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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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

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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

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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.

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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

COpyright http://abcnews.go.com/

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A strengthening Lebanese government is helping the militant group Hezbollah bust alleged spy cells, sometimes using tools and tradecraft acquired from Western nations.

Reporting from Beirut — The chief of Lebanon’s domestic security forces had a warning for the Hezbollah commander: “You’ve been infiltrated.”

With that, Achraf Rifi, head of the U.S.-backed Internal Security Forces, handed over evidence showing that two trusted, mid-ranking Hezbollah commanders were working as informants for Israeli military intelligence, said a high-ranking Lebanese security official with knowledge of the April 2009 meeting.

Wafiq Safa, the security chief for the powerful Shiite Muslim militia and political organization, was silent.

“They were shocked,” said the security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the subject.

Things moved quickly after that. The Hezbollah commander called Rifi the next day to assure him that the militant group would “take care of” the alleged infiltrators, who were never heard from again, the security official said.

A monthlong war between Hezbollah and Israel ended four years ago, and Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon ended a decade ago. But a clandestine intelligence war between the Jewish state and the Iranian-backed militant group continues unabated, officials and security experts say.

Now, a strengthening Lebanese government is helping Hezbollah bust alleged spy cells, sometimes using tools and tradecraft acquired from Western nations eager to build up Lebanon’s security forces as a counterweight to the Shiite group, which since a 2008 power-sharing agreement has been a member of the governing coalition.

Although security officials here say they’re using newfound tools to ferret out spies watching Hezbollah, just like they would against anyone attempting to infiltrate the country, Western observers express concern.

“There are deep Israeli worries that anything the West gives the Lebanese armed forces and the Internal Security Forces could be used against them,” said Mara Karlin, a former Lebanon specialist at the U.S. Defense Department, now a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The United States and its Western allies play a delicate balancing game in Lebanon. Since 2006, Washington has given nearly $500 million in military aid to Lebanese security forces and has allocated $100 million for 2011, making Lebanon the second-largest recipient of American military aid per capita after Israel.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow met officials in Lebanon on Monday, emphasizing that continuing U.S. aid and training would allow the army to “prevent militias and other nongovernment organizations” from undermining the government.

The use of sophisticated equipment in the foiling of alleged Israeli spies may be the first concrete illustration of the U.S. dilemma. According to Lebanese officials, Israeli analysts and a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity, Lebanon has redirected for use against Israel signal-detection equipment donated by France and intended to fight Islamic militants.

“The technology used with Fatah Islam was used to detect Israeli spies and collaborators in Lebanon,” said retired Col. Kamal Awar, a U.S.-trained former member of the Lebanese Special Forces who now publishes Defense 21, an Arabic-language military journal. “They discovered they were talking with the Israeli guy on the other side of the border.”

The U.S. military has also contributed to the Lebanese security forces’ communications abilities. Israeli analyst Ronen Bergman, author of “The Secret War with Iran,” who is writing a book about the history of his country’s intelligence efforts, said the U.S. gave Lebanon’s army sophisticated electronic equipment that allowed it to identify and trace even encrypted communications.

But there is no evidence that the training and equipment have been used to foil the intelligence operations of Israel, a major American ally.

Israel and Lebanon have long claimed counterintelligence coups and thwarted alleged traitors.

In 2008, Israel charged Sgt. Maj. Lovai Balut of Military Intelligence Unit 504 of passing on information to Hezbollah, according to the Jerusalem Post. In June, the Israeli army arrested a soldier and several civilians accused of spying for Hezbollah and smuggling drugs into the Jewish state.

But over the last two years, Lebanon’s security forces may have conducted one of the most extraordinary counterintelligence sweeps in the annals of espionage. Dozens of alleged spies have been arrested in Lebanon on suspicion of sending information to Israel on the whereabouts and movements of Hezbollah and other enemies of the Jewish state.

The broad range of suspects suggests a widespread effort by Israeli security forces to infiltrate Hezbollah, which Israel views as a severe threat to its national security.

They include a city official of a small town in Hezbollah’s Bekaa Valley stronghold. Ziad Homsy, allegedly recruited at a conference in the Far East, is serving a temporary sentence of hard labor pending a final verdict.

“Homsy had fought against the Israeli occupation,” said a Lebanese army officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the topic. “It was not easy to recruit him. But he needed the money. He would never drive a Kia. It was either a Mercedes or an SUV or stay at home.”

There is the case of Lebanese army reserve Brig. Gen. Adib Alam, arrested in 2009 on charges of spying for Israel, who was reportedly convinced that it would help counter Syria, which he despised for its dominant role in recent Lebanese history.

One convicted spy, Marwan Faqih, was a car dealer who allegedly sold Hezbollah bigwigs SUVs equipped with tracking devices that allowed Israel to follow their movements. Hezbollah has denied that its members bought cars from him.

This summer, Lebanese security forces arrested two people working for the country’s state-owned Alfa cellphone company who allegedly allowed Israel to breach the communications network, a matter that has roiled the Lebanese Cabinet and prompted the government to announce that it would seek redress against Israel at the U.N. Security Council.

Three Lebanese nationals, one of whom was found guilty of providing Israel with sensitive information during its 2006 war with Hezbollah, have been sentenced to death for spying activities.

The motives vary, security officials said. Some of those apprehended have political gripes against Hezbollah.

“There are some political reasons, there are some psychological reasons,” the high-ranking security official said. “But mostly it’s money and sex.”

According to Lebanese security officials and intelligence experts, the alleged spies used sophisticated electronic devices to communicate with their handlers via coded messages. In May 2009, the intelligence branch of the ISF paraded some of the devices before an eager press corps. They included laptop computers, satellite phones, a tracking device hidden in the lid of a water cooler and a wooden chest installed with an apparatus for transmitting and receiving messages.

“If only part of this story is true, it means [Hezbollah] has been sharing its every step and move with a silent partner,” said Gad Shimron, a former Mossad officer and author of the book “Mossad Exodus.”

Over the last several years, Lebanon has doubled the number of officers working in counterintelligence. Security officials believed that their efforts are bearing fruit by dismantling a robust Israeli spy infrastructure they say has been in place in the country for decades.

“They were strong and we were weaker,” the Lebanese security official said. “The Israelis thought they had the technological edge that put them ahead of the Arabs by 30 years. But we showed them we’re catching up.”

But some analysts speculate that Lebanese security forces are giving themselves too much credit, and that Hezbollah, Iran and Syria may have contributed to the country’s apparent counterintelligence successes.

“Anecdotal data suggests Hezbollah is providing intelligence to ISF and LAF,” the Lebanese military, said Aram Nerguizian, a resident scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Some of the successes involved blind luck. The alleged activities of Faqih, the SUV dealer, unraveled when a Hezbollah member took his car to a mechanic over a minor electrical problem.

“The electrician started testing here and there,” the Lebanese army officer said. “He found a wire leading to a strange device. He told the owner.”

Hezbollah detained Faqih soon afterward.

July 31, 2010|By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times

Find this story at 31 July 2010
Copyright 2017 Los Angeles Times

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IN THE WAKE of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI assumes an importance and influence it has not wielded since J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972. That is what makes today’s batch of stories from The Intercept, The FBI’s Secret Rules, based on a trove of long-sought confidential FBI documents, so critical: It shines a bright light on the vast powers of this law enforcement agency, particularly when it comes to its ability to monitor dissent and carry out a domestic war on terror, at the beginning of an era highly likely to be marked by vociferous protest and reactionary state repression.

In order to understand how the FBI makes decisions about matters such as infiltrating religious or political organizations, civil liberties advocates have sued the government for access to crucial FBI manuals — but thanks to a federal judiciary highly subservient to government interests, those attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Because their disclosure is squarely in the public interest, The Intercept is publishing this series of reports along with annotated versions of the documents we obtained.

Trump values loyalty to himself above all other traits, so it is surely not lost on him that few entities were as devoted to his victory, or played as critical a role in helping to achieve it, as the FBI. One of the more unusual aspects of the 2016 election, perhaps the one that will prove to be most consequential, was the covert political war waged between the CIA and FBI. While the top echelon of the CIA community was vehemently pro-Clinton, certain factions within the FBI were aggressively supportive of Trump. Hillary Clinton herself blames James Comey and his election-week letter for her defeat. Elements within the powerful New York field office were furious that Comey refused to indict Clinton, and embittered agents reportedly shoveled anti-Clinton leaks to Rudy Giuliani. The FBI’s 35,000 employees across the country are therefore likely to be protected and empowered. Trump’s decision to retain Comey — while jettisoning all other top government officials — suggests that this has already begun to happen.

When married to Trump’s clear disdain for domestic dissent — he venerates strongman authoritarians, called for a crackdown on free press protections, and suggested citizenship-stripping for flag-burning — the authorities vested in the FBI with regard to domestic political activism are among the most menacing threats Americans face. Trump is also poised to expand the powers of law enforcement to surveil populations deemed suspicious and deny their rights in the name of fighting terrorism, as he has already done with his odious restrictions on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Understanding how the federal government’s law enforcement agency interprets the legal limits on its own powers is, in this context, more essential than ever. Until now, however, the rules governing the FBI have largely been kept secret.

CLEVELAND, OH – JULY 18: Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump enters the stage to introduce his wife Melania on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. An estimated 50,000 people are expected in Cleveland, including hundreds of protesters and members of the media. The four-day Republican National Convention kicks off on July 18. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) Donald Trump enters the stage at the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Today’s publication is the result of months of investigation by our staff, and we planned to publish these articles and documents regardless of the outcome of the 2016 election. The public has an interest in understanding the FBI’s practices no matter who occupies the White House. But in the wake of Trump’s victory, and the unique circumstances that follow from it, these revelations take on even more urgency.

After Congress’s 1976 Church Committee investigated the excesses of Hoover’s FBI, in particular the infamous COINTELPRO program — in which agents targeted and subverted any political groups the government deemed threatening, including anti-war protesters, black nationalists, and civil rights activists — a series of reforms were enacted to rein in the FBI’s domestic powers. As The Intercept and other news outlets have amply documented, in the guise of the war on terror the FBI has engaged in a variety of tactics that are redolent of the COINTELPRO abuses — including, for example, repeatedly enticing innocent Muslims into fake terror schemes concocted by the bureau’s own informants. What The Intercept’s reporting on this new trove of documents shows is how the FBI has quietly transformed the system of rules and restraints put in place after the scandals of the ’70s, opening the door for a new wave of civil liberties violations. When asked to respond to this critique, the FBI provided the following statement:

All FBI policies are written to ensure that the FBI consistently and appropriately applies the lawful tools we use to assess and investigate criminal and national security threats to our nation. All of our authorities and techniques are founded in the Constitution, U.S. law, and Attorney General Guidelines. FBI policies and rules are audited and enforced through a rigorous internal compliance mechanism, as well as robust oversight from the Inspector General and Congress. FBI assessments and investigations are subject to responsible review and are designed to protect the rights of all Americans and the safety of our agents and sources, acting within the bounds of the Constitution.

Absent these documents and the facts of how the bureau actually operates, this may sound reassuring. But to judge how well the bureau is living up to these abstract commitments, it is necessary to read the fine print of its byzantine rules and regulations — which the FBI’s secrecy has heretofore made it impossible for outsiders to do. Now, thanks to our access to these documents — which include the FBI’s governing rulebook, known as the DIOG, and classified policy guides for counterterrorism cases and handling confidential informants — The Intercept is able to share a vital glimpse of how the FBI understands and wields its enormous power.

For example, the bureau’s agents can decide that a campus organization is not “legitimate” and therefore not entitled to robust protections for free speech; dig for derogatory information on potential informants without any basis for believing they are implicated in unlawful activity; use a person’s immigration status to pressure them to collaborate and then help deport them when they are no longer useful; conduct invasive “assessments” without any reason for suspecting the targets of wrongdoing; demand that companies provide the bureau with personal data about their users in broadly worded national security letters without actual legal authority to do so; fan out across the internet along with a vast army of informants, infiltrating countless online chat rooms; peer through the walls of private homes; and more. The FBI offered various justifications of these tactics to our reporters. But the documents and our reporting on them ultimately reveal a bureaucracy in dire need of greater transparency and accountability.

One of the documents contains an alarming observation about the nation’s police forces, even as perceived by the FBI. Officials of the bureau were so concerned that many of these police forces are linked to, at times even populated by, overt white nationalists and white supremacists, that they have deemed it necessary to take that into account in crafting policies for sharing information with them. This news arrives in an ominous context, as the nation’s law enforcement agencies are among the few institutional factions in the U.S. that supported Trump, and they did so with virtual unanimity. Trump ran on a platform of unleashing an already out-of-control police — “I will restore law and order to our country,” he thundered when accepting the Republican nomination — and now the groups most loyal to Trump are those that possess a state monopoly over the use of force, many of which are infused with racial animus.

The Church Committee reforms were publicly debated and democratically enacted, based on the widespread fears of sustained intelligence community overreach brought to light by journalists like Seymour Hersh and Betty Medsger, who covered the shocking files revealing Hoover’s activities that were seized by the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI in 1971. It is simply inexcusable to erode those protections in the dark, with no democratic debate.

As we enter the Trump era, with a nominated attorney general who has not hidden his contempt for press freedoms and a president who has made the news media the primary target of his vitriol, one of the most vital weapons for safeguarding basic liberties and imposing indispensable transparency is journalism that exposes information the government wants to keep suppressed. For exactly that reason, it is certain to be under even more concerted assault than it has been during the last 15 years. The revealing, once-secret FBI documents The Intercept is today reporting on, and publishing, demonstrate why protecting press freedom is more critical than ever.

Update: February 1, 2017
This article has been updated to include the role of Betty Medsger and the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI in exposing Hoover’s overreach.

Glenn Greenwald, Betsy Reed
January 31 2017, 1:38 p.m.

Find this story at 31 January 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

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President Trump has inherited a vast domestic intelligence agency with extraordinary secret powers. A cache of documents offers a rare window into the FBI’s quiet expansion since 9/11.

USING LOOPHOLES IT has kept secret for years, the FBI can in certain circumstances bypass its own rules in order to send undercover agents or informants into political and religious organizations, as well as schools, clubs, and businesses.

Beneath the FBI’s redaction marks are exceptions to rules on “undisclosed participation.”

If the FBI had its way, the infiltration loopholes would still be secret. They are detailed in a mammoth document obtained by The Intercept, an uncensored version of the bureau’s governing rulebook, the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, or DIOG. The 2011 edition of the book, which covers everything from wiretapping to how to read Miranda rights, was made public in redacted form thanks to a lawsuit brought by civil liberties groups. Beneath the FBI’s redaction marks were exceptions to rules on “undisclosed participation” that could be easy to exploit.

The FBI rules show a significant level of oversight when it comes to looking into “sensitive” groups — namely, those with religious, political, or academic affiliations. For instance, if an undercover agent wants to pose as a university student and take classes, or if an FBI handler wants to tell an informant to attend religious services — two examples straight out of the rulebook — he or she must obtain a supervisor’s approval and attest both to the operation’s importance and to its compliance with constitutional safeguards.

But all those rules go out the window if an agent decides the group is “illegitimate” or an informant spies on the group of his or her own accord.

The FBI insists that supervisors regularly review agents’ work to make sure these exceptions aren’t being misused, and that the extra steps and approvals detailed in the guide are proof that the bureau has voluntarily limited its authorities beyond what it believes to be the legal minimum.

An FBI spokesperson said that a provision in the DIOG encourages agents to err on the side of considering something sensitive if there is any doubt.

“That discretion will be part of our regular case review. Agents will be asked, ‘Hey, why isn’t that a sensitive investigative matter?’” the spokesperson said.

But civil rights groups still worry that the FBI has made use of precisely these kinds of loopholes, silently undermining cherished freedoms enshrined after a dark chapter of FBI history: the COINTELPRO program in the 1950s and ’60s, when the FBI spied on, harassed, and tried to discredit leftists, civil rights leaders, and anti-war protestors. The exposure of COINTELPRO led to a famous Senate investigation and to institutional reform. The bureau adopted new rules and stricter oversight. Since 9/11, however, these hard-won protections have been weakened. What the public has not known is by exactly how much.

“Going into political gatherings, houses of worship — these are First Amendment-protected activities,” said Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, a group that originally sued to have the rulebook released, particularly over concerns about the issue of undercover infiltration. “We believed the DIOG to be a broadening of their authority to go into those spaces.”

The FBI sees it exactly the other way.

“These are a voluntary narrowing of our authorities. We learn from history and try to get better,” the spokesperson said.

NEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 11: Muslims exit the mosque following traditional Friday prayers outside the Islamic Center of Bay Ridge on November 11, 2016 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. During the sermon, the mosque’s imam reflected on many issues including the election of Donald J. Trump. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images) People exit the Islamic Center of Bay Ridge following traditional Friday prayers on Nov. 11, 2016, in New York’s Brooklyn borough. Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
THE FBI OPENLY acknowledges that some of its undercover operations can be “intrusive” and carry “a greater risk to civil liberties,” and therefore that they may require higher levels of approval or legal review. The requirements for a particular operation vary depending on how intimately the FBI employee or informant will be involved with the group, and what kind of group it is.

The FBI distinguishes between “sensitive undisclosed participation,” in political, religious, media, or academic groups, and “non-sensitive undisclosed participation,” in groups “such as a business or a club formed for recreational purposes.” (Even this basic distinction was previously redacted.)

The once-censored rules explain that for non-sensitive groups, a supervising agent must sign off if the plan is for an FBI agent to infiltrate a group in order to gain information or as part of an investigation. An informant doing the same thing does not require extra approval. If the participation of the FBI agent or informant will influence the group’s activities, then the head counsel for the division needs to review the plan. If the FBI’s presence is specifically likely to influence the group’s First Amendment-protected activity (if, as the guide specifies, the FBI participant plans to steer the group’s agenda on “social, religious, or political” issues), then the FBI’s office of general counsel must get involved, and perhaps senior FBI officials.

The requirements for infiltrating a group considered sensitive are even more stringent: The FBI agent must get approval both from a supervisor and from the head lawyer of his or her division, while also notifying a committee that oversees FBI operations. And if the intention or likelihood is that this infiltration will influence a sensitive group’s exercise of its First Amendment rights, then the FBI director must sign off.

These rules appear to offer layers of oversight. But they only kick in when certain conditions are met. The policy guide gives agents considerable discretion in deciding whether infiltrating an organization constitutes “undisclosed participation” at all — and therefore, whether it requires the extra approvals.

For instance, none of the rules apply if a foreign government operates the organization, or if the FBI “reasonably” believes the organization to be acting on behalf of a foreign power, so long as its U.S.-based members are mostly foreigners. And the rules only apply to groups the FBI deems “legitimate.” The redacted definition of a “legitimate” group is one “formed for lawful purposes” and whose “activities are primarily lawful.” This would exclude obvious criminal networks but could also exclude activist groups if an agent decides that their “primary purpose” is to hold protests involving unlawful acts.

“An organization whose primary purpose is to engage in destruction of property as a means to bring public attention to commercial activities that harm the environment is also not a legitimate organization within the meaning of this definition because its primary purpose is to engage in criminal conduct,” the guide says. “On the other hand, an organization that seeks to bring attention to a social or political cause by engaging primarily in lawful protest or advocacy, but also some acts of civil disobedience, is a legitimate organization.”

Michael German, a former FBI agent who is a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said that such language gives agents wiggle room to justify themselves if they are found to have been improperly investigating an organization.

“It’s not that you can’t ever investigate a legitimate organization, it’s just that it requires an additional level of oversight because of the history of abuse,” German said. “So do we really want to have agents parsing the language of what’s legitimate and what isn’t legitimate without that oversight?”

Classifying constitutionally protected activities as “illegitimate” is not a distant possibility. There have been many recent examples of the FBI twisting or ignoring the rules in order to investigate political or religious groups. In 2010, to take just one example, a Justice Department inspector general found that the FBI had violated policy in investigating groups including the Catholic Worker, Greenpeace, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Documents released last year showed that the bureau tracked Keystone Pipeline protesters without proper authorization. The FBI has also generated legal controversy with its use of informants in mosques.

The definition of what constitutes “participation” is also flexible in the FBI’s reading.

It was previously known that FBI agents and informants could go to public events without identifying themselves and attend up to five meetings of an organization without triggering the undisclosed participation rules — although sending an informant or employee to a religious service always requires a supervisor’s approval, the guide states.

Another loophole allows that if an informant volunteers information about a group without having been asked to collect it, FBI agents don’t have to worry about whether the informant obtained the information through undisclosed participation.

And although the rules require legal review if the FBI employee’s or informant’s participation is intended to influence a group, what constitutes “influencing” is narrowly defined: A source or undercover employee “simply voting or expressing an opinion” does not count. When it comes to First Amendment concerns, the FBI’s activities must “substantially affect the agenda of the organization” in order to raise flags.

There are certain caveats that go in a more restrictive direction: For instance, the rules specify that joining a mailing list or following a group on Twitter does constitute “participation,” and that agents are supposed to err on the side of caution when determining whether or not a group is “legitimate” or whether having undercover agents participate in group activities is “sensitive.”

Tarek Ismail, senior staff attorney with CLEAR, an initiative at the City University of New York that works with communities affected by counterterrorism policies, said that the breadth of these exceptions elaborated in the DIOG demonstrates “broad rules created and then chipped away.”

He added that the rules’ apparent flexibility made sense of the experiences of many of his clients. “There’s a disconnect between what’s on paper and what’s actually done,” Ismail said. “We see significant departures from these rules in our cases, but clearly it’s not because these rules are hard to live with.”

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey listens to a speaker during the graduation ceremony for Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agents at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, on October 30, 2008. AFP PHOTO / Saul LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images) U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey listens to a speaker during the graduation ceremony for FBI special agents at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., on Oct. 30, 2008. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
THE DIOG, DESPITE being hundreds of pages of dense bureaucracy, actually documents a loosening of the standards enacted to rein in the FBI after COINTELPRO and other scandals involving the bureau under Director J. Edgar Hoover.

“The baseline that we started from in the 1970s was that there were no rules governing the FBI,” said Emily Berman, a law professor at the University of Houston.

The fallout from COINTELPRO resulted in new guidelines from the attorney general that reined in domestic intelligence gathering by requiring that agents’ investigations be focused on actual criminal activity. Yet in the decades since — and especially after the 9/11 attacks — the bureau’s mandate has expanded again, beyond the realm of crime fighting and toward intelligence gathering in the name of combating terrorism.

The FBI, which has no single statute governing its activities, has operated under a series of guidelines issued by attorneys general over the years. The DIOG first came out in the last months of the Bush administration in 2008, implementing guidelines from then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Mukasey emphasized intelligence sharing and the retention of information “regardless of whether it furthers investigative objectives in a narrower or more immediate sense.” He cited the “historical evolution of the FBI” after the 9/11 attacks toward the elimination of the traditional wall between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement.

At the time, civil liberties groups were alarmed that Mukasey’s rules, known as the “Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations,” broadened the authorities of the FBI to collect and retain more data than ever before, and allowed for “assessments,” in which agents could probe for information without evidence of wrongdoing. Some of the tactics authorized for assessments were quite invasive, allowing for physical surveillance, interviews, and the tasking of informants to collect information.

Muslim Advocates, with other groups, sued to have the whole rulebook released without redactions. They argued that the redacted portions couldn’t be very sensitive given that the FBI had invited advocacy groups to review portions of the guide at its offices before implementation. But in 2011, a judge disagreed and allowed the redactions to remain. Although portions of the DIOG have been updated since then — the FBI recently posted a new version from 2013, also redacted — the 2011 guide remains the baseline document.

Some of the redactions are inconsistent, with identical text covered in one place and not in another. Most of the text beneath the redactions simply spells out designations of authorities and necessary signoffs for particular activities.

“Now being able to look at what was redacted, it’s hard to understand what the justification would have been” for withholding the information, German said, “other than to prevent having to have a public dialogue about whether these changes to the FBI’s authority were appropriate.”

“This is something that the public has a right to know, what policies the government is operating under, particularly when they’re using authorities that have both a long history and recent history of abuse,” said German. “Anytime you come across some sort of improper activity, you can’t say it’s improper unless you know what the rules are.”

Cora Currier
January 31 2017, 1:06 p.m.

Find this story at 31 January 2017
Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Rules governing the use of national security letters allow the FBI to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the targeted news organization.

President Trump has inherited a vast domestic intelligence agency with extraordinary secret powers. A cache of documents offers a rare window into the FBI’s quiet expansion since 9/11.

This story was originally published on June 30, 2016. We are republishing it along with new reporting on other FBI documents.

SECRET FBI RULES allow agents to obtain journalists’ phone records with approval from two internal officials — far less oversight than under normal judicial procedures.

The classified rules, obtained by The Intercept and dating from 2013, govern the FBI’s use of national security letters, which allow the bureau to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the news organization being targeted. They have previously been released only in heavily redacted form.

Media advocates said the documents show that the FBI imposes few constraints on itself when it bypasses the requirement to go to court and obtain subpoenas or search warrants before accessing journalists’ information.

The rules stipulate that obtaining a journalist’s records with a national security letter requires the signoff of the FBI’s general counsel and the executive assistant director of the bureau’s National Security Branch, in addition to the regular chain of approval. Generally speaking, there are a variety of FBI officials, including the agents in charge of field offices, who can sign off that an NSL is “relevant” to a national security investigation.

There is an extra step under the rules if the NSL targets a journalist in order “to identify confidential news media sources.” In that case, the general counsel and the executive assistant director must first consult with the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

But if the NSL is trying to identify a leaker by targeting the records of the potential source, and not the journalist, the Justice Department doesn’t need to be involved.

The guidelines also specify that the extra oversight layers do not apply if the journalist is believed to be a spy or is part of a news organization “associated with a foreign intelligence service” or “otherwise acting on behalf of a foreign power.” Unless, again, the purpose is to identify a leak, in which case the general counsel and executive assistant director must approve the request.

“These supposed rules are incredibly weak and almost nonexistent — as long as they have that second signoff, they’re basically good to go,” said Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has sued the Justice Department for the release of these rules. “The FBI is entirely able to go after journalists and with only one extra hoop they have to jump through.”

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DIOG-Appendix-Media-NSLs
4 pages
A spokesperson for the FBI, Christopher Allen, declined to comment on the rules or say if they had been changed since 2013, except to say that they are “very clear” that “the FBI cannot predicate investigative activity solely on the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

The Obama administration has come under criticism for bringing a record number of leak prosecutions and aggressively targeting journalists in the process. In 2013, after it came out that the Justice Department had secretly seized records from phone lines at the Associated Press and surveilled Fox News reporter James Rosen, then-Attorney General Eric Holder tightened the rules for when prosecutors could go after journalists. The new policies emphasized that reporters would not be prosecuted for “newsgathering activities,” and that the government would “seek evidence from or involving the news media” as a “last resort” and an “extraordinary measure.” The FBI could not label reporters as co-conspirators in order to try to identify their sources — as had happened with Rosen — and it became more difficult to get journalists’ phone records without notifying the news organization first.

Yet these changes did not apply to NSLs. Those are governed by a separate set of rules, laid out in a classified annex to the FBI’s operating manual, known as the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, or DIOG. The full version of that guide, including the classified annex, was last made public in redacted form in 2011.

The section of the annex on NSLs obtained by The Intercept dates from October 2013 and is marked “last updated October 2011.” It is classified as secret with an additional restriction against distribution to any non-U.S. citizens.

Emails from FBI lawyers in 2015, which were released earlier this year to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, reference an update to this portion of the DIOG, but it is not clear from the heavily redacted emails what changes were actually made.

In a January 2015 email to a number of FBI employee lists, James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI, attached the new attorney general’s policy and wrote that “with the increased focus on media issues,” the FBI and Justice Department would “continue to review the DIOG and other internal policy guides to determine if additional changes or requirements are necessary.”

“Please be mindful of these media issues,” he continued, and advised consulting with the general counsel’s office “prior to implementing any techniques targeting the media.” But the email also explicitly notes that the new guidelines do not apply to “national security tools.”

Allen, the FBI spokesperson, told The Intercept in an emailed statement that “the FBI periodically reviews and updates the DIOG as needed” and that “certainly the FBI’s DIOG remains consistent with all [attorney general] guidelines.”

Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that the “use of NSLs as a way around the protections in the guidelines is a serious concern for news organizations.”

Last week, the Reporters Committee filed a brief in support of the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s lawsuit for the FBI’s NSL rules and other documents on behalf of 37 news organizations, including The Intercept’s publisher, First Look Media. (First Look also provides funding to both the Reporters Committee and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and several Intercept staffers serve on the foundation’s board.)

Seeing the rules in their uncensored form, Timm, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that the FBI should not have kept them classified.

“Redacting the fact that they need a little extra signoff from supervisors doesn’t come close to protecting state secrets,” he said.

The FBI issues thousands of NSLs each year, including nearly 13,000 in 2015. Over the years, a series of inspector general reports found significant problems with their use, yet the FBI is currently pushing to expand the types of information it can demand with an NSL. The scope of NSLs has long been limited to basic subscriber information and toll billing information — which number called which, when, and for how long — as well as some financial and banking records. But the FBI had made a habit of asking companies to hand over more revealing data on internet usage, which could include email header information (though not the subject lines or content of emails) and browsing history. The 2013 NSL rules for the media only mention telephone toll records.

Another controversial aspect of NSLs is that they come with a gag order preventing companies from disclosing even the fact that they’ve received one. Court challenges and legislative changes have loosened that restriction a bit, allowing companies to disclose how many NSLs they receive, in broad ranges, and in a few cases, to describe the materials the FBI had demanded of them in more detail. Earlier this month, Yahoo became the first company to release three NSLs it had received in recent years.

It’s unclear how often the FBI has used NSLs to get journalists’ records. Barton Gellman, of the Washington Post, has said that he was told his phone records had been obtained via an NSL.

The FBI could also potentially demand journalists’ information through an application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or FISA court), which, like NSLs, would also not be covered by the Justice Department policy. The rules for that process are still obscure. The emails about revisions to the FBI guidelines reference a “FISA portion,” but most of the discussion is redacted.

For Brown, of the Reporters Committee, the disclosure of the rules “only confirms that we need information about the actual frequency and context of NSL practice relating to newsgathering and journalists’ records to assess the effectiveness of the new guidelines.”

Top photo: Jerry Delakas, 63, a longtime newspaper vendor in Manhattan’s Cooper Square, stands by his newsstand on April 3, 2012, in New York City.

Cora Currier
January 31 2017, 12:37 p.m.

Find this story at 31 January 2017
Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

The bureau still claims considerable latitude to use race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in deciding which people and communities to investigate.

President Trump has inherited a vast domestic intelligence agency with extraordinary secret powers. A cache of documents offers a rare window into the FBI’s quiet expansion since 9/11.

ONE OF THE Obama administration’s high-profile criminal justice reform efforts was a new policy that purported to ban racial profiling in federal law enforcement. But internal policy guidelines The Intercept has obtained show that the FBI has left its racial profiling practices virtually unchanged, and that the bureau still claims considerable latitude to use race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in deciding which people and communities to investigate.

The issue of profiling by federal law enforcement and immigration authorities has taken on new urgency with the inauguration of Donald Trump, who as a candidate called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals and was slow to denounce white supremacist supporters. Among his first moves in office has been an executive order banning immigration from a list of majority-Muslim countries.

The FBI updated its policy on racial profiling as recently as March 3, 2016, in a section of its main governing manual, known as the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. (The Intercept is publishing the 2011 edition of the DIOG in its entirety, along with the updated section on profiling.) The guidelines make clear that when an FBI agent is deciding whether or how to investigate someone, he or she can consider factors like race, nationality, or ethnicity so long as these factors are clearly relevant and coincide with other reasons for suspicion. And when the FBI selects communities on which to gather intelligence — in order to generate what the bureau calls “domain awareness” — it also allows itself to take such factors into consideration.

The only policy change on profiling added in the five-year gap between the manuals — and in the wake of former Attorney General Eric Holder’s anti-profiling initiative — is that the new version reflects an expanded definition of profiling, which covers not just race and ethnicity but also gender identification, national origin, religion, and sexual orientation.

Civil liberties groups, which have long objected to the FBI’s practice of surveilling ethnic communities and seeding them with informants, say that the guidelines leave the door open to alarming forms of monitoring.

“The fact that the DIOG hasn’t changed is exactly what we had feared,” said Ferhana Khera, president of the group Muslim Advocates. “While we appreciate that Attorney General Holder expanded the categories to include religion, national origin, and sexual orientation, we were concerned that he did not go far enough in making those revisions, and that it still gave a green light to the FBI to engage in activities that would target our communities.”

The flexible guidelines on racial profiling show that the FBI’s formal procedures reflect the blunt talk of its leadership. In late 2014, when the Department of Justice announced the new rules, Holder, who had spoken about his own experiences being stopped by the police as a young black man, heralded them as an important step to ensure “sound, fair, and strong policing practices.”

Yet the very next day, FBI Director James Comey insisted that the new guidance would have no impact on his agency’s counterterrorism investigations or on its ability to look for informants and map Muslim communities and businesses in the United States.

“No, nothing. It doesn’t require any change to our policies or procedures,” he said in a press briefing.

Behind the scenes, the FBI had reportedly pushed back against any rules from Holder that would ban consideration of race, ethnicity, and religion in counterterrorism investigations. Federal law enforcement has long been barred from scrutinizing someone solely on the basis of race or ethnicity, unless chasing down a particular suspect of a crime. But rules in effect under the administration of George W. Bush included a blanket exception for national security and border investigations.

Holder’s guidelines retain significant loopholes. For example, they explicitly permit cultivating sources of a particular ethnicity when investigating a terrorist organization made up of members of that ethnic group. They also allow mapping a city and looking at “population demographics, including concentrations of ethnic demographics,” if that information is collected “pursuant to an authorized intelligence or investigative purpose.” Moreover, the guidelines apply only to federal law enforcement, not to local and state police, and not to federal agents near the borders.

The FBI argues that agents need such latitude in order to recruit informants who might have insight into terrorist networks. For example, the bureau has suggested, agents might look within Somali communities in the United States for people who might have information about the Shabab militant group.

“When there is a threat from outside the country, it makes sense to know who inside the country might be able to help law enforcement,” Comey argued in 2014. “It is about knowing the neighborhoods: What’s it like, where’s the industry, where are the businesses, are there particular groups of folks who live in a particular area?”

In recent years, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents showing FBI field offices investigating ethnic communities based on broad generalities. For example, a 2009 document from San Francisco justified mapping that city’s Chinese neighborhoods because “within this community there has been organized crime for generations.” In Michigan, the FBI looked at the “large Middle Eastern and Muslim population” as “prime territory for attempted radicalization.”

Civil liberties groups, and Muslim groups in particular, oppose this logic, noting that the overwhelming majority of Muslim Americans have nothing to do with terror networks.

“Imagine the FBI deciding to collect data on where all Italian-Americans live, the churches that they worship in, and their charitable giving activities, because they’re concerned about the mob,” said Khera. “Rather than focusing on where there’s evidence of particular criminal activity, they collect data in one broad brush on an entire ethnic group.”

The mapping policy has also come under criticism from those who see it as a representation of the FBI’s mutation after the 9/11 attacks into an intelligence agency with broad investigative powers aimed at counterterrorism rather than at solving specific crimes.

Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that she worried about the FBI combining mapping with “the vast reams of public information that are now available about everybody (including, for example, social media posts and travel records obtained through license plate readers) to create detailed portraits of each of us and of entire communities.”

An FBI spokesperson said the guidelines under which the FBI operates “are very clear that the FBI cannot predicate investigative activity solely on the exercise of First Amendment rights, including freedom of religion, or on race or ethnicity.”

NOGALES, AZ – FEBRUARY 26: A U.S. Border Patrol agent speaks to a driver at a checkpoint from Mexico into the United States on February 26, 2013 north of Nogales, Arizona. Some 15,000 people cross between Mexico and the U.S. each day in Nogales, Arizona’s busiest border crossing. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents are tasked with stopping the illegal flow of drugs into the U.S. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) A U.S. Border Patrol agent speaks to a driver at a checkpoint north of Nogales, Ariz., on Feb. 26, 2013. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
THE FBI’S PROFILING loopholes raise questions about the extent to which other federal law enforcement agencies will amend their practices — especially under a Trump administration that has pledged to take a hard line on immigration and counterterrorism. The Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Transportation Security Administration have all been expected to put out new policies, which are “badly overdue,” said Chris Rickerd, policy counsel for the ACLU.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP and TSA, does have its own policy against racial profiling, but it has a broad loophole for national security. CBP’s current guidance states that “the use of nationality as a screening, enforcement, or investigative criterion is appropriate for the vast majority of CBP functions and operations.” A CBP spokesperson told The Intercept this fall that the agency follows Holder’s 2014 rules but did not elaborate on whether or how it will update its own guidance.

A spokesperson for DHS told The Intercept last month that the department “has reviewed the Attorney General’s guidelines on racial, ethnic, religious and other profiling by federal law enforcement and is in the process of developing our own department-wide standards.”

Activist groups have documented the targeting of Latino drivers for traffic stops and other examples of Border Patrol activity that extends well beyond actual border crossings. Last year, The Intercept reported on FBI cooperation with CBP to create lists of passengers arriving from “countries of interest” who might make good informants.

The TSA has also been singled out for allegedly profiling minority passengers for extra screening. In April, a Minnesota TSA manager said that he was told by his supervisor to look for Somali-Americans.

“Absent a specific, reliable suspect description, no law enforcement agency should engage in profiling based on protected characteristics because such profiling is ineffective and offensive,” Rickerd said. “We call on CBP and TSA to make clear that discriminatory enforcement plays no role in their operations, as well as to implement public data collection and training reforms to be vigilant against profiling.”

Top photo: Somali Muslims pray during a soccer tournament in St. Paul, Minn.

Cora Currier
January 31 2017, 1:04 p.m.

Find this story at 31 January 2017
Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

As many as 117 social leaders and human rights defenders were murdered in Colombia in 2016, according to conflict-monitoring NGO Indepaz.

The number of homicides of rights leaders registered by the NGO is more than double than reported by the government, which has said 55 rights leaders were killed last year.

The report that was released on Tuesday claimed that the regions where the highest number of homicides occurred were the southwestern provinces of Valle del Cauca, Nariño and Cauca, where 57 social leaders were killed.

These three provinces were strongholds of Marxist guerrilla group FARC until the group signed peace with the government and agreed to abandon its territory late last year.

Killing of Colombia’s human rights defenders continues relentlessly

“The presence of paramilitary groups has increased, especially in the areas where the FARC was present,” according to Indepaz.

The Colombian government has consistently denied the existence of paramilitary groups, claiming only organized crime groups are active in Colombia.

The deaths of these social leaders and human rights defenders have been attributed to illegal armed groups to control areas and protect their own political, financial and criminal interests.

These killings have been committed … with the purpose of displacing communities, appropriating territories, defending mega-projects and political control in the regions.”
Indepaz investigator Leonardo Gonzalez

As the peace process and demobilization of the Marxist FARC rebels continues, concerns have raised about the presence of neo-paramilitary groups whom have reportedly being moving into to territory previously controlled by the FARC.

The report called on the government to recognize “the paramilitary phenomenon that could be behind” these atrocities with Leonardo Gonzalez claiming that the murders are as a result of these groups seeking to protect their interests and prevent the dramatic change that the peace process as a whole may bring.

Those who are against seeing their local or regional interests affected, take radical positions and do not want to accept that we are marching towards an end to armed confrontation and conflict. The systematic nature of these events can not be denied, which requires a response from the State as a whole.
Indepaz investigator Leonardo Gonzalez

Extortion in Colombia: Crime groups filling FARC void

The report claims that in 15 of Colombia’s 32 provinces leaflets in which social leaders are accused of being guerrillas and condemned to death or exile have appeared.

INDEPAZ say that in 27 of the 117 murders in 2016, the participation of paramilitary successor groups such as the AGC, “the Tierreros” and “Aguilas Negras” has been confirmed.

In 84 cases it was not possible to identify the perpetrators and in six there are indications that the security forces were involved.

Husband and wife brutally murdered as attacks on Colombia’s community leaders continue

The killings have sparked outcry from rights leaders who have demanded increased protection from neo-paramilitary groups.

The wave of violence has also caught the attention of the United Nations.

The international body last month published a report publicly condemning the violence.

written by Stephen Gill January 25, 2017

Find this story at 25 January 2017

@2016 – Colombia Reports

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

In the first 23 of January 2017, 11 human rights defenders have been killed. One of those killed was Afro-Colombian human rights defender (HRD) Emilsen Manyoma and her partner Joe Javier Rodallega.

On 17 January 2017, the bodies of Afro-Colombian human rights defender (HRD) Emilsen Manyoma and her partner Joe Javier Rodallega were found in Buenaventura. They had been missing since Saturday 14 January 2017. Just a few days before their disappearance, Rodallega reported being threatened and said a truck had been circling Manyoma’s house (see video below).

The local NGO who works with the communities in this region of the country, the Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace, an ecumenical human rights organisation and partner of ABColombia member Christian Aid, reported that both bodies were severely wounded and that Rodallega’s hands had been tied. Contagio Radio said that both bodies had been beheaded.

Emilsen Manyoma was a prominent leader in the Bajo Calima region, as well as an active member of the community network CONPAZ. She had been a brave and outspoken critic of right-wing paramilitary groups and the displacement of local communities by business interests. She denounced paramilitary control and drug trafficking operations in the Calima and San Juan Rivers, and the Buenaventura District, as well as, the lack of action and tolerances by the police of drug trafficking. [1]

During 2016 s part of the recently created Truth Commission, Emilsen Manyoma played a key role in documenting attacks on human rights leaders in the region.

References:

[1] Statement by: Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, Asesinada lideresa de CONPAZ, Emilsen Manyoma y su esposo, Buenaventura, Martes 17 de enero de 2017

ABColombia Published on 26 Jan 2017

Find this story at 26 January 2017

Copyright http://www.abcolombia.org.uk/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — On any given day at MacDill Air Force Base, web crawlers scour social media for potential recruits to the Islamic State group. Then, in a high-stakes operation to counter the extremists’ propaganda, language specialists employ fictitious identities and try to sway the targets from joining IS ranks.

At least that’s how the multimillion-dollar initiative is being sold to the Defense Department.

A critical national security program known as “WebOps” is part of a vast psychological operation that the Pentagon says is effectively countering an enemy that has used the internet as a devastating tool of propaganda. But an Associated Press investigation found the management behind WebOps is so beset with incompetence, cronyism and flawed data that multiple people with direct knowledge of the program say it’s having little impact.

Several current and former WebOps employees cited multiple examples of civilian Arabic specialists who have little experience in counter-propaganda, cannot speak Arabic fluently and have so little understanding of Islam they are no match for the Islamic State online recruiters.

It’s hard to establish rapport with a potential terror recruit when — as one former worker told the AP — translators repeatedly mix up the Arabic words for “salad” and “authority.” That’s led to open ridicule on social media about references to the “Palestinian salad.”

Four current or former workers told the AP that they had personally witnessed WebOps data being manipulated to create the appearance of success and that they had discussed the problem with many other employees who had seen the same. Yet the companies carrying out the program for the military’s Central Command in Tampa have dodged attempts to implement independent oversight and assessment of the data.

Central Command spokesman Andy Stephens declined repeated requests for information about WebOps and other counter-propaganda programs, which were launched under the Obama administration. And he did not respond to detailed questions the AP sent on Jan. 10.

The AP investigation is based on Defense Department and contractor documents, emails, photographs and interviews with more than a dozen people closely involved with WebOps as well as interviews with nearly two dozen contractors. The WebOps workers requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the work and because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The information operations division that runs WebOps is the command’s epicenter for firing back at the Islamic State’s online propaganda machine, which uses the internet to sway public opinion in a swath of the globe that stretches from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa.

Early last year, the government opened bidding on a new counter-propaganda contract — separate from WebOps— that is worth as much as $500 million. Months after the AP started reporting about the bidding process, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service told the AP that it had launched an investigation. NCIS spokesman Ed Buice said the service is investigating a whistleblower’s “allegations of corruption” stemming from how the contract was awarded.

The whistleblower’s complaint alleges multiple conflicts of interest that include division officers being treated to lavish dinners paid for by a contractor. The complaint also alleges routine drinking at the office where classified work is conducted. The drinking was confirmed by multiple contractors, who spoke to AP and described a frat house atmosphere where happy hour started at 3 p.m.

One of the most damning accusations leveled by the whistleblower is against Army Col. Victor Garcia, who led the information operations division until July 2016, when he moved to a new assignment at Special Operations Command, also in Tampa. The whistleblower contended that Garcia steered the contract to a team of vendors that included a close friend’s firm. The whistleblower requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution.

The AP obtained a screen-grab from a Facebook page that shows Garcia and the friend at a tiki bar in Key Largo two weeks before the winning team was officially announced Sept. 30. The photo was also turned over to NCIS investigators by the whistleblower, who said the photo created a “clear impression and perception of impropriety.”

Garcia, a West Point graduate and decorated officer, denied any wrongdoing and described the complaint as “character assassination.” Garcia, who moved to his new post two months before the contract was decided, said he scrupulously avoided any discussions about the contract with both his friend and his former deputy. His former deputy served on the five-member panel that reviewed all of the bids.

“Because I was aware of these conflicts of interest, I intentionally kept myself out of that process — with any of these contract processes,” Garcia said.

The whistleblower is a senior manager at a company that lost its bid for the work. He told AP that he was investigated for attempting to accept kickbacks on an unrelated government contract. He denied the allegations, which were made four years ago, and no charges have been filed in the case.

The problems with the WebOps operation and the personal bonds underpinning the new contract illustrate challenges awaiting President Donald Trump. He has promised to boost military spending by tens of billions of dollars while also cutting waste at the Defense Department and ensuring that contractors aren’t getting sweetheart deals.

Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore’s law school and a government contracting expert, reviewed AP’s findings and called Central Command’s lack of rigorous oversight inexcusable.

“These people should not be wasting the money consigned to defend us against terrorism,” said Tiefer, who served on a bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting. The commission reported in 2011 that at least $31 billion was lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan.

___

“DO YOU SPEAK ARABIC?”

In a large office room filled with cubicles at Central Command, about 120 people, many of them Arabic language specialists, are assigned to fight IS militants on their own turf: the internet.

The WebOps contract is run by Colsa Corp., based in Huntsville, Alabama. A major challenge for Colsa — and contractors working on other national security programs— is finding people who can speak Arabic fluently and can also get security clearances to handle classified material.

The problem, according to six current and former Colsa employees, is that to engage with operatives of the Islamic State, or their potential recruits, you need to be fluent in language, nuance and Islam — and while Colsa has some Arabic experts, those skills are not widely distributed.

“One of the things about jihadis: they are very good in Arabic,” said one specialist who worked on WebOps.

Another former employee said common translation mistakes he personally witnessed, including the “Palestinian salad” example, were the result of the company hiring young people who were faking language abilities.

He mockingly described the conversations between managers and potential hires: “‘Do you speak Arabic?'” he mimicked. “‘Yes. How do you say ‘good morning?’ Oh, you can do that? You are an expert. You are hired.'”

A third specialist said she asked a colleague, who was assigned to analyze material written in Arabic, why he was discarding much of it. While watching a soap opera online, the colleague said the material was irrelevant because it was in Farsi or Urdu. But when she checked, it was indeed Arabic. She has since left WebOps to find more meaningful work, she said.

The WebOps Arabic program focuses on Syria, Iraq and Yemen, but for most of the time Colsa has been running it, it has had no Syrian or Yemeni staff, the AP was told in separate interviews with two current employees and one who left recently.

Engaging in theological discussions on social media with people who are well versed in the Quran is not for beginners. Iraq and Syria are riven with sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, who follow different interpretations of Islam. Multiple workers said that WebOps “experts” often trip up on language that is specific to one sect or region.

“People can tell whether you are local, or whether you are Sunni or Shia,” said another former worker, so poorly crafted messages are not effective. He said he left WebOps because he was disgusted with the work.

A number of the workers complained to AP that a large group on staff from Morocco, in North Africa, were often ignorant of Middle Eastern history and culture — or even the difference between groups the U.S. considers terrorist organizations. The group was so dominant that colleagues jokingly referred to them as “the Moroccan mafia.”

A lot of them “don’t know the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas,” said the employee who left to find more meaningful work. Hezbollah is an Iran-backed Shiite group based in Lebanon. Hamas, based in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, is the Palestinian branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.

Cathy Dickens, a vice president for business management and corporate ethics at Colsa Corp., referred questions to CENTCOM, which declined comment.

___

“YOU SHOULDN’T GRADE YOUR OWN HOMEWORK”

To determine whether WebOps actually dissuades people from becoming radicalized, Colsa’s scoring team analyzes the interactions employees have online and tries to measure whether the subjects’ comments reflect militant views or a more tolerant outlook.

Three former members of its scoring team told the AP they were encouraged by a manager to indicate progress against radicalism in their scoring reports even if they were not making any.

The employee who said she left to find meaningful work recalled approaching a Colsa manager to clarify how the scoring was done shortly after starting her job. She said he told her that the bottom line was “the bread we put on the table for our children.”

The boss told her that the scoring reports should show progress, but not too much, so that the metrics would still indicate a dangerous level of militancy online to justify continued funding for WebOps, she said.

She was shocked. “Until my dying day, I will never forget that moment,” she said.

She, like other former employees, spoke only on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Colsa that could affect future employment.

The manager she spoke to declined to comment. AP withheld his name because of security concerns.

Employees and managers routinely inflate counts of interactions with potential terrorist recruits, known as “engagements,” according to multiple workers. Engagements are delivered in tweets or comments posted on social media to lists of people and can also be automated. That automation is at times used to inflate the actual number of engagements, said two former workers, including the one who talked about colleagues faking their language abilities.

The worker who left in disgust explained that a single tweet could be programmed to be sent out to all the followers of a target individually, multiple times. So the targets and their followers get the same tweets tagged to them over and over again.

“You send it like a blind copy. You program it to send a tweet every five minutes to the whole list individually from now until tomorrow,” the former employee said. “Then you see the reports and it says yesterday we sent 5,000 engagements. Often that means one tweet on Twitter.” The person said that he saw managers printing out the skewed reports for weekly briefings with CENTCOM officers. But the volume made it look like the WebOps team’s work was “wow, amazing,” he said.

Garcia said Colsa has a done a good job under his watch, that the data is sufficiently scrutinized and the program is succeeding.

In 2014, a group of more than 40 Defense Department data specialists came to Tampa to evaluate the program. Their unclassified report, obtained by AP, identified what one of the authors called “serious design flaws.” For instance, the report found that any two analysts were only 69 percent likely to agree on how to score a particular engagement. The author said a rate of 90 percent or higher is required to draw useful conclusions.

The report found that computers would be as accurate or better than analysts, and could evaluate effectiveness more quickly — and cheaply.

What Central Command really needed, the report said, was outside oversight.

“You shouldn’t grade your own homework,” said the author, a former U.S. military officer and data specialist once stationed at Central Command. The author, one of many people who signed off on the report, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution.

He said the report was given to officers, including Garcia, and to Colsa. The author said the suggestions were not implemented and WebOps managers resisted multiple attempts at oversight. The author said that when he directly appealed to Garcia for outside assessment, an officer under Garcia said the effort would cloud the mission.

“The argument was that WebOps was the only program at Central Command that was directly engaging the enemy and that it couldn’t function if its staff was constantly distracted by assessment,” he said. The argument worked, he said, and Colsa was not forced or instructed to accept outside oversight.

Garcia disputed that account but would not elaborate on what steps were taken to address the Defense Department data specialists’ concerns. The Government Accountability Office issued a report in 2015 on WebOps oversight, but it is classified.

___

“UNTOUCHABLE”

Despite the problems behind the scenes at WebOps, Central Command will play a key role in the new $500 million psychological operations campaign against the Islamic State and other groups. The five-year contract was a hefty commitment to “degrade and ultimately defeat extremist organizations,” according to a document detailing the scope of the work. It would run parallel to WebOps.

The request for bids was announced in April. Four separate teams of companies competed for the contract, including one led by defense giant Northrop Grumman.

From the start, competitors complained among themselves that Simon Bergman, an executive with the British advertising firm M&C Saatchi, had an advantage because he was friends with Garcia. Bergman was working with Northrop to prepare the bid.

A former British officer, Bergman was deployed to Iraq while Garcia was there working on psychological operations during the Iraq war. It was well known that the two men were close, and in recent years, contractors often saw Bergman at CENTCOM offices.

In April, defense contractor CACI International held a meeting in Tampa to discuss the bid. Three contractors on the team said a CACI manager warned a roomful of people that Garcia had already told him that he would decide who got the contract. The manager said that Garcia indicated that having Bergman on the team would help.

So in mid-September, when a photo appeared on Facebook showing Garcia and Bergman together in the Florida Keys, it did not look good in the eyes of many contractors. Garcia’s girlfriend captured the old friends inside the Tiki Bar at Gilbert’s Resort in Key Largo. They were on her Facebook page, shoulder-to-shoulder, smiling and giving the thumbs up.

Within days, the photos had been taken down from her page.

Two weeks later, the government announced Northrop had won the contract. Its team included M&C Saatchi, Bergman’s firm.

A panel led by the U.S. General Services Administration chose the winner of the contract. Chris Hamm, a senior GSA acquisition executive, said a five-member team scrutinized the technical merits of the proposals for the contract. That team was led by two GSA officials and included three military officers — one of whom was Marine Corps Lt. Col. Matt Coughlin, who reported directly to Garcia before Garcia left his post. Coughlin is the information operations’ liaison with contractors.

In an interview with AP, Hamm said the contract award was handled properly.

“The process is designed to avoid bias,” Hamm said.

But several other contractors on losing teams said Coughlin would clearly have been the person on the panel with the most sway, because of both his technical expertise and the fact that he represented CENTCOM. And given Coughlin’s ties with Garcia, they found that troubling.

Garcia said that while the bids were being considered, he stayed away from any discussions of it with Coughlin, his deputy. So he didn’t even realize the award announcement was imminent when he went with Bergman to the Keys.

“I wasn’t involved with the contracting process at all,” Garcia said. “So I had no idea what the timing of the contract was.”

When asked why the photo with Bergman was taken off Facebook, Garcia declined to comment.

Bergman said that his friendship with Garcia, one of many he has with military officers, is irrelevant. He noted that M&C Saatchi was only a subcontractor.

“I don’t see why my relationship with somebody in the military would have any influence over anything,” he said.

The whistleblower complaint however, filed in December with Central Command’s inspector general, contended the photo of Garcia and Bergman created a “clear impression and perception of impropriety.”

The four-page complaint, now under investigation by NCIS, said the atmosphere at the CENTCOM division, with routine drinking at the office and myriad conflicts of interest, led to an “air of untouchable invincibility.”

Several contractors who spoke to AP, among the nearly two dozen either bidding for work or involved in CENTCOM information operations, said they suspected undue influence in the decision for the $500 million contract. In his complaint, the whistleblower alleges that Garcia told him directly at one point that “any team must include Simon Bergman.”

All the contractors asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive work because they feared repercussions for their companies.

Colsa, the primary WebOps contractor, was not involved in Northrop’s bid. However, nothing prevents Northrop from bringing the company in as a subcontractor.

That’s the plan, said several contractors who have been briefed by Northrop. Such a move would provide ample funding to keep WebOps running for up to five more years.

___

Associated Press researchers Jennifer Farrar, Rhonda Shafner and Monika Mathur contributed to this report.

By DESMOND BUTLER and RICHARD LARDNER
Jan. 31, 2017

Find this story 31 January 2017

© copyright 2017 Associated Press

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

The Islamic State, or ISIS, is the first terrorist group to hold both physical and digital territory: in addition to the swaths of land it controls in Iraq and Syria, it dominates pockets of the Internet with relative impunity. But it will hardly be the last. Although there are still some fringe terrorist groups in the western Sahel or other rural areas that do not supplement their violence digitally, it is only a matter of time before they also go online. In fact, the next prominent terrorist organization will be more likely to have extensive digital operations than control physical ground.

Although the military battle against ISIS is undeniably a top priority, the importance of the digital front should not be underestimated. The group has relied extensively on the Internet to market its poisonous ideology and recruit would-be terrorists. According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, the territory controlled by ISIS now ranks as the place with the highest number of foreign fighters since Afghanistan in the 1980s, with recent estimates putting the total number of foreign recruits at around 20,000, nearly 4,000 of whom hail from Western countries. Many of these recruits made initial contact with ISIS and its ideology via the Internet. Other followers, meanwhile, are inspired by the group’s online propaganda to carry out terrorist attacks without traveling to the Middle East.

ISIS also relies on the digital sphere to wage psychological warfare, which directly contributes to its physical success. For example, before the group captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014, it rolled out an extensive online campaign with text, images, and videos that threatened the city’s residents with unparalleled death and destruction. Such intimidation makes it easier to bring populations under ISIS’ control and reduces the likelihood of a local revolt.

Foiling ISIS’ efforts on the Internet will thus make the group less successful on the battlefield. To date, however, most digital efforts against ISIS have been too limited, focusing on specific tactics, such as creating counternarratives to extremism, in lieu of generating a comprehensive strategy. Instead of resorting to a single tool, opponents should treat this fight as they would a military confrontation: by waging a broad-scale counterinsurgency.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

The first step of this digital war is to understand the enemy. Most analyses of ISIS’ online footprint focus on social media. In a Brookings Institution report, J. M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan estimated that in late 2014, 46,000 Twitter accounts openly supported the group. Back then, strategies for fighting ISIS online centered on simply removing such accounts.

Social media platforms are just the tip of the iceberg, however. ISIS’ marketing tools run the gamut from popular public platforms to private chat rooms to encrypted messaging systems such as WhatsApp, Kik, Wickr, Zello, and Telegram. At the other end of the spectrum, digital media production houses such as the Al-Furqaan Foundation and the Al-Hayat Media Center—presumably funded by and answering to ISIS’ central leadership—churn out professional-grade videos and advertisements.

The first step of this digital war is to understand the enemy.
Yet understanding the full extent of ISIS’ marketing efforts without knowing who is behind them is not an actionable insight; it is like understanding how much land the group controls without knowing what kinds of fighters occupy it and how they hold it. An effective counterinsurgency requires comprehending ISIS’ hierarchy. Unlike al Qaeda, which comprises a loose cluster of isolated cells, ISIS resembles something akin to a corporation. On the ground in Iraq and Syria, a highly educated leadership sets its ideological agenda, a managerial layer implements this ideology, and a large rank and file contributes fighters, recruiters, videographers, jihadist wives, and people with every other necessary skill. This hierarchy is replicated online, where ISIS operates as a pyramid consisting of four types of digital fighters.

At the top sits ISIS’ central command for digital operations, which gives orders and provides resources for disseminating content. Although its numbers are small, its operations are highly organized. According to Berger, for example, the origins of most of ISIS’ marketing material on Twitter can be traced to a small set of accounts with strict privacy settings and few followers. By distributing their messages to a limited network outside the public eye, these accounts can avoid being flagged for terms-of-service violations. But the content they issue eventually trickles down to the second tier of the pyramid: ISIS’ digital rank and file.

The U.S. Central Command Twitter feed after it was apparently hacked by people claiming to be Islamic State, January, 2015.
STAFF / REUTERS
The U.S. Central Command Twitter feed after it was apparently hacked by people claiming to be Islamic State sympathizers, January, 2015.

This type of fighter may or may not operate offline as well. He and his ilk run digital accounts that are connected to the central command and disseminate material through guerrilla-marketing tactics. In June 2014, for example, Islamic State supporters hijacked trending hashtags related to the World Cup to flood soccer fans with propaganda. Because they operate on the frontline of the digital battlefield, these fighters often find their accounts suspended for terms-of-service violations, and they may therefore keep backup accounts. And to make each new account appear more influential than it really is, they purchase fake followers from social media marketing firms; just $10 can boost one’s follower count by tens of thousands.

Then there are the vast numbers of radical sympathizers across the globe, who constitute ISIS’ third type of digital fighter. Unlike the rank and file, they do not belong to ISIS’ official army, take direct orders from its leadership, or reside in Iraq or Syria. But once drawn into ISIS’ echo chamber by the rank and file, they spend their time helping the group disseminate its radical message and convert people to its cause. These are often the people who identify and engage potential recruits on an individual level, developing online relationships strong enough to result in physical travel. In June, for example, The New York Times documented how a radical Islamist in the United Kingdom met a young woman from Washington State online and convinced her to consider heading to Syria.

Although joining ISIS’ operations in Iraq and Syria may be illegal, spreading extremism online is not. These fighters are masters at taking advantage of their right to free speech, and their strength lies both in their numbers and in their willingness to mimic ISIS’ official line without having to receive direct orders from its leadership.

ISIS’ fourth type of digital fighter is nonhuman: the tens of thousands of fake accounts that automate the dissemination of its content and multiply its message. On Twitter, for example, so-called Twitter bots automatically flood the digital space with retweets of terrorist messages; countless online tutorials explain how to write these relatively simple programs. In comment sections on Facebook, YouTube, and other sites, such automated accounts can monopolize the conversation with extremist propaganda and marginalize moderate voices. This programmable army ensures that whatever content ISIS’ digital central command issues will make its way across as many screens as possible.

RECAPTURING DIGITAL TERRITORY

Much of the debate over how to combat ISIS on the ground has been binary, split between those proposing containment and those insisting on its defeat. The best strategy for fighting it online, however, is something else: marginalization. The result would be something similar to what has happened to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the narcoterrorist group that grabbed headlines throughout the 1990s for its high-profile kidnappings and savage guerrilla warfare. Today, the group has been neither disbanded nor entirely defeated, but its ranks have largely been driven into the jungle.

Along the same lines, ISIS will be neutered as a digital threat when its online presence becomes barely noticeable. The group would find it either too risky or tactically impossible to commandeer control of social media platforms and public chat rooms, and its digital content would be hard to discover. Incapable of growing its online ranks, it would see its ratio of digital fighters to human fighters fall to one to one. It would be forced to operate primarily on the so-called dark Web, the part of the Internet not indexed by mainstream search engines and accessible to only the most knowledgeable users.

Compelling terrorist organizations to operate in secret does make plots more difficult to intercept, but in the case of ISIS, that is a tradeoff worth making. Every day, the group’s message reaches millions of people, some of whom become proponents of ISIS or even fighters for its cause. Preventing it from dominating digital territory would help stanch the replenishment of its physical ranks, reduce its impact on the public psyche, and destroy its most fundamental means of communication.

The Islamic State will be neutered as a digital threat when its online presence becomes barely noticeable.
It will take a broad coalition to marginalize ISIS online: from governments and companies to nonprofits and international organizations. First, they should separate the human-run accounts on social networks from the automated ones. Next, they should zero in on ISIS’ digital central command, identifying and suspending the specific accounts responsible for setting strategy and giving orders to the rest of its online army. When that is done, digital society at large should push the remaining rank and file into the digital equivalent of a remote cave.

The suspension of accounts needs to be targeted—more like kill-or-capture raids than strategic bombing campaigns. Blanket suspensions covering any accounts that violate terms of service could not guarantee that the leadership will be affected. In fact, as Berger and Morgan’s research highlighted, ISIS has learned to protect its digital leadership from suspension by keeping its activities hidden behind strict privacy settings.

This is not to downplay the importance of banning users who break the rules and distribute terrorist content. Technology companies have become skilled at doing just that. In 2014, the British Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, a service run by London’s Metropolitan Police, worked closely with such companies as Google, Facebook, and Twitter to flag more than 46,000 pieces of violent or hateful content for removal. That same year, YouTube took down approximately 14 million videos. In April 2015, Twitter announced that it had suspended 10,000 accounts linked to ISIS on a single day. Such efforts are valuable in that they provide a cleaner digital environment for millions of users. But they would be doubly so if the leadership that orders terrorist content to be distributed were also eliminated.

That, in turn, will require mapping ISIS’ network of accounts. One way law enforcement could make inroads into this digital network is by covertly infiltrating ISIS’ real-world network. This technique has already achieved some success. In April, the FBI arrested two young women accused of plotting attacks in New York City after a two-year investigation that had relied extensively on their social media activity for evidence. Law enforcement should scale such efforts to focus on the digital domain and target ISIS’ digital leadership, suspending the accounts of its members and arresting them in certain cases.

The U.S. Central Command Twitter feed after it was apparently hacked by people claiming to be Islamic State
STAFF / REUTERS
A computer screenshot shows the U.S. Central Command Twitter feed after it was apparently hacked by people claiming to be Islamic State sympathizers January 12, 2015.
Once ISIS’ online leadership has been separated from the rank and file, the rank and file will become significantly less coordinated and therefore less effective. The next step would be to reduce the group’s level of online activity overall, so that it is forced into the margins of digital society. During this phase, the danger is that online, ISIS might splinter into less coordinated but more aggressive rogue groups. With a higher tolerance for risk, these groups might undertake “doxing” of opponents of ISIS, whereby the private information (such as the address and social security number) of a target is revealed, or “distributed denial-of-service attacks,” which can take down an entire website.

To mitigate this threat, the digital fighters’ activities need to be diverted away from extremism altogether. This is where counternarratives against violent extremism can come in. Over the last two years, several notable efforts have been launched, including video series produced by the Arab Center for Scientific Research and Humane Studies and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. To be effective, these campaigns need to reflect the diversity of the group’s ranks: professional jihadist fighters, former Iraqi soldiers, deeply religious Islamic scholars, young men in search of adventure, local residents joining out of fear or ambition. Moderate religious messages may work for the pious recruit, but not for the lonely British teenager who was promised multiple wives and a sense of belonging in Syria. He might be better served by something more similar to suicide-prevention and anti-bullying campaigns.

For maximum effect, these campaigns should be carefully targeted. An antiextremist video viewed by 50,000 of the right kinds of people will have a greater impact than one seen by 50 million random viewers. Consider Abdullah-X, a cartoon series marketed through a YouTube campaign funded by the European Union. Its pilot episode was promoted using targeted advertising oriented toward those interested in extremist Islam. Eighty percent of the YouTube users who watched it found it through targeted ads rather than through unrelated searches.

Given the diversity of ISIS’ digital rank and file, however, betting on counternarratives alone would be too risky. To combat extremists who have already made up their minds, the coalition should target their willingness to operate in the open. Al Qaeda has taken pains to keep its digital operations secret and works under the cover of passwords, encryption, and rigid privacy settings. These tactics have made the group notoriously difficult to track, but they have also kept its digital footprint miniscule. Likewise, ISIS’ rank and file should be forced to adopt similar behavior.

Achieving this will require creativity. For example, governments should consider working with the news media to aggressively publicize arrests that result from covert infiltration of ISIS’ online network. If any new account with which a digital soldier interacts carries the risk of being that of an undercover agent, it becomes exponentially more hazardous to recruit new members. Law enforcement could also create visual presentations showing how police investigations of digital extremists’ accounts can lead to arrests, thereby telling the cautionary tale that a single mistake can cause the downfall of a digital soldier and his entire social network.

Within the next few years, new high-tech tools may become available to help governments marginalize digital rank-and-file terrorists. One is machine learning. Just as online advertisers can target ads to users with a particular set of interests, law enforcement could use algorithmic analysis to identify, map, and deactivate the accounts of terrorist supporters. Assisted by machine learning, such campaigns could battle ISIS online with newfound precision and reach a scale that would not be possible with a manual approach.

It is worth noting that just like a physical counterinsurgency, a digital counterinsurgency is more likely to succeed when bolstered by the participation of local communities. All the online platforms ISIS uses have forum moderators, the equivalent of tribal leaders and sheiks. The technology companies that own these platforms have no interest in seeing their environments flooded with fake accounts and violent messages. They should therefore give these moderators the tools and training to keep their communities safe from extremist messaging. Here again, machine learning could someday help, by automatically identifying terrorist messages and either highlighting them for moderators or blocking them on their behalf.

ACCESS DENIED

At first glance, ISIS can look hopelessly dominant online, with its persistent army of propaganda peddlers and automated trolls. In fact, however, the group is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to resources and numbers. The vast majority of Internet users disagree with its message, and the platforms that its fighters use belong to companies that oppose its ideology.

There is no doubt that undertaking a digital counterinsurgency campaign represents uncharted territory. But the costs of failure are low, for unlike in a real-world counterinsurgency, those who fight digitally face no risk of injury or death. That is yet another factor making ISIS particularly vulnerable online, since it means that the group’s opponents can apply and discard new ways of fighting terrorism quickly to hone their strategy.

The benefits of digitally marginalizing ISIS, meanwhile, are manifold. Not only would neutering the group online improve the lives of millions of users who would no longer be as likely to encounter the group’s propaganda; it would also make the group’s real-world defeat more imminent. As ISIS’ digital platforms, communication methods, and soldiers became less accessible, the group would find it harder to coordinate its physical attacks and replenish its ranks. And those fighting it online would gain valuable experience for when the time came to fight the next global terrorist group trying to win the Internet.

By Jared Cohen
November/December 2015 Issue

Find this story at December 2015

©2017 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.