brendan were working together to expand their pot business, trying to buy in larger quantities and purchasing equipment to grow marijuana on their own, according to another dealer who sometimes worked with them.

Waltham is often described as a small, quiet, suburban town, but in 2011 it was teeming with much bigger drug operations. A few months before the murders, federal investigators indicted a steroid-popping Syrian national named Safwan Madarati, the Waltham-based head of a violent international drug ring. Madarati, the indictment revealed, hired thugs to assault and intimidate his enemies, and maintained “personal connections with members of the Watertown police department.” A former Watertown officer was among those charged in the case. In an unrelated case only a few months later, police arrested a former Watertown council member after they found $2 million worth of hydroponic pot in his Waltham warehouse. They were all convicted.

Police quickly seized on Erik and Brendan’s pot dealing, and theorized that the murders must have been connected to a drug dispute or robbery. “Whose toes were they stepping on in Waltham?” one friend remembers being asked. Investigators grilled the victims’ friends about Erik and Brendan’s drug sources, and asked with whom they had financial disputes. “They were telling us that it could’ve been a drug deal that had gone wrong,” recalled Bellie Hacker, Erik’s mother. “But then it didn’t make sense because there was money left behind, and the marijuana.”

For Bellie, the aftermath of the murder was excruciating. In addition to the cops’ theory about a drug deal gone wrong, there were other dark rumors circulating, some of them concerning Brendan’s ex-girlfriend, Hiba. “One of the theories was that Hiba hired someone to kill Brendan and just Erik and Rafi were there and they got killed, too,” Bellie said. According to news reports, police questioned Hiba on several occasions. Before dropping out of sight, she gave anonymous interviews to the New York Times and the Boston Globe disavowing any involvement in the crime. Bellie didn’t know what to believe. “Nothing really made sense,” she said.

It didn’t help that police seemed to save their toughest questions for the victims’ families and friends. A few days after the murders, Erik’s sister, Aria, learned that her brother had kept a storage unit, and called the company to ask if she could get access to Erik’s belongings. They didn’t call back, and instead she got a hostile phone call from a detective, State Trooper Erik Gagnon, assigned to the Middlesex County DA’s office. What did she think she was going to find in that box? Gagnon asked. Drugs? Money? She remembers that Gagnon called her “deceitful” and threatened to prosecute her for interfering with the investigation. “How many murders have you solved?” he barked. (When I asked Gagnon about the conversation, he wouldn’t comment on it directly, but said, “If someone said I was being accusatory, maybe ask them why.”)

Friends of Erik’s who spoke to the police after his murder had similar experiences. One friend, who did not have a police record, told me he was questioned by detectives just hours after carrying Erik’s casket at his funeral. “They were treating us less like friends and more like drug dealers,” he said.

Then there were leads that the detectives seemed to ignore. They never visited the Wai Kru gym in Allston, where Brendan practiced mixed martial arts several times a week, according to gym owner John Allan. They never spoke to his training partner and best friend, Golden Gloves champion Tamerlan Tsarnaev, even though several friends gave the police his name in a list of Brendan’s closest contacts. Meanwhile, detectives called Aria into the police station and accused her of knowing who killed her brother. She broke down in tears as her mother defended her.

Ten days after the bodies were found, detectives told Bellie that they were not actively pursuing leads in her son’s murder. Instead, she remembers state police detectives explaining, they were waiting for a suspect to shake loose. “They were basically waiting for someone to come forward and say who did it,” Bellie recalled. “They said, ‘Someday down the line, someone is going to need a plea bargain.’”

It was September 22, 2011. The case would go cold for 582 days.

There was a time, just after the bombs went off on Boylston Street, when it looked like the families might finally get some answers about who killed Rafi, Brendan, and Erik. On April 19, media outlets made the connection between Tamerlan and Brendan. Friends recalled that Tamerlan had acted differently after Brendan’s death, and hadn’t attended his memorial service. John Allan, the owner of Wai Kru gym, recalled approaching Tamerlan to offer his condolences, only to have Tamerlan laugh him off.

Bellie was hopeful that the renewed attention would stir something up. “It got international news, everyone found out about it, the whole world knew about it, and someone will get the fire under their tush, and we’ll start really getting some answers,” she remembers thinking.

A few days after the Watertown manhunt, Aria says, she spoke to Gagnon for the first time since 2011. He asked for her brother’s cell-phone number and the name of the gym Brendan Mess went to. The Middlesex County DA’s office had Boston cops send over the files from Erik Weissman’s previous arrests.For the first time, Brendan Mess’s younger brother Dylan and his friends were questioned about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The FBI agents wanted to know if either Brendan or Tamerlan was involved in organized crime. If Tamerlan had guns. Who else he sparred with. If Tamerlan prayed, if he preached. The agents asked if the auto shops where Tamerlan and his father sometimes worked were part of an organized-crime ring.

A few weeks later, in mid-May, FBI agents called on Dylan again. He and a friend met them at Dwelltime, a café near Inman Square. The agents, who were in plainclothes, took them into the back of a van and showed them a series of photo lineups. Dylan and his friend looked at each other, and told the agents that the man in the last photo looked vaguely familiar.

The man in the photo, they would later learn, was Ibragim Todashev.

No one who knew Ibragim Todashev seemed to have a complete picture of who he was. Even his own father, with whom he spoke regularly, did not know he had a wife in America, let alone a girlfriend. Ibragim was a womanizer. He was kind to children. He had a sweet tooth, and a temper. He was a trained MMA fighter who liked to hang out with a close-knit group of Chechnyan friends; he didn’t socialize outside of that circle. He was an erratic driver—he’ d been in several car accidents. He and his friends liked to drive luxury cars, but they’d buy old, broken-down ones and fix them up. He liked to listen to a Russian singer called Mr. Credo, who sings in a fake North Caucasus accent about buying drugs from the Taliban.

Ibragim was the eldest of 12 children—his father, Abdulbaki Todashev, had two wives. The family was on the move constantly in the chaos of war-torn Chechnya. After the wars, Ibragim attended college in Russia for three years before leaving in 2008. He arrived in Boston with a student visa (though he would never attend school here), and shortly thereafter received asylum.

Ibragim was welcomed into Boston’s insular Chechnyan community. Tamerlan was one of his first friends. They worked out together, and went clubbing. But it seems he never socialized with Tamerlan’s many American friends. He most likely knew Tamerlan’s friend Brendan, though, because the three of them once lived within a few blocks of one another around Inman Square, and they all trained at the Wai Kru gym.

According to owner John Allan, Tamerlan introduced Ibragim to the gym shortly after Ibragim first arrived in Boston in 2008. Allan remembers them praying together before training. “[Ibragim’s] English was horrific, and it was really hard to communicate with him,” Allan recalled. “In the beginning I assumed the fights and problems were related to language. But later I learned he was just very hotheaded.” For some reason, Allan said, the word “motherfucker” would incite in Ibragim an inconsolable rage. “He would lose it. He would just lose it. He would be ready to fight 17 people and not care if he would win or lose. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be directed to him.”

In 2010 Ibragim was working for a medical-transport company when he got into a verbal argument with another driver in traffic on Tremont Street. By the time police arrived, he was out of the car, being held back by several bystanders as he screamed, “You say something about my mother! I will kill you!”

Ibragim met his wife, Reni Manukyan, when she came to visit his roommate in May 2010. He was 24; she was 20. They exchanged phone numbers, and when she went home to suburban Atlanta, they began a courtship via text message. The relationship moved fast. By July, Reni, an Armenian Christian, had converted to Islam and married Ibragim; a few months later Ibragim moved in with her in Georgia. But he had trouble finding work, and came back to Boston in the summer of 2011 to work at another medical-transport company. Reni came to visit that July to watch him fight a match (he lost). She remembered that his friend Tamerlan called frequently during that visit. Reni told reporters that Ibragim left Boston in August; she told me she had a bank statement that proves he was in Atlanta the day after the murders, but she said her lawyers advised her not to show it to me.

By early 2012, Ibragim had moved to Orlando alone. A year later, when the bombs went off in Boston, he was living with a girlfriend in a condo complex located between Universal Studios and a swamp. A month later, the FBI shot him dead.

Anonymous FBI sources gave numerous accounts of Ibragim’s death to the press, managing to be both vague and contradictory. The agency claimed that, just before being shot, Ibragim had been sitting at a table, about to write a statement that would implicate both himself and Tamerlan in the Waltham murders. In some reports, he lunged at an FBI agent with a knife, while others said he used a pole or a broomstick. It was an agonizing development: The FBI claimed he had been killed at precisely the moment he was about to give the answers so many of us had been waiting for.

Whatever occurred in Ibragim’s apartment the night he was shot dead, his death put the FBI on the defensive. The agency quashed the coroner’s report, leading media outlets and the American Civil Liberties Union to call for an independent investigation. On its editorial page, the Globe declared that “the agency’s credibility is on the line” due to its lack of accountability in Ibragim’s death. Ibragim’s father accused the agency of “premeditated murder” and released photos of his son’s bullet-ridden corpse, showing that he’d been shot in the top of the head—even though the FBI contended that one of its agents had fired in self-defense. Instead of providing answers, the FBI’s investigation of Ibragim had turned into a sudden dead end.

Bellie was infuriated. “Oh, I was so angry,” she said. “That was just horrible, because here we had an opportunity, they were starting to make connections and tie people and find out more information… and the man that could’ve given us answers is no longer available to us.”

She added, “Where is there for us to go?”

But there was at least one person who might know more about Ibragim. At the time of his death, he had been living with a woman named Tatiana Gruzdeva. I found her on Facebook: a slight 19-year-old with bleached blond hair and huge green eyes. She posted a lot of selfies. I sent her a friend request. On the night of September 18, she accepted it.

We corresponded for a few minutes, and then she sent me her number. When I dialed, she picked up right away. Her voice sounded small, but she talked rapid-fire, her Russian accent thick but understandable. I told her I was a reporter, and that I wanted to hear her story.

Two days later, I flew to Orlando to meet her.

By the front door of 6022 Peregrine Avenue, a wire statue of a cow held a pink sign with the word “Welcome.” The apartment was all one room, with a lofted bed surrounded by a waist-high wall. Tatiana invited me in, and I looked around, taking in the sliver of a linoleum kitchen, distinguished from the carpeted living room by a small island. Tatiana slept in an upstairs loft, in a bed covered in stuffed animals, watched over by a poster of Muhammad Ali. The back wall was all windows, looking out on a black pond a few yards off, where a bale of turtles broke the surface to take in the evening air. Tatiana pointed out the place in the living room where the carpet had been cut out, because it had been stained with Ibragim’s blood.

She had met Ibragim through a mutual friend, Khusen Taramov. Then she moved in. “First it was just friends,” she said, “and after, we starting having relationship and we were sleeping together like boyfriend and girlfriend.” She cooked him meals. Together they adopted a cat, Masia. “It was like a small family, me and him and the cat, he was like a little baby for us.”

Tatiana knew that Ibragim had been married to Reni. She believed they were divorced.

After the Boston bombings, Tatiana recalled, Ibragim seemed upset. “He didn’t tell me it was his friend, he just was so sad. I said, ‘What happen with you?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ Long time he don’t want to tell me. And after, he tell me, ‘My friend is dead.’”

The day after Tamerlan was identified as a marathon bombing suspect, Tatiana was washing the dishes when Ibragim stepped outside. Then she heard shouts outside the house: Get down! Get down! She saw Ibragim on the ground, surrounded by six or seven men. She didn’t know who they were, because they weren’t wearing uniforms. She says they told her they were FBI agents.

They handcuffed Ibragim and made him sit in the middle of the room, and began questioning him about the Boston bombings, asking him what he knew and where he was on the day of the attack. Tatiana spoke up: “He was with me, he was in the house, we didn’t do anything wrong,” she told the agents.

“They just kept asking again and again, the same questions,” she said. They asked if he knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He replied that the two of them had been friends. Tatiana said this was the first time she had heard the name.

Eventually the FBI left with Ibragim, confiscating his phones and computers. About six hours later, Tatiana said, Ibragim came home, reassuring her that everything was okay. The next day, she said, agents returned their electronics.

As best as I can tell, the FBI arrived on Ibragim’s doorstep looking for a terrorist. The marathon bombings had been the largest act of terrorism on American soil since 9/11, and if there were any chance that the Tsarnaevs had ties to a terrorist organization, federal agents had to find it. Wrapping up a drug murder was not their top priority.

For the next month, Ibragim and Tatiana were under intense surveillance. Agents intercepted Ibragim’s wife, Reni, in an airport and questioned her for five hours; she was later interviewed several more times. They even tracked down his old Boston roommate.

Meanwhile, Tatiana said, agents contacted the couple regularly on the phone, visited their home, and on several occasions called them into the local field office for more questioning. They asked Ibragim about a call from Tamerlan a month before the bombings, just after Ibragim had undergone knee surgery. “He asked how he feels after surgery and Ibragim tells him, ‘I’m better, what about you? How is your family?’ So they would talk just a little bit and that’s it,” Tatiana said. At some point, Ibragim deleted the call from his phone’s memory. “FBI asked him, ‘Why did you delete this phone call?’” Tatiana said. “And he said, ‘I was scared.’”

When Ibragim and Tatiana left the house, he would point out cars to her. “When we go to the workplace or we go hang out with him, he show me in the street, ‘Look, look, they’re following us,’” Tatiana recalled.

On May 4, according to an arrest report, Ibragim got into a fistfight over a parking space, beating a man unconscious. He fled the scene in his white Mercedes, pursued by Orange County Sheriff’s deputies. When they caught him, Officer Anthony Riccaboni got out of the car and drew his gun. Ibragim put his hands up, and Riccaboni got a good look at him.

“I could see the features of the suspect’s ears. I immediately recognized the marks on his ears as a cage fighter/jujitsu fighter,” Riccaboni later wrote in his report. “I told this suspect if he tried to fight with us I would shoot him.”

He made the suspect lie on the ground, but when he got up, he told Riccaboni something unexpected.

“Once on his feet, the suspect commented that the vehicles behind us are FBI agents that have been following him,” Riccaboni wrote. “I noticed 3 (three) vehicles with dark tint. These vehicles began to leave the area. I noticed one vehicle was driven by a male, had a computer stand and appeared to be talking on a radio.”

If Ibragim was right, FBI agents had just watched him beat a man bloody without intervening.

Then they turned the pressure up higher.

About two and a half weeks after Ibragim was first interrogated, the FBI called him back to their office yet again. While he was being interviewed, Tatiana said, two agents took her into an office, where they questioned her for three hours. At first they continued to ask her about the Boston bombings. The agents wanted to know if Ibragim was planning another attack.

“They asked me, ‘Can you tell us when he will do something?’” Tatiana recalled. “I said, ‘No! I can’t!’ Because he wasn’t doing anything, and I didn’t know anything.”

Then they brought up a new topic: a triple murder.

“They said, ‘We think he did something else, before.’ They said he killed three people in Boston 2011 with a knife. I said, ‘It’s not true! I can’t believe it.’ You know, I was living with him seven months, and we have a cat.”

Throughout the course of my reporting, Tatiana is the only one of Ibragim’s associates who recalled being questioned about the Waltham murders before Ibragim’s death.

When agents didn’t get the answers they wanted, Tatiana said, they told her they would call immigration officials to detain her. Her visa had expired weeks before. “I said, ‘Come on guys, you cannot do this! Because all this two and a half weeks, you know my visa was expired and you didn’t do anything. And [now] because you need me and I say I don’t want to help you, you just call to immigration?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And they called immigration and immigration came and they took me and they put me in the jail.”

For a week, she said, she was kept in an immigration detention facility. She was allowed to talk to Ibragim every day on the phone. She said he told her that when he had come to find her in the lobby the day she was detained, FBI agents mocked him, saying, “Where’s your girlfriend?”

He told her he was so angry, he felt like hitting them for lying to him and stealing her away.

Later that week, the facility had a visiting day, she said. Ibragim came to see her.

“He kissed me, he hugged me like never, it was so sweet, like always. And he tell me, ‘I will marry you when you get out of here, or in the jail, whatever. If we can marry in the jail, we will marry in the jail.’”

On May 21, the last night of his life, Ibragim was hanging out with friends when the FBI called him again. It was an agent Ibragim’s friends were by now familiar with, but knew only by his first name: Chris. The agent told Ibragim that men from Boston were here to ask him a few questions. Ibragim got nervous. He was afraid of a setup, he told his friend Khusen Taramov.

“And I said, ‘All right, if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. But if you don’t do it, they’re not gonna leave you alone. They’re gonna get more suspicious.’ And so he decided to go, and he wanted me to go with him,” Khusen told reporters later. Despite his temper and proclivity toward violence, Ibragim had stayed relatively calm under weeks of questioning and scrutiny. But now, heading to meet the “men from Boston,” his demeanor changed. Ibragim gave Khusen his family’s phone number back in Chechnya, and told him about the $4,000 he had in his apartment, inside his jacket pocket. In case he got locked up, Khusen thought. Then Ibragim said something strange: “Worst-case scenario,” he told Khusen cryptically, “forgive me.”

When Khusen and Ibragim got to the apartment, Chris was with three other officers—an FBI agent from Boston, and two Massachusetts state troopers. Orlando police were on the scene as well.

The officers took Ibragim into the apartment and Chris said he needed to interview Khusen outside.

It was 7:30 p.m. At the same time, at two different locations in Georgia, agents were interviewing Reni yet again, and questioning Reni’s mother, Elena Teyer, for the first time.

Agent Chris asked Khusen a few questions, “Like what do you think about bombings, or do you know these guys, blah blah blah, or what is my views on certain stuff. You know what I mean, lotta stuff, different questions,” Khusen said. Chris didn’t mention a triple murder.

Khusen waited outside the house for four hours. Then at 11:30 p.m., he was told to leave, and that the agents would drop off Ibragim back at the plaza where the friends often hung out.

What happened next inside the condo is known only to the officers who were there.

Pictures later released by Ibragim’s family, of his inert body, show that he was shot four times in the chest, twice in the arm, and once in the top of the head.

Neighbors remember hearing shots a little after midnight. One of them looked out the window to see the parking lot filled with police cruisers. Then he heard an ambulance coming.

At Glades County Detention Center, in Moore Haven, corrections officers were suddenly hustling Tatiana from an immigration jail to a cell in solitary confinement.

She didn’t know why they had moved her. When she asked, they said, “We’ll tell you tomorrow in the morning.”

The next morning immigration officers came to her cell. They told her Ibragim was dead.

“They said, ‘He’s gone.’

“I said, ‘Come on, what do you mean? That’s not true.’

“They said, ‘He died yesterday.’

“I said, ‘No! I just talked with him.’

“They said, ‘We have a paper, and it says that he’s dead, and you can make a phone call.’”

She called Khusen. He told her it was true: Ibragim was dead. “And I’m screaming. I have panic attack. I realize, I realize, he is really dead. And it’s true, you know, it’s true. And I will not see him anymore. It’s not like a movie, it’s not like we broke up or something, I will not see him anymore, for all my life. And everything is flush in my heart, my heart was broken, because me and Ibragim, we had a plan, we had a plan to be together, we had a plan to have a family…. And now he’s not here and we’re not going to be together anymore.”

She told me she was given a sedative, and was kept in solitary confinement for four more days before being returned to an immigration jail. Her detainment stretched for months longer. Finally, on August 9, she was released. Ibragim’s friend Ashurmamad Miraliev came to pick her up, along with Ibragim’s father, who had flown to Florida from Chechnya.

They drove her back to the apartment she had shared with Ibragim, where he had been killed. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, the house is clean, and we cleaned everything.’”

But the cat, Masia, was gone. With Ibragim dead, and Tatiana in jail, there was no one to feed it, and it had run away into the swamp.

When FBI agents came to tell Reni Manukyan that her husband was dead, they claimed they had hard evidence of his guilt in the Waltham murders. “We have DNA that proves he was involved in that triple murder,” she remembered them saying. “The only thing I was telling them is, ‘This is not true, this cannot be true.’”

With the exception of Ibragim’s alleged confession, no agency has ever offered an official explanation of how it connected either him or Tamerlan to the Waltham murders. Reni’s account is the only one that even suggests the FBI has physical evidence linking her husband to the crime. Last July, the New York Times quoted an anonymous official suggesting that DNA evidence may have linked Tamerlan to the crime scene. But as for Ibragim, the official said, they made their case based merely on “a lot of circumstantial pieces.”

If, in fact, the FBI had only circumstantial evidence against Ibragim at the time they shot him, it might explain what happened next. Investigators who had previously asked Ibragim’s friends only about the bombings suddenly returned to ask them about the murders. Even though their suspects were both dead, the case remained open. After Ibragim’s death, the FBI continued its take-no-prisoners approach: Several of Ibragim’s friends found themselves detained, interrogated, and ultimately deported.

The first to go was Tatiana. On October 1, after I’d published an account of my interview with her, she called me collect from Glades County Detention Center. She’d been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and placed back in solitary confinement—and, she says, immigration agents told her repeatedly that she was about to be deported for talking to Boston magazine. By October 11, she was on a plane back to Russia. An official from ICE confirmed that Tatiana had been in the country legally on what’s called a “deferred action” extension of her expired visa. The official could not tell me why she had been deported.

Others felt the scrutiny of the FBI as well. Several of Ibragim’s Orlando friends worked in a pizza shop; the owner told me that after the FBI came to question him, he fired them. Reni’s mother, Elena—a noncommissioned officer with the U.S. Army—says she was told that she would be flagged as a security risk, preventing a promotion. Khusen left the United States in mid-June, to attend Ibragim’s funeral in Chechnya, but when he attempted to return to the U.S. in December, according to several sources, he was blocked from boarding a plane, despite having a green card.

In one case, I was able to catch a glimpse of how the agency was maneuvering behind the scenes—and how, after Ibragim’s death, its focus seemed to shift from looking for a terror cell to investigating the Waltham murders. When it came to Ibragim’s friend Ashurmamad Miraliev, the agency worked clandestinely with local, state, and federal agencies to manufacture a charge against him, interrogate him without a lawyer present, and ultimately get him out of the country.

After Ibragim’s death, Ashurmamad had come to live with Tatiana, supporting them both with pizza-delivery work. On September 18, while Ashurmamad was driving Tatiana to an appointment with her immigration officer, he was pulled over on an expired driver’s license. But this was no ordinary traffic stop. Between five and seven unmarked law-enforcement vehicles were present; Ashurmamad says FBI agents and local police took him out of his car and escorted him to the Orlando police headquarters. Tatiana never saw him again.

Contacted later, Orlando Police Sergeant Jim Young looked up the arrest record and said it looked like a routine traffic stop—with no mention of FBI involvement. But Ashurmamad says he was questioned by the FBI for hours—he’s not sure exactly how long—and was denied requests to speak to his attorney. (The FBI has declined to comment on this case, but a Tampa Field Bureau public-affairs official told me it is their policy to question individuals “with their consent, or in the presence of their attorney.”)

Agents had previously interviewed Ashurmamad and two of his roommates two days before Ibragim died. They questioned him about his own religious beliefs, the Boston Marathon bombings, and about Ibragim. Now, four months later, the interrogation was different. This time, agents were mostly interested in Ibragim and his involvement in the triple murder in Waltham. They wanted to know if there was someone else who might have been involved in the killings, and who else might have information.

But after hours of questioning, when Ashurmamad asked to leave, the agents told him he was going to jail—on a state charge they claimed to have nothing to do with. That turned out to be an outstanding warrant for a witness-tampering charge. It was the first Ashurmamad had heard of it—but the next thing he knew, he was behind bars.

The trumped-up charge stemmed from an incident the previous summer, when his friend Ibragim had gotten into a fight at a hookah bar with a manager named Youness Dammou. The next day, Youness walked into the pizza shop next door, where Ashurmamad worked. A screaming match ensued; Ashurmamad was angry that Youness had called police after the fight. At the time, police weren’t able to identify Ibragim as the assailant, and Youness never mentioned his confrontation with Ashurmamad, so the case was closed. Then almost a year later, on May 17—five days before Ibragim was shot—the case was suddenly reopened. I wanted to know why.

I found Youness working in an Orlando strip mall. He told me it hadn’t been his idea to reopen the case. Instead, he had been approached by an FBI agent in May, who took him to meet with an Osceola County Sheriff’s Department detective in an unmarked cruiser in a Burger King parking lot. The agent sat in the front seat, Youness sat in the passenger seat, and the detective sat in the back. They showed him a picture of Ibragim. They told him about another fight Ibragim had been in recently—the incident in which agents apparently watched him beat up a man over a parking space without intervening. When he heard about the other assault, Youness was eager to press charges.

The law-enforcement officers did not mention that Ibragim was involved in a larger investigation. A few days later, however, Youness saw Ibragim’s face on the news and learned his aggressor was a murder suspect—and dead.

That was the last he heard about it until the end of August, when the detective came back with another request: The last time they’d met, Youness had recounted the incident with the man who’d screamed at him in the pizza shop, Ashurmamad Miraliev. (Youness hadn’t actually known the man’s name; in the case file the detective wrote that an “Agent Sykes” provided the identification.) The detective said Ashurmamad could be charged with a crime. Would Youness like to pursue charges against him? At first Youness said he wasn’t so sure, but then he agreed.

So the FBI had been matchmaking: They had helped the sheriff’s department go fishing on a long-closed case to find a victim and a charge with which they could pressure or detain first Ibragim, and later Ashurmamad. The witness-tampering charge the FBI brought against Ashurmamad was so flimsy that it was dropped in just a month.

And yet it didn’t matter. Although he had never been to Boston and never met the Tsarnaevs, Ashurmamad was nonetheless flagged—according to a note on the booking sheet—“ON TERRORIST WATCH LIST/PLACED PROTECTIVE CUSTODY AND HIGH RISK. HOUSE ALONE.” Ashurmamad was taken from the Orlando Police Department to the Osceola County jail, where he was kept alone in an 8-by-10 room. To meet with his lawyers, he had to have his hands and wrists shackled and be chained to the ground. Ashurmamad told me there were no windows, the light was always on, and he was always cold. He was there for a month until the tampering case was dropped. But he wasn’t released. His student visa had expired, and he’d missed a court date while he was in jail. So he was moved directly to an immigration detention facility, and on November 4, he was ordered to be deported back to Tajikistan.

Nine months after Ibragim’s death, the FBI still hasn’t put the Waltham case to rest—or offered any further insight into the death of the man who might have closed it. Back in January, FBI director James Comey claimed the agency had completed its report on Ibragim’s shooting and was “eager” to share it—but almost two months later, the report somehow still hadn’t been released. The Florida prosecutor’s office was also investigating the shooting—but at the end of 2013, shortly after speaking with the Department of Justice, it announced the report would be delayed.

When I spoke to Ibragim’s father in February, he said he was waiting to hear the FBI’s findings before deciding whether to file a wrongful-death lawsuit. But that account is unlikely to shed significant new light on Ibragim’s death: The FBI has a long, unbroken history of clearing its agents of wrongdoing in shooting incidents, the New York Times found in a review of 150 such cases over the past two decades. And according to WBUR’s David Boeri—quoting unnamed “law-enforcement sources familiar with accounts of what happened” that night—the FBI has little to add to the story it peddled to reporters on background shortly after the killing. Boeri’s sources told him that during the interrogation, Ibragim admitted to being present at the crime scene but “blamed Tsarnaev for the murders.” He also quoted law-enforcement sources saying that Ibragim had knocked over a table and come at the FBI agent with a pipe.

According to a statement by the Middlesex County DA’s office, the triple-homicide case is “open and active” and state police, Waltham police, and the FBI are conducting a “thorough, far-reaching” investigation. “This investigation has not concluded and is by no means closed,” it said.

They have not updated the statement in nine months.

In late September, Aria Weissman and Dylan Mess invited me to accompany them to the annual Garden of Peace ceremony, which is held beside a dry, stone-lined riverbed near the State House to honor Massachusetts homicide victims. As she does every year, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley presided over the event. “We have more people who are here to listen and to find some peace tonight,” she said to the crowd that evening.

Afterward, Aria, Dylan, and I approached Coakley and asked her why there hadn’t been any progress in the Waltham case. “We haven’t been getting any answers,” Aria told Coakley.

Coakley was calm and respectful. “I know how frustrating and how difficult it is for you,” she told us. The triple murder, Coakley explained, was not her investigation—it was the Middlesex County DA’s concern. She said that she could and would follow up to make sure state police were working with Waltham police on the murder case. “The Waltham PD and the state police should be working together,” she told us.

But two weeks later, Detective Patrick Hart of the Waltham police, who has been investigating the murders since before the Boston Marathon bombings, told me his department had not been contacted by Coakley’s office. “No one here knows,” he said at the time. “I think I would have been told.”

Two days after I reported on Coakley’s exchange with Aria and Dylan, a victims’ advocate from the Middlesex County DA’s office reached out to Aria. The advocate said officials from the DA’s office were looking to sit down with the victims’ families and provide more information soon. But they never did.

After Ibragim was killed, Bellie Hacker’s friends congratulated her. The case had been solved—she must be so relieved!

“I’d say, ‘Don’t pay any attention, nothing is solved,’” she said.

She’s still waiting to be shown evidence—to know, finally, what truly happened to Erik. “I was told that once they knew something, someone would knock on my door in the middle of the night,” she said. “I was told that I would be contacted even in the middle of the night.”

State officials once told Bellie that they were waiting for a lead to shake loose, maybe from another case.

They were right. But by then it was too late.

By Susan Zalkind | Boston Magazine | March 2014

Find this story at 7 March 2014

Copyright © 2014 Metrocorp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Did FBI Focus on Controversial Stings Distract from Pursuit of Tsarnaev Before Boston Attacks? (2013)

Questions are mounting over whether U.S. security officials failed to heed warnings that could have foiled the bombing of the Boston Marathon. After news emerged that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was on the intelligence radar in the United States. As a result, there have been growing calls for federal agencies to re-examine their priorities, particularly to focus on sting operations that critics say constitute entrapment. We speak with Trevor Aaronson, author of “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism,” published in January. He is co-director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and a contributing writer at Mother Jones. His most recent article is called, “How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong ‘Terrorist.'” In the piece, he writes while the FBI “decided to stop tracking Tsarnaev — whose six-month trip to Russia at that time is now of prime interest to investigators — the FBI conducted a sting operation against an unrelated young Muslim man who had a fantastical plan for attacking the U.S. Capitol with a remote-controlled airplane.”
Transcript

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

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today with mounting questions over whether U.S. security officials failed to heed warnings that could have foiled the bombing of the Boston Marathon. This comes as authorities say the surviving suspect behind the bombing, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has confessed to planning further attacks in New York City. Speaking Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the suspects intended to detonate the rest of their explosives in Times Square.

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Last night we were informed by the FBI that the surviving attacker revealed that New York City was next on their list of targets. He told the FBI, apparently, that he and his brother had intended to drive to New York and designate additional in Times Square. They had built these additional explosives, and we know they had the capacity to carry out the attacks.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: According to New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the two brothers abandoned the plan only when they realized that the car they had hijacked did not have enough gasoline for the trip. In addition to carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings that left three dead and over 170 wounded, the brothers are also accused of shooting dead an MIT campus police officer last Thursday before being apprehended.

Meanwhile, at a news conference on Thursday in the Russian republic of Dagestan, the mother of the suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, denied her sons had anything to do with the bombings and blamed the United States for robbing her of her children.

ZUBEIDAT TSARNAEVA: I’m like sure that my kids were not involved in anything. Yes, I, like, would prefer not to live in America now. Why did I even go there? Why? I thought America is going to, like, protect us, our kids; it’s going to be safe for, like, any reason. But it happened opposite, like it’s just—America took my kids away from me. Only America.

AMY GOODMAN: After news emerged that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was on the intelligence radar in the U.S., there have been mounting calls for federal agencies to re-examine their priorities, particularly a focus on sting operations that critics say constitute entrapment. In an editorial on Wednesday, The Washington Post wrote, quote, “The FBI has devoted considerable resources to sting operations against people it judges to be terror suspects, sometimes on what look like dubious grounds. … [I]t’s not clear that a sometimes far-fetched plot would have gone forward without the encouragement and help of FBI informants,” they wrote.

For more, we go to Tampa, Florida, to talk to Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. He is co-director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and a contributing writer at Mother Jones. His most recent piece is called “How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong ‘Terrorist.'” In the piece, he writes, while the FBI, quote, “decided to stop tracking Tsarnaev—whose six-month trip to Russia at that time is now of prime interest to investigators—the FBI conducted a sting operation against an unrelated young Muslim man who had a fantastical plan for attacking the US Capitol with a remote-controlled airplane.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Trevor. Why don’t you lay out your point in this article? Who was this other person? And what happened to the tracking of the Boston bombing suspect?

TREVOR AARONSON: Well, what we know is that in January 2011 the FBI in Boston investigated two men that they suspected could be involved in terrorist organizations or somehow sympathetic to terrorist organizations. The first was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and we all know the story. They investigated him, looked at his web traffic and decided that he wasn’t a threat. And that’s where their trail essentially ended. In the same month, in January 2011, an FBI informant who was a heroin addict and was being paid thousands of dollars by the FBI came to the bureau and said, “I know a man named Rezwan Ferdaus. Rezwan Ferdaus said he wanted to commit an act of terrorism.” And it was a ridiculous idea. He wanted to fly a remote-controlled airplane into the U.S. Capitol building and have it laden with grenades and and then explode it over the—or detonate it over the gold dome.

But if it wasn’t bad enough that his idea was patently ridiculous, Rezwan had no capacity to even move forward in it. He didn’t have any money. He didn’t have any access to explosives. He didn’t really have any capacity at all to commit even the most minor crime. And yet, the FBI, instead of choosing to pursue Tamerlan Tsarnaev, chose to start a nine-month sting investigation, sting operation on Rezwan Ferdaus. They gave him $4,000, which he used to purchase a remote-controlled airplane. They then paid for a trip for him to scout out locations in Washington, D.C., where he could launch the airplane. And then, in the final stage, they gave him all the explosives he needed. They gave him C-4. They gave him grenades. And they delivered it to him. And at that point, the FBI arrested him and charged him with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. He did plead guilty to that, and he’s serving 17 years in prison. But what’s interesting about it is that the evidence in his case clearly showed that without the FBI’s assistance, without the FBI providing all of the means and opportunity, he never would have been able to commit his crime. And yet, at the same time, the FBI chose not to pursue the person who ultimately detonated bombs at the Boston Marathon.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Trevor, we’ve seen this over and over again, and you’ve looked at it, the tendency of the FBI to use undercover informants who actually become instigators or co-conspirators in a plot to snag folks who otherwise would not be able to commit these crimes.

TREVOR AARONSON: That’s right. You know, since 9/11, there have been more than 175 defendants who have been caught in terrorism sting operations. And this is due to a very aggressive policy that has its roots in the current FBI mission of preventing the next attack at whatever cost. And so, what the FBI is looking for are men who they believe, you know, will become the terrorists of tomorrow. They want to catch today that terrorist of tomorrow. And so they look for people who are espousing radical beliefs, who say they want to commit some sort of act of violence, and then they set up, through undercover agents and informants posing as al-Qaeda operatives, these elaborate sting operations in which they provide everything that the target of the sting operation would need. You know, it can be the transportation. That can be the guns and the weapons. In some cases, that can be even the idea for the terrorist attack. And then they put it all together, let the person move forward in the plot, and when they push the button that would detonate the bomb, they then arrest them and announce to the public another terror plot foiled.

But if you look closely at these cases, it’s very clear that the men caught in these cases never could have committed their crimes were it not for the FBI providing the means and the opportunity. You know, these are men who are far more aspirational than operational, in the FBI’s parlance, and yet the FBI then arrests them and charges them, with the full extent of the law, as if they were terrorists. And, you know, the question I raised in my book, which came out in January before the Boston bombing, is: What are we missing as a result of pursuing these men, who are really of questionable importance, who are really of questionable danger? And I think what the Boston bombing shows is that as we’re—as the FBI has been pursuing these men in sting operations whose danger is very questionable, perhaps we’re missing the real dangerous guys, such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar.

AMY GOODMAN: The FBI has come under criticism after reports emerged, of course, that the agency interviewed the Boston suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in January 2011 and decided not to pursue his case. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney defended the FBI’s claim it did everything it could with the information it had at the time.

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: You know, all of these—all of these issues are obviously under investigation. What we do know is that the FBI took action in response to that notification, investigated the elder brother, and investigated thoroughly, and came to the conclusion that there was no derogatory information, no indication of terrorist activity or associations, either foreign or domestic, at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: That was White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Your response, Trevor Aaronson?

TREVOR AARONSON: I think what this suggests is that the FBI is pursuing people for the wrong reasons. You know, for example, the FBI is limited in the law in how it can pursue people. It has 72 hours to do what’s called a threat assessment, to figure out if there is information that will allow them to establish a predicate to move forward in an investigation. And what’s ultimately happening is that the FBI is finding people like Tsarnaev, who may not have direct—you know, that they can’t find direct information on that they’re involved in crimes, and yet instead they’re finding these loudmouths who say they want to commit an act of terrorism, and then they move forward in these elaborate sting operations.

And I think what we really need to examine here is how the FBI targets and how the FBI puts on suspicion lists people they suspect might be involved in terrorism. I mean, saying you want to commit some sort of act of terrorism, being a loudmouth, is really enough to launch these elaborate sting operations. And yet, the people who are committing the real offenses, the real acts of terrorism, the, you know, Tamerlan Tsarnaevs or Faisal Shahzads, who—the Faisal Shahzad who delivered a bomb to Times Square that fortunately didn’t go off—the really dangerous guys aren’t being trapped in these sting operations, in part because, in a way, they’re not dumb enough to go into the local mosque or into the community and talk to an informant about how they want to commit an act of terrorism. The really dangerous guys aren’t being detected by the FBI. And so, I think we really need to examine how we consider the targets, how we target the targets, and ultimately, who we should be investigating for possible terrorist operations.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what have you been able to tell from the information that’s come out so far about this age-old problem of lack of coordination between the FBI and the CIA—the Russian intelligence actually contacted both agencies separately at different times about their concerns about Tamerlan—and whether there’s been any progress in terms of these agencies being able to coordinate their activities?

TREVOR AARONSON: Well, what is interesting in the Boston case, for example, is, you know, the Russian government contacted both the FBI and the CIA and expressed a concern about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. That wasn’t enough for them to really pursue an investigation against him any more than they did. And yet, you know, the nine-month sting operation they conducted on Rezwan Ferdaus was brought to them through an FBI informant who had a heroin addiction and was working for money for the FBI. I mean, I certainly think a threat—a possible threat coming from the Russian government is much more credible than an informant, but yet the FBI chose to follow the informant’s tip over the Russian government’s.

But what this also gets at, as you mention, is that there has been—has long been competition between the intelligence agencies in the United States. The CIA doesn’t get along well with the FBI; the FBI doesn’t get along well with the CIA. The FBI also doesn’t get along well with the NYPD’s intelligence division. There’s a real competition here. And that was illuminated very clearly in the 9/11 report, where lack of communication really exacerbated the problems of intelligence at that time. And while we’ve seen improvements, what clearly this shows is that those improvements haven’t been good enough.

AMY GOODMAN: We hear you fine.

TREVOR AARONSON: Those improvements haven’t been good enough.

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Trevor. We hear you fine.

TREVOR AARONSON: OK. Those improvements haven’t been good enough. I mean, the problem has been that the—that here’s a case where both the CIA and the FBI were looking at the same defendant, both from information from the Russian government, and they weren’t communicating at all. And I think, you know, this really needs to be addressed, which is, you know, shouldn’t we have been pursuing someone much more thoroughly who was—came to our attention through the Russian government, as opposed to coming to our attention through an FBI informant who, you know, has a financial incentive in finding terrorists and, you know, knows he can get a payday if he can bring someone to the FBI who says he wants to commit some sort of act of terrorism?

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the question of informants, that you’ve been discussing, and how they’ve been used by intelligence agencies in counterterrorism work, especially after 9/11. We have been reporting on this for years. I’m going back to 2010 to Imam Salahuddin Muhammad of Newburgh, New Jersey, about—of Newburgh, New York, about FBI informants within the Muslim community.

IMAM SALAHUDDIN MUHAMMAD: I believe that what we are seeing today with the FBI surveillance and the FBI allowing for agent provocateurs to enter into Muslim communities is the same thing that happened in the ’60s with a lot of the black nationalist organizations. That’s what I see happening today in the Islamic community. The FBI, they are sending these agent provocateurs into the community, and they are cultivating and nurturing and actually creating situations that would never have occurred if they didn’t have their man in there to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Imam Salahuddin Muhammad of Newburgh, New York. Trevor Aaronson, your final comment?

TREVOR AARONSON: You know, it’s important to realize that since 9/11 we’ve had an explosion of informants. You know, in the COINTEL days of the ’60s, there were 1,500 informants. Today there are 15,000. And most of them are targeting Muslim communities, and many of them are acting as agent provocateurs. Their mission is to go into Muslim communities, find people who are espousing violence or say they want to commit some sort of act of terrorism, even if they have no means, even if they have no capability of committing that crime, and then putting everything together—you know, getting the idea, then saying to them, “Well, I can provide the bombs, I can provide the weapons,” and then the FBI, in an elaborate sting, provides the transportation, provides the weapons and everything that they need to move forward in a terrorism sting operation. And then, when they arrest them, they announce to the public: “Another terrorism plot foiled. Here’s the FBI. Here’s us keeping you safe. Here’s us doing our jobs.” But I think the real question we need to ask is, you know: Through these sting operations, have we exaggerated the threat of Islamic terrorism in the United States, while at the same time missing the real threats, missing the Tamerlan Tsarnaevs, missing the Faisal Shahzads, missing the Nidal Hasans? Because the FBI has a clear record of being able to set up in sting operations people who want to commit violence but don’t have the means, while at the same time it misses the really dangerous threats, like what we saw in Boston.

AMY GOODMAN: Trevor Aaronson, I want to thank you for being with us, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, also co-director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and contributing writer at Mother Jones. We’ll link to your piece, “How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong ‘Terrorist.'” Trevor Aaronson’s work has won more than two dozen national and regional awards, including the Molly Prize and the Data Journalism Award.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’re going to rural Georgia, where young black and white women have decided that they’re not going to go to segregated proms any longer, and they’re having their own prom tomorrow night. We’ll speak with them. Stay with us.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Find this story at 26 April 2013

Stakeknife: Spy linked to 18 murders, BBC Panorama finds

The British spy Stakeknife – described by an Army general as “our golden egg” – is now the subject of a £35m criminal inquiry called Operation Kenova.

The inquiry has been triggered by a classified report which Northern Ireland’s Director of Public Prosecutions Barra McGrory QC has told Panorama “made for very disturbing and chilling reading”.

What Stakeknife actually did has been wreathed in speculation since he was identified in 2003 as Belfast bricklayer Freddie Scappaticci.
The one stand-out fact, however, has not been in doubt: for over a decade Scappaticci maintained his cover in the IRA by interrogating fellow British agents to the point where they confessed and were then shot.
One British spy was preparing other British spies for execution.
Step back over Stakeknife, PPS deputy asked
Chief investigator calls for witnesses
New investigation into Stakeknife launched
Stakeknife linked to up to 50 murders
And there were a lot of executions: 30 shot as spies by the IRA’s so-called Nutting Squad which, I am told, Scappaticci eventually came to head.
Panorama has learned that Scappaticci is linked to at least 18 of those “executions”.
‘Draconian injunction’
Not all the victims would have been registered agents like him who produced the best intelligence.
Some were akin to “informers” – people with close access to IRA members, or who passed on what they saw and heard to the security forces.
A few were innocent of the IRA’s charge of spying.
Still, the spectacle of one British agent heading an IRA unit dedicated to rooting out and shooting other British spies is so extraordinary that I’ve often wondered how exactly the state benefitted by the intelligence services having tolerated this for the whole of the 1980s.
The obvious person to ask is Scappaticci himself – but a draconian injunction stops journalists from approaching him, even to the point of making any enquiries about where he now lives or what he does.
The Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Police, Jon Boutcher (left), is leading the investigation with the delegated authority of the PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton
Image caption

Scappaticci was recruited by a section within military intelligence called the Force Research Unit, or FRU.
I’m told the Army have assessed his intelligence as having saved some 180 lives.
Can Scappaticci’s intelligence have been so valuable that the sacrifice of other agents was a price worth paying to maintain his cover?
It’s not quite that simple.
Had the cavalry been sent in every time Scappaticci tipped off his handlers about who was at risk, he himself wouldn’t have lasted long.
Yet protecting him also meant the murders he knew about – or was even involved in – were never properly investigated, driving a “coach and horses” through the criminal justice system, according to Mr McGrory.
Barra McGrory
Image caption
Barra McGrory said the report made for “disturbing and chilling reading”
Also, the Army’s assessment that Stakeknife saved 180 lives doesn’t translate to the number of actual lives saved as a direct consequence of actioning Stakeknife’s intelligence by, for example, interdicting an IRA unit on active service.
I understand that figure of 180 is partly the army’s guesstimate of lives that would have been lost had Stakeknife’s intelligence not led to arrests and the recovery of weapons.
Of course Stakeknife also contributed significantly to “building a picture” of the IRA, an insight much valued by the intelligence services.
An ex-FRU operative with access to his intelligence told me: “He knew all of the main players and picked up a tremendous amount of peripheral information.
“As the [IRA] campaign changed and the political side became more important again he was highly placed to comment on that.”
‘Cunning and resilience’
No doubt, but it’s hard to quantify “picture building” in terms of actual lives saved.
One thing is for sure: leading a double life at the heart of an IRA unit with a Gestapo-like hold over its rank and file would have required cunning – and resilience.
Especially since Scappaticci told his army handlers he disliked gratuitous violence.
He seems to have managed the violence bit though, even when it was close to home.
I’m told that in January 1988, Scappaticci sent a young boy up to the home of Anthony McKiernan, asking him to call by to see Scappaticci.
The Scappaticcis and McKiernans were friends – children from both families had sleepovers.
That was the last McKiernan’s wife and children saw of him. Accused by Scappaticci’s Nutting Squad of being a spy – something the family strongly deny – some 24 hours later, he was shot in the head.
Bond films
Unsurprisingly, Scappaticci’s ex-IRA comrades paint a less flattering picture than his handlers.
They say he was a prodigious consumer of pornography, loved James Bond movies and – although he was on the IRA’s Belfast Brigade staff – was never a “true republican.”
That might explain why, after Scappaticci was released from detention without trial in December 1975, he drifted away from the republican movement and got involved in a building trade VAT scam.
There were family holidays in Florida.
But then he was arrested by the police and agreed to work for the fraud squad as an informer.
His former IRA comrades also speak of a man with an intimidating manner, handy with his fists and a large ego who liked to be at the centre of things.
His appointment to the IRA’s Nutting Squad – a job most IRA members ran a mile from – certainly gave him that opportunity.
It provided Scappaticci with unrivalled access to what the IRA high command were thinking and their war plans.
Freddie Scappaticci
Image caption
Mr Scappaticci left Northern Ireland when identified by the media as Stakeknife, in 2003
It also gave him access to the names of new IRA recruits on the pretext of vetting them, plus details of IRA operations on the pretext of debriefing IRA members released from police custody to establish whether they gave away too much to their interrogators.
That explains why military intelligence was so eager to recruit Scappaticci when, in September 1979, he graduated to the FRU from spying for the fraud squad.
He got an agent number – 6126 – and a codename. Stakeknife.
His luck ran out in January 1990 after police agent Sandy Lynch was rescued from the clutches of the nutting squad.
The police thought Lynch was about to be shot, Scappaticci having got him to confess. The ordinary CID who did not know Scappaticci was a spy found a thumb print in the house where Lynch had been held.
Scappaticci fled to Dublin. However, a senior police officer who was in the know advised the FRU to get Scappaticci to concoct an alibi for his thumbprint.
It worked. On his return to Belfast in the autumn of 1992, Scappaticci was arrested and then released without charge.
Sidelined
His handlers hoped he could return to spying. But by now the IRA were suspicious and removed him from the security unit.
With Scappaticci’s access to IRA secrets gone, the FRU formally stood him down as an agent in 1995.
How did he escape the same treatment at the hands of the IRA that he had helped mete out to others?
Probably because the sight of his body dumped on a roadside would have provoked a slew of questions about those IRA leaders who appointed him to protect the IRA from spies like him – and who also ignored warnings from their more sceptical comrades along the border that “Scap” was not to be trusted.
That did not stop the IRA in Belfast from putting Scap in his place.
After being sidelined, he agreed to help the staunchly republican Braniff family clear the name of a brother, Anthony, who was shot as a spy in 1981. He was eventually exonerated by the IRA.
But when Scappaticci spoke up for Anthony at a private meeting of republicans, to his embarrassment, the IRA’s most senior man in Belfast, Sean “Spike” Murray suddenly appeared and slapped him down.
When Scap was eventually outed as Stakeknife by a former FRU operative in 2003, he was spirited to England where MI5 told him the IRA knew he had been a spy.
Stakeknife’s gamble
He rejected MI5’s offer of protective custody, flew straight back to Belfast and sought a meeting with the IRA.
He gambled on not being shot because he calculated the IRA now had every reason to support a denial that he was a spy – even though he knew they didn’t believe him.
His gamble was based on the fact that the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein were now engaged in the peace process.
Scappaticci calculated that were the IRA to admit they’d long suspected he was a spy, it would undermine the official line that they’d fought the British to an honourable draw.
Any such admission would provoke the rank and file into questioning whether the IRA had been pushed into peace, paralysed by the penetration of agents like him.
His gamble paid off.
After meeting two of the most senior representatives of the IRA leadership, Martin “Duckster” Lynch and Padraic Wilson, I’m told Scappaticci and the IRA came to an understanding: Scappaticci would issue a firm denial which the IRA would not contest.
To this day, that’s been the IRA’s official position – even though, as they say in Belfast, the dogs in the street know it’s nonsense.
Once again, Agent 6126 had relied on his wits and native cunning.
Whether the 71-year-old Scappaticci now outwits the 50 detectives trawling over everything he did, what his handlers allowed him to do, and what the IRA leaders authorised him to do, is another question.
You might say he’s the spy who knows too much – because he knows the answers to all these questions.

By John Ware
Reporter, BBC Panorama
11 April 2017
Find this story at 11 April 2017

watch the documentary
Copyright http://www.bbc.com/

Stakeknife: double agent in IRA ‘was given alibi by senior British officials’

Panorama documentary claims agent who leaked secrets to British army is
linked to 18 murders in 1980s and 90s

One of Britain’s most important agents inside the IRA has been linked to
18 murders and was provided with an alibi by a senior police officer to
avoid getting him arrested during the Troubles, it has emerged.
Army whistleblower to testify on IRA double agent Stakeknife
Read more

The Guardian can also reveal that the informer codenamed “Stakeknife”
reported directly to the late Martin McGuinness in the 1980s and 90s
when the man who would become Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister
was the IRA’s northern commander and army council member.

Stakeknife, whose real name is believed to be Freddie Scappaticci, was
the IRA’s chief spycatcher, briefing McGuinness, all the while betraying
some of the most important secrets to the British army.

Further light is shone on the career of Stakeknife in the BBC Panorama
documentary titled The Spy in the IRA to be broadcast on Tuesday night.

The programme focuses on Scappaticci’s role as head of the IRA’s
so-called “nutting squad”, whose task was to smoke out, interrogate and
in most cases kill members suspected of being informers.

Panorama claims to have linked Stakeknife directly to 18 murders of IRA
members accused of being agents, with Scappaticci’s unit responsible for
30 deaths overall.

In the film, a retired Royal Ulster Constabulary DI, Tim McGregor,
claims that a superior officer in the force thwarted his and his
colleagues’ efforts to arrest Scappaticci. McGregor and fellow RUC
officers wanted to question Scappaticci after a forensic investigation
found his thumbprint in a Belfast house where the police believed one of
their agents was about to be shot by the IRA.

The programme alleges that an army report stated a senior police officer
told Scappaticci’s handlers about the pending arrest and an alibi was
concocted by them to prevent Stakeknife being taken into custody.

McGregor tells Panorama that without that alibi Scappaticci would have
been arrested and charged in connection with the other informer’s
abduction.
IRA informer accuses police of abandoning him to die
Read more

Northern Ireland’s director of public prosecutions, Barra McGrory, who
was once a solicitor for the president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams,
described any move to “allow” certain informers to die in order to
promote and protect Stakeknife within IRA’s ranks as having “driven a
coach and horses” through the criminal justice system.

McGrory refused to comment on allegations aired in the programme over
the retirement of the deputy director of public prosecutions after
reviewing her decision in 2007 not to prosecute Scappaticci over claims
he committed perjury in court. The Belfast-born son of Italian
immigrants denied in court he was Stakeknife.

The then senior DPP lawyer, now deputy DPP, who made that decision was
Pamela Aitchison but her former boss McGrory tells the programme he
could not discuss “personnel issues”.

A former RUC assistant chief constable, Raymond White, also declines to
state how many of his agents or informers he lost while Scappaticci led
the IRA’s internal security unit.

Meanwhile, the whistleblower who first exposed the existence of
Stakeknife back in 2003 accused the agent’s associates of “turning a
blind eye” to the corruption of the criminal justice system.

Ian Hurst, a former military intelligence operative for the army’s Force
Research Unit, told the Guardian: “The political class created this and
other similar intelligence problems. That said, they needed and relied
upon weak-minded or selfish people in sensitive positions to facilitate
cover-ups.

“The aim of the state cover-up was to degrade the available evidence and
make it almost impossible to portion blame upon culpable individuals.
The state succeeded on both points,” he said.
‘Stakeknife’: police spy in IRA to be investigated over murders
Read more

The “Stakeknife” scandal is being investigated by an independent police
team led by former counter-terrorism detective John Boutcher, now chief
constable of Bedfordshire. Boutcher’s Operation Kenova has a budget of
£30m but has so far been unable to interview Ian Hurst, the man who
first made public the existence of Stakeknife.

A Ministry of Defence court injunction still bars Hurst from talking to
police officers about his knowledge of Stakeknife from his time as a FRU
officer.

Another military intelligence officer who operated in the region when
Stakeknife was being managed as a high-grade agent, compared the IRA
relationship between Scappaticci and McGuinness respectively to that of
the “operation manager” and the “managing director” in terms of deciding
on the approach to suspected spies and their fate once unmasked.

Henry McDonald Ireland correspondent
Tuesday 11 April 2017 06.02 BST
Find this story at 11 April 2017

Copyright The Guardian

TRIAL AND TERROR The U.S. government has prosecuted 796 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never even got close to committing an act of violence.

The U.S. government segregates terrorism cases into two categories — domestic and international. This database contains cases classified as international terrorism, though many of the people charged never left the United States or communicated with anyone outside the country.

Since the 9/11 attacks, most of the 796 terrorism defendants prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice have been charged with material support for terrorism, criminal conspiracy, immigration violations, or making false statements — vague, nonviolent offenses that give prosecutors wide latitude for scoring quick convictions or plea bargains. 523 defendants have pleaded guilty to charges, while the courts found 175 guilty at trial. Just 2 have been acquitted and 3 have seen their charges dropped or dismissed, giving the Justice Department a near-perfect record of conviction in terrorism cases.

Today, 345 people charged with terrorism-related offenses are in custody in the United States, including 58 defendants who are awaiting trial and remain innocent until proven guilty.

Very few terrorism defendants had the means or opportunity to commit an act of violence. The majority had no direct connection to terrorist organizations. Many were caught up in FBI stings, in which an informant or undercover agent posed as a member of a terrorist organization. The U.S. government nevertheless defines such cases as international terrorism.

415 terrorism defendants have been released from custody, often with no provision for supervision or ongoing surveillance, suggesting that the government does not regard them as imminent threats to the homeland.

A large proportion of the defendants who did have direct connections to terrorist groups were recruited as informants or cooperating witnesses and served little or no time in prison. At present, there have been 32 such cooperators. By contrast, many of the 296 defendants caught up in FBI stings have received decades in prison because they had no information or testimony to trade. They simply didn’t know any terrorists.

DATA LAST UPDATED ON APRIL 20, 2017
Find this story at 20 April 2017

Copyright The Intercept

THE RELEASED More Than 400 People Convicted of Terrorism in the U.S. Have Been Released Since 9/11

Trial and TerrorTrial and Terror
Part 1
The U.S. government has prosecuted almost 800 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never committed an act of violence.

OVER THE LAST 15 years, the U.S. government has quietly released more than 400 people convicted on international terrorism-related charges, according to a data analysis of federal terrorism prosecutions by The Intercept. Some were deported to other countries following their prison terms, but a large number of convicted terrorists are living in the United States. They could be your neighbors.

The release of people convicted on terrorism-related charges with little if any monitoring by law enforcement might suggest U.S. government officials believe they can be fully rehabilitated following minor prison terms. A more likely explanation is that many of these so-called terrorists weren’t particularly dangerous in the first place.

Among them is one of the Herald Square bombers, who plotted to attack the New York subway in 2004. Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay, egged on by informant Osama Eldawoody, conspired to plant bombs at the Herald Square station. They drew rough plans on napkins, surveilled the station, and discussed how they might acquire explosives. It was all talk. The two alleged bombers took different paths after their arrests. Siraj fought the charges and went to trial, where he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He won’t be released until 2030. Elshafay pleaded guilty and received a comparably modest sentence of five years in prison and three years of supervised release. He’s been a free man since January 28, 2009.

Or consider the case of Wassim I. Mazloum, who was part of an alleged terror cell in Toledo, Ohio, with Mohammad Zaki Amawi and Marwan Othman El-Hindi. The group’s leader was Darren Griffin, a former U.S. Army Special Forces member who became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI following a drug arrest. As part of a sting, Griffin trained the three men to use firearms, watched jihadi videos online with them, and conspired with Amawi in a half-baked plot to smuggle laptops from Jordan to Iraq. Mazloum, who was convicted at trial for his role, was released in April 2014.

Others convicted on terrorism-related charges were more blustery than dangerous. Two of the men who operated the website RevolutionMuslim.com — Jesse Curtis Morton and Joseph Cohen — were released. Morton and Cohen (who went by Younus Abdullah Muhammad and Yousef Mohamid Al-Khattab, respectively) were converts to Islam and encouraged violence against various people, including Jewish-American community leaders and the creators of “South Park.” Cohen was released in August 2016. Morton became an FBI informant and was released in February 2015. He was a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, which described him as a “reformed” extremist, until December 2016, when local police in Virginia arrested him for bringing crack cocaine to meet a prostitute. Because the drug and prostitution arrest violated his parole terms, Morton went back to prison — but he’s scheduled to be released again on April 23.

Some of the more than 400 people convicted on terrorism-related charges and freed since 9/11 appear from government evidence to have been involved in genuine plots or to have been connected to dangerous actors. For example, Hassan Abu-Jihaad was a Navy signalman who was convicted at trial of providing material support to Al Qaeda by disclosing the location of the USS Benfold in an online forum. Using coded language, he also provided an FBI informant with information about the movements of U.S. Navy ships. He was released in January 2016.

Still others are quietly reintegrating into society through halfway houses, or “residential re-entry management centers,” in the language of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, for instance, was once in the national spotlight as the co-conspirator of Colleen LaRose, better known by her online moniker, “JihadJane.” LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez were part of a small group that went to Ireland and plotted to murder Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist best known for his drawing of the Prophet Mohammed’s head on the body of a dog. In Ireland, Paulin-Ramirez married Ali Charaf Damache, who was arrested in Spain in December 2015 on a U.S. warrant alleging he was a terrorist recruiter. While Damache was fighting extradition from Spain, Paulin-Ramirez was finishing her prison term in a halfway house in Philadelphia, where she was released on March 21.

IN THE WAR on terror, U.S. District Courts have represented the primary stage of what can fairly be described as national security theater. With a near-perfect record of conviction, the Justice Department since the 9/11 attacks has hauled into court nearly 800 people on terrorism-related charges. While Justice Department and FBI news releases and press conferences heralded the arrests of such defendants, the U.S. government has said precious little about the hundreds of people convicted on terrorism-related charges who have been released back into the United States or deported to their home countries. During the remainder of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, for example, 67 people convicted on terrorism-related charges are scheduled to be released, according to The Intercept’s data analysis.

Those being released today, and the ones who will be released tomorrow, were yesterday examples the U.S. government held up as thwarted enemies caught by newly aggressive counterterrorism agents. One-fourth of those so far released were targets of FBI sting operations, in which an informant or undercover agent, posing as a terrorist operative, provided the means and opportunity for otherwise incapable individuals to move forward in terrorist plots. In congressional testimony, FBI Director James Comey and his predecessor, Robert Mueller, have specifically mentioned foiled plots from sting operations as examples of jobs well done, all part of a larger, ongoing pitch to justify to Congress and the public the more than $3 billion the FBI spends every year on counterterrorism efforts.

The FBI declined to answer specific questions about the release of people convicted on terrorism-related charges and did not provide any information about programs or policies to monitor those who have been released. “The FBI’s mission is to stay ahead of threats to the U.S. and its interests in order to protect the American people and uphold the U.S. Constitution,” FBI spokesperson Carol Cratty said, offering instead a blanket statement. “It is our duty to follow up on information we receive by using all lawful investigative techniques and methods to ensure public safety.”

The so-called Liberty City Seven case is indicative of how the U.S. government plays up the dangers of terrorism defendants when they are arrested but then never acknowledges that such purportedly dangerous individuals are routinely returned to their homes in the United States, in some cases just a few years after their arrests. As in other stings, the defendants in the Liberty City Seven case had no connection to terrorists. An undercover FBI informant, pretending to be an Al Qaeda agent, was the only alleged connection to terrorism. The case, one of the earliest of the FBI’s informant stings, was sloppier than most as well, because much of the bureau’s evidence seemed to support the men’s steadfast assertion that they were street hustlers trying to scam a big-talking Middle Easterner out of his money, not terrorists on the make. In fact, despite the government’s efforts to obfuscate this inconvenient fact, the seven men weren’t even Muslim; they considered themselves members of the Moorish Science Temple, blending together elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their belief system.

“The Liberty City case was a bellwether for the FBI and the Justice Department,” said James J. Wedick, a former FBI supervisory agent who was hired by the defense team to review the evidence. “If they could get convictions based on a thin case like this, they had a green light to be even more aggressive with terrorism stings.”

MIAMI – JUNE 23: Media stands outside the warehouse that the FBI raided last evening June 23, 2006 in the Liberty CIty neighborhood of Miami, Florida. The U.S. Justice Department was expected to provide details of an alleged plot to attack the Chicago Sears Tower, in which at least seven people who were staying in the warehouse were arrested in Miami. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Members of the media stand outside the warehouse raided by the FBI in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, Florida, June 23, 2006. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
IN 2004, THE brothers Burson and Rothschild Augustin lived in a Miami apartment above Narseal Batiste. Batiste, a former Chicago street preacher, operated a small drywall and construction business and considered himself a student of Western religions, studying the Old Testament, New Testament, and Quran. Inspired by the Guardian Angels he had seen patrolling in Chicago, Batiste also fashioned himself something of a community activist and guardian.
The Augustin brothers joined up with Batiste and, along with a half-dozen others, worked in his drywall business and together rented a warehouse in the Miami neighborhood known as Liberty City, where they offered martial arts training and religious studies to neighborhood kids. They called themselves the “Seas of David” and would sometimes wear military-style uniforms as they marched through the streets. The group was largely Batiste’s personality cult. He described himself as the “divine leader” and suggested once that “man has the authority to, on a certain level, be God.”

A Yemeni man named Abbas al-Saidi ran a convenience store in Miami that Batiste and his guys frequented. Al-Saidi, who had worked as an informant for the New York Police Department, got in touch with the FBI and reported a suspicious group of men from Liberty City, who he claimed had sent him to Yemen to make connections with Al Qaeda. FBI agents turned al-Saidi into a paid informant, and on instructions from the bureau, he introduced Batiste to a second informant, Elie Assaad, who was posing as a representative of Osama bin Laden. Assaad was a seasoned hand for the FBI, having conducted another terrorism sting in South Florida that lured a young man named Imran Mandhai into a bomb plot. (Mandhai was released from prison in March 2015 and deported to Pakistan.)

For Batiste, who is now incarcerated in a low-security facility in Texas, what happened next was nothing more than a street hustle; according to the U.S. government, the interaction between Batiste and Assaad was far more sinister.

“Al-Saidi made it perfectly clear that he was dealing with the police, and if we played the game the way he would lay it out, we’d be able to get a certain amount [of money] and then just basically break off and just go about our business and do all the things that we wanted to do,” Batiste said in a phone interview from prison.

FBI video footage of a meeting between Narseal Batiste and Elie Assaad, an informant posing as a representative of Osama bin Laden.

Batiste and Assaad met in a hotel room to discuss their future together. A hidden FBI video camera recorded their meeting. Following al-Saidi’s advice to dress the part of a Muslim extremist, Batiste wore what appeared to be a turban and carried a walking staff. He looked more like a Halloween partygoer than an Al Qaeda operative. “I’ve never met someone like you,” Batiste confessed to Assaad. “Someone on a mission.” They both sat at a table, where Assaad was eating a room service meal.

“I am a man that is determined. Whether I get any help from you or not, I’m going to do what needs to be done,” Batiste continued in the video, being as vague as possible. “And I’m well on my way of accomplishing that. I’m not far right now.”

“You’re not far? So I’m not wasting my time,” Assaad said, holding a french fry. He then added: “They didn’t bring me from over there just to hear words. I will see some action, or no?”

“Yeah, you’re not wasting your time,” Batiste said. “Absolutely, absolutely.”

MIAMI – JUNE 23: The inside of a warehouse that the FBI raided is viewed through a hole in the door June 23, 2006 in the Liberty CIty neighborhood of Miami, Florida.The US Justice Department was expected to provide details of an alleged plot to attack the Chicago Sears Tower, in which at least seven people who were staying in the warehouse were arrested in Miami. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Inside the Liberty City warehouse rented by the FBI for Narseal Batiste and his friends, viewed through a hole in the door, June 23, 2006, Miami, Florida. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
BUT THE LIBERTY City Seven plot consisted mainly of words. Assaad kept promising to transfer $25,000 to Batiste, who in turn said what he needed to say to string along Assaad. They talked about a harebrained plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago. Batiste even boasted he could raise an army in Chicago. As time went by and no money arrived from Assaad, however, Batiste and his group became frustrated. So the FBI, through Assaad, rented them a newer, larger warehouse, complete with a refrigerator stocked with food and a new van they could use — all to keep them on the hook and to keep them plotting.
“At that time, we were just thinking, OK, we got the warehouse, and then inside the warehouse, they had food and everything,” Rothschild Augustin remembered. “Like frozen food, fish and stuff. So we were thinking, wow, the money is coming. Then they had a van in there. So we were thinking that all that was ours, so we just kept going along with it.”

The FBI had wired the new warehouse with cameras. Once they were in the warehouse, Assaad asked Batiste and his guys to swear a “bay’at,” or oath of allegiance, to Al Qaeda.

“It was kind of like we got blindsided. We just show up and, ‘Hey, you are going to take this oath.’ What? What oath? Whatever, we just went through it, uncomfortable,” Rothschild Augustin said.

Batiste was still trying to do whatever was necessary to sucker Assaad out of his money. Here was a guy giving them a warehouse, a van, and a promise to provide $25,000. So what if they had to pledge an oath like Boy Scouts? Each of the men stood before Assaad, gave his name, and then pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda. The hustle was finally working, everyone thought.

“The so-called bay’at, oath thing, that was placed upon us — all that was basically acting, just making up stuff,” Batiste recalled.

After the oath, Assaad asked Batiste to do one more thing: take pictures of the FBI office and federal courthouse in Miami. So Batiste and two of the guys gamely drove around Miami taking photographs from their van, with a camera provided by the FBI.

FBI video footage of Elie Assaad administering an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda.

AT THIS POINT, Batiste’s spiritual adviser, a Chicago preacher named Sultan Khan Bey of the Moorish Science Temple, arrived in Miami and the case transformed into theater of the bizarre. An FBI surveillance vehicle recorded Batiste and his guys picking up Khan Bey and his wife, both dressed in colorful flowing African-inspired garb, from the airport in Fort Lauderdale.

When Batiste explained to Khan Bey what had been happening — the generous Arab guy who gave them a warehouse with a refrigerator full of food in exchange for the oath and taking a few pictures — Khan Bey told the group what should have been obvious all along: They were fools being played by the feds. Khan Bey then held a trial of sorts for Batiste, banished him, and took possession of the warehouse and control of the small group. Another of Batiste’s spiritual advisers, Master G.J.G. Atheea, who unbeknownst to the others had agreed to wear a wire for the FBI, confronted Khan Bey at the warehouse and advocated for Batiste’s return as leader of the group. An argument erupted, and Khan Bey grabbed a gun and shot at Atheea, narrowly missing him.

The gun was legal and registered to Lyglenson Lemorin, a Haitian-born member of the group who had carried it for security detail work in the past. Lemorin had mistakenly left the gun at the warehouse, where Khan Bey found it.

Miami police arrested Khan Bey for the shooting, and federal prosecutors took over the case. Khan Bey cooperated by talking to agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It wasn’t his first run-in with the law. Khan Bey had been convicted of rape in 1977 and attempted murder in 1973. He pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm and received a sentence of 14 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, with the stipulation that his sentence be served at a facility near his home in Chicago.

During the madness in Miami, the group was falling apart. Lemorin, frustrated by Batiste and his ill-conceived scam, moved to Atlanta. Some of the other guys began to distance themselves from Batiste after the oath, believing he’d pushed the hustle too far. Patrick Abraham ignored all the folly around him by focusing on jobs with the drywall company.

IMG_20160515_192731-1492629195 Patrick Abraham now lives in Haiti, where he teaches English at a school in Port-au-Prince. Photo: Trevor Aaronson
ON JUNE 22, 2006, Abraham was driving to a worksite when he saw a Chevrolet Suburban accelerate past his van and then quickly stop in front of him. “I see people come out of everywhere and pull out guns, aiming at my window,” Abraham remembered. After the FBI agents rushed the car, one asked Abraham a question that perplexed him: “Do you have a bomb in the car?”
“What?” Abraham asked, confused.

“Do you have a bomb in the car?” the agent repeated.

Abraham shook his head, exasperated. “Go ahead with the bullshit, man,” Abraham said, giving the agents permission to search his vehicle.

The others were arrested in similarly dramatic ways. Seven agents, for example, arrested Rothschild Augustin while he was shopping for clothes.

After their arrests, the FBI brought each of the Liberty City Seven individually into interrogation rooms at the bureau’s Miami office. Stanley Phanor, one of the guys who had remained loyal to Batiste throughout, didn’t understand why he had been arrested when he wound up in an interrogation room. A slender, soft-spoken man of Haitian descent, Phanor had gone by the nickname Sonny since he was a child. In the indictment, prosecutors listed him as “Brother Sunni,” perhaps as a way of making him seem more menacing and Islamic.

None of the men accepted a plea deal, and they all stood trial together. The case was bullshit, they agreed. The first trial resulted in a hung jury for six of the seven defendants. Because he’d abandoned the group during the sting, Lemorin was acquitted — but was immediately detained by immigration officials for deportation.

“On the one hand, they just seemed like a hapless group of guys and their defense all along was that they were just going along with it because they were going to rip off [the FBI informant],” said Jeffrey Agron, who was the jury foreman. “There were a fair number of people on the jury who believed that it was a scam. … On the other hand, when asked to pledge an allegiance to Al Qaeda, they did it. When asked to take pictures for the plot, they did take the pictures.”

Family members of some of the seven men charged with plotting to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago and other buildings, center left in white t-shirts, look on during a news conference where activists spoke, Thursday, June 29, 2006 at the Liberty City neighborhood warehouse in Miami where the FBI arrested most of the men. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee) Family members of the Liberty City Seven look on during a news conference on June 29, 2006, at the warehouse in Miami where the FBI arrested most of the men. Photo: Wilfredo Lee/AP
IT TOOK THREE trials to convict five of the seven men. While Lemorin was acquitted in the first trial, Naudimar Herrera, a bit player in the group, was acquitted following the third trial. But five others — Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Phanor, Burson Augustin, and Rothschild Augustin — were convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization, among other charges, and sent to prison. Following their convictions, Jeffrey Sloman, who was then the acting U.S. attorney in Miami, said the prosecution “helped make our community safer by rooting out nascent terrorists before they could carry out their threats.” The convicted men received sentences ranging from six to 13 years. If the Justice Department thought the men were dangerous, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons seemed to disagree. The Liberty City Seven members were incarcerated in medium and minimum security facilities once in BOP custody. The FBI paid Assaad $85,000 and al-Saidi $21,000 for their work on the sting.
Burson Augustin was the first of the convicted Liberty City Seven defendants to be released, on September 21, 2012, after serving six years in prison. Instead of returning to Miami, he chose to move to Fort Myers, where he had an aunt and where no one else knew him. “I thought my best bet is to go to a place I don’t know,” Augustin said. “To get a fresh start.”

A well-built man who wears thick dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail, Augustin tried to make an honest living in Fort Myers, but he found it impossible to land a job with a terrorism conviction on his record. So Augustin went back to his old trade, hustling, and was soon busted for dealing cocaine. Because he was on supervised release at the time of the drug deal, his case went to federal court and he was sentenced to another four years in prison.

Lemorin, a Haitian national who had fathered two children in Miami, fell victim to a unique kind of double jeopardy. After being acquitted in the first trial, the evidence from that trial was used against him in immigration court. It proved enough to justify his deportation order.

His deportation was delayed because of the 2010 earthquake, which devastated Haiti. But one year after the earthquake, with the island still recovering from the destruction, Lemorin was on one of the first deportee planes to Port-au-Prince. In some ways, despite being acquitted, his punishment was in line with that of the other defendants: Between the time he was in a holding cell awaiting trial and his time in an immigration detention center, Lemorin spent nearly six years behind bars.

When he arrived in Haiti, he found himself detained yet again. Not knowing who among the deportees was a violent criminal and who wasn’t, Haitian officials threw everyone into detention cells. Those whose families had money could offer bribes to get loved ones released. The ones without family or means were at the mercy of Haitian officials in a filthy prison where cholera was spreading and some detainees had already died.

“There’s feces everywhere,” Lemorin remembered. “Feces on the wall, feces on everything, feces on the place where you take a shower.”

When Lemorin finally got out of detention, his relatives in Leogane gave him a small plot of land on which to live. His mother in Miami collected old cellphones and other electronics and shipped them to Lemorin, who sold them to buy the concrete and rebar to build his new home. He only has walls around the bedroom, but the foundation is laid. In time, he hopes to build up the walls around a small living room and kitchen.

In the United States, he was not only forced to leave behind his mother, but also his son and daughter. In April 2011, Lemorin learned that his 15-year-old son, Lukenson Lemorin, had been killed in a car accident in Miami. U.S. authorities denied Lemorin’s visa application to attend the funeral, he said, and he was forced to observe the service through a grainy Skype connection.

“I got robbed of my son’s life because I beat the case,” Lemorin said, tears welling in his eyes. “Twelve jurors found me not guilty. … And when I’m supposed to be home with my son, I’m in Haiti, deported, sent back for the same trial I beat.”

Two years after arriving in Haiti, Lemorin learned that his old friend Patrick Abraham had also been deported. Patrick had only distant relatives to help him in Haiti. But he had Lemorin, who offered to share his one-room home. On a recent evening, Abraham brought home a watermelon from Port-au-Prince. They sliced up and ate the watermelon together as they watched the kids from the village playing soccer with a deflated ball. Impoverished and isolated from the rest of the world, the pair seemed the world’s least probable terrorists.

For his part, Lemorin isn’t bitter about his circumstances. He doesn’t blame the United States. “I love America,” he said. “America is a great country. But what happened to us, it’s not America that did it. It’s not America — it’s a few people in America that others put their trust in.”

IMG_20160512_153116-1492629193 Burson Augustin is now back in South Florida, where he is trying to rebuild his life after serving a decade in prison. Photo: Trevor Aaronson
ABOUT 700 MILES away, in Miami, the rest of the Liberty City Seven are mostly together. Burson and Rothschild Augustin live in a small studio apartment in Broward County, north of Miami. Burson landed a job as a valet on Miami Beach; these days, having learned from his experience in Fort Myers, when he fills out job applications, he just leaves the question about felony convictions blank. It’s best not to try to explain. Rothschild has bounced from job to job; he’s done stints sewing body armor in a factory in an industrial part of town and working in a juice bar in a trendy section of Miami.
Stanley Phanor was released on June 28, 2016, after a short stay at a halfway house. He’s living with his mother in Little Haiti, where Burson and Rothschild Augustin sometimes visit. If the FBI is at all concerned with members of an alleged terror cell associating again in the city of their crime, the three are unaware of it. The Bureau of Prisons does not treat the release of people convicted on terrorism-related charges any differently than that of other criminals, and the FBI does not have a program to track and monitor released terrorists, at least not that it has acknowledged publicly. Phanor and the Augustin brothers haven’t been prohibited from seeing each other, and none of them have seen anything to suggest they are under physical surveillance. As far as they can tell, no one is paying any attention to them at all.

They’ll have a new addition soon. The Liberty City Seven’s alleged ringleader, Narseal Batiste, will be released to a halfway house this summer, a little more than a decade after he purportedly tried to wage a ground war against the U.S. government.

Trevor Aaronson
April 20 2017, 7:12 p.m.

Find this story at 20 April 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

THE COOPERATORS Terrorism Defendants With Concrete Ties to Violent Extremists Leverage Their Connections to Avoid Prison

Trial and TerrorTrial and Terror
Part 2
The U.S. government has prosecuted almost 800 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never committed an act of violence.

˅ EXPAND ALL PARTS
SINCE THE 9/11 attacks, at least 30 people convicted of international terrorism-related offenses have become informants and/or cooperating witnesses in exchange for leniency in sentencing, according to an analysis by The Intercept of federal terrorism prosecutions.

Using the threat of criminal prosecution to encourage someone to cooperate is a well-worn tactic that long predates the war on terror. But this tactic has been used to great effect by federal prosecutors in the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks. There’s a cruel irony in this system. The misguided men, and sometimes women, who are caught up in counterterrorism stings — where an undercover agent or informant encourages or facilitates plans for an attack — are often sentenced to decades in prison because they have no information to trade. Members of the so-called Liberty City Seven, a group of Miami men who discussed a bomb plot with an undercover informant posing as an Al Qaeda operative, spent six to 13 years behind bars; they couldn’t become cooperating witnesses, because they didn’t know any real terrorists. But the more dangerous a defendant, or the more extensive his contacts with terrorists, the more likely he can leverage his connections for leniency.

One early informant was Mohammed Junaid Babar, an Al Qaeda operative who provided material support to efforts against U.S. forces in Pakistan. In exchange for more than six years of cooperation, Babar received a sentence of time served and 10 years of supervised release. As part of his supervised release, Babar was required to continue to cooperate with the government. His whereabouts have never been disclosed publicly, and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has no public record of Babar having entered custody at any point during his cooperation.

The case of Najibullah Zazi offers another example. Zazi trained with Al Qaeda in Pakistan and then mixed beauty-supply chemicals for backpack bombs in a motel outside Denver. He was arrested in September 2009, before he could drive to New York and place those bombs on the subway. Zazi, whose sentence has been pending since he pleaded guilty in February 2010, is currently working for the government as a cooperating witness.

Some of the government’s cooperating witnesses have been plucked from far-flung battlefields. Bryant Neal Vinas, who went by the name Bashir al-Ameriki, was captured in Pakistan. After admitting that he fired rockets on a U.S. military base in September 2008, Vinas turned informant. He provided information about a plot to blow up a Long Island Rail Road commuter train in New York’s Penn Station as well as information about Belgian and French men who attended the same training camp he did. Vinas pleaded guilty in January 2009 to an indictment charging him with, among other offenses, conspiracy to kill Americans and material support for terrorists. His sentence has been pending since then, and there is no record of him ever being turned over to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, suggesting he is in a witness security program.

One of the most colorful and revealing cases of a terrorism defendant-turned-cooperator is that of Earnest James Ujaama, perhaps the most prolific cooperating witness in the war on terror. A would-be entrepreneur with an explosive temper and a penchant for running minor scams, Ujaama became a close associate of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, whom a senior Justice Department official once called “an unrepentant all-purpose terrorist.” But while Abu Hamza is now serving a life prison sentence, Ujaama is free, living in idyllic Berkeley, California, collecting approximately $2,000 per month from the federal government, at least until recently, and looking to tell his story to a receptive audience.

I first heard from Ujaama on November 12, 2015, when he sent me an email. “I’m looking to tell the story of a case that I think you will be most interested in,” he wrote. Later that day, in another email, Ujaama disclosed the primary condition of his cooperation. He wanted me to write a book with him about his life. “I’ve listened to you speak,” he wrote. “I’ve watched your presentation. I like your work.”

In a series of phone and email conversations, Ujaama described how he also wanted compensation for his story. “I don’t pay for access to people,” I told Ujaama.

This sort of back-and-forth continued for months. Sometimes I initiated contact, because I was intrigued by Ujaama’s story. Sometimes he reached out to me, for reasons that were not always clear. Our exchanges always were short-lived. Ujaama is a chameleon-like man who has been many things: entrepreneur, author, college student, religious scholar, newsletter publisher, aspiring movie producer, website designer, even a mule carrying cash into Afghanistan. Now, it seemed, he was attempting to fashion a new career as a terrorism expert, but at his core, the slender 51-year-old with close-cropped hair and braces on his teeth is a hustler — someone who, in the words of one federal judge, always plays “fast and loose.”

During his 13-year cooperation as a witness for the government, Ujaama has testified in two terrorism trials — including that of Abu Hamza, who was also known as Mustafa Kamel Mustafa — and would have testified in a third had the defendant not pleaded guilty. In a court filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney John P. Cronan called Ujaama’s cooperation with the government “extraordinary.”

Finally, in October 2016, Ujaama wrote me once again. He was irritated by a 60 Minutes story about Mary Quin, a New Zealander who was kidnapped in Yemen by an Al Qaeda-affiliated group and portrayed by CBS News as the U.S. Department of Justice’s star witness in Abu Hamza’s trial. This was outrageous to Ujaama, because in his view, he was the star witness against the religious cleric with connections to Al Qaeda. “You should come see me. I’m in the Bay Area until November,” Ujaama wrote. We agreed to meet the following month.

LONDON, United Kingdom: (FILES) Imam Abu Hamza al-Masri addresses followers during Friday prayer in near Finsbury Park mosque in north London, in this 26 March 2004 file photo. Hamza al-Masri was found guilty Tuesday 07 February 2006 of incitement of racial hatred and soliciting murder charges after a criminal trial in London. Hamza, 47, was convicted of six out of nine soliciting-to-murder charges and two out of four charges of “using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred”.AFP PHOTO/ODD ANDERSEN/FILES (Photo credit should read ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images) Imam Abu Hamza al-Masri addresses followers during Friday prayer near Finsbury Park Mosque in north London on March 26, 2004. Photo: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
BORN IN DENVER as James Earnest Thompson, Ujaama moved to Seattle as a boy. “I grew up under the Black Panthers,” he said in court testimony. By most accounts he was whip-smart, driven, and eager to make a mark on the world.

But Ujaama also had a fiery disposition. Once, when his girlfriend called police and reported that he had a gun, Ujaama got into a scuffle with a cop and broke the officer’s watch. Enacting revenge on his girlfriend for the incident, Ujaama poured a five-pound bag of sugar into her car’s gasoline tank.

In the mid-1980s, Ujaama moved to Pelican, Alaska, to take a job at a seafood company, where he said he struggled with a racist culture there. “I just got tired of being called nigger,” he recalled. One day, frustrated by the racism, Ujaama grabbed a .375 Winchester rifle and shot out the window of the housing unit where he was staying. He went to jail for the incident.

By the early 1990s, he’d returned to Seattle and joined the personal computer industry. Ujaama was a partner in Olympic Computers, which sold IBM clones at wholesale. But the company didn’t last; Ujaama began a scam, telling customers to send him checks so that he would get the money rather than his partner. In all, Ujaama raked in about $10,000 from the ploy.

Then Ujaama switched to writing books, positioning himself as a motivational speaker and community activist. One book, “The Young People’s Guide to Starting a Business Without Selling Drugs,” encouraged young black men to become entrepreneurs. “When a person lacks knowledge and vision,” Ujaama wrote in the foreword, “that person becomes a soldier in the wrong war, an enemy to others and to themselves.”

Ujaama followed these efforts with a work of fiction, “Coming Up,” a semi-autobiographical story about two friends — one becomes a drug dealer, the other a successful businessman. Ujaama moved to Los Angeles in the hopes of turning “Coming Up” into a movie. Although he claimed to have received a commitment for half of the money to produce the film adaptation, the promised funds were contingent on Ujaama raising the second half from other sources, which he couldn’t do. It was a flop, like most of Ujaama’s business ventures.

Despite characterizing himself as an entrepreneur, Ujaama has never run a successful business, at least not according to any measure the IRS would endorse. He has never paid taxes, and in some years did not file tax returns at all. “The understanding I had was that I did not owe taxes,” he said.

At a low point after failing to turn his book into a movie, Ujaama returned to Seattle and converted to Islam in late 1996. Ujaama devoted himself to Islam and moved to England to study under Abdullah El-Faisal, a Jamaican-born cleric who was imam of the Brixton Mosque in South London. Ujaama became something of an apostle for El-Faisal, traveling back and forth from London to Seattle, where he’d sell tapes of El-Faisal’s sermons. Yet rather than providing a portion of the sales to El-Faisal, Ujaama pocketed the proceeds.

While in London, Ujaama married a Muslim woman from Somalia, and they had a child. El-Faisal had taught Ujaama that jihad training was a Muslim’s obligation, so in late 1998, Ujaama traveled to Afghanistan for training. “I was looking to learn physical jihad training, which would include hand-to-hand combat, how to use weaponry, and live as a Muslim,” Ujaama explained later in court testimony. He made his way to a training camp run by a conservative Muslim missionary group. The camp used an aging Soviet-built military barracks, a soccer field, a large artillery gun, and some broken-down tanks. Ujaama received weapons training and learned how to recite the Quran. But he wasn’t much of a militant. One night, while in the bathroom, Ujaama accidentally fired his rifle. He soon fell ill and left the camp after just two weeks.

Ujaama returned to London and continued his studies under El-Faisal. At the time, El-Faisal was badmouthing Abu Hamza, the religious leader in London who would later be prosecuted in New York. Some of El-Faisal’s students asked Ujaama to meet with Abu Hamza and help mediate the dispute.

Abu Hamza commanded a mysterious aura because, well, he looked like a James Bond villain. He had one eye and was missing both of his hands, forcing him to use a prosthetic hook. Born in Egypt, Abu Hamza studied civil engineering before coming to the United Kingdom in 1979. Various stories have circulated about how Abu Hamza sustained his injuries, including one that alleged his hands were chopped off after he was caught stealing in Saudi Arabia. In truth, according to Abu Hamza, he lost his hands and an eye during an explosives accident while assisting the Pakistani military in a road-building project.

Ujaama recalled being “very impressed with Sheikh Abu Hamza” from that initial meeting. After listening to Abu Hamza’s taped lectures, Ujaama turned his back on El-Faisal. “I decided that he wasn’t a good person to follow,” Ujaama said. His spurned mentor began telling people that Ujaama had stolen money.

But it didn’t matter. Ujaama had his new teacher, Abu Hamza, who had a growing international following through the website of his organization, Supporters of Sharia. When Ujaama decided to return to the United States in 1999, Abu Hamza gave him about a dozen tapes of his lectures. The tapes bore Supporters of Sharia’s logo — a shackled man behind bars reaching out of the cell with a Quran in hand. The lectures were “very angry, but serious,” according to Ujaama, who distributed copies in Seattle’s Muslim community. As he did with El-Faisal’s tapes, Ujaama pocketed the profits.

It was during this return trip to Seattle that Ujaama heard about a ranch in southern Oregon. The entrepreneur in Ujaama saw an opportunity: He could build a training camp for Muslims and advertise it to Abu Hamza’s followers. Ujaama sent a fax to Abu Hamza describing his idea, but he also exaggerated the progress he’d made in turning the ranch into a training camp. He claimed he had secured weapons and recruits and had already started to build structures. He asked Abu Hamza to send two men from London to assist him.

Oussama Kassir, center, Lebanese-born Swedish citizen wanted in the United States on suspicion of plotting to set up a terrorist camp there, is escorted by heavily armed policemen to the courtroom in Prague on Wednesday, April 25, 2007. The Czech court ruled today that Oussama Kassir can be extradited to the USA however he immediately appealed the decision of the Municipal Court in Prague. Kassir is charged in the USA with conspiracy aimed at providing material support to terrorists for which he faces up to a life sentence if found guilty. Kassir was arrested by the Czech police upon an international arrest warrant at Prague’s Ruzyne airport during a stop-over of his plane flying from Stockholm to Beirut in December 2005. (AP Photo/CTK) ** SLOVAKIA OUT ** Oussama Kassir, center, a Lebanese national and Swedish citizen wanted in the United States on suspicion of plotting to set up a terrorist camp, is escorted by armed police officers to the courtroom in Prague on April 25, 2007. Photo: CTK/AP
THE MEN ABU HAMZA sent were Oussama Kassir, a Lebanese national and Swedish citizen who claimed to have been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, and Haroon Aswat, a slender British man. The brawny Kassir was to be a physical trainer at the camp, while the studious Aswat would act as a religious and Arabic tutor there. They flew to New York on November 26, 1999, and then took a Greyhound bus across the country to Seattle.

After they arrived, Ujaama drove the two men for eight hours to southern Oregon, where Ujaama showed them the ranch. Instead of having the makings of a training camp, it was desolate. There were no stockpiles of weapons. There were no recruits. The only structures were dilapidated trailers.

Ujaama, true to his roots, had been running a hustle. He just needed Abu Hamza’s stamp of approval and support, and he figured if he could get a couple of Abu Hamza’s guys on site, he could line up investments to get the weapons he claimed he already had and start the construction he said was already underway.

But Kassir, realizing that Ujaama had lied about the camp, became angry. “He got in my face and began to point his finger at me,” Ujaama later testified.

His training camp scheme dashed following the argument with Kassir, Ujaama fled back to Seattle, leaving behind the two men Abu Hamza had sent. Ujaama never returned to the ranch.

Instead, Ujaama moved back to London in the spring of 2000 and returned to his studies under Abu Hamza. If the religious cleric was irritated by Ujaama’s overselling of the training camp, or his dispute with Kassir, he didn’t seem to show it. He took in Ujaama as a close aide, and Ujaama began to work on the Supporters of Sharia website, expanding the English-language portion in order to reach non-Arabic speakers.

Eventually Abu Hamza had a mission for Ujaama. He asked him to travel to Afghanistan to deliver money and escort a member of the London mosque, a Ugandan-born British man named Feroz Abbasi. Abu Hamza gave Ujaama a letter addressed to the foreign minister of the Taliban government to guarantee safe passage into Afghanistan.

Ujaama and Abbasi purchased plane tickets and traveled to Pakistan. After checking into a hotel in Quetta, Ujaama snuck away without telling Abbasi and headed to the Taliban embassy. “I decided that because he would interfere with what I was doing,” Ujaama said. At the embassy, Ujaama handed the Taliban representative the letter from Abu Hamza.

The Taliban escorted Ujaama in an SUV across the border and to the Kandahar compound of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan who ran a training camp in Afghanistan. Following Abu Hamza’s instruction, he gave al-Libi an envelope containing 500 British pounds. Ujaama then traveled to Khost to find a girls’ school to deliver another envelope of money, but wasn’t able to locate it. Instead, he encountered a man who wanted to send Ujaama to the front lines in the Taliban’s war against the Northern Alliance. Ujaama called Abu Hamza in London to intercede. “I’m not here for that purpose,” he said.

The call prevented Ujaama’s military conscription, but Abu Hamza asked him about Abbasi. “I left him behind,” Ujaama said. Angry, Abu Hamza demanded that Ujaama go back to Pakistan and bring Abbasi to Afghanistan. Ujaama told Abu Hamza that he would collect Abbasi, even though he had no intention of doing so.

Back at the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, Ujaama continued to assist Abu Hamza and work on the Supporters of Sharia website. In early September 2001, Ujaama agreed to travel once more to Afghanistan to deliver money.

On September 11, 2001, on his way to Afghanistan, Ujaama was awoken to the Pakistani military police knocking on his hotel door. “They asked me if I needed protection,” Ujaama recalled. He learned that hijacked airplanes had been turned into weapons in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

Abu Hamza wanted Ujaama to continue into Afghanistan and deliver the money, but Ujaama refused. The U.S. military had begun bombing the country. Instead, Ujaama made his way to the United States, with 1,000 pounds of Abu Hamza’s cash in hand.

Ujaama was arrested in July 2002 at his grandmother’s former home in Denver, Colorado. “The government is conducting a witch hunt,” Ujaama said in a public statement at the time. The federal government first held Ujaama on a material witness warrant, then indicted him on material support charges related to the supposed training camp in Oregon.

Though he seemed destined for a lengthy prison sentence, Ujaama’s life was about to take a new turn.

AFTER HIS ARREST, Ujaama followed a path similar to those of other post-9/11 terrorism defendants. As part of a plea deal, Ujaama admitted that he conspired to aid the Taliban. In exchange for a sentence of two years in prison, Ujaama agreed to be a witness in the U.S. government’s prosecutions of Abu Hamza and the two other men who collaborated with Ujaama on the purported training camp in Oregon — Oussama Kassir and Haroon Aswat. In 2004, prosecutors in Manhattan charged Abu Hamza, Kassir, and Aswat with terrorism-related charges.

When they were indicted, Abu Hamza was in the United Kingdom, Kassir in the Czech Republic, and Aswat in Zambia. All three fought extradition to the United States, creating a prolonged legal battle that meant Ujaama would wait years to fulfill his obligation to testify in their cases.

By December 2006, Ujaama grew impatient and frustrated by what he viewed as the government forcing him to testify against Abu Hamza. He fled to Belize, where he hoped he could be reunited with his wife and child, but he was arrested by local authorities. Since he violated his plea deal in Washington, federal prosecutors indicted Ujaama again in Manhattan, this time with additional charges. As part of a second cooperating agreement, Ujaama pleaded guilty to three terrorism-related counts, including a conspiracy to build the training camp in Oregon. He served an additional four years in prison.

Ujaama testified against Kassir in 2009, helping the government to win a conviction and ensuring that the man he’d argued with on the ranch received a sentence of life in prison.

Five years after Kassir’s trial, federal prosecutors finally put Abu Hamza on trial in Manhattan. Ujaama testified for four days in the spring of 2014, describing in detail how he helped his former mentor with the Supporters of Sharia website and newsletter, how he asked him to send two men to the ranch in Oregon, and how he delivered money to Afghanistan.

Abu Hamza was convicted on May 19, 2014, and sentenced to life in prison. He is reportedly in solitary confinement and without his prosthetic limbs.

Haroon Aswat pleaded guilty in March 2015 following the successful convictions of Kassir and Abu Hamza. He received a sentence of 30 years in prison.

On October 23, 2015, Ujaama was sentenced, for the final time, in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. “I wish I would have never gotten involved with Abu Hamza,” Ujaama said at his sentencing. “And I think he’s a bad man.”

Judge Katherine B. Forrest said she did not believe Ujaama posed a terrorist threat. If he posed any threat to society, she said, it was “petty fraud or something like that.” She sentenced Ujaama to time served, and in recognition of Ujaama’s years of cooperation with the government, she declined to give him any term of supervised release.

For the first time since 2002, Ujaama was free.

ujaama_edit-1492629291 Earnest James Ujaama poses for a photograph at the University of Washington, where he became a graduate student while serving as a government witness in terrorism prosecutions. Photo: Wikipedia
UJAAMA NOW DIVIDES his time between Berkeley and Seattle. He’s collected at least $100,000 in payments from the government for his cooperation and has amassed student loan debt, which, as of late 2015, had reached $86,000. He expects to finish his doctoral studies at the University of Washington.
Following my year of on-and-off exchanges with Ujaama, we met for the first time in Berkeley in December 2016. I agreed to one condition: We’d keep the first day off the record, and then once we’d gotten acquainted, our conversations thereafter would be on the record.

But after speaking with me over coffee and lunch in Berkeley, Ujaama still wasn’t willing to participate in an interview for an article he couldn’t control. After several hours, I told him it was now his choice. I walked toward the Berkeley BART station. Ujaama followed. We chatted for another hour, standing in the train station lobby. I finally told him that if he wanted to be interviewed, he could come see me in San Francisco the next day.

That evening, I emailed Ujaama to give him one last chance to talk, and to let him know I’d be writing about him, regardless of his cooperation.

“Have a safe return home, bro,” was his only reply.

The next week, I sent Ujaama a list of questions for this story. “I’m in the middle of a research project for my doctoral studies and am very busy,” he wrote. He didn’t respond to any of the questions.

Ujaama doesn’t want to be seen as just another snitch in the ongoing war on terror. He clings to a personal brand of exceptionalism that paints him as both a victim of overzealous prosecution and a star actor on the larger stage of U.S. terrorism prosecutions. And while he insists he wants to spark reform, his case best illustrates the injustice of a system that gives light sentences to those who trade terrorist contacts and cooperation for leniency, while sending those with no such connections to prison for decades.

In the meantime, during my discussions with Ujaama, his Wikipedia entry was being updated almost daily with granular detail about his life.

The entry at one point refers directly to the editor responsible for the frequent updates: “This author is in possession of all court transcripts, sentencing memorandums, and primary documents related to United States vs. Earnest James Ujaama,” the entry read, noting that many of the documents are filed under seal. “Most of what is found on the Internet is piece-meal journalism, speculation or theory, and is outdated,” the entry continued.

I sent Ujaama one final question. “Are you the one writing your Wikipedia entry?” I asked. Ujaama never responded.

Trevor Aaronson
April 20 2017, 7:14 p.m.

Find this story at 20 April 2017
Copyright The Intercept

THE NEW TARGETS FBI Stings Zero In on ISIS Sympathizers. Few Have Terrorist Links.

Trial and TerrorTrial and Terror
Part 3
The U.S. government has prosecuted almost 800 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never committed an act of violence.

˅ EXPAND ALL PARTS
BOSTON POLICE CAPT. Robert Ciccolo was one of the first responders to the Boston Marathon bombings. When his 23-year-old son, Alexander, who had converted to Islam and given himself the name Ali Al Amriki, began telling his father he was “not afraid to die for the cause,” Ciccolo became alarmed. Alexander had a history of mental illness, and his interest in Islam had become an obsession. In October 2014, Ciccolo contacted the FBI about his son.

The federal agents could have monitored Alexander, or perhaps confronted him. Instead, as the bureau does in most such cases, agents launched an investigation. They found Alexander’s Facebook page, listed under his nom de guerre. There was a photograph of a young man in a wooded area wearing a head covering and holding a machete. “Another day in the forest strengthening myself,” the caption read. Another photo on his Facebook page appeared to show a dead American soldier. “Thank you Islamic State!” read the caption.

As part of a sting, an FBI informant contacted Alexander and offered to provide him with guns for an attack. After Alexander collected the weapons on July 4, 2015, FBI agents arrested him and charged him with terrorism-related offenses. As he was being processed at a detention center, he stabbed a nurse with a pen, causing a minor injury. His case made national news, and FBI Director James Comey told reporters that Alexander Ciccolo’s was among several plots related to the Fourth of July holiday that were foiled by counterterrorism agents. “I do believe that our work disrupted efforts to kill people, likely in connection with July 4,” Comey told reporters during a July 7, 2015, briefing.

Alexander Ciccolo is among 63 men and women who have been arrested in FBI stings targeting ISIS sympathizers, according to an analysis of federal terrorism prosecutions by The Intercept.

Demonstrating the evolving threat of terrorism in the United States, alleged ISIS sympathizers are now the primary targets of FBI stings, upstaging Al Qaeda, the Shabab, and all other terrorist groups. The first ISIS case in the United States culminated in an arrest in March 2014, and the number quickly grew. Fifty-eight people were charged in 2015 for alleged ISIS affiliations. In 2016, 32 FBI cases involved ISIS sympathizers, compared to just one each that year involving Al Qaeda and Shabab sympathizers.

But as with earlier FBI stings that primarily targeted Al Qaeda sympathizers, most of the targets of the bureau’s ISIS stings are aspirational, not operational.

In the majority of ISIS stings, targets were not in direct contact with ISIS representatives and did not have weapons of their own, government evidence showed. Instead, these targets were inspired by online propaganda to join ISIS and either made arrangements on their own to travel to Syria or were aided by FBI informants or undercover agents in their attempts join ISIS or plot attacks inside the United States.

BOSTON, MA – JUNE 24: Boston cab drivers rallied this morning before attending a hearing, chaired by Capt. Robert Ciccolo, seen here, with Boston Police Hackney Division at Roxbury Community College regarding a proposed fare increase. (Photo by George Rizer/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) Capt. Robert Ciccolo chairing a hearing at Roxbury Community College. Photo: George Rizer/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
After Alexander was arrested, FBI agents read him his Miranda rights. He then sat for an interview with FBI agents Paul Ambrogio and Julia Cowley.
Dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, he refused to talk about the guns, but he defended ISIS as a just organization, even as he demonstrated his ignorance about the group. The FBI recorded the interview.

“ISIS claimed responsibility, right, for a lot of beheadings?” Ambrogio asked. “There’s someone who names himself Jihadi John and he beheads people, right? He does it in an online way so that people can see it. So what’s your feeling about that? They represent themselves as ISIS; they’re ISIS. What’s your feeling?”

“The people that you see being executed are criminals,” Alexander answered. “They’re criminals. They’re the lowest of the low.”

According to his family, Alexander, a high school dropout, had battled off and on with alcohol addiction. He was also admitted to a psychiatric institution when he was a teenager.

As a child, he went back and forth between the homes of his father, a stern cop who did not respond to requests for comment for this story, and his mother, something of a free spirit. Alexander followed in his mother’s footsteps.

“I raised him Catholic; he was baptized Catholic,” said Shelley MacInnes, his mother. “He stayed with his Catholic beliefs for quite a long time. I would say he is a very religious person and very spiritual, but as he got older, I think he started searching.”

Alexander Ciccolo first gravitated toward Buddhism and spent time at the Grafton Peace Pagoda in Petersburgh, New York. In 2012, he and other members of the Peace Pagoda walked around Lake Ontario to raise awareness of the dangers of nuclear power. A photograph from the time shows him wearing a green V-neck T-shirt and holding a handwritten sign that reads: “Peace walk for no more Fukushima.”

Shortly after, he returned to Massachusetts and announced that he would become a Muslim. “One day we were out having dinner, and he went to the bathroom,” MacInnes recalled. “He ran into an imam. … He was so excited. ‘Mom, you’re aren’t going to believe what just happened.’”

Alexander became fixated on Islam and ISIS, and he would talk often with his parents about his newfound beliefs. “He’s always been an investigator, never takes anything at face value,” MacInnes said. “As far as ISIS goes, my personal opinion is that he was investigating the validity of that organization, rather than taking the media’s answer for it.”

Following its sting playbook, the FBI introduced to Alexander an informant posing as an ISIS sympathizer. The informant and Alexander met for the first time in person on June 24, 2015. The young man told the informant that he wanted to travel to another state and use pressure cooker bombs to attack two bars and a police station. Over the course of a week, his plan changed from bombing bars and a police station to attacking a university. He boasted that he knew how to use sniper rifles and had grown up with guns. “I know what I’m doing,” he said.

But Alexander didn’t have any weapons, aside from a couple of machetes. His only would-be bomb components were a pressure cooker purchased from Wal-Mart and some half-made Molotov cocktails.

That’s where the FBI stepped in again. The undercover informant provided Alexander with two assault rifles and two handguns. As soon as Alexander took possession of the guns, FBI agents arrested him, charging him with attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction. He was also charged with being a felon in possession of firearms, owing to an earlier state conviction of driving under the influence.

BRIGHTON — Buddhist nun Jun Yasuda, left, Lauren Carlbon and Alex Ciccolo on their recent peace walk through Brighton. Ms. Yasuda and her fellow walkers are traveling 600 km around Lake Ontario to spread awareness about the dangers of nuclear energy and weapons. July 26, 2012. Alexander Ciccolo, right, along with Buddhist nun Jun Yasuda and Lauren Carlbon, on a peace walk through Brighton, Mass., July 26, 2012. Photo: Dave Fraser/Metroland Media/The Independent
WHETHER OUT OF mental illness, immaturity, or naiveté, Alexander Ciccolo professed support for ISIS, but it’s unclear whether he would have posed a threat had the FBI informant not encouraged him and provided him with weapons. In this way, Ciccolo’s case is prototypical of ISIS stings.

In these cases, the FBI provides encouragement and capacity to otherwise hapless individuals.

For example, in a similar case in April 2016, the FBI arrested a South Florida man who allegedly plotted to bomb a Jewish community center. An FBI informant gave James Medina, a homeless man with a history of making baseless threats of violence, the opportunity. It was in fact the FBI informant who first came up with the idea of crediting their attack to ISIS. Farther north, in upstate New York, Emanuel L. Lutchman, another homeless man, told an FBI informant that he had received directions from an overseas ISIS member and was planning an attack, using a machete and knives, on a New Year’s Eve celebration in Rochester. The FBI’s informant provided the $40 Lutchman needed to purchase the machete and knives.

In other ISIS stings, the FBI has encouraged and helped to facilitate the international travel of would-be ISIS recruits. An example is the case of Jason Michael Ludke, a Milwaukee man who made contact with an FBI undercover employee through social media. The FBI undercover employee, pretending to be affiliated with ISIS, encouraged Ludke and his friend Yosvany Padilla-Conde to join the terrorist group. The pair drove from Wisconsin to Texas, where they were arrested. According to Padilla-Conde’s statements after the arrest, they were under the impression that the FBI undercover employee was going to assist them in crossing the border into Mexico and then traveling to Iraq or Yemen. Ludke and Padilla-Conde are facing charges of material support for terrorists.

The analysis of terrorism prosecutions by The Intercept shows that federal judges have wrestled with appropriate punishments for those convicted of ISIS-related terrorism offenses.

Some defendants who were arrested before they had an opportunity to travel to Syria have received relatively lenient sentences. Mohammed Hamzah Khan, of Bolingbrook, Illinois, was arrested as he attempted to board a flight to Turkey at O’Hare International Airport. He received about three years in prison. Shannon Maureen Conley, who lived in Colorado, received about four years after she was arrested at the airport in Denver, on her way to Turkey.

At the same time, defendants whose support for ISIS consisted of online activity, such as distributing propaganda on social media, have received comparable sentences to, and in some cases more prison time than, defendants who tried to join ISIS on the battlefield. Heather Elizabeth Coffman, of Glen Allen, Virginia, used several social media accounts to communicate with FBI informants posing as ISIS agents. She was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison. Ali Shukri Amin, who also lived in Virginia, admitted that he operated a pro-ISIS Twitter account and blog and provided instructions to ISIS supporters on how to use Bitcoin to avoid currency transfer restrictions. He was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.

But the most significant prison sentences await those who, like Alexander Ciccolo, moved forward with terrorist plots in the United States, even if it was the FBI making them possible. Christopher Cornell, of Cincinnati, Ohio, plotted with an FBI informant to travel to Washington, D.C., and attack the U.S. Capitol. He was arrested as he was leaving a gun store. After pleading guilty to terrorism-related charges, Cornell was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Lutchman, who was involved in the purported plans to attack a New Year’s Eve celebration in upstate New York, pleaded guilty to material support and received a 20-year prison sentence.

It’s still too early to establish conclusive trends about the sentencing of ISIS defendants in U.S. District Courts. Of the 110 ISIS defendants charged, only 45 have been sentenced.

Yet the arrests of ISIS sympathizers continue at a steady clip, even when the targets of stings have proven themselves to be incompetent ISIS recruits.

An example is Mohamed Rafik Naji, of New York, who attempted five times to travel to ISIS territory but never made it. That’s when an FBI informant, posing as an ISIS affiliate, contacted him through Facebook.

The informant told him that ISIS needed someone to attack Times Square with a garbage truck. “I was saying if there is a truck, I mean a garbage truck, and one drives it there to Times Square and crushes them,” Naji told the informant, repeating the idea. Naji was indicted in November 2016 on a charge of material support for terrorists, the 93rd person to be charged in federal court in an ISIS-related case.

Alexander Ciccolo is now undergoing psychological evaluation; his trial is pending. MacInnes, Ciccolo’s mother, believes he was an impressionable young man manipulated by the FBI and set up with weapons that he never could have obtained on his own. “I don’t think he even knew what his plan was,” MacInnes said.

Trevor Aaronson
April 20 2017, 7:15 p.m.

Find this story at 20 April 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

THE BANNED The Government’s Own Data Shows Country of Origin Is a Poor Predictor of Terrorist Threat

Trial and Terror
Part 4
The U.S. government has prosecuted almost 800 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never committed an act of violence.

WHILE THE TRUMP administration has struggled to provide evidence to support the need for a travel ban targeting Muslims, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been working since at least 2015 to limit Muslim immigration.

In November 2015, in a letter co-signed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, then-Alabama Sen. Sessions accused the Obama administration of refusing to provide immigration information about defendants who had been charged in U.S. District Court with international terrorism-related offenses.

“It is quite telling that this administration — which seems to have unlimited resources to circumvent our immigration laws and further its executive amnesties — cannot find the time or resources to provide timely answers to these simple questions,” Sessions and Cruz wrote.

So the two senators took matters into their own hands. Using a list of 580 terrorism-related defendants provided by the Justice Department, Sessions assigned the staff of the Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, which he chaired at the time, to research the country of origin and immigration status of each defendant. The committee staff found that of the 580 terrorism defendants they researched, 375 were born outside the United States. To Sessions and Cruz, this validated their view that terrorism was a largely foreign threat.

In another letter to the Obama administration in June 2016, Sessions and Cruz wrote that the information “makes clear that the United States lacks the ability to properly screen individuals prior to their arrival to the United States. It further makes clear that our nation has a serious assimilation problem.”

The Sessions data, which included country of origin and immigration data for some, but not all, of the defendants, was among the sources used by The Intercept to build a database of international terrorism prosecutions since the 9/11 attacks. (The Intercept intends to keep the database up to date and expand the fields regularly; at present, staff members are researching, among other data, the country of origin for approximately 350 international terrorism-related defendants not found by the subcommittee staff.)

A review of the Sessions data, however, suggests that neither country of origin nor immigration status is a clear indicator of heightened national security concern.

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN NUMBER OF PEOPLE
United States 73
Pakistan 61
Lebanon 27
Somalia 21
Colombia 20
Yemen 20
Iraq 19
Egypt 17
Jordan 16
Afghanistan 10
Palestine 9
Saudi Arabia 9
India 8
Gaza 7
Syria 7
Morocco 6
West Bank 6
Indonesia 5
Kuwait 5
Canada 4
El Salvador 4
Iran 4
Turkey 4
United Kingdom 4
Albania 3
Bangladesh 3
Guyana 3
Mali 3
Sri Lanka 3
Sudan 3
Tunisia 3
Algeria 2
Bosnia 2
Eritrea 2
Ethiopia 2
France 2
Haiti 2
Kazakhstan 2
Kosovo 2
Libya 2
Nigeria 2
Senegal 2
Singapore 2
South Africa 2
Tanzania 2
Venezuela 2
Angola 1
Australia 1
Brazil 1
Cambodia 1
Chile 1
Denmark 1
Djibouti 1
Dominican Republic 1
Germany 1
Greece 1
Guatemala 1
Israel 1
Ivory Coast 1
Kuwait – Citizen of Jordan 1
Lebanon – Canada 1
Malaysia 1
Mexico 1
Nicaragua 1
Pakistan – Canada 1
Panama 1
Paraguay 1
Peru 1
Philippines 1
Qatar 1
Russia 1
South Korea 1
Trinidad & Tobago 1
United Kingdom – India 1
Uzbekistan 1
Vietnam 1
Yugoslavia 1
In June 2016, the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest chaired by Jeff Sessions released data on 580 terrorism defendants, including country of origin for 448, as part of his campaign to limit Muslim immigration. The data shows that national birthplace is a poor predictor of terrorist threat.

While at first blush the Sessions data may seem to suggest disproportionate numbers of terrorism defendants from countries affected by the travel ban, or by immigrants who came to the United States as refugees, the data is incomplete — country of origin is not known for 132 defendants, or 23 percent — and inherently biased by prosecutorial targeting. Following the 9/11 attacks, with the FBI increasing its number of informants in Muslim communities due to a presidential mandate, Muslims became the primary focus of terrorism investigations and, by extension, prosecutions for charges related to international terrorism. Many of these prosecutions were not for serious offenses such as material support or weapons of mass destruction, but instead for nonviolent crimes such as immigration violations or lying to FBI agents.

In addition, the U.S. government segregates terrorism prosecutions into two types — domestic and international. The Sessions data includes only prosecutions related to international terrorism and leaves out all prosecutions of domestic terrorists, who are in most cases born in the United States.

Of the 580 defendants in the list, Sessions’s committee staff found the country of birth for 448 based on open-source research. Of those, U.S.-born American citizens represented the single largest group, with 73 defendants. The second largest group, consisting of 61 defendants, was from Pakistan, which is not affected by the travel ban.

The numbers fall precipitously from there. The third-largest group, consisting of 21 defendants, was from Somalia, which is included in the travel ban. The other countries included in Trump’s travel ban were Iran (four), Libya (two), Sudan (three), Syria (seven), and Yemen (20). Iraq, which was in the first version of the travel ban but not the second, had 19 terrorism defendants in Sessions’s data.

For comparison, 20 of the terrorism defendants in the Sessions data were born in Colombia, the same number of defendants who were born in Yemen. If the travel ban were indeed about restricting travel from terror-prone nations, as the Trump administration has claimed, the Sessions data would in theory provide a compelling case for adding Colombia, a Catholic-majority nation, to the ban list.

The Trump administration’s travel ban, which was established by executive order and affected seven Muslim-majority nations in its first iteration and six in its second, also temporarily blocks refugees from entering the country. Of the 448 defendants for whom Sessions’s committee staffers could find information, 24 entered the United States as refugees. According to the Sessions data, not a single refugee from Syria has been charged with terrorism-related offenses in the United States. Trump’s first travel ban blocked Syrian refugees indefinitely. The current travel ban places a temporary halt on the entry of all refugees.

Neither version of Trump’s travel ban is in effect, following multiple successful court challenges arguing that the executive orders discriminate against Muslims. The Trump administration has filed notice to appeal at least one ruling that halted the second version of the travel ban.

Trevor Aaronson
April 20 2017, 7:15 p.m.

Find this story at 20 April 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Mossad Reportedly Turned French Spies Into Double Agents After Joint Syria Op

Le Monde reveals how Israeli espionage agency allegedly exploited a successful chemical weapons operation to get French counterparts to become sources; former head of French counterintelligence agency being questioned as suspect in case.

PARIS – An internal report written by French intelligence, parts of which were published in the daily newspaper Le Monde on Sunday, reveal efforts by the Mossad to develop relationships with French spies, “to the point of crossing the line of turning them into double agents.”
The audit report recommends investigating Bernard Squarcini, the head of the General Directorate for Internal Security until 2012, on suspicion of maintaining unauthorized and unreported ties with the Mossad’s Paris bureau chief at the time (identified in the report only by his initials, D.K.).

The background to all this was a joint operation launched by the Mossad and French counterintelligence agency in 2010 to collect intelligence about Syrian President Bashar Assad’s chemical warfare plans. The operation, code-named Ratafia, aimed to recruit a senior Syrian engineer, who was meant to come to France to do additional training in chemistry and also to help recruit other engineers.
The Mossad and French agents would hold work meetings using assumed names, as is customary. The French agents, who belonged to three different counterintelligence units, were responsible for the operation in Paris, while the Mossad agents were responsible for the plot that would enable the Syrian target to leave the country for studies and to recruit others in the French capital.
Police officers guard the General Directorate for Internal Security headquarters in Levallois Perret, outside Paris, 2015.
Police officers guard the General Directorate for Internal Security headquarters in Levallois Perret, outside Paris, 2015.Christophe Ena / AP
But according to the report, the Israelis exploited the operation to persuade an unknown number of French agents to also serve as intelligence sources for Israel.
One of the French agents under surveillance was seen going up to the apartment of the Mossad’s Paris chief for dinner one Friday night. Later, he reported to his superiors that he was going to Dubai on vacation, when in fact he flew with his family to Israel, where he spent time with Mossad agents without permission and without reporting the meetings afterward.
In addition, according to the report, suspicious sums of money were deposited in the bank accounts of those French agents who were involved in the Ratafia operation.
The internal report calls for further investigation to understand what damage was done to the French intelligence service.
Le Monde also published details about the Ratafia operation. The paper claimed that the Mossad succeeded in recruiting the Syrian engineer and extracted information from him about Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal.
The French daily said the operation enabled Israel to prove that the scientific cooperation between the European Union and Syria was being used to boost Assad’s chemical weapons program, which led to the cancellation of the agreement with the Syrians in 2011.
According to Le Monde, the Mossad’s interest in building relations with French spies was exposed because a different French espionage agency, responsible for information security, was keeping the agents under surveillance and photographed them with Mossad agents.
The paper said that all the Mossad agents involved were identified by their real names. The French filed a formal complaint, and two Israeli diplomats in the Israeli Embassy in Paris left their posts and returned to Israel. The Mossad chief, D.K., also returned to Israel following the French complaint.
According to the report, the two Mossad agents suspected of contacts with the French have left the service and are now private businessmen in Tel Aviv. But during 2016, the report noted, they made contact with Squarcini (the counterintelligence head they’d worked with) in Paris.
Squarcini, who is now being questioned as a suspect in the case, told investigators he met the two “totally by chance.”
A short time before the suspicions came to light, Squarcini himself launched an internal inquiry into whether the Mossad was trying to recruit French agents as sources. However, the agents he put under surveillance did not include those involved in the Ratafia operation, even though Squarcini was fully aware of the close ties that had developed between his people and the Mossad operatives, the report said.
An investigating judge appointed by the French filed an official request with Israel to question the two ex-Mossad agents who made contact with Squarcini in 2016. It isn’t clear if he received a response.
The judge is seeking to build on the internal investigative report and broaden the investigation into whether the Mossad infiltrated French intelligence under Squarcini.

Dov Alfon Mar 27, 2017 5:40 PM

Find this story at 27 March 2017

Copyright http://www.haaretz.com/

Associés dans l’opération « Ratafia », les espions français et israéliens se sont-ils espionnés entre eux ?

Le Mossad aurait tenté d’infiltrer le service de contre-espionnage
français dans le cadre de l’opération visant à lutter contre le
programme d’armes chimiques syrien, à partir de 2010.

Dans le monde de l’espionnage, si des services décident d’unir leurs
efforts, cela n’en fait pas pour autant des amis. Rien ne les empêchera
de s’espionner. Jamais. La preuve lors d’une opération qui a réuni, à
partir de 2010, la sécurité intérieure française et le service secret
israélien du Mossad pour lutter contre le programme d’armes chimiques
développé par le régime syrien de Bachar Al-Assad.

L’enquête de sécurité interne diligentée par la Direction centrale du
renseignement intérieur (DCRI, devenue Direction générale de la sécurité
intérieure en 2014) sur la tentative du Mossad d’infiltrer, à cette
occasion, le service de contre-espionnage français illustre ces
pratiques. Lorsque l’opération ayant pour nom de code « Ratafia »
débute, en 2010, c’est encore l’union sacrée pour prendre au piège un
Syrien qui doit effectuer des séjours en France. Il s’agit de l’amener à
livrer des secrets sur le programme d’armes chimiques syrien auquel il
appartient.

Lorsque le Mossad obtient le soutien de plusieurs groupes de la DCRI et
d’agents de la DGSE, tous ses membres agissent sous de faux noms et une
dizaine d’entre eux sont des clandestins à l’exception de D.K., chef de
poste du Mossad à Paris. Selon les accusations de la DCRI, auxquelles Le
Monde a eu accès, le Mossad aurait profité du contact quotidien avec ces
agents français lors des séjours de la cible syrienne pour nouer des
liens jugés suspects.

L’un des agents français a ainsi été vu fêtant le shabbat avec le chef
de poste du Mossad à Paris, il est également parti faire du tir à Dubaï
puis a rejoint, en famille, ses camarades du Mossad à Jérusalem. Une
proximité revenant, selon la DCRI, à franchir la ligne jaune. Des
soupçons portent également sur le versement de sommes d’argent en
espèces et l’existence de cadeaux contraire aux règles internes.
Résultat, plusieurs agents français intégrés dans l’équipe conjointe
avec le Mossad se verront retirer leur habilitation secret défense et
seront mutés dans des services subalternes.

L’enquête interne de la DGSI se garde cependant de rappeler qu’un autre
groupe de la DCRI, chargé de contre-espionnage, s’est arrangé pour
prendre en photo, à leur insu, les agents du Mossad qui travaillaient
avec les Français. Un audit sera, enfin, déclenché sur l’utilisation des
fonds de l’opération « Ratafia » après la découverte de demandes de
remboursement de frais douteux.

Compromission

Cette enquête interne a été évoquée dans le cadre d’une information
judiciaire visant Bernard Squarcini, chef de la sécurité intérieure de
2007 à 2012. Soupçonné d’avoir pu utiliser les moyens d’écoutes de son
service à des fins personnelles, il s’est défendu en indiquant que le
bref placement sur écoute d’un fonctionnaire qui lui est reproché était
destiné à vérifier s’il n’avait pas été, à son tour, « touché » par ce
service étranger. Ce qui se révéla infondé. « Le service de sécurité de
la DCRI m’a informé qu’une entreprise de matériel côtoyait de très près
des personnels ex-RG affectés aux missions de surveillance
opérationnelle et qu’il s’agissait d’une tentative du Mossad ou de gens
considérés comme très proches d’infiltrer le service », a ajouté M.
Squarcini. S’il a évoqué la compromission de policiers de son service,
il n’a, en revanche, pas dit un mot sur l’opération « Ratafia » menée
avec le Mossad.

La DCRI fit part de ses griefs à la hiérarchie du Mossad à Tel-Aviv.
Deux membres de l’ambassade d’Israël à Paris furent priés de quitter la
France, dont D. K. Ils ont quitté le Mossad et se sont reconvertis dans
le privé. M. Squarcini a affirmé qu’il avait, par hasard, rencontré, en
2016, ces deux hommes venus en France pour affaires.

Fin décembre, les juges d’instruction ont émis, à l’attention de
l’Inspection générale de la police nationale (IGPN), deux commissions
rogatoires pour en savoir plus sur cette affaire. La première sur
l’enquête de contre-espionnage visant le Mossad et les relations
existant entre ce service et la DGSI, la seconde demande aux policiers
d’entendre les deux anciens du Mossad qu’aurait rencontrés M. Squarcini.

LE MONDE | 25.03.2017 à 11h26
Par Jacques Follorou

Find this story at 25 March 2017
Copyright http://www.lemonde.fr/

Mostefaï, kamikaze du Bataclan, sept ans en pointillés sur les radars policiers

A la lumière de notes déclassifiées de la DGSI, «Libération» retrace le
parcours d’Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, l’un des assaillants du 13 Novembre,
sous-estimé par les services français.

Rétrospectivement, c’est peut-être sur le parcours d’Ismaël Omar
Mostefaï, l’un des trois kamikazes du Bataclan, que la faillite du
renseignement intérieur s’avère la plus crue dans le dossier des
attentats du 13 novembre 2015. Connu du contre-terrorisme français
depuis 2008, le jeune homme – qui s’est fait exploser à 29 ans dans la
salle de spectacle avec Samy Amimour et Foued Mohamed-Aggad – n’a jamais
fait l’objet d’une surveillance assidue. Et ce, malgré près de six
années passées au contact des sphères fondamentalistes. Une proximité
dont la Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (DCRI, devenue
DGSI en 2014) avait parfaitement connaissance. Libération retrace
l’itinéraire d’Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, à la lumière des notes
déclassifiées sur demande des juges antiterroristes parisiens.

Décrochage.

Fils d’un chauffeur routier algérien aux pratiques rigoristes, Ismaël
Omar Mostefaï grandit à Courcouronnes (Essonne). Entre 2004 et 2010, le
jeune homme cumule décrochage scolaire et huit condamnations pénales
pour détention de stupéfiants, violences, outrage et conduite sans
permis. En 2005, la famille Mostefaï déménage à Chartres, où Ismaël Omar
intègre peu à peu un groupe salafiste.

Dès 2009, huit membres de cette cellule se réunissant dans des
appartements font l’objet d’une attention particulière de la DCRI. Et
pour cause : comme l’a révélé Mediapart une dizaine de jours après les
attentats du 13 Novembre, le petit noyau de fondamentalistes est fédéré
autour d’Abdelilah Ziyad, un prédicateur marocain au CV bien rempli. Et
qui, surtout, n’a rien à faire dans la préfecture d’Eure-et-Loir.

En effet, Ziyad, la soixantaine, n’est autre que le «co-instigateur des
attentats de Fès et Marrakech», selon les notes de la DGSI que nous
avons pu consulter. Le 24 août 1994, trois Français recrutés par Ziyad
abattent deux touristes et en blessent un autre dans le hall de l’hôtel
Atlas Asni de Marrakech. Arrêté en août 1995, il est jugé un an plus
tard. A l’audience, il confesse son implication et écope de huit ans de
prison. La peine est assortie de dix ans d’interdiction du territoire
français. Libéré en 2001, Ziyad disparaît. Du moins momentanément.

En 2008, l’émir est donc débusqué à Chartres. Mais la réalité est bien
pire : en violation de son interdiction du territoire, Ziyad vit depuis
des années sous de fausses identités à Migennes (Yonne). Il effectue
alors secrètement des allers-retours à Chartres. C’est à son contact que
Mostefaï épouse l’idéologie jihadiste. En août 2012, sa famille
redéménage. Cette fois-ci, à Romilly-sur-Seine (Aube). Pile dans la
sphère d’influence de Ziyad, qui réside à Migennes mais qui dispose
d’attaches dans l’Aube. Cet emménagement est-il fortuit ? A l’époque, en
tout cas, les services spécialisés ne semblent guère s’en inquiéter.
Pourtant, à l’été 2012, Ismaël Omar Mostefaï coupe les ponts avec sa
famille.

«Leur maître».

Quelques semaines plus tard, le 29 septembre, il est localisé à Charmoy,
une commune limitrophe de… Migennes. Les gendarmes arrêtent un véhicule
avec deux personnes à bord, dont Mostefaï. Aux pandores, les deux
acolytes expliquent chercher une rue. Pour la DGSI, cette virée a une
tout autre motivation. Dans une note du 24 octobre 2012, le service
intérieur écrit : «Certains membres de ce groupe [les huit salafistes de
Chartres, ndlr] ont repris leurs déplacements dans l’agglomération de
Migennes afin d’y rencontrer leur maître.» Un maître qui n’est autre
qu’Abdelilah Ziyad, empruntant désormais l’identité d’Abdelmalek Bachir.
Malgré ces éléments, qui caractérisent la volonté récurrente de Mostefaï
de côtoyer son mentor, la DGSI n’adopte aucune surveillance poussée.
Plusieurs mois passent. Et Mostefaï est des plus discrets. Le 6
septembre 2013, il pénètre en Turquie avec deux hommes, dont Samy
Amimour. Leur destination est la Syrie, ce que la France n’apprendra que
des mois plus tard, presque par hasard. Rien dans les notes de la DGSI
ne documente ce premier voyage au Levant. Pire, les agents se disent
probablement que Mostefaï ne s’est jamais rendu en Syrie lorsqu’ils le
relocalisent le 9 avril 2014 à… Chartres.

«Combat de rue».

Ce jour-là, le futur kamikaze participe encore à une réunion sous
l’égide de Ziyad. Une entrevue jugée suffisamment sérieuse par la DGSI
pour que soient engagées des mesures de surveillance de certains
participants. D’aucuns feront l’objet d’écoutes et de filatures jusqu’en
septembre 2015. Dans une note de ce même 9 avril, que révèle Libération,
la DGSI écrit : «Les membres du groupe se sont entraînés physiquement en
présence de Bachir Abdelmalek, qu’ils considèrent comme leur maître. Ils
se sont également livrés à l’apprentissage de techniques de combat de
rue, sous l’égide de Bachir Abdelmalek, qu’ils jugent expert en la
matière.» Malgré ces renseignements clairs, Mostefaï est jugé
«périphérique» et ne bénéficie, une nouvelle fois, d’aucune attention
soutenue.

La suite est encore plus invraisemblable. Mostefaï part une deuxième
fois en Syrie. Quand ? Nul ne le sait aujourd’hui. En octobre 2014, la
France envoie une requête à la Turquie concernant le passage sur son sol
de jihadistes présumés. Ankara retourne une liste sur laquelle figure
Mostefaï pour… son premier séjour, celui effectué en septembre 2013.
Quatorze mois plus tard, les autorités françaises sont enfin au parfum.
Mais ni la DGSI ni son homologue extérieur, la DGSE, ne parviendront à
relocaliser précisément Mostefaï et à prévenir son deuxième retour et sa
participation à l’attentat du 13 Novembre au Bataclan, dans lequel 90
personnes ont trouvé la mort.

Par Willy Le Devin — 29 mars 2017 à 19:46
Find this story at 29 March 2017

Copyright http://www.liberation.fr/

NYPD officers accessed Black Lives Matter activists’ texts, documents show

Exclusive: Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal details of how police posed as protesters amid unrest following the death of Eric Garner
People protest after a grand jury decided not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the Eric Garner case.

Undercover officers in the New York police department infiltrated small groups of Black Lives Matter activists and gained access to their text messages, according to newly released NYPD documents obtained by the Guardian.

The records, produced in response to a freedom of information lawsuit led by New York law firm Stecklow & Thompson, provide the most detailed picture yet of the sweeping scope of NYPD surveillance during mass protests over the death of Eric Garner in 2014 and 2015. Lawyers said the new documents raised questions about NYPD compliance with city rules.

The documents, mostly emails between undercover officers and other NYPD officials, follow other disclosures that the NYPD regularly filmed Black Lives Matter activists and sent undercover personnel to protests. The NYPD has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment or interview.

Emails show that undercover officers were able to pose as protesters even within small groups, giving them extensive access to details about protesters’ whereabouts and plans. In one email, an official notes that an undercover officer is embedded within a group of seven protesters on their way to Grand Central Station. This intimate access appears to have helped police pass as trusted organizers and extract information about demonstrations. In other emails, officers share the locations of individual protesters at particular times. The NYPD emails also include pictures of organizers’ group text exchanges with information about protests, suggesting that undercover officials were either trusted enough to be allowed to take photos of activists’ phones or were themselves members of a private planning group text.

protesters text message
Police obtained access to protesters’ text messages, the documents show. Photograph: NYPD/Screenshot/Scribd
“That text loop was definitely just for organizers, I don’t know how that got out,” said Elsa Waithe, a Black Lives Matter organizer. “Someone had to have told someone how to get on it, probably trusting someone they had seen a few times in good faith. We clearly compromised ourselves.”

Keegan Stephan, a regular attendee of the Grand Central protests in 2014 and 2015, said information about protesters’ whereabouts was limited to a small group of core organizers at that time. “I feel like the undercover was somebody who was or is very much a part of the group, and has access to information we only give to people we trust,” said Stephan, who has been assisting attorneys with a lawsuit to obtain the documents on behalf of plaintiff James Logue, a protester. “If you’re walking to Grand Central with a handful of people for an action, that’s much more than just showing up to a public demonstration – that sounds like a level of friendship.”

Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD detective sergeant and professor at John Jay College, agreed that it would not be easy for an undercover officer to join a small group of protesters and hear their plans. “It would be pretty amazing that they would be able to get into the core group in such a short window of time,” said Giacalone. “This could have been going on a while before for these people to get so close to the inner circle.”

The NYPD documents also included a handful of pictures and one short video taken at Grand Central Station demonstrations. Most are pictures of crowds milling about or taking part in demonstrations. In one picture of a small group of activists, the NYPD identifies an individual in a brown jacket as the “main protester”. These images of protesters are reminiscent of those taken by undercover transit police, who were also deployed to Black Lives Matter protests in Grand Central Station in 2015.

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An individual is identified as the ‘main protester’. Photograph: NYPD/Screenshot/Scribd
Giacalone said this type of leadership identification was standard police practice at protests. “If you take out the biggest mouth, everybody just withers away, so you concentrate on the ones you believe are your organizers,” he said. “Once you identify that person, you can run computer checks on them to see if they have a warrant out or any summons failures, then you can drag them in before they go out to speak or rile up the crowd, as long as you have reasonable cause to do so.”

Attorneys say the documents raise legal questions about whether the NYPD was acting in compliance with the department’s intelligence-gathering rules, known as the Handschu Guidelines. The guidelines, which are based on an ongoing decades-old class-action lawsuit, hold that the NYPD can begin formally investigating first amendment activity “when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that an unlawful act has been, is being, or will be committed” and if the police surveillance plan has been authorized by a committee known as the Handschu Authority. (That committee was exclusively staffed by NYPD officials at the time.) However, according to the guidelines, before launching a formal investigation, the NYPD can also conduct investigative work such as “checking of leads” and “preliminary inquiries” with even lower standards of suspicion.

Michael Price, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said it was difficult to know whether NYPD’s undercover surveillance operations crossed the line, as the documents did not make clear what, if any, stage of investigation the police were in at the time of the operations. But he said the department’s retention of pictures and video raised questions, since police are not allowed to retain information about public events unless it relates to unlawful activity.

“So my question would be: what was the unlawful activity that police had reason to suspect here?” said Price. “It doesn’t appear that there was any criminal behavior they were talking about in the emails. Most references are to protesters being peaceful, so I would be very concerned if they were hinging their whole investigation on civil disobedience, such as unpermitted protests or blocking of pedestrians.”

Throughout the emails, the NYPD’s undercover sources provide little indication of any unlawful activity, frequently characterizing demonstrators as peaceful and orderly with only one mention of a single arrest.

“The documents uniformly show no crime occurring, but NYPD had undercovers inside the protests for months on end as if they were al-Qaida,” said David Thompson, an attorney of Stecklow & Thompson, who helped sue for the records.

Giacalone argued that police could have easily come up with a legal justification to initiate surveillance, especially if such operations occurred after the shooting of two NYPD officers in December of 2014 (all dates in the NYPD’s email communications were redacted). But he noted that such investigative activities would be harder to justify if officers were not directly observing signs of unlawful activity.

“If they’re not talking about any crimes being committed, they’re going to have a difficult time defending this. It may end up in another one of these lawsuits,” said Giacalone. “Some may say this is good police work, fine, but good police work or not, we have rules against this kind of thing in New York.”

Attorneys have already filed a petition charging that the NYPD may have failed to produce all of its surveillance records. But for some protesters, the damage has already been done.

“In the first couple of months, we had a lot of people in and out of the group, some because they didn’t fit our style but others because of the whispers that they were undercovers,” recalled Waithe. “Whether it was real or perceived, that was the most debilitating part for me, the whispers … It’s really hard to organize when you can’t trust each other.”

George Joseph in New York
Tuesday 4 April 2017 11.00 BST Last modified on Tuesday 4 April 2017 22.00 BST
Find this story at 4 April 2017

© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Met police accused of using hackers to access protesters’ emails

Exclusive: Watchdog investigates claim that secretive unit worked with Indian police to obtain campaigners’ passwords

An anonymous letter claimed the Scotland Yard unit accessed activists’ email accounts for ‘a number of years’.

The police watchdog is investigating allegations that a secretive Scotland Yard unit used hackers to illegally access the private emails of hundreds of political campaigners and journalists.

The allegations were made by an anonymous individual who says the unit worked with Indian police, who in turn used hackers to illegally obtain the passwords of the email accounts of the campaigners, and some reporters and press photographers.

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The person, who says he or she previously worked for the intelligence unit that monitors the activities of political campaigners, detailed their concerns in a letter to the Green party peer Jenny Jones. The peer passed on the allegations to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which is investigating.

Hacked passwords were passed to the Metropolitan police unit, according to the writer of the letter, which then regularly checked the emails of the campaigners and the media to gather information. The letter to Jones listed the passwords of environmental campaigners, four of whom were from Greenpeace. Several confirmed they matched the ones they had used to open their emails.

The letter said: “For a number of years the unit had been illegally accessing the email accounts of activists. This has largely been accomplished because of the contact that one of the officers had developed with counterparts in India who in turn were using hackers to obtain email passwords.”

Jones said: “There is more than enough to justify a full-scale criminal investigation into the activities of these police officers and referral to a public inquiry. I have urged the Independent Police Complaints Commission to act quickly to secure further evidence and to find out how many people were victims of this nasty practice.”

The letter also alleges that emails of reporters and photographers, including two working for the Guardian, were monitored. A spokesperson for the Guardian said: “Allegations that the Metropolitan police has accessed the email accounts of Guardian journalists are extremely concerning and we expect a full and thorough investigation into these claims.”

The IPCC has for several months been investigating claims that the national domestic extremism and disorder intelligence unit shredded a large number of documents over a number of days in May 2014.

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Last month the IPCC said it had uncovered evidence suggesting the documents had been destroyed despite a specific instruction that files should be preserved to be examined by a judge-led public inquiry into the undercover policing of political groups.

The letter claimed that the shredding “has been happening for some time and on a far greater scale than the IPCC seems to be aware of”. The author added that “the main reason for destroying these documents is that they reveal that [police] officers were engaged in illegal activities to obtain intelligence on protest groups”.

The letter to Jones lists 10 individuals, alongside specific passwords that they used to access their email accounts. Lawyers at Bindmans, who are representing Jones, contacted six on the list and, after outlining the allegations, asked them to volunteer their passwords.

Five of them gave the identical password that had been identified in the letter. The sixth gave a password that was almost the same. The remaining four on the list have yet to be approached or cannot be traced.

Colin Newman has for two decades volunteered to help organise mainly local Greenpeace protests which he says were publicised to the media. He used the password specified in the letter for his private email account between the late 1990s and last year.

Newman said he felt “angry and violated, especially for the recipients”. He added: “I am open about my actions as I make a stand and am personally responsible for those, but it is not fair and just that others are scrutinised.

“I am no threat. There is no justification for snooping in private accounts unless you have a reason to do so, and you have the authority to do that.”

He said he had been cautioned by the police once, for trespassing on the railway during a protest against coal about two years ago.

Another on the list was Cat Dorey who has worked for Greenpeace, both as an employee and a volunteer, since 2001. She said all the protests she had been involved in were non-violent.

The password specified in the letter sent to Jones had been used for emails that contained private information about her family and friends.

She said: “Even though Greenpeace UK staff, volunteers, and activists were always warned to assume someone was listening to our phone conversations or reading our emails, it still came as a shock to find out I was being watched by the police. It’s creepy to think of strangers reading my personal emails.”

In 2005, she was part of a group of Greenpeace protesters who were sentenced to 80 hours of community service after installing solar panels on the home of the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott, in a climate change demonstration.

According to the letter, the “most sensitive side of the work was monitoring the email accounts of radical journalists who reported on activist protests (as well as sympathetic photographers) including at least two employed by the Guardian newspaper”. None were named.

Investigators working for the IPCC have met Jones twice with her lawyer, Jules Carey, and have asked to interview the peer. An IPCC spokesperson said: “After requesting and receiving a referral by the Metropolitan police service, we have begun an independent investigation related to anonymous allegations concerning the accessing of personal data. We are still assessing the scope of the investigation and so we are not able to comment further.”

The letter’s writer said he or she had spoken out about the “serious abuse of power” because “over the years, the unit had evolved into an organisation that had little respect for the law, no regard for personal privacy, encouraged highly immoral activity and, I believe, is a disgrace”.

In recent years, the unit has monitored thousands of political activists, drawing on information gathered by undercover officers and informants as well as from open sources such as websites. Police chiefs say they need to keep track of a wide pool of activists to identify the small number who commit serious crime to promote their cause.

But the unit has come in for criticism after it was revealed to be compiling files on law-abiding campaigners, including John Catt, a 91-year-old pensioner with no criminal record as well as senior members of the Green party including the MP Caroline Lucas.

The Metropolitan police said the IPCC had made it “aware of anonymous allegations concerning the accessing of personal data, and requested the matters were referred to them by the MPS. This was done. The MPS is now aware that the IPCC are carrying out an independent investigation.”

Rob Evans
Tuesday 21 March 2017 16.35 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 22 March 2017 00.50 GMT

Find this story at 22 March 2017

© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

The letter I received about alleged police hacking shows how at risk we all are

The whistleblower lists damning claims of spying on innocent individuals by a secretive Scotland Yard unit. It’s now vital that we hold the police to account
‘When the police act with impunity all of our private lives are put at risk’

As the only Green party peer I receive a lot of post to my office in the House of Lords. Rarely, though, do I open letters like the one that has been revealed. The anonymous writer alleged that there was a secretive unit within Scotland Yard that has used hackers to illegally access the emails of campaigners and journalists. It included a list of 10 people and the passwords to their email accounts.

As soon as I read the first sentence of the letter, I knew the content would be astonishing – and when some aspects of the letter were corroborated by lawyers and those on the list – I was convinced that we owed it to this brave whistleblower to hold the police to account.

The list of allegations is lengthy. It includes illegal hacking of emails, using an Indian-based operation to do the dirty work, shredding documents and using sex as a tool of infiltration. And these revelations matter to all of us. None of us knows whether the police organised for our emails to be hacked, but all of us know the wide range of personal information that our emails contain. It might be medical conditions, family arguments, love lives or a whole range of drug- or alcohol-related misdemeanours.

When the police act with impunity, all of our private lives are put at risk. Whether you’re involved in a local campaign against library closures, a concerned citizen worried about air pollution or someone working for a charity – who’s to say that officers won’t be spying on the emails you send? The police put me on the domestic extremism database during the decade when I was on the Metropolitan Police Authority signing off their budgets and working closely with officers on the ground to fight crimes such as road crime and illegal trafficking. If someone in my position – no criminal record and on semi-friendly terms with the Met commissioner – can end up on the database, then you can too.

The truth is that without the bravery and professionalism of two serving police officers who have blown the whistle on state snooping I would know nothing about my files, and those of other campaigners, being shredded by the Domestic Extremism Unit. We would have had no suspicion that those files had been shredded to cover up the illegal hacking of personal and work e-mails by the police.

Please don’t fall for the old establishment lie that the problem is a few rotten apples. This alleged criminality is the result of a deliberate government policy of using the police and security services to suppress dissent and protest in order to protect company profits and the status quo. Such an approach inevitably leads to police officers overstepping the mark as they feel emboldened by those at the top levels of government and an immunity from prosecution provided by senior officers keen to please the people who decide their budgets.

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The police don’t always act as neutral agents of the law. We know that the Thatcher government’s determination to break the miners’ strike led to the Orgreave confrontation in 1984. There are still allegations about the links between the police and those running blacklisting databases that led to hundreds of construction workers being condemned to unemployment and poverty.

And don’t mistake this for a partisan attack on Conservative politicians. Theresa May has forced through the draconian Investigatory Powers Act, but the Labour party too has been timid at best in opposing this snoopers’ charter. Indeed it was the Blair government that left a legacy of draconian public order laws, and which broadly defined the anti-terrorism legislation upon which an edifice of modern surveillance powers has been constructed.

Many are unaware that joining an anti-fracking group, or going on a demonstration, could get you labelled a domestic extremist, photographed, questioned and followed for months or even years – without ever having been convicted of a crime.

It’s only by speaking out against these intrusions that we are able to challenge this rotten culture of impunity. After all, it was David Cameron who gave us the Hillsborough inquiry and Theresa May who set up the Pitchford inquiry into undercover officers. Politicians don’t always do things for good reasons, but they do respond to public pressure.

Change is possible, but in the meantime, we should be doing everything we can to make it hard for the police to spy on us. Use encryption, two-step email security and other precautions suggested by organisations such as Liberty. Don’t stop saying what you think, or working to make the world a better place, but do assume that the police will be working to protect the companies, banks or energy companies that you want to challenge.

It isn’t how things should be, but the evidence shows that is the way things are.

A campaign to get the police out of the lives of environmentalists and social justice campaigners is a good start, but it will fail unless it reaches out – starting by working with those in the Muslim community intimidated by Prevent.

Above all, we must convince the middle ground of society that everyone will be safer if the security services focused on what we all want them to do – stopping terrorists and serious criminals. This is not unreasonable, and the starting point is a change to the legislation so that it narrows the definition of terrorism to exclude the nonviolent, noisy and rebellious

Wednesday 22 March 2017 15.23 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 22 March 2017 17.29 GMT
Jenny Jones
Find this story at 22 March 2017

© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Police Scotland confirms secret G8 file on notorious undercover police unit

POLICE Scotland has confirmed that a secret file was created on the activities of a disgraced undercover unit at the G8 summit at Gleneagles.

The “intelligence briefings” on the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, whose officers had sex with the protestors they spied on, will now be examined by a watchdog as part of its covert policing probe. Police Scotland said they would not comment on the contents of the file.

Two Met-based units – the Special Demonstration Squad and the NPOIU – were set up to keep tabs on so-called subversives and domestic extremists.

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A key strategy was to embed undercover officers in campaign groups, which included anti-racism organisations, and report back to handlers.

However, some of the tactics deployed by officers in the units, such as using the identities of dead babies and deceiving women into long-term sexual relationships before vanishing, have since been exposed.

The Pitchford Inquiry, set up by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary, is examining undercover policing going back decades.

Although the judicial-led investigation does not apply to Scotland, NPOIU activity took place north of the border in the run up to the G8 summit in Scotland in 2005.

Mark “Stone” was a driver for campaigners at the G8, but was unmasked as undercover officer Mark Kennedy.

He later said in an interview: “My superior officer told me on more than one occasion, particularly during the G8 protests in Scotland in 2005, that information I was providing was going directly to Tony Blair’s desk.”

Ahead of the G8, the then Scottish Executive issued a Ministerial Certificate blocking the release of information connected with the summit. The blackout applied to all Scottish public authorities, including police forces, health bodies and the Government.

However, it can be revealed that the SNP Government quietly revoked the certificate in 2010, a decision that could result in information on the summit being released.

After being asked by this newspaper for the titles of all files produced by on the G8 in 2005, Police Scotland confirmed the names of 1168 files.

Forty-four were created by the former Fife Constabulary, whose patch included the Gleneagles hotel, while 1124 files were produced by Lothian and Borders police.

Many of the files are on routine policing matters, but one document is described as “intelligence briefings” on the “National Public Order Intelligence Unit”.

Other files include “stop the war coalition – regulatory board” and “indymedia”, which was a left-wing website at the time.

There was also correspondence with the security services on the “Senior Leadership Development Programme”, a funding request for a “special branch operation” in May 2005 and over a dozen files on the peaceful Make Poverty History march.

After the UK Government refused to extend the Pitchford Inquiry to Scotland, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland launched its own review of undercover policing.

A spokesperson for HMICS said: “As outlined in our terms of reference HMICS will examine the scale and extent of undercover police operations in Scotland conducted by the SDS and the NPOIU. As part of our scrutiny, we will review the authorisations for undercover deployments during the G8 Summit in Scotland in July 2005. HMICS are currently engaged in this process with the full cooperation of Police Scotland. With specific regard to the intelligence file, HMICS will ?examine this file for any information that may inform our review process.”

Donal O’Driscoll, a core participant in the Pitchford Inquiry who was spied on in Scotland, said: “We have long argued that the both the SDS and the NPOIU were active in Scotland, particularly around the 2005 G8. The existence of this file strengthens our case that there needs to be a full inquiry into the activities of spy cops in Scotland – and renders the exclusion of Scotland from the Pitchford Inquiry even more inexplicable.

“We continue to have no confidence in the HMICS review. Nevertheless, I’d expect them to at least make the effort to examine this and related briefings as part of the bare minimum they need to do. Not least because it is now beyond dispute there were multiple undercover police from the NPOIU and foreign police forces present at the G8 protests. However, only a full public inquiry can get to the truth as to what the police and the state had planned and co-ordinated when they interfered in legitimate democratic protest.”

A Police Scotland spokesperson said: “Police Scotland does not routinely comment on covert policing or intelligence. We will not offer any comment on the contents of any specific files. Any inquiries relating to the NPOIU should be directed to the Met Police. Police Scotland will also fully and openly co-operate with the review of undercover policing to be carried out by HMICS.”

/ Paul Hutcheon, Investigations Editor / @paulhutcheon

Find this story at 25 March 2017
© Copyright 2017 Herald & Times Group

Donald Trump’s Muslim Laptop Ban Could Be a Protectionist Scheme

THE DEPARTMENT OF Homeland Security announced an unprecedented new restriction on travelers from 10 airports in eight Muslim-majority countries on Tuesday.

The DHS restriction states “that all personal electronic devices larger than a cell phone or smart phone be placed in checked baggage at 10 airports where flights are departing for the United States.”

It’s a Muslim laptop ban.

The 10 airports are in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

American-based airlines do not fly directly to the United States from these airports, so these restrictions will not apply to them. The impact of this move will instead fall on nine airlines, including Gulf-based carriers that U.S. airlines have been asking President Trump to punish since the day after his election.

The U.S. carriers have long complained that Gulf carriers such as Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways are unfairly subsidized by their national governments.

Executives at Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and American Airlines met with Trump in early February. The day before the meeting, a group representing these American airlines, called the Partnership for Open & Fair Skies, distributed a slick video using Trump’s own words to argue against the subsidies.

With this new travel impediment, Trump may be throwing these executives a bone. The new restrictions appear to be targeting airports that serve as flight “hubs” for these airlines — such as Dubai International, which is the hub of Emirates. Airlines use these hub airports to transfer passengers between flights, delivering significant savings.

California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, quickly rose to the defense of Trump’s DHS on Tuesday, calling the restrictions both “necessary and proportional to the threat”:

Ranking House Intel Dem Schiff backs new electronics ban on US-bound flights from 8 Muslim-maj countries – critics say measure is arbitrary pic.twitter.com/3zPwehf2ZW

— Jessica Schulberg (@jessicaschulb) March 21, 2017

In 2015, Schiff was one of 262 Members of the House who signed a letter protesting subsidies for the Gulf airlines. The letter is featured on the website of the Partnership for Open & Fair Skies.

Whatever the motivation, the security justifications are unclear at best. The Guardian interviewed a number of top technologists about the new policy on Tuesday, and they were puzzled. “If you assume the attacker is interested in turning a laptop into a bomb, it would work just as well in the cargo hold,” Nicholas Weaver, who is a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, told the paper.

“From a technological perspective, nothing has changed between the last dozen years and today. That is, there are no new technological breakthroughs that make this threat any more serious today,” Bruce Schneier, a top technologist at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told the Guardian. “And there is certainly nothing technological that would limit this newfound threat to a handful of Middle Eastern airlines.”

The United Kingdom enacted similar restrictions hours after the United States, but with two puzzling differences. The U.K. ban includes 14 airlines, including six based in the U.K. And it does not include airports in Qatar or the UAE — which are the epicenter of the subsidies dispute. Canada is reportedly weighing its own restrictions.

For its part, Emirates responded by inviting customers to sample its in-flight entertainment in lieu of tablets and laptops — by repurposing an old advertisement featuring Jennifer Anniston:

Let us entertain you. pic.twitter.com/FKqayqUdQ7

— Emirates airline (@emirates) March 21, 2017

Zaid Jilani
March 21 2017, 7:51 p.m.
Find this story at 21 March 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

The Many Mysteries of the Muslim Laptop Ban

A new Homeland Security rule will ban electronics on flights from airports in Muslim-majority countries. Is this protectionism or prudence? Well, it’s complicated.

Travelers from eight different Muslim-majority nations will no longer be allowed to carry laptops, tablets, or certain other electronic devices with them in the cabin on flights inbound to the U.S., according to new rules that take effect on Tuesday. The U.K. was quick to announce that it would follow suit with a Muslim laptop ban of its own.

Officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration say that the new rules reflect a potential threat of terrorists smuggling explosive devices on board planes using portable electronic devices—iPads, Kindles, and the like. The DHS guidance cites a 2016 attempted airliner downing in Somalia as one recent incident that could be linked to a laptop bomb. The U.S. rules affect last-point-of-departure airports from 10 airports—some of them the busiest hubs in the Middle East—from Saudi Arabia to Istanbul to the UAE.

Behind the order, though, lies a long history of conflict between America’s big three carriers—Delta, United, and American—and their peers in the Gulf. Critics spied an ulterior motive behind the Trump administration’s new rule: a protectionist measure for U.S. carriers promised by President Donald Trump.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman floated this notion in the Washington Post, suggesting that the financial security of United, American, and Delta might be behind the new counterterrorism measures. The U.S. airlines have grumbled for years that their counterparts from the Gulf—specifically Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways—benefit unfairly from government subsidies. Those carriers have recently expanded their service to U.S. cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. (as any Washington Wizards fan can tell you, since Etihad is a major advertiser in the Verizon Center).

Back in February, the chief executives of United, American, and Delta sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson complaining about the “massive subsidization of three state-owned Gulf carriers … and the significant harm this subsidized competition is causing to U.S. airlines and U.S. jobs.” In a meeting with the executives shortly thereafter, Trump promised “phenomenal” tax relief, broad deregulation, and other forms of support to the industry.

It’s not yet clear whether this laptop travel ban applies exclusively to all inbound flights from Muslim-majority airports or just those from Gulf carriers. If the latter, that would be a boon to U.S. operators. International business-class travelers—and there are a lot of them circulating between the U.S. and the Middle East—are bound to prefer flights that allow them to work on the plane. During a 14-hour nonstop haul from Dubai to Dulles, passengers are likely to appreciate all the electronic conveniences and entertainment they can carry.

But a one-sided ban would also be a plain violation of trade rules. Global airline carriers have been duking it out over national subsidies for years. In September, the World Trade Organization ruled that the European Union had been illegally propping up Airbus to the tune of $22 billion, a decision that the Washington Post described as “the most expensive dispute in international history.”

A U.K. electronics ban in the Gulf would bite the hand that feeds British Airways.
The Financial Times reports that the rule applies only to non-U.S. carriers: Saudi Arabian Airlines, Royal Jordanian Airlines, Emirates, Etihad Airways, Qatar Airways, Kuwait Airways, Turkish Airlines, EgyptAir, and Royal Air Maroc. Several of these state-owned airlines have indeed enjoyed massive subsidies from their governments. But there’s nothing in the guidance released by Homeland Security that specifies those carriers or otherwise exempts U.S. domestic airlines from the electronics ban. DHS is specific only about the 10 affected airports.

According to CNN, domestic carriers are not affected by the ruling because they do not operate any direct flights to the U.S. from those airports. A travel engine search corroborates and complicates that explanation. Delta runs flights from Cairo to Washington, D.C., that are operated by Air France, for example. British Airways operates American Airlines flights from Istanbul to New York. Both Delta and United operate inbound flights by other carriers—Lufthansa, KLM, and so on—from the restricted airports.

Homeland Security has not responded to a request for clarification. Across the pond, an electronics ban is even more more complicated, since Qatar Airways has increased its ownership stake in the parent company for British Airways to 20 percent after Brexit. A U.K. electronics ban in the Gulf would bite the hand that feeds British Airways.

These bans may be motivated by urgent and legitimate national security concerns. Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and a Democrat, says that the electronics ban is justified. There is a debate to be had even if the threat is real, though. The tradeoff between travel security and convenience is an enormous drag on productivity (not to mention a cost for airports and airlines). The new rules may sidestep that debate. If an electronics ban applies solely to Gulf carriers, exempting domestic airlines, then it’s pretty plainly a protectionist measure, of the kind that Trump has explicitly promised to deliver for U.S. airlines.

The risk, of course, is that Gulf states could respond in kind—meaning that no one gets to binge on Netflix on international flights. Trade battles have a way of escalating quickly. After the European Union restricted hormone-treated beef from America in 1999, the Clinton administration retaliated with a 100 percent tariff on Roquefort from France. The Bush administration escalated the conflict—totally arbitrarily!—with a 300 percent duty on Roquefort in 2003. The ensuing cheese war lasted nearly through the Obama administration.

Depriving Americans of imported fromage is one thing; taking screens away from their toddlers could represent a whole other degree of inconvenience. Whether or not the Trump administration is pushing protectionist trade policies under the guise of national security, it seems likely that international flights are going to feel a whole hell of a lot longer.

KRISTON CAPPS @kristoncapps Mar 21, 2017 10 Comments

Find this story at 21 March 2017

Copyright 2017 The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Were the hackers who broke into the DNC’s email really Russian?

The question of whether political operative Roger Stone helped Russian hackers break into the email of Democratic politicians, to some people, invites another: Who says the hackers were Russian?

The FBI does, and so do several U.S. intelligence agencies, as they’ve declared repeatedly over the past five months. But among private-sector computer security companies, not everybody thinks the case is proven.

“I have no problem blaming Russia for what they do, which is a lot,” said Jeffrey Carr of the international cybersecurity company Taia Global Inc. “I just don’t want to blame them for things we don’t know that they did. It may turn out that they’re guilty, but we are very short on evidence here.”

As Carr notes, the FBI never examined the servers that were hacked at the Democratic National Committee. Instead, the DNC used the private computer security company CrowdStrike to detect and repair the penetrations.

“All the forensic work on those servers was done by CrowdStrike, and everyone else is relying on information they provided,” said Carr. “And CrowdStrike was the one to declare this the work of the Russians.”

The CrowdStrike argument relies heavily on the fact that remnants of a piece of malware known as AGENT-X were found in the DNC computers. AGENT-X collects and transmits hacked files to rogue computers.

“AGENT-X has been around for ages and ages, and its use has always been attributed to the Russian government, a theory that’s known in the industry as ‘exclusive use,’” Carr said. “The problem with exclusive use is that it’s completely false. Unlike a bomb or an artillery shell, malware doesn’t detonate on impact and destroy itself.

“You can recover it, reverse-engineer it, and reuse it. The U.S. government learned a lesson about that when it created the Stuxnet computer worm to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Stuxnet survived and now other people have it.”

Carr said he is aware of at least two working copies of AGENT-X outside Russian hands. One is in the possession of a group of Ukrainian hackers he has spoken with, and the other is with an American cybersecurity company. “And if an American security company has it, you can be certain other people do, too,” he said.

There’s growing doubt in the computer security industry about CrowdStrike’s theories about AGENT-X and Russian hackers, Carr said, including some critical responses to a CrowdStrike report on Russian use of the malware to disable Ukrainian artillery.

“This is a close-knit community and criticizing a member to the outside world is kind of like talking out of turn,” Carr said. “I’ve been repeatedly criticized for speaking out in public about whether the hacking was really done by the Russians. But this has to be made public, has to be addressed, and has to be acknowledged by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.”

MARCH 24, 2017 7:00 AM
BY GLENN GARVIN

Find this story at 24 March 2017
Copyright http://www.miamiherald.com/

Did the Russians Really Hack the DNC?

Russia, we are told, breached the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), swiped emails and other documents, and released them to the public, to alter the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

How substantial is the evidence backing these assertions?

Hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate unusual network activity, the security firm Crowdstrike discovered two separate intrusions on DNC servers. Crowdstrike named the two intruders Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, in an allusion to what it felt were Russian sources. According to Crowdstrike, “Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none,” and “both groups were constantly going back into the environment” to change code and methods and switch command and control channels.

On what basis did Crowdstrike attribute these breaches to Russian intelligence services? The security firm claims that the techniques used were similar to those deployed in past security hacking operations that have been attributed to the same actors, while the profile of previous victims “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government. Furthermore, it appeared that the intruders were unaware of each other’s presence in the DNC system. “While you would virtually never see Western intelligence agencies going after the same target without de-confliction for fear of compromising each other’s operations,” Crowdstrike reports, “in Russia this is not an uncommon scenario.” [1]

Those may be indicators of Russian government culpability. But then again, perhaps not. Regarding the point about separate intruders, each operating independently of the other, that would seem to more likely indicate that the sources have nothing in common.

Each of the two intrusions acted as an advanced persistent threat (APT), which is an attack that resides undetected on a network for a long time. The goal of an APT is to exfiltrate data from the infected system rather than inflict damage. Several names have been given to these two actors, and most commonly Fancy Bear is known as APT28, and Cozy Bear as APT29.

The fact that many of the techniques used in the hack resembled, in varying degrees, past attacks attributed to Russia may not necessarily carry as much significance as we are led to believe. Once malware is deployed, it tends to be picked up by cybercriminals and offered for sale or trade on Deep Web black markets, where anyone can purchase it. Exploit kits are especially popular sellers. Quite often, the code is modified for specific uses. Security specialist Josh Pitts demonstrated how easy that process can be, downloading and modifying nine samples of the OnionDuke malware, which is thought to have first originated with the Russian government. Pitts reports that this exercise demonstrates “how easy it is to repurpose nation-state code/malware.” [2]

In another example, when SentinalOne Research discovered the Gyges malware in 2014, it reported that it “exhibits similarities to Russian espionage malware,” and is “designed to target government organizations. It comes as no surprise to us that this type of intelligence agency-grade malware would eventually fall into cybercriminals’ hands.” The security firm explains that Gyges is an “example of how advanced techniques and code developed by governments for espionage are effectively being repurposed, modularized and coupled with other malware to commit cybercrime.” [3]

Attribution is hard, cybersecurity specialists often point out. “Once an APT is released into the wild, its spread isn’t controlled by the attacker,” writes Mark McArdle. “They can’t prevent someone from analyzing it and repurposing it for their own needs.” Adapting malware “is a well-known reality,” he continues. “Finding irrefutable evidence that links an attacker to an attack is virtually unattainable, so everything boils down to assumptions and judgment.” [4]

Security Alliance regards security firm FireEye’s analysis that tied APT28 to the Russian government as based “largely on circumstantial evidence.” FireEye’s report “explicitly disregards targets that do not seem to indicate sponsorship by a nation-state,” having excluded various targets because they are “not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests.” [5] FireEye reported that the APT28 “victim set is narrow,” which helped lead it to the conclusion that it is a Russian operation. Cybersecurity consultant Jeffrey Carr reacts with scorn: “The victim set is narrow because the report’s authors make it narrow! In fact, it wasn’t narrowly targeted at all if you take into account the targets mentioned by other cybersecurity companies, not to mention those that FireEye deliberately excluded for being ‘not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests’.” [6]

FireEye’s report from 2014, on which much of the DNC Russian attribution is based, found that 89 percent of the APT28 software samples it analyzed were compiled during regular working hours in St. Petersburg and Moscow. [7]

But compile times, like language settings, can be easily altered to mislead investigators. Mark McArdle wonders, “If we think about the very high level of design, engineering, and testing that would be required for such a sophisticated attack, is it reasonable to assume that the attacker would leave these kinds of breadcrumbs? It’s possible. But it’s also possible that these things can be used to misdirect attention to a different party. Potentially another adversary. Is this evidence the result of sloppiness or a careful misdirection?” [8]

“If the guys are really good,” says Chris Finan, CEO of Manifold Technology, “they’re not leaving much evidence or they’re leaving evidence to throw you off the scent entirely.” [9] How plausible is it that Russian intelligence services would fail even to attempt such a fundamental step?

James Scott of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology points out that the very vulnerability of the DNC servers constitutes a muddied basis on which determine attribution. “Attribution is less exact in the case of the DNC breach because the mail servers compromised were not well-secured; the organization of a few hundred personnel did not practice proper cyber-hygiene; the DNC has a global reputation and is a valuable target to script kiddies, hacktivists, lone-wolf cyber-threat actors, cyber-criminals, cyber-jihadists, hail-mary threats, and nation-state sponsored advanced persistent threats; and because the malware discovered on DNC systems were well-known, publicly disclosed, and variants could be purchased on Deep Web markets and forums.” [10]

Someone, or some group, operating under the pseudonym of Guccifer 2.0, claimed to be a lone actor in hacking the DNC servers. It is unclear what relation – if any – Guccifer 2.0 has to either of the two APT attacks on the DNC. In a PDF file that Guccifer 2.0 sent to Gawker.com, metadata indicated that it was it was last saved by someone having a username in Cyrillic letters. During the conversion of the file from Microsoft Word to PDF, invalid hyperlink error messages were automatically generated in the Russian language. [11]

This would seem to present rather damning evidence. But who is Guccifer 2.0? A Russian government operation? A private group? Or a lone hacktivist? In the poorly secured DNC system, there were almost certainly many infiltrators of various stripes. Nor can it be ruled out that the metadata indicators were intentionally generated in the file to misdirect attribution. The two APT attacks have been noted for their sophistication, and these mistakes – if that is what they are – seem amateurish. To change the language setting on a computer can be done in a matter of seconds, and that would be standard procedure for advanced cyber-warriors. On the other hand, sloppiness on the part of developers is not entirely unknown. However, one would expect a nation-state to enforce strict software and document handling procedures and implement rigorous review processes.

At any rate, the documents posted to the Guccifer 2.0 blog do not necessarily originate from the same source as those published by WikiLeaks. Certainly, none of the documents posted to WikiLeaks possess the same metadata issues. And one hacking operation does not preclude another, let alone an insider leak.

APT28 relied on XTunnel, repurposed from open source code that is available to anyone, to open network ports and siphon data. The interesting thing about the software is its failure to match the level of sophistication claimed for APT28. The strings in the code quite transparently indicate its intent, with no attempt at obfuscation. [12] It seems an odd oversight for a nation-state operation, in which plausible deniability would be essential, to overlook that glaring point during software development.

Command-and-control servers remotely issue malicious commands to infected machines. Oddly, for such a key component of the operation, the command-and-control IP address in both attacks was hard-coded in the malware. This seems like another inexplicable choice, given that the point of an advanced persistent threat is to operate for an extended period without detection. A more suitable approach would be to use a Domain Name System (DNS) address, which is a decentralized computer naming system. That would provide a more covert means of identifying the command-and-control server. [13] Moreover, one would expect that address to be encrypted. Using a DNS address would also allow the command-and-control operation to easily move to another server if its location is detected, without the need to modify and reinstall the code.

One of the IP addresses is claimed to be a “well-known APT 28” command-and-control address, while the second is said to be linked to Russian military intelligence. [14] The first address points to a server located in San Jose, California, and is operated by a server hosting service. [15] The second server is situated in Paris, France, and owned by another server hosting service. [16] Clearly, these are servers that have been compromised by hackers. It is customary for hackers to route their attacks through vulnerable computers. The IP addresses of compromised computers are widely available on the Deep Web, and typically a hacked server will be used by multiple threat actors. These two particular servers may or may not have been regularly utilized by Russian Intelligence, but they were not uniquely so used. Almost certainly, many other hackers would have used the same machines, and it cannot be said that these IP addresses uniquely identify an infiltrator. Indeed, the second IP address is associated with the common Trojan viruses Agent-APPR and Shunnael. [17]

“Everyone is focused on attribution, but we may be missing the bigger truth,” says Joshua Croman, Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. “[T]he level of sophistication required to do this hack was so low that nearly anyone could do it.” [18]

In answer to critics, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a joint analysis report, which presented “technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used” by Russian intelligence services “to compromise and exploit networks” associated with the U.S. election, U.S. government, political, and private sector entities. The report code-named these activities “Grizzly Steppe.” [19]

For a document that purports to offer strong evidence on behalf of U.S. government allegations of Russian culpability, it is striking how weak and sloppy the content is. Included in the report is a list of every threat group ever said to be associated with the Russian government, most of which are unrelated to the DNC hack. It appears that various governmental organizations were asked to send a list of Russian threats, and then an official lacking IT background compiled that information for the report, and the result is a mishmash of threat groups, software, and techniques. “PowerShell backdoor,” for instance, is a method used by many hackers, and in no way describes a Russian operation.

Indeed, one must take the list on faith, because nowhere in the document is any evidence provided to back up the claim of a Russian connection. Indeed, as the majority of items on the list are unrelated to the DNC hack, one wonders what the point is. But it bears repeating: even where software can be traced to Russian origination, it does not necessarily indicate exclusive usage. Jeffrey Carr explains: “Once malware is deployed, it is no longer under the control of the hacker who deployed it or the developer who created it. It can be reverse-engineered, copied, modified, shared and redeployed again and again by anyone.” Carr quotes security firm ESET in regard to the Sednit group, one of the items on the report’s list, and which is another name for APT28: “As security researchers, what we call ‘the Sednit group’ is merely a set of software and the related infrastructure, which we can hardly correlate with any specific organization.” Carr points out that X-Agent software, which is said to have been utilized in the DNC hack, was easily obtained by ESET for analysis. “If ESET could do it, so can others. It is both foolish and baseless to claim, as Crowdstrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the Russian government when the source code is there for anyone to find and use at will.” [20]

The salient impression given by the government’s report is how devoid of evidence it is. For that matter, the majority of the content is taken up by what security specialist John Hinderaker describes as “pedestrian advice to IT professionals about computer security.” As for the report’s indicators of compromise (IoC), Hinderaker characterizes these as “tools that are freely available and IP addresses that are used by hackers around the world.” [21]

In conjunction with the report, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security provided a list of IP addresses it identified with Russian intelligence services. [22] Wordfence analyzed the IP addresses as well as a PHP malware script provided by the Department of Homeland Security. In analyzing the source code, Wordfence discovered that the software used was P.A.S., version 3.1.0. It then found that the website that manufactures the malware had a site country code indicating that it is Ukrainian. The current version of the P.A.S. software is 4.1.1, which is much newer than that used in the DNC hack, and the latest version has changed “quite substantially.” Wordfence notes that not only is the software “commonly available,” but also that it would be reasonable to expect “Russian intelligence operatives to develop their own tools or at least use current malicious tools from outside sources.” To put it plainly, Wordfence concludes that the malware sample “has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence.” [23]

Wordfence also analyzed the government’s list of 876 IP addresses included as indicators of compromise. The sites are widely dispersed geographically, and of those with a known location, the United States has the largest number. A large number of the IP addresses belong to low-cost server hosting companies. “A common pattern that we see in the industry,” Wordfence states, “is that accounts at these hosts are compromised and those hacked sites are used to launch attacks around the web.” Fifteen percent of the IP addresses are currently Tor exit nodes. “These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be anonymous online, including malicious actors.” [24]

If one also takes into account the IP addresses that not only point to current Tor exits, but also those that once belonged to Tor exit nodes, then these comprise 42 percent of the government’s list. [25] “The fact that so many of the IPs are Tor addresses reveals the true sloppiness of the report,” concludes network security specialist Jerry Gamblin. [26]

Cybersecurity analyst Robert Graham was particularly blistering in his assessment of the government’s report, characterizing it as “full of garbage.” The report fails to tie the indicators of compromise to the Russian government. “It contains signatures of viruses that are publicly available, used by hackers around the world, not just Russia. It contains a long list of IP addresses from perfectly normal services, like Tor, Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, and so forth. Yes, hackers use Yahoo for phishing and maladvertising. It doesn’t mean every access of Yahoo is an ‘indicator of compromise’.” Graham compared the list of IP addresses against those accessed by his web browser, and found two matches. “No,” he continues. “This doesn’t mean I’ve been hacked. It means I just had a normal interaction with Yahoo. It means the Grizzly Steppe IoCs are garbage.” Graham goes on to point out that “what really happened” with the supposed Russian hack into the Vermont power grid “is that somebody just checked their Yahoo email, thereby accessing one of the same IP addresses I did. How they get from the facts (one person accessed Yahoo email) to the story (Russians hacked power grid)” is U.S. government “misinformation.” [27]

The indicators of compromise, in Graham’s assessment, were “published as a political tool, to prove they have evidence pointing to Russia.” As for the P.A.S. web shell, it is “used by hundreds if not thousands of hackers, mostly associated with Russia, but also throughout the rest of the world.” Relying on the government’s sample for attribution is problematic: “Just because you found P.A.S. in two different places doesn’t mean it’s the same hacker.” A web shell “is one of the most common things hackers use once they’ve broken into a server,” Graham observes. [28]

Although cybersecurity analyst Robert M. Lee is inclined to accept the government’s position on the DNC hack, he feels the joint analysis report “reads like a poorly done vendor intelligence report stringing together various aspects of attribution without evidence.” The report’s list “detracts from the confidence because of the interweaving of unrelated data.” The information presented is not sourced, he adds. “It’s a random collection of information and in that way, is mostly useless.” Indeed, the indicators of compromise have “a high rate of false positives for defenders that use them.” [29]

Among the government’s list of Russian actors are Energetic Bear and Crouching Yeti, two names for the same threat group. In its analysis, Kaspersky Lab found that most of the group’s victims “fall into the industrial/machinery building sector,” and it is “not currently possible to determine the country of origin.” Although listed in the government’s report, it is not suggested that the group played a part in the DNC hack. But it does serve as an example of the uncertainty surrounding government claims about Russian hacking operations in general. [30]

CosmicDuke is one of the software packages listed as tied to Russia. SecureList, however, finds that unlike the software’s predecessor, CosmicDuke targets those who traffic in “controlled substances, such as steroids and hormones.” One possibility is that CosmicDuke is used by law enforcement agencies, while another possibility “is that it’s simply available in the underground and purchased by various competitors in the pharmaceutical business to spy on each other.” In either case, whether or not the software is utilized by the Russian government, there is a broader base for its use. [31]

The intent of the joint analysis report was to provide evidence of Russian state responsibility for the DNC hack. But nowhere does it do so. Mere assertions are meant to persuade. How much evidence does the government have? The Democratic Party claims that the FBI never requested access to DNC servers. [32] The FBI, for its part, says it made “multiple requests” for access to the DNC servers and was repeatedly turned down. [33] Either way, it is a remarkable admission. In a case like this, the FBI would typically conduct its own investigation. Was the DNC afraid the FBI might come to a different conclusion than the DNC-hired security firm Crowdstrike? The FBI was left to rely on whatever evidence Crowdstrike chose to supply. During its analysis of DNC servers, Crowdstrike reports that it found evidence of APT28 and APT29 intrusions within two hours. Did it stop there, satisfied with what it had found? Or did it continue to explore whether additional intrusions by other actors had taken place?

In an attempt to further inflame the hysteria generated from accusations of Russian hacking, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a declassified version of a document briefed to U.S. officials. The information was supplied by the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, and was meant to cement the government’s case. Not surprisingly, the report received a warm welcome in the mainstream media, but what is notable is that it offers not a single piece of evidence to support its claim of “high confidence” in assessing that Russia hacked the DNC and released documents to WikiLeaks. Instead, the bulk of the report is an unhinged diatribe against Russian-owned RT media. The content is rife with inaccuracies and absurdities. Among the heinous actions RT is accused of are having run “anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on health issues,” airing a documentary on Occupy Wall Street, and hosting third-party candidates during the 2012 election.[34]

The report would be laughable, were it not for the fact that it is being played up for propaganda effect, bypassing logic and appealing directly to unexamined emotion. The 2016 election should have been a wake-up call for the Democratic Party. Instead, predictably enough, no self-examination has taken place, as the party doubles down on the neoliberal policies that have impoverished tens of millions, and backing military interventions that have sown so much death and chaos. Instead of thoughtful analysis, the party is lashing out and blaming Russia for its loss to an opponent that even a merely weak candidate would have beaten handily.

Mainstream media start with the premise that the Russian government was responsible, despite a lack of convincing evidence. They then leap to the fallacious conclusion that because Russia hacked the DNC, only it could have leaked the documents.

So, did the Russian government hack the DNC and feed documents to WikiLeaks? There are really two questions here: who hacked the DNC, and who released the DNC documents? These are not necessarily the same. An earlier intrusion into German parliament servers was blamed on the Russians, yet the release of documents to WikiLeaks is thought to have originated from an insider. [35] Had the Russians hacked into the DNC, it may have been to gather intelligence, while another actor released the documents. But it is far from certain that Russian intelligence services had anything to do with the intrusions. Julian Assange says that he did not receive the DNC documents from a nation-state. It has been pointed out that Russia could have used a third party to pass along the material. Fair enough, but former UK diplomat Craig Murray asserts: “I know who the source is… It’s from a Washington insider. It’s not from Russia.” [36]

There are too many inconsistencies and holes in the official story. In all likelihood, there were multiple intrusions into DNC servers, not all of which have been identified. The public ought to be wary of quick claims of attribution. It requires a long and involved process to arrive at a plausible identification, and in many cases the source can never be determined. As Jeffrey Carr explains, “It’s important to know that the process of attributing an attack by a cybersecurity company has nothing to do with the scientific method. Claims of attribution aren’t testable or repeatable because the hypothesis is never proven right or wrong.” [37]

Russia-bashing is in full swing, and there does not appear to be any letup in sight. We are plunging headlong into a new Cold War, riding on a wave of propaganda-induced hysteria. The self-serving claims fueling this campaign need to be challenged every step of the way. Surrendering to evidence-free emotional appeals would only serve those who arrogantly advocate confrontation and geopolitical domination.

Notes.

[1] Dmitri Alperovitch, “Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee,” Crowdstrike blog, June 15, 2016.

[2] Josh Pitts, “Repurposing OnionDuke: A Single Case Study Around Reusing Nation-state Malware,” Black Hat, July 21, 2015.

[3] Udi Shamir, “The Case of Gyges, the Invisible Malware,” SentinelOne, July 2014.

[4] Mark McArdle, “’Whodunnit?’ Why the Attribution of Hacks like the Recent DNC Hack is so Difficult,” Esentire, July 28, 2016.

[5] “The Usual Suspects: Faith-Based Attribution and its Effects on the Security Community,” October 21, 2016.

[6] Jeffrey Carr, “The DNC Breach and the Hijacking of Common Sense,” June 20, 2016.

[7] “APT28: A Window into Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations?” FireEye, October 27, 2014.

[8] Mark McArdle, “’Whodunnit?’ Why the Attribution of Hacks like the Recent DNC Hack is so Difficult,” Esentire, July 28, 2016.

[9] Patrick Howell O’Neill, “Obama’s Former Cybersecurity Advisor Says Only ‘Idiots’ Want to Hack Russia Back for DNC Breach,” The Daily Dot, July 29, 2016.

[10] Janes Scott, Sr., “It’s the Russians! … or is it? Cold War Rhetoric in the Digital Age,” ICIT, December 13, 2016.

[11] Sam Biddle and Gabrielle Bluestone, “This Looks like the DNC’s Hacked Trump Oppo File,” Gawker, June 15, 2016.

Dan Goodin, “’Guccifer’ Leak of DNC Trump Research Has a Russian’s Fingerprints on It,” Ars Technica, June 16, 2016.

[12] Pat Belcher, “Tunnel of Gov: DNC Hack and the Russian XTunnel,” Invincea, July 28, 2016.

[13] Seth Bromberger, “DNS as a Covert Channel within Protected Networks,” National Electric Sector Cyber Security Organization, January 25, 2011.

[14] Thomas Rid, “All Signs Point to Russia Being Behind the DNC Hack,” Motherboard, July 25, 2016.

[15] https://www.threatminer.org/host.php?q=45.32.129.185

[16] https://www.threatminer.org/host.php?q=176.31.112.10

[17] https://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/Troj~Agent-APPR/detailed-analysis.aspx

https://www.symantec.com/security_response/earthlink_writeup.jsp?docid=2015-062518-5557-99

[18] Paul, “Security Pros Pan US Government Report on Russian Hacking,” The Security Ledger, December 30, 2016.

[19] “Grizzly Steppe – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity,” JAR-16-20296, National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation, December 29, 2016.

[20] Jeffrey Carr, “FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report: A Fatally Flawed Effort,” Jeffrey Carr/Medium, December 30, 2016.

[21] John Hinderaker, “Is “Grizzly Steppe’ Really a Russian Operation?” Powerline, December 31, 2016.

[22] https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR-16-20296A.csv

[23] Mark Maunder, “US Govt Data Shows Russia Used Outdated Ukrainian PHP Malware,” Wordfence, December 30, 2016.

[24] Mark Maunder, “US Govt Data Shows Russia Used Outdated Ukrainian PHP Malware,” Wordfence, December 30, 2016.

[25] Micah Lee, “The U.S. Government Thinks Thousands of Russian Hackers May be Reading my Blog. They Aren’t,” The Intercept, January 4, 2017.

[26] Jerry Gamblin, “Grizzly Steppe: Here’s My IP and Hash Analysis,” A New Domain, January 2, 2017.

[27] Robert Graham, “Dear Obama, from Infosec,” Errata Security, January 3, 2017.

[28] Robert Graham, “Some Notes on IoCs,” Errata Security, December 29, 2016.

[29] Robert M. Lee, “Critiques of the DHS/FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report,” Robert M. Lee blog, December 30, 2016.

[30] “Energetic Bear – Crouching Yeti,” Kaspersky Lab Global Research and Analysis Team, July 31, 2014.

[31] “Miniduke is back: Nemesis Gemina and the Botgen Studio,” Securelist, July 3, 2014.

[32] Ali Watkins, “The FBI Never Asked for Access to Hacked Computer Servers,” Buzzfeed, January 4, 2017.

[33] “James Comey: DNC Denied FBI Direct Access to Servers During Russia Hacking Probe,” Washington Times, January 10, 2017.

[34] “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, January 6, 2017.

[35] “Quelle für Enthüllungen im Bundestag Vermutet,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 17, 2016.

[36] RT broadcast, January 7, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3DvaVrRweY

[37] Jeffrey Carr, “Faith-based Attribution,” Jeffrey Carr/Medium, July 10, 2016.

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Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute. He a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org

JANUARY 13, 2017
by GREGORY ELICH

Find this story at 13 January 2017
Copyright © CounterPunch

HERE’S THE PUBLIC EVIDENCE RUSSIA HACKED THE DNC — IT’S NOT ENOUGH

THERE ARE SOME good reasons to believe Russians had something to do with the breaches into email accounts belonging to members of the Democratic party, which proved varyingly embarrassing or disruptive for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But “good” doesn’t necessarily mean good enough to indict Russia’s head of state for sabotaging our democracy.

There’s a lot of evidence from the attack on the table, mostly detailing how the hack was perpetrated, and possibly the language of the perpetrators. It certainly remains plausible that Russians hacked the DNC, and remains possible that Russia itself ordered it. But the refrain of Russian attribution has been repeated so regularly and so emphatically that it’s become easy to forget that no one has ever truly proven the claim. There is strong evidence indicating that Democratic email accounts were breached via phishing messages, and that specific malware was spread across DNC computers. There’s even evidence that the attackers are the same group that’s been spotted attacking other targets in the past. But again: No one has actually proven that group is the Russian government (or works for it). This remains the enormous inductive leap that’s not been reckoned with, and Americans deserve better.

We should also bear in mind that private security firm CrowdStrike’s frequently cited findings of Russian responsibility were essentially paid for by the DNC, which contracted its services in June. It’s highly unusual for evidence of a crime to be assembled on the victim’s dime. If we’re going to blame the Russian government for disrupting our presidential election — easily construed as an act of war — we need to be damn sure of every single shred of evidence. Guesswork and assumption could be disastrous.

The gist of the Case Against Russia goes like this: The person or people who infiltrated the DNC’s email system and the account of John Podesta left behind clues of varying technical specificity indicating they have some connection to Russia, or at least speak Russian. Guccifer 2.0, the entity that originally distributed hacked materials from the Democratic party, is a deeply suspicious figure who has made statements and decisions that indicate some Russian connection. The website DCLeaks, which began publishing a great number of DNC emails, has some apparent ties to Guccifer and possibly Russia. And then there’s WikiLeaks, which after a long, sad slide into paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, and general internet toxicity has made no attempt to mask its affection for Vladimir Putin and its crazed contempt for Hillary Clinton. (Julian Assange has been stuck indoors for a very, very long time.) If you look at all of this and sort of squint, it looks quite strong indeed, an insurmountable heap of circumstantial evidence too great in volume to dismiss as just circumstantial or mere coincidence.

But look more closely at the above and you can’t help but notice all of the qualifying words: Possibly, appears, connects, indicates. It’s impossible (or at least dishonest) to present the evidence for Russian responsibility for hacking the Democrats without using language like this. The question, then, is this: Do we want to make major foreign policy decisions with a belligerent nuclear power based on suggestions alone, no matter how strong?

What We Know

So far, all of the evidence pointing to Russia’s involvement in the Democratic hacks (DNC, DCCC, Podesta, et al.) comes from either private security firms (like CrowdStrike or FireEye) who sell cyber-defense services to other companies, or independent researchers, some with university affiliations and serious credentials, and some who are basically just Guys on Twitter. Although some of these private firms groups had proprietary access to DNC computers or files from them, much of the evidence has been drawn from publicly available data like the hacked emails and documents.

Some of the malware found on DNC computers is believed to be the same as that used by two hacking groups believed to be Russian intelligence units, codenamed APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 28/Fancy Bear and APT 29/Cozy Bear by industry researchers who track them.

The attacker or attackers registered a deliberately misspelled domain name used for email phishing attacks against DNC employees, connected to an IP address associated with APT 28/Fancy Bear.
Malware found on the DNC computers was programmed to communicate with an IP address associated with APT 28/Fancy Bear.
Metadata in a file leaked by “Guccifer 2.0″ shows it was modified by a user called, in cyrillic, “Felix Edmundovich,” a reference to the founder of a Soviet-era secret police force. Another document contained cyrillic metadata indicating it had been edited on a document with Russian language settings.
Peculiarities in a conversation with “Guccifer 2.0″ that Motherboard published in June suggests he is not Romanian, as he originally claimed.
The DCLeaks.com domain was registered by a person using the same email service as the person who registered a misspelled domain used to send phishing emails to DNC employees.
Some of the phishing emails were sent using Yandex, a Moscow-based webmail provider.
A bit.ly link believed to have been used by APT 28/Fancy Bear in the past was also used against Podesta.
Why That Isn’t Enough

Viewed as a whole, the above evidence looks strong, and maybe even damning. But view each piece on its own, and it’s hard to feel impressed.

For one, a lot of the so-called evidence above is no such thing. CrowdStrike, whose claims of Russian responsibility are perhaps most influential throughout the media, says APT 28/Fancy Bear “is known for its technique of registering domains that closely resemble domains of legitimate organizations they plan to target.” But this isn’t a Russian technique any more than using a computer is a Russian technique — misspelled domains are a cornerstone of phishing attacks all over the world. Is Yandex — the Russian equivalent of Google — some sort of giveaway? Anyone who claimed a hacker must be a CIA agent because they used a Gmail account would be laughed off the internet. We must also acknowledge that just because Guccifer 2.0 pretended to be Romanian, we can’t conclude he works for the Russian government — it just makes him a liar.

Next, consider the fact that CrowdStrike describes APT 28 and 29 like this:

Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of “living-off-the-land” techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and “access management” tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.

Compare that description to CrowdStrike’s claim it was able to finger APT 28 and 29, described above as digital spies par excellence, because they were so incredibly sloppy. Would a group whose “tradecraft is superb” with “operational security second to none” really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic comments on these documents? Would these groups that “constantly [go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels” get caught because they precisely didn’t make sure not to use IP addresses they’d been associated before? It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.

But how do we even know these oddly named groups are Russian? CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch himself describes APT 28 as a “Russian-based threat actor” whose modus operandi “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government” and “may indicate affiliation [Russia’s] Main Intelligence Department or GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service.” Security firm SecureWorks issued a report blaming Russia with “moderate confidence.” What constitutes moderate confidence? SecureWorks said it adopted the “grading system published by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to indicate confidence in their assessments. … Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.” All of this amounts to a very educated guess, at best.

Even the claim that APT 28/Fancy Bear itself is a group working for the Kremlin is speculative, a fact that’s been completely erased from this year’s discourse. In its 2014 reveal of the group, the high-profile security firm FireEye couldn’t even blame Russia without a question mark in the headline: “APT28: A Window into Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations?” The blog post itself is remarkably similar to arguments about the DNC hack: technical but still largely speculative, presenting evidence the company “[believes] indicate a government sponsor based in Moscow.” Believe! Indicate! We should know already this is no smoking gun. FireEye’s argument that the malware used by APT 28 is connected to the Russian government is based on the belief that its “developers are Russian language speakers operating during business hours that are consistent with the time zone of Russia’s major cities.”

As security researcher Jeffrey Carr pointed out in June, FireEye’s 2014 report on APT 28 is questionable from the start:

To my surprise, the report’s authors declared that they deliberately excluded evidence that didn’t support their judgment that the Russian government was responsible for APT28’s activities:

“APT28 has targeted a variety of organizations that fall outside of the three themes we highlighted above. However, we are not profiling all of APT28’s targets with the same detail because they are not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests.” (emphasis added)

That is the very definition of confirmation bias. Had FireEye published a detailed picture of APT28’s activities including all of their known targets, other theories regarding this group could have emerged; for example, that the malware developers and the operators of that malware were not the same or even necessarily affiliated.

The notion that APT 28 has a narrow focus on American political targets is undermined in another SecureWorks paper, which shows that the hackers have a wide variety of interests: 10 percent of their targets are NGOs, 22 percent are journalists, 4 percent are aerospace researchers, and 8 percent are “government supply chain.” SecureWorks says that only 8 percent of APT 28/Fancy Bear’s targets are “government personnel” of any nationality — hardly the focused agenda described by CrowdStrike.

Truly, the argument that “Guccifer 2.0″ is a Kremlin agent or that GRU breached John Podesta’s email only works if you presume that APT 28/Fancy Bear is a unit of the Russian government, a fact that has never been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. According to Carr, “it’s an old assumption going back years to when any attack against a non-financial target was attributed to a state actor.” Without that premise, all we can truly conclude is that some email accounts at the DNC et al. appear to have been broken into by someone, and perhaps they speak Russian. Left ignored is the mammoth difference between Russians and Russia.

Security researcher Claudio Guarnieri put it this way:

[Private security firms] can’t produce anything conclusive. What they produce is speculative attribution that is pretty common to make in the threat research field. I do that same speculative attribution myself, but it is just circumstantial. At the very best it can only prove that the actor that perpetrated the attack is very likely located in Russia. As for government involvement, it can only speculate that it is plausible because of context and political motivations, as well as technical connections with previous (or following attacks) that appear to be perpetrated by the same group and that corroborate the analysis that it is a Russian state-sponsored actor (for example, hacking of institutions of other countries Russia has some geopolitical interests in).

Finally, one can’t be reminded enough that all of this evidence comes from private companies with a direct financial interest in making the internet seem as scary as possible, just as Lysol depends on making you believe your kitchen is crawling with E. Coli.

What Does the Government Know?

In October, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a joint statement blaming the Russian government for hacking the DNC. In it, they state their attribution plainly:

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.

What’s missing is any evidence at all. If this federal confidence is based on evidence that’s being withheld from the public for any reason, that’s one thing — secrecy is their game. But if the U.S. Intelligence Community is asking the American electorate to believe them, to accept as true their claim that our most important civic institution was compromised by a longtime geopolitical nemesis, we need them to show us why.

The same goes for the CIA, which is now squaring off directly against Trump, claiming (through leaks to the Washington Post and New York Times) that the Russian government conducted the hacks for the express purpose of helping defeat Clinton. Days later, Senator John McCain agreed with the assessment, deeming it “another form of warfare.” Again, it’s completely possible (and probable, really) that the CIA possesses hard evidence that could establish Russian attribution — it’s their job to have such evidence, and often to keep it secret.

But what we’re presented with isn’t just the idea that these hacks happened, and that someone is responsible, and, well, I guess it’s just a shame. Our lawmakers and intelligence agencies are asking us to react to an attack that is almost military in nature — this is, we’re being told, “warfare.” When a foreign government conducts (or supports) an act of warfare against another country, it’s entirely possible that there will be an equal response. What we’re looking at now is the distinct possibility that the United States will consider military retaliation (digital or otherwise) against Russia, based on nothing but private sector consultants and secret intelligence agency notes. If you care about the country enough to be angry at the prospect of election-meddling, you should be terrified of the prospect of military tensions with Russia based on hidden evidence. You need not look too far back in recent history to find an example of when wrongly blaming a foreign government for sponsoring an attack on the U.S. has tremendously backfired.

We Need the Real Evidence, Right Now

It must be stated plainly: The U.S. intelligence community must make its evidence against Russia public if they want us to believe their claims. The integrity of our presidential elections is vital to the country’s survival; blind trust in the CIA is not. A governmental disclosure like this is also not entirely without precedent: In 2014, the Department of Justice produced a 56-page indictment detailing their exact evidence against a team of Chinese hackers working for the People’s Liberation Army, accused of stealing American trade secrets; each member was accused by name. The 2014 trade secret theft was a crime of much lower magnitude than election meddling, but what the DOJ furnished is what we should demand today from our country’s spies.

If the CIA does show its hand, we should demand to see the evidence that matters (which, according to Edward Snowden, the government probably has, if it exists). I asked Jeffrey Carr what he would consider undeniable evidence of Russian governmental involvement: “Captured communications between a Russian government employee and the hackers,” adding that attribution “should solely be handled by government agencies because they have the legal authorization to do what it takes to get hard evidence.”

Claudio Guarnieri concurred:

All in all, technical circumstantial attribution is acceptable only so far as it is to explain an attack. It most definitely isn’t for the political repercussions that we’re observing now. For that, only documental evidence that is verifiable or intercepts of Russian officials would be convincing enough, I suspect.

Given that the U.S. routinely attempts to intercept the communications of heads of state around the world, it’s not impossible that the CIA or the NSA has exactly this kind of proof. Granted, these intelligence agencies will be loath to reveal any evidence that could compromise the method they used to gather it. But in times of extraordinary risk, with two enormous military powers placed in direct conflict over national sovereignty, we need an extraordinary disclosure. The stakes are simply too high to take anyone’s word for it.

Sam Biddle
December 14 2016, 5:30 p.m.

Find this story at 14 December 2016

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Al Arabiya investigates: Who really killed Hezbollah’s Mustafa Badreddine?

On the May 13, 2016, Lebanese people were surprised when the Hezbollah’s leading man Hassan Nasrallah was seen mourning the death of his most senior militia commander Mustafa Badreddine.

No sooner did the news of Badreddine demise in Syria broke out, the Lebanese media adopted the story perpetuated by Hezbollah on the circumstances surrounding his death. Still, a few days later, questions began to rise about the credibility of Hezbollah’s version of events.

After investigations into the story, evidence proved that Badreddine did not die fighting in the battlefields of Syria as claimed, but rather, the Hezbollah militia commander was assassinated. And the person responsible for his assassination was none other but his revered leader and friend, Hassan Nasrallah.

Events leading up to May 12
In 2013, Hezbollah was summoned to fight in Syria and Nasrallah commissioned Badreddine to lead the factions there alongside Iran’s Qassem Soleimani who led Quds Force, a branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Soleimani ignored Badreddine’s great experience and aspired to lead the entire battle all by himself. While Badreddine took one risk after the other in the battlefields, leading his soldiers to victories and assuming full responsibility for the losses, he discovered that Soleimani was favoring the lives of the revolutionary guards over those of Hezbollah. The former asked the latter to lead his soldiers himself and take full responsibility over his army.

Both Hassan Nasrallah and Qassem Soleimani are said to have a hand behind Mustafa Badreddine mysterious death.

While Badreddine was fighting with his army in Syria, he was tried in absentia at the International Tribunal in the case of the assassination Rafiq Hariri, former Prime Minister of Lebanon in 2005. Nasrallah has been under a huge pressure from Soleimani, who requested the removal of Badreddine from the battlefield. Consequently, it appears that he had schemed to get rid of the commander.

The question then begs: What really happened on the evening of May 12, 2016? How did Soleimani and Nasrallah arrange the assassination of Mustafa Badreddine? And what really happened near the Damascus International Airport on the night between the May 12-13, 2016?

Aftermath
On May 14, 2016, less than two days after the operation, Al-Akhbar newspaper published the results of the investigation. Badreddine was reported to have arrived to the international airport was reportedly accompanied to the meeting with three other people but was the only one who was killed.

Initial reporting by Al-Mayadeen blamed Israel for the fatal attack, claiming that an Israeli Air Force (IAF) strike successfully targeted Badreddine’s position. But that article was later erased.

The cause of his death was assumed to be a vacuum bomb, while the nearest fighter group was 12 km away from the Damascus airport, which places it in the range of the artillery. Yet, these groups usually used unguided shells for their operations.

However, no gun powder residue found at the scene.

Infographic: Who was Hezbollah’s Mustafa Badreddine?

(Design by: Craig Willers)

Nicholas Blanford, a nonresident senior fellow with the Middle East Peace and Security Initiative, recently wrote an analysis on that point.

“The one claim of responsibility from the rebels came from the Jaysh al-Sunna group which said it had killed Badreddine in Khan Touman in southern Aleppo province. If that were true, why would Hezbollah hide it and make up a story about “takfiris” killing Badreddine much further south in the Damascus airport area?” Blanford asked.

“Also it is unclear what weapon system would be in the hands of rebel groups in the vicinity of Damascus airport that could account for the “large explosion” that Hezbollah said on Friday killed Badreddine. Diplomatic sources in Beirut confirmed that there really was a powerful blast near Damascus airport on Thursday (May 12) even if its origin remains unknown,” Blanford added.

One airport employee recounted the events of the night, saying airport employees were being barred from entering their workplace as the operation was taking place.

“As I was approaching to go to work, I saw a lot of people crowding near the airport. At approximately 10 PM that night we suddenly heard a loud bang and what sounded like fire from three rifles,” the airport employee told Al Arabiya.

“We tried approaching the scene to see what was going on but we were stopped by Hezbollah fighters telling us we weren’t allowed to enter. They did not even allow Syrian senior army officer or the Syrian police from entering the airport,” he said.

Images show the reported site hours before Mustafa Badreddine was killed compared to the same site pictured a day later. (Al Arabiya)

Al Arabiya also obtained images of the site where Mustafa Badreddine was killed which revealed aerial views of the exact scene on May 12 and May 14, both photos showing the site unscathed.

On the same say, the Shiite cleric Abbas Hoteit declared to the south Lebanon website Janoubia that “Badreddine was killed by two treacherous bullets”.

Evidence and eyewitness accounts suggested that four people met at the security building near the Damascus airport that night, one of them being Badreddine himself. The identity of the second person was discovered immediately after the operation on Twitter when a number of people reported they saw Soleimani leaving the site minutes before the operation. The third person was Badreddine’s bodyguard, who could not save his commander’s life.

According to eyewitnesses, the fourth person identified was Ibrahim Hussein Jezzini, a person who Badreddine reportedly trusted the most.

Badreddine’s death was seen as a victory for those affected by his involvement in attacks dating back to the 1980s, reportedly including the deadly suicide truck bombing attack that left over 200 US soldiers dead in Beirut in 1983 as well as the bombings targeting the French and US embassies in Kuwait the same year.

Al Arabiya News ChannelWednesday, 8 March 2017
Find this story at 8 March 2017

Copyright http://english.alarabiya.net

Israel’s Army Chief: Hezbollah Commander Mustafa Badreddine Killed by His Own Men

Killing of Mustafa Amine Badreddine last year shows the ‘depth of the internal crisis within Hezbollah,’ Gadi Eisenkot says.

Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot said reports that Mustafa Amine Badreddine was killed by Hezbollah officers are in accordance to “intelligence we have.” The incident “indicates the depth of the internal crisis within Hezbollah,” and “the extent of the cruelty, complexity and tension between Hezbollah and its patron Iran.”
He added that despite Hezbollah’s fighting in Syria providing it with cumulative operational experience, it remains in crisis. “It is an internal crisis over what they are fighting fore, an economic crisis and a leadership crisis,” he asserted. Eisenkot was speaking at an academic conference in Netanya.
Badreddine, one of Hezbollah’s highest ranking military commanders, was killed in Syria in May last year. Initial reports attributed the attack to a covert Israeli operation, but signs suggested otherwise.
Badreddine was said to have assumed the position of his brother-in-law, Hezbollah commander Imad Moughniyeh, who died in a 2008 assassination in Damascus also attributed to Israel. However, some dispute his official status as the group’s military leader, saying he was only in charge of its operations in Syria, as Hezbollah has never publicly named a successor for Moughniyeh, whose son Jihad was also killed in Syria in an attack said to be Israel’s doing.

A U.S. Department of the Treasury statement detailing sanctions against Badreddine had said he was assessed to be responsible for the group’s military operations in Syria since 2011, and he had accompanied Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah during strategic coordination meetings with Assad in Damascus.

Eisenkot also hinted at the Israeli army’s recent operational activity, which has generated tension with the Russian regime. He said, “Despite six years of war in Syria, we are managing to maintain a quiet border, and to prevent the growth in power of those who need not be strengthened with advanced weaponry.” He added that the civil war in Syria involves not only risks but also “many opportunities for regional and international cooperation.”
In his remarks, Eisenkot also stressed Iran’s influence on Hezbollah and Hamas. “Iran is waging before us another campaign, a proxy war, and it is present both in Lebanon and in Syria with thousands of Shi’ite militiamen, as well as in Gaza,” he said. The chief of staff contended that the “primary challenge” for the Israel Defense Forces is Hezbollah, which operates both in Lebanon and in Syria.
Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, however, said Iran poses Israel’s foremost threat. Iran did not give up its nuclear ambitions, and it is trying to influence and shape the Middle East, said Cohen, also at the conference.
“As long as the Ayatollah regime exists, Iran will be the primary challenge for the security establishment, with or without the nuclear deal,” he asserted.

Gili Cohen Mar 22, 2017 12:44 PM

Find this story at 22 March 2017
© Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd

TOP HEZBOLLAH COMMANDER MUSTAFA BADREDDINE ASSASSINATED BY OWN GROUP: ISRAELI MILITARY

Israel’s military chief said Tuesday that a top Hezbollah commander who died last year was assassinated by members of his own group, the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militia.

Mustafa Badreddine died near the Syrian capital, Damascus, in May 2016, and Hezbollah said that Syrian rebel shelling caused his death.

But recent Arab media reports have alleged that Hezbollah wanted rid of Badreddine because of a difference in opinion on how to wage the military campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Hezbollah has deployed thousands of troops to the war-torn country to boost the Syrian dictator’s ranks.

Lieutenant-General Gadi Eisenkot, chief of the Israeli armed forces, said that Israeli intelligence had corroborated reports of Hezbollah assassinating one of its own commanders, but did not elaborate on the circumstances.

“According to [media] reports, he was killed by his superiors, which points to the extent of the cruelty, complexity and tension between Hezbollah and its patron, Iran,” he said during a conference speech in the central Israeli city of Netanya, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. “These reports corresponded with the information we have and with our assessment.”

Read more: Another war between Israel and Hezbollah is inevitable

He continued: “It is an internal crisis over what they are fighting for, an economic crisis and a leadership crisis.”

Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif told Reuters the Israeli remarks were “lies that do not deserve comment.”

Both the U.S. and Israel believed 55-year-old Badreddine to be Hezbollah’s military commander in Syria. His brother-in-law Imad Mughniyeh was Hezbollah’s military commander until he was assassinated in a 2008 bomb blast in Damascus, which reports suggested was the work of both Israel’s Mossad and America’s CIA agencies. Israel as a rule does comment on its foreign operations.

The Lebanese militia fought a one-month war with Israel, its primary enemy, in 2006. It centered on the southern Lebanese border with northern Israel, and the Golan Heights, a contested territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Iran, whose leadership routinely calls for Israel’s destruction, continues to support Hezbollah financially and militarily. Israel continues to conduct strikes against Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon to prevent Iranian arms transfers to the group.

BY JACK MOORE ON 3/21/17 AT 1:51 PM

Find this story at 21 March 2017

Copyright http://www.newsweek.com/

2 Lebanese, 2 Nepalese and 1 Palestinian Held for Spying for Israel

The General Directorate of General Security announced Wednesday that it has arrested two Lebanese men, two Nepalese women and a Palestinian man on charges of “spying for Israeli embassies abroad.”

“During interrogation, the detainees confessed to the charges, admitting that they had called phone numbers belonging to the Israeli enemy’s embassies in Turkey, Jordan, Britain and Nepal with the aim of spying and passing on information,” a General Security statement said.

The investigations revealed that the two aforementioned Nepalese women were actively recruiting Nepalese domestic workers in Lebanon with the aim of spying for Israel.

“They gave them the phone number of the Israeli embassy in Nepal so that they pass on information about their employers to the Mossad Israeli intelligence agency,” the statement added.

“Following interrogation, they were referred to the relevant judicial authorities on charges of collaborating with the Israeli enemy and efforts are underway to arrest the rest of the culprits,” General Security said.

by Naharnet Newsdesk 25 January 2017, 16:04

Find this story at 25 January 2017

Naharnet © 2017

Leading Hezbollah commander and key Israel target killed in Syria (2016)

Hezbollah has confirmed its military commander, Mustafa Badreddine, was killed in Syria this week in what it described as a “major explosion” at Damascus airport.

Media reports in Lebanon and Israel quickly suggested the blast had been caused by an Israeli airstrike, a suggestion to which Hezbollah gave weight, announcing it was investigating whether a “missile or artillery strike” had been responsible.

Badreddine was the most senior member of the organisation to have been killed since the death of his predecessor and brother-in-law, Imad Mughniyeh, who was assassinated by a joint Mossad/CIA operation in the Syrian capital in February 2008.

There was no immediate reaction from the Israeli government, which has authorised at least eight air strikes against targets inside Syria since the start of the civil war five years ago. Most had targeted anti-aircraft systems that Israeli officials claimed were being moved to Lebanon, where they could pose a threat against its air force.

Mustafa Amine Badreddine, in an undated handout picture released at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon website.
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Mustafa Amine Badreddine, in an undated handout picture released at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon website.
Announcing Badreddine’s death, Hezbollah said: “He said months ago that he would not return from Syria except as a martyr or carrying the flag of victory. He is the great jihadi leader Mustafa Badreddine, and he has returned today a martyr.”

The statement added: “The information gleaned from the initial investigation is that a major explosion targeted one of our centres near Damascus International airport, which led to the martyrdom of Sayyid Zul Fikar [his nom de guerre] and the injuries of others.

“The investigation will work to determine the nature of the explosion and its causes, whether it was due to an air or missile or artillery strike, and we will announce the results of the investigation soon.”

Nicknamed Zul Fikar, after the sword of Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and one of the most revered figures in Shia Islam, Badreddine was born in 1961 in the southern Beirut suburb of Ghobeiry, and rose to greater prominence after Mughniyeh’s assassination.

He was sentenced to death in Kuwait in the 1980s over a plot to blow up the American and French embassies there during the Iran-Iraq war, but later escaped after Saddam Hussein’s army invaded the oil-rich emirate and threw open its prisons.

Hezbollah said he had been involved in nearly all the group’s operations since its inception in the early 1980s. Most had targeted Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. However, Badreddine had also been accused of leading a cell that was allegedly responsible for the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri on the Beirut waterfront in February 2005.

He was indicted in 2011 by the special tribunal for Lebanon, an international court established in the Hague, in connection with the massive 2005 bombing, which led Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to withdraw his forces from Lebanon in the face of a civic uprising.

Badreddine and four other alleged members of Hezbollah remain on trial in absentia at the Hague. Prosecutors have offered one of the few publicly available glimpses of the shadowy Hezbollah operative, describing him as the “apex” of the cell that allegedly killed Hariri, and a figure akin to an “untraceable ghost” who assumed multiple identities.

‘Nobody wants to stay in Lebanon. It’s a miserable life’
Read more
He was known to have studied at a Lebanese university and to have maintained an apartment in the Lebanese seaside area of Jounieh. He was also active in the south Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, where he was last seen early last year at a wake for Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of Imad Mughniyeh, who was also killed by an Israeli airstrike.

While holding senior positions throughout his career, Badreddine was most known for his role in leading Hezbollah’s large contingent in Syria, which it sent to defend the interest of the Assad regime as his grip on power weakened in 2012. Hezbollah has since lost an estimated 900 members in fighting across Syria, where along with Iran, it has taken the lead in directing numerous battles.

Israel has refused to comment on airstrikes it has previously launched inside Syria. However, unnamed officials have said the strikes had targeted anti-aircraft systems that were allegedly being transferred to Hezbollah. It had also targeted a Hezbollah leader, Samir Kuntar, who had been jailed inside Israel for more than 30 years until his release in 2008.

Despite Israeli protests, Russia has recently proceeded with a long-delayed sale to Iran of the advanced S-300 weapons system, which can shoot down most modern fighter jets. Israeli officials have said they would prioritise tracking the whereabouts of the systems, the position of which in southern Lebanon would pose a potent threat to their air force.

The US treasury department sanctioned Badreddine in 2012 for his activities in support of the government of Assad in Syria, along with the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its head of external operations, Talal Hamiyah.

Hezbollah said it would hold funeral services on Friday in honour of Badreddine. In south Beirut, posters of Badreddine, whose image had rarely been published, were being hung from overpasses and lamp-posts.

Tens of thousands of mourners are expected to pay their respects at a shrine site for Hezbollah dead, which includes the graves of Imad and Jihad Mughniyah. Nasrallah is also expected to make a public statement – his second within a week.

Martin Chulov and Kareem Shaheen in Beirut
Friday 13 May 2016 04.00 BST First published on Friday 13 May 2016 03.32 BST

Find this story at 13 May 2016

© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Mustafa Badreddine: the Hezbollah leader who left no footprints (2016)

Elias Saab. Sami Issa. Safi Badr. Zul Fikar. All were aliases of Hezbollah’s secretive military commander, Mustafa Amine Badreddine, described in court records as an “untraceable ghost”.

Few details are known about Badreddine, who was killed this week in a mysterious explosion at a Hezbollah base near Damascus airport. This despite him being one of the most prominent figures in the party and the brother-in-law of the notorious Imad Mughniyeh, who he succeeded as military commander after the latter was killed in a 2008 joint CIA-Mossad operation in the Syrian capital.

Born in the southern Beirut suburb of Ghobeiry on 6 April 1961, Badreddine had a pronounced limp, believed to have been sustained while he fought alongside pro-Palestinian and pan-Arabist militias during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

His nom de guerre was Sayyed Zul Fikar: Sayyed indicating a claimed descent from the prophet Muhammad; Zul Fikar being the name of the legendary forked sword of Imam Ali, the prophet’s cousin and one of the most revered figures in Shia Islam.

Badreddine was arrested and sentenced to death in Kuwait in 1983 over his suspected involvement in a string of coordinated bombings in the tiny Gulf emirate that also targeted the US and French embassies. They were believed to be retribution for Kuwait and the west’s support for Iraq in its war with Iran.

The sentence, which had to be formally approved by the emir, was never carried out, perhaps as a consequence of a series of attacks and plane hijackings demanding the release of the Kuwait attackers, and which allegedly involved Mughniyeh. It was also never carried out because when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he threw open the doors of the country’s prisons, allowing Badreddine to escape.

This is where the trail disappears. It only emerges again in 2011, when UN prosecutors investigating a 2005 Beirut bombing that killed Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafik Hariri, indicted Badreddine. They alleged he was the coordinator of a sophisticated network that tracked and ultimately assassinated the popular billionaire.

Analysis Ten years after Hariri’s assassination, Lebanon badly needs his moderation
Lebanon dared to hope under Rafik Hariri, but the prime minister’s death exposed the country’s sectarian fault lines and lit the fuse that led to Syria’s civil war
Read more
Court records from the special tribunal for Lebanon have offered a rare glimpse into the life of Badreddine, who was charged with conspiring to commit a terrorist act, carrying out a terrorist act by means of an explosive device, and intentional homicide.

Badreddine studied political science at the Lebanese American University from 2002-04. He drove a Mercedes Benz, owned the Samino jewellery shop in Beirut, and an apartment in Jounieh, a coastal town north of the capital known for its active nightlife, where he supposedly entertained friends.

His phone’s contact list, prosecutors alleged, included the numbers of college friends and business associates, Hezbollah officials and bodyguards, family members as well as supposed girlfriends.

Badreddine became military commander in 2008 after his brother-in-law was killed by a bomb placed in the headrest of his car. Mughniyeh had been the architect of Hezbollah’s guerrilla defence in Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel and was implicated in the 1990s bombing of a synagogue in Argentina.

There are almost no images available of Badreddine. Two that were made available by the tribunal were dated, one showing him as a teenager and the other apparently from his days in Kuwait, showing a handsome young man with curly hair and a moustache, dressed in a tie-less suit. On Friday’s Hezbollah’s media department circulated an photo of the commander smiling in military fatigues and sporting a short grey beard and spectacles.

Badreddine left few personal records. Investigators for the UN trial say they found no driving licences or passports, no property formally owned by him, no record of him ever having left Lebanon, no bank accounts, and no photos from around the time of Hariri’s assassination. In the opening sessions of his trial in absentia in The Hague, prosecutors said he “passes as an unrecognisable and untraceable ghost throughout Lebanon, leaving no footprint as he passes”.

Hezbollah vehemently denies the allegations and does not recognise the tribunal.

In recent years, Badreddine was mostly known for his role in leading Hezbollah’s contingent in Syria, where the paramilitary group has been instrumental in ensuring the continued survival of the Assad government, alongside its patron, Iran, where an estimated 900 of the party’s fighters have died, including Jihad Mughniyeh, Imad’s son.

Badreddine was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department over his role in Syria in 2012.

An Israeli investigative journalist who is writing a history of the Mossad said the strike that killed Jihad Mughniyeh near the Golan Heights last year was actually aimed at Badreddine.

Kareem Shaheen in Beirut
Friday 13 May 2016 10.02 BST Last modified on Friday 27 May 2016 07.25 BST

Find this story at 13 May 2016

© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Mystery of Missing Lebanese Cleric Deepens (2015)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — When the youngest son of the former Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was arrested in Lebanon last week in connection with the unsolved disappearance of Moussa al-Sadr, an exalted Lebanese Shiite cleric who vanished while visiting Libya in 1978, speculation sprouted about new information concerning one of the biggest whodunits in the treacherous politics of the Middle East.

On Monday, the mystery deepened with news that the son, Hannibal Qaddafi, may have been forcibly — and illegally — brought to Lebanon against his will in a plot involving the son of a colleague of Mr. Sadr’s, Sheikh Mohammad Yacoub, who disappeared along with Mr. Sadr and a third companion in Libya nearly four decades ago.

Lebanese officials said that Sheikh Yacoub’s son, Hassan Yacoub, a former member of Parliament, had been formally placed under arrest on suspicion that he had helped orchestrate the abduction of Hannibal Qaddafi from Damascus, Syria, in the days preceding Mr. Qaddafi’s arrest here. The officials and a lawyer for Mr. Qaddafi said he had been living in Syria, granted asylum by the Syrian government in the aftermath of Colonel Qaddafi’s violent fall from power in October 2011.

Even with the arrest of Mr. Yacoub, Hannibal Qaddafi remains under arrest in Lebanon, accused by an investigative magistrate of not providing all information he may know about the disappearance of Mr. Sadr, Sheikh Yacoub and Abbas Badreddine, a journalist, while they were visiting Libya at Colonel Qaddafi’s invitation in August 1978. It is unclear what information Hannibal Qaddafi, 40, could possibly share, since he was a small boy at the time.

The disappearance of Mr. Sadr and his colleagues in Libya remains a potent mystery in Lebanon, where Mr. Sadr is revered as a hero to poor Shiites from the tumultuous days of the 1970s, when Lebanon was convulsed by civil war, a spillover of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other problems. The disappearance has been the subject of numerous criminal inquiries. Colonel Qaddafi, a notoriously erratic and unpredictable dictator, insisted that he had nothing to do with it and that the Lebanese visitors vanished after having flown to Italy.

Many Lebanese say they believe that three Qaddafi aides, disguised as the Lebanese visitors, flew to Italy with their luggage to create a false narrative about where they had last been seen.

Mr. Qaddafi’s lawyer, Boshra Khalil, said in a telephone interview that her client had been beaten and thrown into a car trunk when kidnapped from Syria by people she described as bodyguards of Mr. Yacoub.

The Lebanese news media have widely reported that Mr. Qaddafi had been brought to Lebanon in Mr. Yacoub’s car. His abductors forced Mr. Qaddafi to read a statement broadcast on Lebanese television on Dec. 10, in which he said that they were disciples of Mr. Sadr and that their cause was just. They turned him over to Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces the next day, and he was placed under formal arrest on Dec. 14.

Ms. Khalil said she expected him to be released soon. “He is not guilty, and he was 3 years old when Imam Sadr went missing,” she said. “He knows nothing about the case.”

Hwaida Saad reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

By HWAIDA SAAD and RICK GLADSTONEDEC. 21, 2015

Find this story at 21 December 2015

© 2017 The New York Times Company

Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks, Feels Forgotten (2015)

The relatives of one of the victims of the twin suicide attacks in Beirut mourned during a funeral procession in the city’s Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood. Credit Wael Hamzeh/European Pressphoto Agency
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Ali Awad, 14, was chopping vegetables when the first bomb struck. Adel Tormous, who would die tackling the second bomber, was sitting at a nearby coffee stand. Khodr Alaa Deen, a registered nurse, was on his way to work his night shift at the teaching hospital of the American University at Beirut, in Lebanon.

All three lost their lives in a double suicide attack in Beirut on Thursday, along with 40 others, and much like the scores who died a day later in Paris, they were killed at random, in a bustling urban area, while going about their normal evening business.

Around the crime scenes in south Beirut and central Paris alike, a sense of shock and sadness lingered into the weekend, with cafes and markets quieter than usual. The consecutive rampages, both claimed by the Islamic State, inspired feelings of shared, even global vulnerability — especially in Lebanon, where many expressed shock that such chaos had reached France, a country they regarded as far safer than their own.

But for some in Beirut, that solidarity was mixed with anguish over the fact that just one of the stricken cities — Paris — received a global outpouring of sympathy akin to the one lavished on the United States after the 9/11 attacks.

Monuments around the world lit up in the colors of the French flag; presidential speeches touted the need to defend “shared values;” Facebook offered users a one-click option to overlay their profile pictures with the French tricolor, a service not offered for the Lebanese flag. On Friday the social media giant even activated Safety Check, a feature usually reserved for natural disasters that lets people alert loved ones that they are unhurt; they had not activated it the day before for Beirut.

Photo

The site of Thursday’s twin suicide bombings in the Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon. Credit Bilal Hussein/Associated Press
“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog. “When my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.”

The implication, numerous Lebanese commentators complained, was that Arab lives mattered less. Either that, or that their country — relatively calm despite the war next door — was perceived as a place where carnage is the norm, an undifferentiated corner of a basket-case region.

In fact, while Beirut was once synonymous with violence, when it went through a grinding civil war a generation ago, this was the deadliest suicide bombing to hit the city since that conflict ended in 1990. Lebanon has weathered waves of political assassinations, street skirmishes and wars; Israeli airstrikes leveled whole apartment blocks in 2006. But it had been a year of relative calm.

(A reminder of the muddled perceptions came last week, when Jeb Bush, the Republican presidential candidate, declared that “if you’re a Christian, increasingly in Lebanon, or Iraq or Syria, you’re gonna be beheaded.” That was news to Lebanon’s Christians, who hold significant political power.)

The disparity in reactions highlighted a sense in the region of being left alone to bear the brunt of Syria’s deadly four-year war, which has sent more than four million refugees fleeing, mostly to neighboring countries like Lebanon. For the Lebanese, the government has been little help, plagued as it is with gridlock and corruption that have engendered electricity and water shortages and, most recently, a collapse of garbage collection. Many in the region — both supporters and opponents of the Syrian government — say they have long warned the international powers that, if left unaddressed, the conflict would eventually spill into the West.

How ISIS Expanded Its Threat
The Islamic State emerged from a group of militants in Iraq to take over large portions of Iraq and Syria, and now threatens other countries in Europe and elsewhere.

To be sure, the attacks meant different things in Paris and Beirut. Paris saw it as a bolt from the blue, the worst attack in the city in decades, while to Beirut the bombing was the fulfillment of a never entirely absent fear that another outbreak of violence may come.

Lebanon seemed to have recovered over the past year and a half from a series of bombings claimed by Sunni militant groups as revenge for the intervention by Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia, in the Syrian civil war to provide critical support for the Syrian government.

Some blamed news coverage for the perception that Beirut is still an active war zone. They cited headlines — including, briefly, a Times one that was soon changed to be more precise — that refer to the predominantly Shiite neighborhood where the bombing took place as a “stronghold” of the militia and political party Hezbollah.

That is hard to dispute in the political sense — Hezbollah controls security in the neighborhood and is highly popular there, along with the allied Amal party. But the phrase also risks portraying a busy civilian, residential and commercial district as a justifiable military target.

Meanwhile, Syrians fretted that the brunt of reaction to both attacks would fall on them. There are a million Syrians in Lebanon, a country of four million; some have become desperate enough to contemplate joining the accelerating flow of those taking smugglers’ boats to Europe.

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But now, the attacks could rally political pressure in Europe to stop admitting them. When evidence emerged that at least one of the Paris attackers may have posed as an asylum seeker to reach Europe, some opponents of the migration quickly used that to argue for closing the doors.

That drew sharp reactions from Syrians, who said refugees were fleeing to Europe precisely to escape indiscriminate violence.

“This is the sort of terrorism that Syrian refugees have been fleeing by the millions,” declared Faisal Alazem, a spokesman for the Syrian Canadian Council.

The compassion gap is even more evident when it comes to the situation in Syria itself, where death tolls comparable to the 129 so far in the Paris attacks are far from rare and, during the worst periods, were virtually daily occurrences.

“Imagine if what happened in Paris last night would happen there on a daily basis for five years,” said Nour Kabbach, who fled the heavy bombardment of her home city of Aleppo, Syria, several years ago and now works in humanitarian aid in Beirut.

GRAPHIC
Where ISIS Has Directed and Inspired Attacks Around the World
More than a dozen countries have had attacks since the Islamic State, or ISIS, began to pursue a global strategy in the summer of 2014.

OPEN GRAPHIC
“Now imagine all that happening without global sympathy for innocent lost lives, with no special media updates by the minute, and without the support of every world leader condemning the violence,” she wrote on Facebook. Finally, she said, ask yourself what it would be like to have to explain to your child why an attack in “another pretty city like yours” got worldwide attention and your own did not.

Back in southern Beirut over the weekend, as the government announced the arrest of seven Syrians and two Lebanese in connection with the attack, the street where the bombings took place was strewn with lettuce and parsley from pushcarts overturned in the blast. Men washed blood from sidewalks. A shop’s inventory of shoes — from small children’s slippers to women’s clogs — was scattered across the pavement. Several funeral processions were massing, ready to march to cemeteries.

Residents mourned Ali Awad, 14, passing around his picture in a scouting uniform. He had run out to see what had happened after the first blast, and was caught in the second, relatives said.

Nearby, Abdullah Jawad stood staring glumly into a shop. His friend, the owner, had died there, just after Mr. Jawad had painted the place.

“The government can’t protect us,” he said. “They can’t even pick up the trash from the streets.”

As for Facebook, it declared that the high level of social media activity around the Paris attacks had inspired the company to activate Safety Check for the first time for an emergency other than a natural disaster, and that a policy of when to do so was still developing.

“There has to be a first time for trying something new, even in complex and sensitive times, and for us that was Paris,” wrote Alex Schultz, the company’s vice president for growth, adding that Safety Check is less useful in continuing wars and epidemics because, without a clear end point, “it’s impossible to know when someone is truly ‘safe.’”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
By ANNE BARNARDNOV. 15, 2015

Find this story at 15 November 2015

© 2017 The New York Times Company

Islamist group ISIS claims deadly Lebanon blast, promises more violence (2014)

A Sunni Islamist group claims responsibility for a suicide bombing in Beirut
The group, ISIS, says it’s the “first small payment” in a bigger push against Hezbollah
Thursday’s car bomb detonated in a Beirut suburb known as a Hezbollah stronghold
Lebanon has seen a surge in violence as tensions are exacerbated by Syria’s civil war
A Sunni Islamist militant group claimed responsibility Saturday for a car bomb attack in Lebanon’s capital two days earlier which killed four people and injured dozens.
The group, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, known as ISIS, said Thursday’s suicide blast in southern Beirut was the “first small payment” in a bigger push against the Lebanon-based Shiite militia Hezbollah.
The al Qaeda-affiliated group has been pushing for a fundamentalist Islamic state carved out of northern Syria, while Hezbollah fighters have been supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal push to crush a rebellion there.
The ISIS statement said it targeted “the Shiite Satan party” — meaning Hezbollah — in order “to crush its strongholds in the heart of its home in what is called the security zone in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Thursday in a first small payment from the heavy account that is awaiting those wicked criminals.”
The residential Harek Hreik district, where the car bomb exploded Thursday, is known as a Hezbollah stronghold.
Car bombings in the same area of Beirut in July and August killed dozens and injured hundreds.
And in November, a suicide bomb attack outside the Iranian Embassy, close to the neighborhood where Thursday’s attack occurred, killed two dozen people and injured about 150.
Long-standing tensions in Lebanon have been exacerbated by the civil war raging on its doorstep in Syria, where sectarian divisions reflect those in Lebanon.
Regional turmoil
The Lebanese army said Saturday that the alleged chief of another Sunni jihadist group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, had died in custody after his health deteriorated.
Majed Al-Majed, a Saudi national, was detained in the past few days by the Lebanese army. His group has claimed responsibility for bombings in Lebanon and elsewhere.
Beirut-based Middle East analyst Rami Khouri told CNN that the recent surge in violence in Lebanon was part of larger, regional turmoil.
“We are seeing the greatest proxy war of modern times playing itself out in Lebanon and Syria and Iraq, that have now become really one battlefield in which two great ideological camps are fighting to the death like gladiators,” he said.
Political divisions and ideological tensions in Lebanon go back several decades, Khouri said, but they have been reinforced by the emergence of radical Islamist terrorist groups, linked to al Qaeda, following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, was designated as a terrorist group by the United States in 1995.

By Mohammed Tawfeeq and Laura Smith-Spark, CNN
Updated 1547 GMT (2347 HKT) January 4, 2014
Find this story at 4 January 2014

© 2017 Cable News Network

Did Hizballah Beat the CIA at Its Own Techno-Surveillance Game? (2011)

The CIA found itself in some rough waters in the Middle East last week. On Thursday, an influential member of Iran’s parliament announced that the Islamic republic had arrested 12 “CIA agents” who had allegedly been targeting Iran’s military and its nuclear program. The lawmaker didn’t give the nationality of the agents, but the presumption is that they were Iranians recruited to spy for the CIA. The agency hasn’t yet commented, but from what I’ve heard it was a serious compromise, one which the CIA is still trying to get to the bottom of.

Even more curious was the flap in Lebanon. In June, Hizballah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah announced that the movement had arrested two of its own members as CIA spies. But it wasn’t until last week that the story got traction in Washington. The CIA confirmed that operations in Beirut had been compromised but declined to offer details. As in the case of the alleged Iranian debacle, it’s no doubt still doing a “damage assessment” — a process that can take years. Even then, it will be difficult to determine exactly what happened.

From what I’ve been able to piece together, Hizballah aggressively went after the CIA in Lebanon using telephone “link analysis.” That’s a form of electronic intelligence gathering that uses software capable of combing through trillions of gigabytes of phone-call data in search of anomalies — prepaid cell phones calling each other, series of brief calls, analysis of a cell-phone company’s GPS tracking. Geeks who do this for a living understand how it works, and I’ll take their word for it.

But it’s not the technology that’s remarkable, as much as the idea that it’s being employed by Hizballah, a militant Islamic organization better known for acts of terror than for electronic counterespionage. That’s another reminder that Hizballah has effectively supplanted the Lebanese state, taking over police and security functions that in other countries are the exclusively the domain of sovereign authority. Indeed, since Nasrallah’s announcement of catching the CIA agents, no Lebanese authority has questioned why Hizballah, rather than Lebanese intelligence, would be responsible for catching alleged spies for foreign powers in Lebanon. Nobody bothers to ask what would be a pointless question; everyone knows that when it comes to military and security functions, Hizballah might as well be the state.

(Watch a video of Hizballah’s theme park.)
Since I served in Beirut during the ’80s, I’ve been struck by the slow but inexorable shift of sovereign power to Hizballah. Not only does the movement have the largest military, with nearly 50,000 rockets pointed at Israel; it has de facto control over Lebanon’s spies, both military and civilian. It green-lights senior appointments. Hizballah also is wired into all the databases, keeping track of who enters the country, who leaves, where they stay, whom they see and call. It’s capable of monitoring every server in the country. It can even tap into broadband communications like Skype. And, of course, it doesn’t bother with such legal niceties as warrants. If foreigners are going to be caught spy in Lebanon, it will be Hizballah that catches them.

I have a feeling last week’s events bodes ill for U.S. intelligence because it suggests that anyone capable from organized crime to terrorist groups can greatly enhance their counterintelligence capability by simply buying off-the-shelf equipment and the know-how to use it. Like a lot of people, I thought it would be easy coasting at the end of the Cold War after the KGB was defanged. Instead, globalization and the rapid spread of sophisticated technologies have opened an espionage Pandora’s box.

By Robert Baer Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011
Find this story at 30 November 2011

© 2016 Time Inc.

Exclusive: CIA Spies Caught, Fear Execution in Middle East (2011)

In a significant failure for the United States in the Mideast, more than a dozen spies working for the CIA in Iran and Lebanon have been caught and the U.S. government fears they will be or have been executed, according to four current and former U.S. officials with connections to the intelligence community.

The spies were paid informants recruited by the CIA for two distinct espionage rings targeting Iran and the Beirut-based Hezbollah organization, considered by the U.S. to be a terror group backed by Iran.

“Espionage is a risky business,” a U.S. official briefed on the developments told ABC News, confirming the loss of the unspecified number of spies over the last six months.

“Many risks lead to wins, but some result in occasional setbacks,” the official said.

Robert Baer, a former senior CIA officer who worked against Hezbollah while stationed in Beirut in the 1980’s, said Hezbollah typically executes individuals suspected of or caught spying.

“If they were genuine spies, spying against Hezbollah, I don’t think we’ll ever see them again,” he said. “These guys are very, very vicious and unforgiving.”

Other current and former officials said the discovery of the two U.S. spy rings occurred separately, but amounted to a setback of significant proportions in efforts to track the activities of the Iranian nuclear program and the intentions of Hezbollah against Israel.

“Remember, this group was responsible for killing more Americans than any other terrorist group before 9/11,” said a U.S. official. Attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 killed more than 300 people, including almost 260 Americans.

The U.S. official, speaking for the record but without attribution, gave grudging credit to the efforts of Iran and Hezbollah to detect and expose U.S. and Israeli espionage.

“Collecting sensitive information on adversaries who are aggressively trying to uncover spies in their midst will always be fraught with risk,” said the U.S. official briefed on the spy ring bust.

But others inside the American intelligence community say sloppy “tradecraft” — the method of covert operations — by the CIA is also to blame for the disruption of the vital spy networks.

In Beirut, two Hezbollah double agents pretended to go to work for the CIA. Hezbollah then learned of the restaurant where multiple CIA officers were meeting with several agents, according to the four current and former officials briefed on the case. The CIA used the codeword “PIZZA” when discussing where to meet with the agents, according to U.S. officials. Two former officials describe the location as a Beirut Pizza Hut. A current US official denied that CIA officers met their agents at Pizza Hut.

From there, Hezbollah’s internal security arm identified at least a dozen informants, and the identities of several CIA case officers.

Hezbollah then began to “roll up” much of the CIA’s network against the terror group, the officials said.

One former senior intelligence official told ABC News that CIA officers ignored warnings that the operation could be compromised by using the same location for meetings with multiple assets.

“We were lazy and the CIA is now flying blind against Hezbollah,” the former official said.

CIA Spies Caught in Iran

At about the same time that Hezbollah was identifying the CIA network in Lebanon, Iranian intelligence agents discovered a secret internet communication method used by CIA-paid assets in Iran.

The CIA has yet to determine precisely how many of its assets were compromised in Iran, but the number could be in the dozens, according to one current and one former U.S. intelligence official.

The exposure of the two spy networks was first announced in widely ignored televised statements by Iranian and Hezbollah leaders. U.S. officials tell ABC News that much of what was broadcast was, in fact, true.

Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, announced in June of this year that two high-ranking members of Hezbollah had been exposed as CIA spies, leading U.S. officials to conclude that the entire network inside Hezbollah had been compromised.

In Iran, intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi announced in May that more than 30 U.S. and Israeli spies had been discovered and an Iranian television program, which acts as a front for Iran’s government, showed images of internet sites used by the U.S. for secret communication with the spies.

U.S. officials said the Iranian television program showed pictures of people who were not U.S. assets, but the program’s video of the websites used by the CIA was accurate.

Some former U.S. intelligence officials say the developments are the result of a lack of professionalism in the U.S. intelligence community.

“We’ve lost the tradition of espionage,” said one former official who still consults for the U.S. intelligence community. “Officers take short cuts and no one is held accountable,” he said.

But at the CIA, officials say such risks come with the territory.

“Hezbollah is an extremely complicated enemy,” said a U.S. official. “It’s a determined terrorist group, a powerful political player, a mighty military and an accomplished intelligence operation, formidable and ruthless. No one underestimates its capabilities.”

“If you lose an asset, one source, that’s normally a setback in espionage,” said Robert Baer, who was considered an expert on Hezbollah.

“But when you lose your entire station, either in Tehran or Beirut, that’s a catastrophe, that just shouldn’t be. And the only way that ever happens is when you’re mishandling sources.”

By MATTHEW COLEBRIAN ROSS Nov. 21, 2011

Find this story at 21 November 2011

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