The Federal Bureau of Investigation has some explaining to do this week, after a federal judge ordered the agency to provide a more thorough explanation to justify why it withheld information from a graduate student’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents regarding an alleged 2011 assassination plot against leaders of Houston’s Occupy movement.

The requests — which were filed last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate Ryan Noah Shapiro, who is researching the plot — sought all records “relating or referring to Occupy Houston, any other Occupy Wall Street-related protests in Houston, Texas, and law enforcement responses.” Shapiro noticed a reference to the plot in FBI documents about the Occupy movement that were unsealed in 2012 after a civil-rights group filed a FOIA request.

An FBI document that Shapiro showed to VICE News describes the plot against Occupy Houston:

“An identified [redacted] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors [sic] in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary…. [Redacted] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.”

The FBI said it had identified 17 pages of records relevant to Shapiro’s FOIA request, but it only released five of them, all highly redacted. Shapiro then filed suit against the FBI.

FBI FOIA Chief David Hardy defended suppressing the information in a motion to dismiss Shapiro’s lawsuit. Hardy noted that the request concerned material that the FBI had given to local authorities who were investigating “potential criminal activity” by Occupy Houston protesters. The FBI was working with them to assess potential terrorist threats posed by Occupy Houston and determine whether it had advocated overthrowing the US government. Hardy .

The FBI and the Department of Justice invoked the Bureau’s “general investigative authority” and its “lead role in investigating terrorism and in the collection of terrorism threat information” as a basis for its exemption from FOIA, but this did not convince Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. She agreed with Shapiro that the FBI’s justification was “overly-generalized and not particular.”

“At no point does Mr. Hardy supply specific facts as to the basis for the FBI’s belief that the Occupy protestors [sic] might have been engaged in terroristic or other criminal activity,” Collyer wrote in an opinion that denied part of the FBI’s motion to dismiss. “Neither the word ‘terrorism’ nor the phrase ‘advocating the overthrow of the government’ are talismanic, especially where FBI purports to be investigating individuals who ostensibly are engaged in protected First Amendment activity.”

VICE News asked the Department of Justice for its reaction to Judge Collyer’s opinion, but it declined to comment.

Shapiro, who currently has more than 700 active FOIA requests and four other pending lawsuits with the FBI, told VICE News that he’s not surprised that the FBI is stonewalling.

“The FBI is again hiding behind vague unsupported allegations of ‘terrorism’ and threats to national security to withhold these documents,” he said. “Not only is this far-fetched, it highlights that we as a nation need to foster a broader understanding of ‘national security.’ ”

Shapiro is doubtful that the FBI has truthfully acknowledged the records relevant to his requests, and wonders whether the Bureau investigated the plot to assassinate US citizens on domestic soil for exercising their First Amendment rights.

“Here we have an FBI investigation of purported possible terrorism and attempts to overthrow the American government by a protest group, and the discovery during this investigation of an actual terrorist plot to assassinate the leaders of that protest group,” he said. “And yet, the FBI is claiming it amassed only 17 pages total on all of the above? Well, beyond implausible, the FBI’s claim is preposterous.”

Jeffrey Light, Shapiro’s attorney, told VICE News that the FBI’s standing as a law enforcement agency only goes so far.

“Just because you are a law enforcement agency, by definition, doesn’t mean that everything that you do is for law enforcement purposes,” he explained. “You could be, for example, monitoring political activists. That’s not a law enforcement purpose. The argument is that there’s not enough information.”

Collyer has given the FBI until April 9th to provide a more detailed explanation for its exemptions, which the Bureau can submit to the court under seal.

By Maxwell Barna
March 21, 2014 | 5:45 pm

Find this story at 21 March 2015

Copyright Vice.com

A federal judge has ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to give her a better explanation for its refusal to turn over information to a student researching an alleged plot to assassinate “Occupy” protest leaders in Houston.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student who is seeking records from the FBI related to a Houston spin-off of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and an alleged sniper plot. The student claims that the heavily redacted responses he got back from the government violated the Freedom of Information Act.

Information about the alleged plot first surfaced in FBI documents — released through a prior FOIA request by a civil-rights legal organization in Washington – that referenced a “plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles,” according to court documents. It’s not known who was behind the alleged plot or whether the FBI investigated it.

In a ruling last week, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the FBI to explain with more detail why it claims that certain information requested by the student, Ryan Noah Shapiro, is exempted under FOIA.

The law governing the public’s access to records allows the FBI to shield “information compiled for law enforcement purposes” if disclosure would interfere with an investigation, endanger life or cause other types of harm.

That exemption was repeatedly cited by FBI FOIA chief David Hardy in a filing to the court in support of an FBI motion to dismiss Mr. Shapiro’s lawsuit. Some information was redacted, according to Mr. Hardy’s filing, because it involved information shared with local law enforcement agencies related to an investigation of “potential criminal activity by protestors involved with the ‘Occupy’ movement in Houston.” He stated that the potential crimes included “domestic terrorism” and “advocating overthrow of government.”

Judge Collyer said that justification wasn’t sufficient.

“At no point does Mr. Hardy supply specific facts as to the basis for FBI’s belief that the Occupy protestors might have been engaged in terroristic or other criminal activity,” she wrote. “Neither the word ‘terrorism’ nor the phrase ‘advocating the overthrow of the government’ are talismanic, especially where FBI purports to be investigating individuals who ostensibly are engaged in protected First Amendment activity.”

She asked the the FBI to get back to her with a more specific explanation by April 9. The judge is allowing the FBI to file its response under seal.

Jeffrey Louis Light, an attorney representing Mr. Shapiro, told Law Blog that he was puzzled why the FBI seemed to be focusing on investigating the protesters and not the alleged assassination plot.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice, which is representing the FBI in the case, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

March 18, 2014, 7:41 PM ET
ByJacob Gershman

Find this story at 18 March 2015

Copyright 2015 Dow Jones & Company

Last May, after getting a ride to school with his dad, 18-year-old Abdullahi Yusuf absconded to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to board a flight to Turkey. There, FBI agents stopped Yusuf and later charged him with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization—he was allegedly associated with another Minnesota man believed to have gone to fight for the Islamic State in Syria.

To keep other youth from following Yusuf’s path, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger recently said that the federal government would be launching a new initiative to work with Islamic community groups and promote after-school programs and job training–to address the “root causes” of extremist groups’ appeal. “This is not about gathering intelligence, it’s not about expanding surveillance or any of the things that some people want to claim it is,” Luger said.

Luger’s comments spoke to the concerns of civil liberties advocates, who believe that blurring the line between engagement and intelligence gathering could end up with the monitoring of innocent individuals. If past programs in this area are any guide, those concerns are well founded.

Documents obtained by attorneys at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and shared with the Intercept, show that previous community outreach efforts in Minnesota–launched in 2009 in response to the threat of young Americans joining the al-Qaeda-linked militia al-Shabab, in Somalia—were, in fact, conceived to gather intelligence.

A grant proposal from the St. Paul Police Department to the Justice Department, which the Brennan Center obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI, lays out a plan in which Somali-speaking advocates would hold outreach meetings with community groups and direct people toward the Police Athletic League and programs at the YWCA. The proposal says that “the team will also identify radicalized individuals, gang members, and violent offenders who refuse to cooperate with our efforts.”

“It’s startling how explicit it was – ‘You don’t want to join the Police Athletic League? You sound like you might join al-Shabab!’” said Michael Price, an attorney with the Brennan Center.

***

The Islamic State may be the new face of religious extremism, but for a number of years, law enforcement in St. Paul and Minneapolis have had to contend with the appeal of al-Shabab to members of the country’s largest Somali population—more than 20 young men have reportedly left Minnesota to fight with the group since 2007.

Dennis Jensen, St. Paul’s former assistant police chief, had spent years studying relations between police and the city’s Somali community, which is largely composed of recent immigrants from a war zone who have little reason to trust the authorities. But the al-Shabab threat galvanized the Department to see their work as a frontline for counterterrorism. Jensen told the Center for Homeland Defense and Security in 2009 that extremist recruitment added “a greater sense of urgency about what we are doing,” he said. “We’re up front about what our intentions are. It’s not a secret we’re interested in radicalized individuals.” (Jensen did not respond to emailed questions from the Intercept.)

Jensen helped design a new program for St. Paul–a two-year initiative called the African Immigrant Muslim Coordinated Outreach Program, which was funded in 2009 with a $670,000 grant from the Justice Department.

The outreach push would help police identify gang members or extremists, using “criteria that will stand up to public and legal scrutiny,” according to the proposal submitted to the Justice Department. “The effort of identifying the targets will increase law enforcement’s ability to maintain up-to-date intelligence on these offenders, alert team members to persons who are deserving of additional investigative efforts and will serve as an enhanced intelligence system,” the proposal reads. The Center for Homeland Defense and Security, in the 2009 interview with Jensen, characterized it as “developing databases to track at-risk youth who may warrant follow-up contact and investigation by law enforcement.”

Asad Zaman, executive director of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, said that his organization got funding through the program to hire a police liaison. They held meetings once or twice a month for two years, usually involving 20 or so community members and a few local cops. “The officers talked about drug enforcement and gangs and recruitment and domestic violence. Everyone loved it when they brought their bomb-sniffing robot once,” he recalled.

He said he was not told about an intelligence component, though he had been asked to keep track of attendees at outreach meetings. “Several times [the police department] asked me whether that was possible to turn over the list of people at the programs, and I said, ‘It ain’t gonna happen,’” Zaman said.

Steve Linders, a St. Paul Police spokesman, said that “the intelligence aspect never came to fruition. The program evolved away from that.” He said that they would sometimes pass information that community members brought to their attention to the FBI, but that was the extent of the bureau’s involvement.

Linders said that people were not required to sign in to outreach meetings and there was no list of people who refused to participate, as originally proposed. “It was a conscious decision,” not to follow the plan laid out in the grant application, Linders said. “We frankly got more out of the program when we viewed it more as a way to get [community groups] resources and get their trust and partnership,” he said.

For the Brennan Center’s Price, the shifting description just underlines how such programs can mislead the public. “I’m glad to hear they appear to have had a change of heart,” he said, “but it would be in everybody’s interest to clarify at the outset that they are collecting information for intelligence purposes, or that they are not.”

The program “still raises questions for me,” Price added. “What led them to at first propose intelligence gathering, and then do an about face?”

***

Around the same time that St. Paul developed its program, the FBI was leading a parallel push to leverage community outreach for intelligence. In 2009, it launched “Specialized Community Outreach Teams,” which would “strategically expand outreach to the Somali community to address counterterrorism-related issues” in Minneapolis and several other cities around the country. Then-FBI director Robert Mueller described the teams as part of an effort “to develop trust, address concerns, and dispel myths” about the FBI.

In an internal memo obtained by the Brennan Center, however, the teams were called a “paradigm shift,” allowing “FBI outreach to support operational programs.”

The co-mingling of intelligence and outreach missions would appear to run afoul of the FBI’s own guidelines for community engagement, the 2013 version of which state that officers must maintain “appropriate separation of operational and outreach efforts.”

The FBI would not say if the “Specialized Community Outreach Teams” (which have ended) would be allowed under the new guidance, though in a statement, the FBI said the guidance “does not restrict coordination with operational divisions to obtain a better understanding of the various violations (i.e. terrorism, drugs, human trafficking, white collar crime, etc.) which may be impacting communities.”

“If the guidance would allow this program to continue, then it just confirms that it’s full of loopholes,” said Price, of the Brennan Center.

This isn’t the first FBI outreach program to raise these concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union has documented cases in recent years in San Francisco and San Jose where federal agents visited mosques and attended Ramadan dinners in the name of outreach, all the while keeping records on the participants.

Some of the programs were well-meaning attempts at educating Islamic leaders about the threat of hate crimes, but nonetheless ended up collecting private information, according to Mike German, a former FBI agent who worked on this issue for the ACLU (he is now also with the Brennan Center). In other cases, “FBI agents were going out with outreach officers or mimicking community outreach to exploit it for intelligence purposes,” he said.

Lori Saroya, until recently executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota, said that people weren’t always aware of their rights when faced with outreach visits. “We had cases of people inviting FBI agents in for tea or to have dinner, not knowing they didn’t have to let them in,” she said.

It’s this precedent that gives pause to critics of a new White House initiative to “counter violent extremism.” Though it is ostensibly aimed at extremists of all stripes, the outreach push has largely framed the involvement of Islamic community groups as key to helping authorities “disrupt homegrown terrorists, and to apprehend would-be violent extremists,” in Attorney General Eric Holder’s words.

Luger’s plan for the Minneapolis area is part of this initiative, run jointly between the Justice Department, National Counterterrorism Center, and the Department of Homeland Security. Los Angeles and Boston are the other pilot cities. Details about the undertaking are still vague, though the attacks in Paris this month refocused attention on the issue, and the White House abruptly scheduled a summit on the topic for February (it was postponed last fall, without explanation.)

German is doubtful about the prospects. “Countering violent extremism” is a relatively young science, and he points to studies that have failed to identify predictable indicators of what makes someone decide to commit ideologically motivated violence.

Pumping resources into underserved communities is great, says German, but some of these programs may end up just alienating the communities they are intended to work with. “It suggests that the entire community is a threat, or a potential threat, and something to be managed,” he said.

Email the author: cora.currier@theintercept.com

BY CORA CURRIER @coracurrier 01/21/2015

Find this story at 21 January 2015

Copyright firstlook.org/theintercept/

The Justice Department on Wednesday issued a press release trumpeting its latest success in disrupting a domestic terrorism plot, announcing that “the Joint Terrorism Task Force has arrested a Cincinnati-area man for a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol and kill government officials.” The alleged would-be terrorist is 20-year-old Christopher Cornell (above), who is unemployed, lives at home, spends most of his time playing video games in his bedroom, still addresses his mother as “Mommy” and regards his cat as his best friend; he was described as “a typical student” and “quiet but not overly reserved” by the principal of the local high school he graduated in 2012.

The affidavit filed by an FBI investigative agent alleges Cornell had “posted comments and information supportive of [ISIS] through Twitter accounts.” The FBI learned about Cornell from an unnamed informant who, as the FBI put it, “began cooperating with the FBI in order to obtain favorable treatment with respect to his criminal exposure on an unrelated case.” Acting under the FBI’s direction, the informant arranged two in-person meetings with Cornell where they allegedly discussed an attack on the Capitol, and the FBI says it arrested Cornell to prevent him from carrying out the attack.

Family members say Cornell converted to Islam just six months ago and claimed he began attending a small local mosque. Yet The Cincinnati Enquirer could not find a single person at that mosque who had ever seen him before, and noted that a young, white, recent convert would have been quite conspicuous at a mosque largely populated by “immigrants from West Africa,” many of whom “speak little or no English.”

The DOJ’s press release predictably generated an avalanche of scary media headlines hailing the FBI. CNN: “FBI says plot to attack U.S. Capitol was ready to go.” MSNBC: “US terror plot foiled by FBI arrest of Ohio man.” Wall St. Journal: “Ohio Man Charged With Plotting ISIS-Inspired Attack on U.S. Capitol.”

Just as predictably, political officials instantly exploited the news to justify their powers of domestic surveillance. House Speaker John Boehner claimed yesterday that “the National Security Agency’s snooping powers helped stop a plot to attack the Capitol and that his colleagues need to keep that in mind as they debate whether to renew the law that allows the government to collect bulk information from its citizens.” He warned: “We live in a dangerous country, and we get reminded every week of the dangers that are out there.”

The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots.

First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups.

They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target.

Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked. As AP noted last night, “defense arguments have repeatedly failed with judges, and the stings have led to many convictions.”

Consider the truly remarkable (yet not aberrational) 2011 prosecution of James Cromitie, an impoverished African-American Muslim convert who had expressed anti-Semitic views but, at the age of 45, had never evinced any inclination to participate in a violent attack. For eight months, the FBI used an informant – one who was on the hook for another crime and whom the FBI was paying – to try to persuade Cromitie to agree to join a terror plot which the FBI had concocted. And for eight months, he adamantly refused. Only when they dangled a payment of $250,000 in front of him right as he lost his job did he finally assent, causing the FBI to arrest him. The DOJ trumpeted the case as a major terrorism arrest, obtained a prosecution and sent him to prison for 25 years.

The federal judge presiding over his case, Colleen McMahon, repeatedly lambasted the government for wholly manufacturing the plot. When sentencing him to decades in prison, she said Cromitie “was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own,” and that it was the FBI which “created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true.” She added: “only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”

In her written ruling upholding the conviction, Judge McMahon noted that Cromitie “had successfully resisted going too far for eight months,” and agreed only after “the Government dangled what had to be almost irresistible temptation in front of an impoverished man from what I have come (after literally dozens of cases) to view as the saddest and most dysfunctional community in the Southern District of New York.” It was the FBI’s own informant, she wrote, who “was the prime mover and instigator of all the criminal activity that occurred.” She then wrote (emphasis added):

As it turns out, the Government did absolutely everything that the defense predicted in its previous motion to dismiss the indictment. The Government indisputably “manufactured” the crimes of which defendants stand convicted. The Government invented all of the details of the scheme – many of them, such as the trip to Connecticut and the inclusion of Stewart AFB as a target, for specific legal purposes of which the defendants could not possibly have been aware (the former gave rise to federal jurisdiction and the latter mandated a twenty-five year minimum sentence). The Government selected the targets. The Government designed and built the phony ordnance that the defendants planted (or planned to plant) at Government-selected targets. The Government provided every item used in the plot: cameras, cell phones, cars, maps and even a gun. The Government did all the driving (as none of the defendants had a car or a driver’s license). The Government funded the entire project. And the Government, through its agent, offered the defendants large sums of money, contingent on their participation in the heinous scheme.

Additionally, before deciding that the defendants (particularly Cromitie, who was in their sights for nine months) presented any real danger, the Government appears to have done minimal due diligence, relying instead on reports from its Confidential Informant, who passed on information about Cromitie information that could easily have been verified (or not verified, since much of it was untrue), but that no one thought it necessary to check before offering a jihadist opportunity to a man who had no contact with any extremist groups and no history of anything other than drug crimes.

On another occasion, Judge McMahon wrote: “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromitie could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved. And if by some chance he had, he would not have had the slightest idea how to make it happen.” She added that while “Cromitie, who was desperately poor, accepted meals and rent money from [the informant], he repeatedly backed away from his violent statements when it came time to act on them,” and that “only when the offers became outrageously high–and when Cromitie was particularly vulnerable to them, because he had lost his job–did he finally succumb.”

This is pre-emptory prosecution: targeting citizens not for their criminal behavior but for their political views. It’s an attempt by the U.S. Government to anticipate who will become a criminal at some point in the future based on their expressed political opinions – not unlike the dystopian premise of Minority Report – and then exploiting the FBI’s vast financial, organizational, and even psychological resources, along with the individuals’ vulnerabilities, to make it happen.

In 2005, federal appellate judge A. Wallace Tashima – the first Japanese-American appointed to the federal bench, who was imprisoned in an U.S. internment camp – vehemently dissented from one of the worst such prosecutions and condemned these FBI cases as “the unsettling and untoward consequences of the government’s use of anticipatory prosecution as a weapon in the ‘war on terrorism.’”

There are countless similar cases where the FBI triumphantly disrupts its own plots, causing people to be imprisoned as terrorists who would not and could not have acted on their own. Trevor Aaronson has comprehensively covered what amounts to the FBI’s own domestic terror network, and has reported that “nearly half [of all DOJ terrorism] prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violation.” He documents “49 [terrorism] defendants [who] participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.” In 2012, Petra Bartosiewicz in The Nation reviewed the post-9/11 body of terrorism cases and concluded:

Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.

The U.S. Government has been aggressively pressuring its allies to adopt the same “sting” tactics against their own Muslim citizens (and like most War on Terror abuses, this practice is now fully seeping into non-terrorism domestic law: in a drug smuggling prosecution last year, a federal judge condemned the Drug Enforcement Agency for luring someone into smuggling cocaine, saying that “the government’s investigation deployed techniques that generated a wholly new crime for the sake of pressing criminal charges against” the defendant).

Many of the key facts in this latest case are still unknown, but there are ample reasons to treat this case with substantial skepticism. Though he had brushes with the law as a minor arguably indicative of anger issues, the 20-year-old Cornell had no history of engaging in politically-motivated violence (he disrupted a local 9/11 memorial ceremony last year by yelling a 9/11 Truth slogan, but was not arrested). There is no evidence he had any contact with any overseas or domestic terrorist operatives (the informant vaguely claims that Cornell claims he “had been in contact with persons overseas” but ultimately told the informant that “he did not think he would receive specific authorization to conduct a terrorist attack in the United States”).

Cornell’s father accused the FBI of responsibility for the plot, saying of his son: “He’s a mommy’s boy. His best friend is his cat Mikey. He still calls his mother ‘Mommy.’” His father said that “he might be 20, but he was more like a 16-year-old kid who never left the house.” He added that his son had only $1,200 in his bank account, and that the money to purchase guns could only have come from the FBI. It was the FBI, he said, who were “taking him somewhere, and they were filling his head with a lot of this garbage.”

The mosque with which Cornell was supposedly associated is itself tiny, a non-profit that reported a meager $115,000 in revenue last year. It has no history of producing terrorism suspects or violent radicals.

Whatever else is true, a huge dose of scrutiny and skepticism should be applied to the FBI’s claims. Media organizations certainly should not be trumpeting this as some dangerous terror plot from which the FBI heroically saved us all, nor telling their viewers that the FBI “uncovered” a plot that it actually created, nor trying to depict it (as MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki did in the pictured segment) as part of some larger plot of international terror groups, at least not without further evidence (and, just by the way, Mr. Kornacki: Anwar Awlaki was not “the leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen,” no matter how much repeating that false claim might help President Obama, who ordered that U.S. citizen killed with no due process). Nor should politicians like John Boehner be permitted without challenge to claim that this scary plot shows how crucial is the Patriot Act and the NSA domestic spying program in keeping us safe.
Having crazed loners get guns and seek to shoot people is, of course, a threat. But so is allowing the FBI to manufacture terror plots: in the process keeping fear levels about terrorism completely inflated, along with its own surveillance powers and budget. Ohio is a major recipient of homeland security spending: it “has four fusion centers, more than any other state except California, New York and Texas. Ohio also ranks fourth in the nation (tying New York) with four FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs).”

Something has to be done to justify all that terrorism spending. For all those law enforcement agents with little to do, why not sit around and manufacture plots to justify those expenditures, giving a boost to their pro-surveillance ideology to boot? Media outlets have a responsibility to investigate the FBI’s claims, not mindlessly repeat them while parading their alarmed faces and scary graphics.

Email the authors: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com, fishman@theintercept.com
BY GLENN GREENWALD AND ANDREW FISHMAN @ggreenwald@AndrewDFish 01/16/2015

Find this story at 16 January 2015

Copyright firstlook.org/theintercept/

President Bashar al-Assad on anti-IS strikes: “We knew about the campaign before it started, but we didn’t know about the details”

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad says his government is receiving messages from the US-led coalition battling the jihadist group, Islamic State.
Mr Assad told the BBC that there had been no direct co-operation since air strikes began in Syria in September.
But third parties – among them Iraq – were conveying “information”.
The US National Security Council has denied co-ordinating with the Syrian government.
A spokesperson told the BBC that there has been no “advance notification to the Syrians at a military level”.
‘Childish story’
Mr Assad also denied that Syrian government forces had been dropping barrel bombs indiscriminately on rebel-held areas, killing thousands of civilians.
He dismissed the allegation as a “childish story”, in a wide-ranging interview with BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen in Damascus.
“We have bombs, missiles and bullets… There is [are] no barrel bombs, we don’t have barrels.”
Our correspondent says that his denial is highly controversial as the deaths of civilians in barrel bomb attacks are well-documented.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond condemned the president’s comments and said that the Syrian government had used crude and indiscriminate weapons against its own people.
He added: “Assad is deluded or lying when he says his military are not murdering hundreds of innocent civilians with the use of barrel bombs.”
line
Analysis: Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East Editor
Mr Assad’s many enemies will dismiss his view of the war.
For them, he has been in charge of a killing machine that has been chewing Syrians up and spitting them out.
As the war enters its fifth year, the barrel bomb has become the most notorious weapon in the regime’s arsenal.
Two or three years ago, I saw the results of what must have been one in Douma, a suburb of Damascus that has been held by rebels since close to the beginning of the war.
Mr Assad insisted that the Syrian army would never use them in a place where people lived.
“I know about the army. They use bullets, missiles and bombs. I haven’t heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots.”
It was a flippant response; the mention of cooking pots was either callousness, an awkward attempt at humour, or a sign that Mr Assad has become so disconnected from what is happening that he feels overwhelmed.
Bowen: Assad defends conduct of war
Assad interview: Key excerpts
Watch Assad interview in full
People search under rubble at a site hit by what activists said were barrel bombs in al-Halek neighbourhood of Aleppo, 1 February 2015.
Aleppo has continually been hit by barrel bombs, activists say
line
Mr Assad’s denial of indiscriminate bombings has also been strongly criticised on social media. Arabic twitter users have been posting photos of the destruction of the rebel-held Douma suburb of Damascus by Syrian government airstrikes.
The hashtag “#Duma_is_being_exterminated” was used over 150,000 times in 24 hours.
‘No dialogue’
Many US-led coalition states have denied co-operating with Mr Assad, whom they have urged to step down since an uprising against his rule erupted in 2011.
But the Islamic State’s (IS) seizure of large parts of Syria and Iraq in the past year and its creation of a “caliphate” has prompted officials to consider working with the Syrian leader to combat the group.
Despite this, Mr Assad ruled out joining the international coalition that is seeking to “degrade and destroy” IS.
Jordanian air force F-16 takes off to strike Islamic State positions in the Syrian city of Raqqa (5 February 2015)
The Jordanian air force has stepped up strikes on IS positions in Syria since the killing of one of its pilots
“No, definitely we cannot and we don’t have the will and we don’t want, for one simple reason – because we cannot be in an alliance with countries which support terrorism,” he said.
He did not give details, but the Syrian government routinely portrays both jihadist militants and members of the political opposition as “terrorists”.
Mr Assad stressed that he was not against co-operating over IS with other countries. But he would refuse to talk with American officials, he said, “because they don’t talk to anyone, unless he’s a puppet”, an apparent reference to Western- and Gulf Arab-backed opposition leaders.
“And they easily trample over international law, which is about our sovereignty now, so they don’t talk to us, we don’t talk to them.”
Jaish al-Islam fighter training in eastern Damascus (12 January 2015)
President Assad dismissed efforts by the US to train and equip a “moderate” rebel force to fight IS militants
The president did concede, however, that his government had been receiving information indirectly via third parties about sorties by US and Arab warplanes over Syria.
“Sometimes, they convey a message, a general message, but there’s nothing tactical,” he said, adding: “There is no dialogue. There’s, let’s say, information, but not dialogue.”
Mr Assad dismissed efforts by the US to train and equip a “moderate” rebel force to fight IS militants on the ground in Syria, saying it was a “pipe-dream”. He argued that there were no moderates, only extremists from IS and al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, al-Nusra Front.
‘No indiscriminate weapons’
Elaborating on his denial of the use of barrel bombs, Mr Assad said: “I know about the army. They use bullets, missiles and bombs. I haven’t heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots.”
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Media caption
What is a barrel bomb? – in 30 seconds
He added: “There are no indiscriminate weapons. When you shoot you aim, and when you shoot, when you aim, you aim at terrorists in order to protect civilians… You cannot have war without casualties.”
Barrel bombs are large cylindrical metal containers filled with explosive and shrapnel.
Human rights activists say they are typically dropped from helicopters – which only government forces are believed to operate – at high altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft fire. At that distance, it is impossible to target with precision, they add.
Mr Assad similarly denied that government forces had used chlorine as a weapon, despite investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons supporting claims that at least 13 people had been killed in a series of attacks by helicopters on three villages last year.
The president also defended the besieging of rebel-held areas across Syria, which activists say has had the effect of starving civilian residents.
“In most of the areas where the rebels take over, the civilians fled and come to our areas,” he said. “So in most of the areas that we encircle and attack, are only filled with militants.”

10 February 2015

Find this story at 10 February 2015

Copyright © 2015 BBC

OTTAWA, Jan 13 (Reuters) – The five nations that make up the world’s leading intelligence-sharing network will meet in London next month to confer on strategies to fight terrorism in the wake of the Paris attacks, Canada said on Tuesday.

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said the so-called Five Eyes – the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand – had scheduled a meeting for Jan 22.

A Canadian government official later said the five would actually meet in London some time in February.

Blaney’s comments were unusual, since members of the Five Eyes network rarely talk about its activity.

“We’re going to have a meeting with our Five Eyes allies in London … and this is serious stuff. Terrorism will be there” on the agenda, he told CTV television.

U.S. intelligence officials have shared with their French counterparts information related to the travel history of those suspected of involvement in the Paris attacks, in which a total of 17 people died, a White House spokesman said on Tuesday.

Blaney gave no more details of the London meeting, save to say that U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson would be present.

Separately, the Canadian government official said the London event had been scheduled before the Paris attacks.

“The Five Eyes regularly meet to discuss shared concerns and approaches,” he said.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that the fight against terrorism would be “a major focus” of the meeting but declined to give more details.

The five nations that comprise the group divide the world into eavesdropping target sectors and share the results. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Grant McCool and Lisa Shumaker)

Source: Reuters – Wed, 14 Jan 2015 01:37 GMT
By David Ljunggren

Find this story at 17 January 2015

Copyright © 2015 Thomson Reuters Foundation

Iraq’s vice-president for reconciliation says air strikes alongside failure to reconcile Shias and Sunnis may drive more tribes to join jihadis
Bombing in Kobani, Syria

From the air, things appear to be going well for the US-led coalition that has dropped more than 1,700 bombs on Islamic State (Isis) targets in Iraq and Syria, scattering the terror group in some areas and slowing its momentum in others.

But the view on the ground tells a different story, officials and tribal leaders in Iraq say. The absence of a political process to accompany the air strikes is instead driving Sunni communities to consider allying with Isis, they claim, especially in sensitive areas around Baghdad.

Iraq’s vice-president for reconciliation, Iyad Allawi, said a lack of a political process between the Shias who dominate the country’s power base, and disenfranchised Sunnis was a “grave mistake” that could mean the air attacks end up achieving little.

“The whole strategy needs to be revisited and readdressed and the international allies should be part of this,” Allawi told the Guardian. “People are asking me what will come after Isis. What would be the destiny of [local] people? Are they going to be accused of supporting or defeating Isis? Would they be accused of being Ba’athists? It is going to be really difficult for them to engage without reconciliation.”

Allawi said the areas surrounding Baghdad – where Isis had made inroads even before the group overran Iraq’s second city, Mosul, last June – are now increasingly unstable and vulnerable.

“The Baghdad belt demonstrates the lack of strategy and reconciliation. There is widespread ethnic cleansing there, militias are roaming the areas. Scores and scores of people … have been expelled from their areas and they can’t go back because of the dominance of the militias.”

A senior Iraqi official, Dr Hisham al-Hashimi, who advises the government on Isis, agreed. “The areas around Baghdad are suffering from a lot of sectarian violence and the tribes there have started to reflect on the idea of joining Isis. The tribes believe that there are moves to deport them from their lands.”

Samarra to the north of the Iraqi capital and Sunni areas just to the south remain tense and dangerous, despite more than seven months of air strikes that have supported the embattled Iraqi military and the large number of Shia militias that fight alongside it.

Controlling both areas is considered vital to establishing control of Iraq. Two other senior Iraqi officials contacted by the Guardian during the week claim the security forces’ relative control now would fast melt away if tribes threw their weight behind the insurgency.

Tribal leaders themselves echo those fears, insisting deep distrust between them and the government could push some tribes to opt for the clout of Isis over moribund political moves.

“The tribes are divided this time on defending the government, said Anbar-based tribal leader Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Bahari. “We don’t have faith in the government especially because they are mainly dealing with the sheikhs of tribes who fled years ago and are staying in Amman or Dubai for fear of their lives.

“The government didn’t make a mistake once or twice. They kept repeating the same mistake over and over and the government didn’t deliver any of their promises till now. Why would we trust them?

“The situation around Baghdad is fragile. Most of the areas are under Isis. The situation in Abu Ghraib [on Baghdad’s western outskirts] is very fragile and the army will probably lose it in any day.”

Hashimi said the air strikes both in Iraq and Syria were of limited use: “The Americans have used three tactics: creating obstacles and defence; attacking weapons storages and oil refineries to cut Isis finances; and attacking the structure of the organisation. They haven’t done much to the latter and Isis have started adapting to the American strategy which has reduced the damage to them.

“The American advisers … are embarrassed for not delivering their promises to the Sunnis. Relatively speaking, the Americans are losing.”

US officials in Baghdad have spent much of the past three months trying to prevent a further slide away from state control. Officials have rekindled some links with tribal leaders who led a successful counter insurgency at the height of the civil war in 2007 against Isis’s predecessor, the Islamic State of Iraq.

That collaboration was dubbed “the Awakening” and using popular support is again central to plans to drive Isis away from towns and cities it occupies. Washington announced on Friday that it would send 400 troops to train Syrian rebels to fight against Isis.

Now though, Iraqi tribes are resisting taking the lead on another Awakening, believing the last one gave them few long-term benefits. While the revolt did restore tribal control over Anbar province, the toll in blood and treasure was high. More importantly, it did nothing to change the balance of power with Baghdad, which increasingly saw the Sunnis of Anbar as a fifth column – a view that has led some Sunni communities to join the revitalised insurgency.

Isis insiders say the group retains strategic control over the Euphrates valley area, which stretches north-west from Anbar to the Syrian border. In this area, many of the weapons it looted from abandoned Iraqi Army depots last June and from Syrian bases it has also over-run, are stored in small towns and villages.

It has less success, however, in the far north of the country, where Irbil was briefly threatened last summer and where more than 300 of the 900 or more strikes to have been launched inside Iraq have hit.

Across the border in Syria, the Kurdish town of Kobani near the Turkish border has been struck by jets close to 600 times – accounting for the vast majority of attacks in the country. Kobani, however, remains contested between Kurdish militias and Isis, who have lost an estimated 400 fighters trying to seize the town.

“The horror which will come up after liberating areas from Isis is too enormous if we don’t care about what happens next,” said Allawi. “We have to find jobs for these people, by reconstructing the areas, by giving people rights to go back and support their provinces. We shouldn’t create new armed people in the streets.”

Martin Chulov in Beirut
Sunday 18 January 2015 18.06 GMT Last modified on Monday 19 January 2015 00.02 GMT
Additional reporting by Mais al-Baya’a

Find this story at 18 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

Thirteen years ago, the intelligence community concluded in a 93-page classified document used to justify the invasion of Iraq that it lacked “specific information” on “many key aspects” of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But that’s not what top Bush administration officials said during their campaign to sell the war to the American public. Those officials, citing the same classified document, asserted with no uncertainty that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, concealing a vast chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and posing an immediate and grave threat to US national security.

Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had “overstated” its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD program were “not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.” But that underlying intelligence reporting — contained in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to justify the invasion — has remained shrouded in mystery until now.

Related: ‘Leading the Fight Against the Islamic State: The Battle For Iraq, Dispatch 10’

The CIA released a copy of the NIE in 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but redacted virtually all of it, citing a threat to national security. Then last year, John Greenewald, who operates The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified government documents, asked the CIA to take another look at the October 2002 NIE to determine whether any additional portions of it could be declassified.

The agency responded to Greenewald this past January and provided him with a new version of the NIE, which he shared exclusively with VICE News, that restores the majority of the prewar Iraq intelligence that has eluded historians, journalists, and war critics for more than a decade. (Some previously redacted portions of the NIE had previously been disclosed in congressional reports.)

‘The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment.’
For the first time, the public can now read the hastily drafted CIA document [pdf below] that led Congress to pass a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, a costly war launched March 20, 2003 that was predicated on “disarming” Iraq of its (non-existent) WMD, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and “freeing” the Iraqi people.

A report issued by the government funded think-tank RAND Corporation last December titled “Blinders, Blunders and Wars” said the NIE “contained several qualifiers that were dropped…. As the draft NIE went up the intelligence chain of command, the conclusions were treated increasingly definitively.”

An example of that: According to the newly declassified NIE, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq “probably has renovated a [vaccine] production plant” to manufacture biological weapons “but we are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed.” The NIE also said Hussein did not have “sufficient material” to manufacture any nuclear weapons and “the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.”

But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”

Related: White House Considers Declassifying 28 Pages on Alleged Saudi Government Role in 9/11

One of the most significant parts of the NIE revealed for the first time is the section pertaining to Iraq’s alleged links to al Qaeda. In September 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed the US had “bulletproof” evidence linking Hussein’s regime to the terrorist group.

“We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad,” Rumsfeld said. “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.”

But the NIE said its information about a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq was based on “sources of varying reliability” — like Iraqi defectors — and it was not at all clear that Hussein had even been aware of a relationship, if in fact there were one.

“As with much of the information on the overall relationship, details on training and support are second-hand,” the NIE said. “The presence of al-Qa’ida militants in Iraq poses many questions. We do not know to what extent Baghdad may be actively complicit in this use of its territory for safehaven and transit.”

The declassified NIE provides details about the sources of some of the suspect intelligence concerning allegations Iraq trained al Qaeda operatives on chemical and biological weapons deployment — sources like War on Terror detainees who were rendered to secret CIA black site prisons, and others who were turned over to foreign intelligence services and tortured. Congress’s later investigation into prewar Iraq intelligence concluded that the intelligence community based its claims about Iraq’s chemical and biological training provided to al Qaeda on a single source.

“Detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — who had significant responsibility for training — has told us that Iraq provided unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qai’ida members beginning in December 2000,” the NIE says. “He has claimed, however, that Iraq never sent any chemical, biological, or nuclear substances — or any trainers — to al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan.”

Al-Libi was the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which the Taliban closed prior to 9/11 because al-Libi refused to turn over control to Osama bin Laden.

Last December, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified summary of its so-called Torture Report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. A footnote stated that al-Libi, a Libyan national, “reported while in [redacted] custody that Iraq was supporting al-Qa’ida and providing assistance with chemical and biological weapons.”

Related: Senate torture report finds the CIA was less effective and more brutal than anyone knew

“Some of this information was cited by Secretary [of State Colin] Powell in his speech to the United Nations, and was used as a justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” the Senate torture report said. “Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim after he was rendered to CIA custody on February [redacted] 2003, claiming that he had been tortured by the [redacted], and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear.”

Al-Libi reportedly committed suicide in a Libyan prison in 2009, about a month after human rights investigators met with him.

The NIE goes on to say that “none of the [redacted] al-Qa’ida members captured during [the Afghanistan war] report having been trained in Iraq or by Iraqi trainers elsewhere, but given al-Qa’ida’s interest over the years in training and expertise from outside sources, we cannot discount reports of such training entirely.”

All told, this is the most damning language in the NIE about Hussein’s links to al Qaeda: While the Iraqi president “has not endorsed al-Qa’ida’s overall agenda and has been suspicious of Islamist movements in general, apparently he has not been averse to some contacts with the organization.”

The NIE suggests that the CIA had sources within the media to substantiate details about meetings between al Qaeda and top Iraqi government officials held during the 1990s and 2002 — but some were not very reliable. “Several dozen additional direct or indirect meetings are attested to by less reliable clandestine and press sources over the same period,” the NIE says.

The RAND report noted, “The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment.”

The NIE also restores another previously unknown piece of “intelligence”: a suggestion that Iraq was possibly behind the letters laced with anthrax sent to news organizations and senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy a week after the 9/11 attacks. The attacks killed five people and sickened 17 others.

“We have no intelligence information linking Iraq to the fall 2001 attacks in the United States, but Iraq has the capability to produce spores of Bacillus anthracis — the causative agent of anthrax — similar to the dry spores used in the letters,” the NIE said. “The spores found in the Daschle and Leahy letters are highly purified, probably requiring a high level of skill and expertise in working with bacterial spores. Iraqi scientists could have such expertise,” although samples of a biological agent Iraq was known to have used as an anthrax simulant “were not as pure as the anthrax spores in the letters.”

Paul Pillar, a former veteran CIA analyst for the Middle East who was in charge of coordinating the intelligence community’s assessments on Iraq, told VICE news that “the NIE’s bio weapons claims” was based on unreliable sources such as Ahmad Chalabi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group supported by the US.

“There was an insufficient critical skepticism about some of the source material,” he now says about the unredacted NIE. “I think there should have been agnosticism expressed in the main judgments. It would have been a better paper if it were more carefully drafted in that sort of direction.”

But Pillar, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, added that the Bush administration had already made the decision to go to war in Iraq, so the NIE “didn’t influence [their] decision.” Pillar added that he was told by congressional aides that only a half-dozen senators and a few House members read past the NIE’s five-page summary.

David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, told Frontline that the intelligence community did a “poor job” on the NIE, “probably the worst of the modern NIE’s, partly explained by the pressure, but more importantly explained by the lack of information they had. And it was trying to drive towards a policy conclusion where the information just simply didn’t support it.”

The most controversial part of the NIE, which has been picked apart hundreds of times over the past decade and has been thoroughly debunked, pertained to a section about Iraq’s attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. The Bush administration claimed that this was evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated at the time on CNN that the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs,” and that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

The version of the NIE released in 2004 redacted the aluminum tubes section in its entirety. But the newly declassified assessment unredacts a majority of it and shows that the intelligence community was unsure why “Saddam is personally interested in the procurement of aluminum tubes.” The US Department of Energy concluded that the dimensions of the aluminum tubes were “consistent with applications to rocket motors” and “this is the more likely end use.” The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research also disagreed with the intelligence community’s assertions that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

The CIA’s 25-page unclassified summary of the NIE released in 2002 did not contain the State or Energy Departments’ dissent.

“Apart from being influenced by policymakers’ desires, there were several other reasons that the NIE was flawed,” the RAND study concluded. “Evidence on mobile biological labs, uranium ore purchases from Niger, and unmanned-aerial-vehicle delivery systems for WMDs all proved to be false. It was produced in a hurry. Human intelligence was scarce and unreliable. While many pieces of evidence were questionable, the magnitude of the questionable evidence had the effect of making the NIE more convincing and ominous. The basic case that Saddam had WMDs seemed more plausible to analysts than the alternative case that he had destroyed them. And analysts knew that Saddam had a history of deception, so evidence against Saddam’s possession of WMDs was often seen as deception.”

Related: ‘Primary Sources,’ the VICE News FOIA blog

According to the latest figures compiled by Iraq Body Count, to date more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, although other sources say the casualties are twice as high. More than 4,000 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been injured and maimed. The war has cost US taxpayers more than $800 billion.

In an interview with VICE founder Shane Smith, Obama said the rise of the Islamic State was a direct result of the disastrous invasion.

“ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama said. “Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

By Jason Leopold
March 19, 2015 | 6:10 pm

Find this story at 19 March 2015

The documents

Copyright Vice.com

Retired Gen. Bilgin Balanlı, who was among the 236 suspects acquitted in the “Balyoz” (Sledgehammer) coup-plot case, has said the United States or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could have had a finger in the coup case.

The CIA or the U.S.’ “deep state” could have been involved in the case, recalling the testimony of a suspect, who said in 2010 he and a former deputy had picked up a sack full of documents in 2007 to be used in the Balyoz coup plot case from an American senator and a retired Turkish major in Istanbul and taken it to Ankara, according to Balanlı.

Balanlı said the alleged military documents, which became evidence and began the investigation, contained terms the Turkish army did not use and which were known to be used in the U.S. Army.

“For example, we do not use the word ‘ocean’ when we talk about our seas. The term ‘ocean’ was used in some places of the Balyoz coup plot plan. I think that they could have translated this from an American plan,” said Balanlı.

Balanlı, who was the only four-star general on active duty who was a suspect in the coup-plot case, was in line to be appointed to Chief of the Air Staff in August 2011 if he had not been arrested and sent to jail just two months before. He spent two years in jail and was forced to retire.

Balanlı said even though government officials now say they have been deceived about the case they believed they could gain political benefit from the plot case at the time.

“We can say the government perceived they could politically benefit from the case. Maybe both an opinion was formed and they believed the information given to them within the plot. They believed the plotters very much. Now they say they were deceived,” said Balanlı, adding this was a weakness for the Turkish Republic with all its institutions.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said March 19, during his first speech as commander-in-chief at the War Colleges Command, that the “parallel structure” of state officials sympathetic to U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen “misled and deceived” Turkey through the Ergenekon and Balyoz coup-plot cases, claiming he had personally objected to the arrest of top commanders and officers.

Stating he had identified a formation dubbed the “parallel structure” by the government as a “gang” when he lodged a petition to the court during his first trial, Balanlı said it would be “naïve” not to think the “parallel structure” had also stationed its own people inside the army, as some of the documents about the suspects in the case contained information people outside of the military could not have known.

Balanlı said they had struggled on their own to tell the truth to the nation, disclaiming the General Staff and Chief of General Staff Necdet Özel’s contributions to winning the case.

“We made the struggle to enlighten the public and made the nation see the truth. If there is any honor in this matter then it is the honor of the people who have showed the courage to stand by us and the truth. I do not believe the General Staff has [made] any contributions to this,” said Balanlı.

April/06/2015
Cansu Çamlıbel
ISTANBUL

Find this story at 6 April 2015

Copyright hurriyetdailynews.com

A recent decision by a public prosecutor’s office to drop a five-year case investigating top-secret documents found at a Turkish military headquarters has revived suspicions that now-defunct Gladio-type illegal structures from the Cold War years within NATO might still be alive in this member of the alliance.
Counter-Guerrilla was the name of the Turkish branch of Operation Gladio, a clandestine anti-communist initiative within NATO backed by the US during the Cold War years to counter also a possible Soviet invasion at the time.
There is a general belief that although Gladio-type illegal structures were disbanded in all NATO countries after the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, ending the Cold War, the counter-guerilla structure has not been purged in Turkey.
Early last week, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office dropped an investigation initiated in 2009 over allegations that a group of officers within the Turkish military was planning to assassinate Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, claiming that there was no such plot. So, it also dropped the investigation into findings from the “Cosmic rooms” of the Turkish Armed Forces’ (TSK) Tactical Mobilization Group (STK), where top secret documents said to be related to the Turkish military’s operational plans were kept.
As part of the earlier investigation, a Turkish prosecutor and judge conducted searches in 2009 and 2010 at the STK, marking the first time that civilian prosecutors and judges had entered a top-secret section of a military facility, even though this was initially met with great resistance by the military.
However, as Mustafa Bilgili, the prosecutor of the investigation at the time, said in a recent interview, he was allowed to conduct searches to trace the alleged assassination attempt only in limited sections of the cosmic rooms.
According to the March 12 editions of the Cumhuriyet and Milliyet dailies, quoting excerpts from the investigation dropped recently by the prosecutor’s office, the examinations of findings from even the limited areas of the STK have been such as to prompt us to draw conclusions that the Turkish military is still involved in designing secret plans over counter-guerilla activities.
Both dailies published documents found during the search of the cosmic rooms which discuss how civilians can be mobilized against certain target nations as well as against groups inside the country. Civilians from every walk of life — lawyers, judges, journalists, mayors, governors, university rectors, student councils etc. — are categorized under different colors in accordance with their tasks of monitoring political parties, tariqats, minorities, political parties’ vote potential, as well as the creation of new guerilla units.
However, these details obtained from the investigation have not caused alarm or concern within society that the TSK might still be busying itself with internal subversive activities. Instead, for instance, the military released a statement last Friday saying that it would file a criminal complaint against the unauthorized persons who revealed the confidential documents that were obtained during the search of the cosmic rooms of the STK and later kept in the secure room of the courthouse.
Neither the government nor opposition parties has made any attempt to ask the military to explain the reasons behind possible plans recalling Gladio-type structures that might exist within the TSK.
Moreover, in its decision to drop the investigation, the chief public prosecutor’s office failed to unearth, among other things, then-prosecutor Bilgili’s decision to widen the investigation into alleged coup plot plans as well as unresolved murders. The office is also understood not to have probed the threats that Bilgili and a judge received at the time they were looking into the “cosmic case.”
It was not long ago — to be exact, back in November 2012 — when a parliamentary commission released a 145-page report urging both the government and the legislative assembly to take the necessary steps to prevent the repetition of military coups as well as other undemocratic activities.
The Coup and Memorandum Investigation Commission, for instance, said in its report that the STK of the General Staff has never been subjected to the inspection and control of civilian authority. “The documents relevant to unresolved murders in those cosmic rooms should be investigated and these institutions should be subjected to a thorough review,” Nimet Baş, a deputy from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), urged at the time.
At the time when this commission was set up and produced important conclusions as well as policy suggestions, the ruling AKP had not yet distanced itself from democratic governance, appearing to be firm on ending the military tutelage system that has hijacked Turkish democracy since the first coup of 1960. Today, however, Turkish democracy has further regressed under this same ruling party, making discussions on how to improve democracy — interrupted by three military coups — a thing of the past.
Now there is real concern that the government has, in fact, been sweeping the military’s secret reports — which might have a damaging effect on society — under the carpet.

LALE KEMAL
l.kemal@todayszaman.comLALE KEMAL
March 16, 2015, Monday

Find this story at 16 March 2015

© Feza Gazetecilik A.Ş. 2007

“CIA’s Graham Fuller: One of the early advocates of using Muslim Brotherhood & Gülen Cemaat to advance US foreign policy.”

The following is the translation of an interview with William Engdahl conducted by journalist Deniz Ülkütekin of Turkey’s Cumhuriyet:

As I read you started to research about Gulen Cemaat when you came to Turkey for a conference. What was the thing that attracted your interest about Gulen and his members?
WE: I am a geopolitical researcher and author now for more than thirty years. My prime theme is geopolitics or how power is organized in our world by whom, to what aim. When I was invited to Turkey on a speaking tour for one of my books, a Turkish journalist who since has become a trusted friend suggested if I wanted to understand what was going on in Turkey, a country I have long considered to have a far more positive role than she has played within NATO, I should look deeply into the Gülen Cemaat. That began a long process as I began to realize the deeper agenda behind the façade of Rumi that Gülen and his people project.
Our first knowledge about Gülen is, his struggle against communism via a foundation (which was a NATO agenda indeed). So could we say that Gülen and his CIA relationship started long ago?
WE: Yes, all evidence suggests that NATO Turkish Gladio networks picked up Gülen as a potentially useful asset years ago. As their agenda changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union, their role for Gülen changed as well and doors were opened for him to play that role.
So in a true sense we can say that the Gülen Cemaat is the nothing more than the projection of an idea from Langley Virginia CIA headquarters, an idea from essentially stupid people there who believed they could use him and they could abuse religion as a cover to advance their design for global control, what David Rockefeller calls One World Government.
Unlike the CIA’s Mujahideen Jihadists like Hekmatyar in Afghanistan or Naser Oric in Bosnia, the CIA decided to give Fethullah Gülen a radically different image. No blood-curdling, head-severing, human-heart-eating Jihadist. No, Fethullah Gülen was presented to the world as a man of “peace, love and brotherhood,” even managing to grab a photo Op with Pope John Paul II, which Gülen featured prominently on his website. The Gülen organization in the US hired one of Washington’s highest-paid Public Relations image experts, George W. Bush’s former campaign director, Karen Hughes, to massage his “moderate” Islam image.
The ideas and manipulations of the CIA and US State Department are collapsing everywhere today, but they are blinded by their own arrogance. Just look at their absurd mess they created with the neo-nazis in Ukraine.
As it’s a very conflicted subject, how do you certainly believe that Gülen and CIA work together?
WE: This is not merely my view but that of very knowledgeable Turkish analysts and even the former Turkish MIT senior figure, Osman Nuri Gundes, former FBI Turkish-American translator Sibel Edmonds, and others have documented his deep links to very senior CIA people such as Graham Fuller. When Gülen fled Turkey to avoid prosecution for treason in 1998, he chose not to go to any of perhaps a dozen Islamic countries which could have offered him asylum. He chose instead the United States. He did so with the help of the CIA. The US State Department tried to block a special “preference visa as an alien of extraordinary ability in the field of education” permanent visa status for Gülen, arguing he was basically a fraud with a fifth grade education and no special Islam scholar. Over the objections of the FBI, of the US State Department and of the US Department of Homeland Security, three former CIA operatives intervened and managed to secure a Green Card and permanent US residency for Gülen.
Intervention by three current or “former” CIA people–George Fidas, who was US Ambassador to Turkey and an ex CIA Deputy Director; Morton Abramowitz who was described as at least “informal” CIA, and CIA career man who spent time in Turkey, Graham E. Fuller. They got Gülen asylum in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. That certainly suggests a strong tie at the very least.
Was the relationship between Gulen and the CIA depending on both parties’ benefits? If so what were their benefits? How did CIA support Gulen to develop and grow his foundation?
WE: Yes, clearly. For the Gülen Cemaat it enabled a vast business empire to be created which gained more and more influence by placing its people inside the police, the courts and education ministry. He could build his recruiting schools across Central Asia with CIA support. In the USA and Europe, CIA-influenced media like CNN gave him beautiful free publicity to overcome opposition to open his schools across America. For the CIA it was one more tool to destroy not only an independent secular Kemalist Turkey, but to advance their Afghan drug trade worldwide and to use Gülen’s people to destabilize opponent regimes that CIA network in Washington, the “deep state” wanted to get rid of.
Sibel Edmonds, former FBI Turkish translator and “whistleblower,” named Abramowitz, along with Graham E. Fuller, as part of a dark cabal within the US Government that she discovered were using networks out of Turkey to advance a criminal “deep state” agenda across the Turkic world, from Istanbul into China. The network that she documented included significant involvement in heroin trafficking out of Afghanistan.
On retiring from the State Department, Abramowitz served on the board of the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and was a co-founder with George Soros of the International Crisis Group. Both the NED and International Crisis Group were implicated in various US Government-backed “color revolutions” since the 1990’s collapse of the Soviet Union, from Otpor in Serbia to the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the 2013-14 coup in Ukraine, to the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, to the 2011 Lotus Revolution in Tahrir Square in Egypt.
Graham E. Fuller had been immersed in the CIA’s activities in steering Mujahideen and other political Islamic organizations since the 1980’s. He spent 20 years as CIA operations officer in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, and was one of the CIA’s early advocates of using the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist organizations like Gülen Cemaat to advance US foreign policy.
How does CIA work via Gulen schools at Middle-Asia?
WE: First it should be noted that Russia moved swiftly to ban the Gülen schools when the CIA began the Chechyn terror in the 1990’s. In the 1980’s when the Iran-Contra scandal broke in Washington (a scheme authored by Fuller at CIA), he “retired” to work at the CIA and Pentagon-financed RAND think-tank. There, under RAND cover, Fuller was instrumental in developing the CIA strategy for building the Gülen Movement as a geopolitical force to penetrate former Soviet Central Asia. Among his RAND papers, Fuller wrote studies on Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, in Sudan, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Algeria. His books praise Gülen lavishly.
After the fall of the USSR, Fetullah Gülen’s cadre were sent to establish Gülen schools and Madrasses across newly-independent former Soviet states in Central Asia. It was a golden chance for the CIA, using the cover of Gülen religious schools, to send hundreds of CIA agents deep inside Central Asia the first time. In 1999 Fuller argued, “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Russians. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”
Gülen was named by one former FBI authoritative source as, “one of the main CIA operation figures in Central Asia and the Caucasus.” During the 1990’s the Gülen schools then growing up across Eurasia were providing a base for hundreds of CIA agents under cover of being “native-speaking English teachers.” Osman Nuri Gundes revealed that the Gülen movement “sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone in the 1990s.
Gulen migrated from Turkey to USA at 1999, 3 days after terrorist Kurdish movement leader Abdullah Ocalan was kidnapped and brought to Turkey. What did it mean? Could Gulen co-operate better with CIA when he moved USA?
WE: I think the CIA feared Gülen would end in prison and could be far more useful in US sanctuary where they could feed his image better and pump up his aura. Now clearly Gülen fears to return to Turkey even though he legally could. That says a lot.
What does Gulen Foundation do for the benefits of CIA inside Turkey and Middle-East?
WE: That would require a much longer discussion. What I find interesting is how a deep and now bitter split has emerged between Gülen Cemaat in Turkey and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I believe Erdogan began to pursue his own agenda and that came in collision with that of the CIA and State Department for Turkey in the larger world.
Turkish goverment AKP currently running a huge police operation against Gulen members among justice and police organisation, on the other hand, public sceptic about these operations as AKP and Gulen were also allies before november 17th corruption scandal occured. So could we say that AKP, Tayyip Erdogan and CIA were also allies once?
WE: Turkey is a NATO member so no Turkish government is permitted for long if it tries to be independent of NATO, i.e. Washington, for long, as you know. When Erdogan began going his own way, the US networks began to demonize him in media worldwide, and Gülen media attacked him fiercely. I believe the split between Erdogan and Gülen went long before Nov. 17 scandals. Who was behind the leaking of those accusations? What was US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone doing in that regard? Interesting questions for someone.
You say that CIA is at Gulen’s side in their fight against AKP. What could CIA do to stop Erdogan and AKP?
WE: My opinion is that was what the scandals were for, to try to prevent Erdogan’s election as President but they failed. Keep in mind the “scandal” was about how Erdogan allegedly violated US oil sanctions against Iran, so the scandals were intended to break that trade, a Washington goal.
Anything to add…
WE: I believe that Turkey today can play a very positive role in a new world that is emerging to replace the world of CIA wars, terror and chaos. Turkey is a geopolitical crossroads which has the possibility to play a very positive role in the emerging Eurasian system of China and Russia, the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, in building energy and rail infrastructure. By herself, Turkey will be isolated and broken as Ukraine, and by the same people. In a principled economic and political alliance with Russia and China, she can play a pivot role in building a new world free of the debt of the collapsing Dollar System that also included the stagnating Europe. Turkey has a beautiful opportunity to partner with Russia and change the world power balance. It will require a lot of will. But if done in a good open way, Turkey could enjoy prosperity as never before and be a genuine “good neighbor.”

WILLIAM ENGDAHL | FEBRUARY 10, 2015

Find this story at 10 February 2015

© 2014 Boiling Frogs Post

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A briefing of top Obama national security officials in the Situation Room of the White House, October 2009. (Photo: White House/Pete Souza)
As 2015 begins, let’s take a trip down memory lane. Imagine that it’s January 1963. For the last three years, the United States has unsuccessfully faced off against a small island in the Caribbean, where a revolutionary named Fidel Castro seized power from a corrupt but U.S.-friendly regime run by Fulgensio Batista. In the global power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union in which much of the planet has chosen sides, Cuba, only 90 miles from the American mainland, finds itself in the eye of the storm. Having lost Washington’s backing, it has, however, gained the support of distant Moscow, the other nuclear-armed superpower on the planet.

In October 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower instituted an embargo on U.S. trade with the island that would, two years later, be strengthened and made permanent by John F. Kennedy. On entering the Oval Office, Kennedy also inherited a cockamamie CIA scheme to use Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro. That led, in April 1961, to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in which, despite major Agency support, the exiles were crushed (after which the CIA would hatch various mad plots to assassinate the new Cuban leader). What followed in October 1962 was “the most dangerous moment in human history” — the Cuban missile crisis — a brief period when many Americans, my 18-year-old self included, genuinely thought we might soon be nuclear toast.

Now, imagine yourself in January 1963, alive and chastened by a world in which you could be obliterated at any moment. Imagine as well that someone from our time suddenly invited you into the American future some 52 Januaries hence, when you would, miracle of miracles, still be alive and the planet still more or less in one piece. Imagine, as a start, being told that the embargo against, and Washington’s hostility toward, Cuba never ended. That 52 futile years later, with Cuba now run by Fidel’s “younger” brother, 83-year-old Raul, the 11th American president to deal with the “crisis” has finally decided to restore diplomatic relations, ease trade restrictions, and encourage American visitors to the island.

Imagine being told as well that in Congress, more than half a century later, a possible majority of representatives remained nostalgic for a policy that spent 52 years not working. Imagine that members of the upcoming 2015 Senate were already swearing they wouldn’t hand over a plug nickel to the president or the State Department to establish a diplomatic mission in Havana or confirm an ambassador or ease the embargo or take any other steps to change the situation, and were denouncing the president — who, by the way, is a black man named Barack Obama — as a weakling and an “appeaser-in-chief” for making such a move.

Perhaps that American visitor from 1963 would already feel as if his or her mind were being scrambled like a morning egg and yet we’re only beginning. After all, our visitor would have to be told that the Soviet Union, that hostile, nuclear-armed communist superpower and partner of Washington in the potential obliteration of the planet, no longer exists; that it unexpectedly imploded in 1991, leaving its Eastern European empire largely free to integrate into the rest of Europe.

One caveat would, however, need to be added to that blockbuster piece of historical news. Lest our visitor imagine that everything has changed beyond all recognition, it would be important to point out that in 2015 the U.S. still confronts an implacably hostile, nuclear-armed communist state. Not the USSR, of course, nor even that other communist behemoth, China. (Its Communist Party took the “capitalist road” in the late 1970s and never looked back as that country rose to become the globe’s largest economy!)

Here’s a hint: it fought the U.S. to a draw in a bitter war more than six decades ago and has just been accused of launching a devastating strike against the United States. Admittedly, it wasn’t aimed at Washington but at Hollywood. That country — or some group claiming to be working in its interests — broke into a major movie studio, Sony (oh yes, a Japanese company is now a significant force in Hollywood!), and released gossip about its inner workings as well as the nasty things actors, producers, and corporate executives had to say about one another. It might (or might not), that is, have launched the planet’s first cyber-gossip bomb.

And yes, you would have to tell our visitor from 1963 that this hostile communist power, North Korea, is also an oppressive, beleaguered, lights-out state and in no way a serious enemy, not in a world in which the U.S. remains the “last superpower.”

You would, of course, have to add that, 52 years later, Vietnam, another implacable communist enemy with whom President Kennedy was escalating a low-level conflict in 1963, is now a de facto U.S. ally — and no, not because it lost its war with us. That war, once considered the longest in U.S. history, would at its height see more than 500,000 American combat troops dispatched to South Vietnam and, in 1973, end in an unexpectedly bitter defeat for Washington from which America never quite seemed to recover.

2015 and Baying for More

Still, with communism a has-been force and capitalism triumphant everywhere, enemies have been just a tad scarce in the twenty-first century. Other than the North Koreans, there is the fundamentalist regime of Iran, which ran its Batista, the Shah, out in 1979, and with which, in the 35 years since, the U.S. has never come to terms — though Barack Obama still might — without ever quite going to war either. And of course there would be another phenomenon of our moment completely unknown to an American of 1963: Islamic extremism, aka jihadism, along with the rise of terrorist organizations and, in 2014, the establishment of the first mini-terror state in the heart of the Middle East. And oh yes, there was that tiny crew that went by the name of al-Qaeda, 19 of whose box-cutter-wielding militants hijacked four planes on September 11, 2001, and destroyed two soaring towers (not yet built in 1963) in downtown New York City and part of the Pentagon. In the process, they killed themselves and thousands of civilians, put apocalyptic-looking scenes of destruction on American television screens, and successfully created a sense of a looming, communist-style planetary enemy, when just about no one was there.

Their acts gave a new administration of right-wing fundamentalists in Washington the opportunity to fulfill its wildest dreams of planetary domination by launching, only days later, what was grandiloquently called the Global War on Terror (or the Long War, or World War IV), a superpower crusade against, initially, almost no one. Its opening salvo would let loose an “all-volunteer” military (no more draft Army as in 1963) universally believed to be uniquely powerful. It would, they were sure, wipe out al-Qaeda, settle scores with various enemies in the Greater Middle East, including Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and leave the U.S. triumphant in a way no great power had been in history. In response to a few thousand scattered al-Qaeda members, a Pax Americana would be created on a global scale that would last generations, if not forever and a day.

Washington’s enemies of that moment would have been so unimpressive to Americans of 1963 that, on learning of the future that awaited them, they might well have dropped to their knees and thanked God for the deliverance of the United States of America. In describing all this to that visitor from another America, you would, however, have to add that the Global War on Terror, in which giant ambitions met the most modest of opponents any great power had faced in hundreds of years, didn’t work out so well. You would have to point out that the U.S. military, allied intelligence outfits, and a set of warrior corporations (almost unknown in 1963) mobilized to go to war with them struck out big time in a way almost impossible to fathom; that, from September 2001 to January 2015, no war, invasion, occupation, intervention, conflict, or set of operations, no matter how under-armed or insignificant the forces being taken on, succeeded in any lasting or meaningful way. It was as if Hank Aaron had come to the plate for a more than a decade without ever doing anything but striking out.

For our by now goggle-eyed visitor, you would have to add that, other than invading the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada against no opposition in 1983 and Panama against next to no opposition in 1989, the mightiest power on the planet hasn’t won a war or conflict since World War II. And after explaining all this, the strangest task would still lie ahead.

Our American beamed in from 1963, who hadn’t even experienced defeat in Vietnam yet, would have to be filled in on the two wars of choice Washington launched with such enthusiasm and confidence in 2001 and 2003 and could never again get out of. I’m talking, of course, about Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries that would barely have registered on an American radar screen 52 years ago, and yet would prove unparalleled quagmires (a Vietnam-era term our observer wouldn’t have yet run across). We would need to explain how the “lone superpower” of the twenty-first century would transform each of them into competitors for the “longest American war” ever.

Washington’s Iraq War began in 1991, the year the Soviet Union would disappear, and in one form or another essentially never ended. It has involved the building of major war-making coalitions, invasions, a full-scale occupation, air wars of various sorts, and god knows what else. As 2015 begins, the U.S. is in its third round of war in Iraq, having committed itself to a new and escalating conflict in that country (and Syria), and in all that time it has won nothing at all. It would be important to remind our visitor from the past that Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 on the promise of getting the U.S. out of Iraq and actually managed to do so for three years before plunging the country back in yet again.

The first American war in Afghanistan, on the other hand, was a CIA Cold War operation that began in 1979 just after the Soviets invaded the country and was meant as payback for Vietnam. And yes, to confuse that visitor even more, in its first Afghan War, the U.S. actually supported the crew who became al-Qaeda and would later attack New York and Washington to ensure the launching of the second Afghan War, the one in which the U.S. invaded and occupied the country. That war has been going on ever since. Despite much talk about winding it down or even ending the mission there 13 years later, the commitment has been renewed for 2015 and beyond.

In both countries, the enemies of choice proved to be lightly armed minority insurgencies. In both, an initial, almost ecstatic sense of triumph following an invasion slowly morphed into a fear of impending defeat. To add just a fillip to all this, in 2015 a Republican majority in the Senate as well as in the House — and don’t forget to explain that we’re no longer talking about Eisenhower Republicans here — will be baying for more.

The National Security State as a Self-Perpetuating Machine

So far, America’s future, looked at from more than half a century ago, has been little short of phantasmagoric. To sum up: in an almost enemy-less world in which the American economic system was triumphant and the U.S. possessed by far the strongest military on the planet, nothing seems to have gone as planned or faintly right. And yet, you wouldn’t want to leave that observer from 1963 with the wrong impression. However much the national security state may have seemed like an amalgam of the Three Stooges on a global stage, not everything worked out badly.

In fact, in these years the national security state triumphed in the nation’s capital in a way that the U.S. military and allied intelligence outfits were incapable of doing anywhere else on Earth. Fifty-three years after the world might have ended, on a planet lacking a Soviet-like power — though the U.S. was by now involved in “Cold War 2.0” in eastern Ukraine on the border of the rump energy state the Soviet Union left behind — the worlds of national security and surveillance had grown to a size that beggared their own enormous selves in the Cold War era. They had been engorged by literally trillions of taxpayer dollars. A new domestic version of the Pentagon called the Department of Homeland Security had been set up in 2002. An “intelligence community” made up of 17 major agencies and outfits, bolstered by hundreds of thousands of private security contractors, had expanded endlessly and in the process created a global surveillance state that went beyond the wildest imaginings of the totalitarian powers of the twentieth century.

In the process, the national security state enveloped itself in a penumbra of secrecy that left the American people theoretically “safe” and remarkably ignorant of what was being done in their name. Its officials increasingly existed in a crime-free zone, beyond the reach of accountability, the law, courts, or jail. Homeland security and intelligence complexes grew up around the national security state in the way that the military-industrial complex had once grown up around the Pentagon and similarly engorged themselves. In these years, Washington filled with newly constructed billion-dollar intelligence headquarters and building complexes dedicated to secret work — and that only begins to tell the tale of how twenty-first-century “security” triumphed.

This vast investment of American treasure has been used to construct an edifice dedicated in a passionate way to dealing with a single danger to Americans, one that would have been unknown in 1963: Islamic terrorism. Despite the several thousand Americans who died on September 11, 2001, the dangers of terrorism rate above shark attacks but not much else in American life. Even more remarkably, the national security state has been built on a foundation of almost total failure. Think of failure, in fact, as the spark that repeatedly sets the further expansion of its apparatus in motion, funds it, and allows it to thrive.

It works something like this: start with the fact that, on September 10, 2001, global jihadism was a microscopic movement on this planet. Since 9/11, under the pressure of American military power, it has exploded geographically, while the number of jihadist organizations has multiplied, and the number of people joining such groups has regularly and repeatedly increased, a growth rate that seems to correlate with the efforts of Washington to destroy terrorism and its infrastructure. In other words, the Global War on Terror has been and remains a global war for the production of terror. And terror groups know it.

It was Osama bin Laden’s greatest insight and is now a commonplace that drawing Washington into military action against you increases your credibility in the world that matters to you and so makes recruiting easier. At the same time, American actions, from invasions to drone strikes, and their “collateral damage,” create pools of people desperate for revenge. If you want to thrive and grow, in other words, you need the U.S. as an enemy.

Via taunting acts like the beheading videos of the Islamic State, the new “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, such movements bait Washington into action. And each new terrorist crew, each “lone wolf” terrorist undiscovered until too late by a state structure that has cost Americans trillions of dollars, each plot not foiled, each failure, works to bolster both terrorist outfits and the national security state itself. This has, in other words, proved to be a deeply symbiotic and mutually profitable relationship.

From the point of view of the national security state, each failure, each little disaster, acts as another shot of fear in the American body politic, and the response to failure is predictable: never less of what doesn’t work, but more. More money, more bodies hired, more new outfits formed, more elaborate defenses, more offensive weaponry. Each failure with its accompanying jolt of fear (and often hysteria) predictably results in further funding for the national security state to develop newer, even more elaborate versions of what it’s been doing these last 13 years. Failure, in other words, is the key to success.

In this sense, think of Washington’s national security structure as a self-perpetuating machine that works like a dream, since those who oversee its continued expansion are never penalized for its inability to accomplish any of its goals. On the contrary, they are invariably promoted, honored, and assured of a golden-parachute-style retirement or — far more likely — a golden journey through one of Washington’s revolving doors onto some corporate board or into some cushy post in one complex or another where they can essentially lobby their former colleagues for private warrior corporations, rent-a-gun outfits, weapons makers, and the like. And there is nothing either in Washington or in American life that seems likely to change any of this in the near future.

An Inheritance From Hell

In the meantime, a “war on terror” mentality slowly seeps into the rest of society as the warriors, weapons, and gadgetry come home from our distant battle zones. That’s especially obvious when it comes to the police nationwide. It can be seen in the expanding numbers of SWAT teams filled with special ops vets, the piles of Pentagon weaponry from those wars being transferred to local police forces at home, and the way they are taking on the look of forces of occupation in an alien land, operating increasingly with a mentality of “wartime policing.” Since the events of Ferguson, all of this has finally become far more evident to Americans (as it would, with some explanation, to our visitor from 1963). It was no anomaly, for example, that Justice Department investigators found a banner hanging in a Cleveland police station that identified the place sardonically as a “forward operating base,” a term the military uses, as the New York Times put it, “for heavily guarded wartime outposts inside insurgent-held territory.”

In the wake of Ferguson, the “reforms” being proposed — essentially better training in the more effective use of the new battlefield-style gear the police are acquiring — will only militarize them further. This same mentality, with its accompanying gadgetry, has been moving heavily into America’s border areas and into schools and other institutions as well, including an enormous increase in surveillance systems geared to streets, public places, and even the home.

In the meantime, while a national security state mentality has been infiltrating American society, the planners of that state have been rewriting the global rules of the road for years when it comes to torture, kidnapping, drone assassination campaigns, global surveillance, national sovereignty, the launching of cyberwars, and the like — none of which will, in the end, contribute to American security, and all of which has already made the planet a less secure, more chaotic, more fragmented place. In these last years, in other words, in its search for “security,” the U.S. has actually become a force for destabilization — that is, insecurity — across significant swaths of the planet.

Perhaps one of these days, Americans will decide to consider more seriously what “security,” as presently defined by the powers that be in Washington, even means in our world. There can, as a start, be no question that the national security state does offer genuine security of a very specific sort: to its own officials and employees. Nothing they do, no matter how dumb, immoral, or downright criminal, ever seems to stand in the way of their own upward mobility within its structure.

As an example — and it’s only one in an era filled with them — not a single CIA official was dismissed, demoted, or even reprimanded in response to the recent release of the redacted executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. It hardly mattered that the report included actual criminal behavior (even by the degraded “enhanced interrogation” standards green-lighted by the Bush administration) and the grimmest kinds of abuse of prisoners, some quite innocent of anything. In an America in which, economically speaking, security has not exactly been the gold standard of the twenty-first century, it is hard to imagine any group that is more secure.

As for the rest of us, insecurity will surely be the story of our lives for the rest of the twenty-first century (as it was, of course, in 1963). After all, on August 6, 1945, when we consciously entered the age of the apocalyptic possibility at Hiroshima, we had no way of knowing that we had already done so perhaps 200 years earlier as the industrial revolution, based on the burning of fossil fuels, took off. Nor almost 20 years later, did that American of 1963 know this. By 1979, however, the science adviser for the president of the United States was well aware of global warming. When Jimmy Carter gave his infamous “malaise” speech promoting a massive commitment to alternative energy research (and got laughed out of the White House), he already knew that climate change — not yet called that — was a reality that needed to be dealt with.

Now, the rest of us know, or at least should know, and so — with what is likely to be the hottest year on record just ended — would be obliged to offer our visitor from 1963 a graphic account of the coming dangers of a globally warming world. There has always been a certain sense of insecurity to any human life, but until 1945 not to all human life. And yet we now know with something approaching certainty that, even if another nuclear weapon never goes off (and across the planet nuclear powers are upgrading their arsenals), chaos, acidifying oceans, melting ice formations, rising seas, flooding coastal areas, mass migrations of desperate people, food production problems, devastating droughts, and monster storms are all in a future that will be the definition of human-caused insecurity — not that the national security state gives much of a damn.

Admittedly, since at least 2001, the Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community have been engaged in blue-skies thinking about how to give good war in a globally warming world. The national security state as a whole, however, has been set up at a cost of trillions of dollars (and allowed to spend trillions more) to deal with only one kind of insecurity — terrorism and the ever-larger line up of enemies that go with it. Such groups do, of course, represent a genuine danger, but not of an existential kind. Thought about another way, the true terrorists on our planet may be the people running the Big Energy corporations and about them the national security state could care less. They are more than free to ply their trade, pull any level of fossil fuel reserves from the ground, and generally pursue mega-profits while preparing the way for global destruction, aided and abetted by Washington.

Try now to imagine yourself in the shoes of that visitor from 1963 absorbing such a future, bizarre almost beyond imagining: all those trillions of dollars going into a system that essentially promotes the one danger it was set up to eradicate or at least bring under control. In the meantime, the part of the state dedicated to national security conveniently looking the other way when it comes to the leading candidate for giving insecurity a new meaning in a future that is almost upon us. Official Washington has, that is, invented a system so dumb, so extreme, so fundamentalist, and so deeply entrenched in our world that changing it will surely prove a stunningly difficult task.

Welcome to the new world of American insecurity and to the nightmarish inheritance we are preparing for our children and grandchildren.

Tuesday, January 06, 2015
by TomDispatch
byTom Engelhardt

Find this story at 6 January 2015

© 2014 TomDispatch.com

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A lot can change in five years. In December 2005 the Guardian opened its pages for me to respond to a leak – the Bush-Blair memo in which both leaders discussed the possibility of bombing Al-Jazeera’s Qatar HQ, where more than 1,000 people work. While those who leaked the memo were imprisoned, its detailed contents were never disclosed. Earlier this year I learned from a senior US official that the discussions had indeed taken place.

I was not surprised. Our bureaus in Kabul and Iraq had previously been bombed by the US in an attempt to stifle the channel’s independence; one of our journalists in Iraq was killed. But this did not deter us from our mission to provide “the opinion and the other opinion” – our motto; to give a voice to the voiceless; to hold centres of power to account; and to uphold our editorial independence no matter what the cost. We maintained these values even as the US bombed our offices, continuing our coverage of both sides of the story.

The Arab world, the region in which we are located, continues to see its share of bloodshed and war. Our audience, often the victim of these conflicts, demands honesty, credibility and integrity. If we get a story wrong, or are biased, it could mean the difference between life and death for viewers. They have come to expect independence as a standard.

This week our independence was once again called into question. Cables from the US embassy in Doha were made accessible by WikiLeaks, alleging that Qatar was using Al-Jazeera as a tool for its foreign policy. While nothing could be further from the truth, US diplomats had the freedom to express their opinions. But interpretation and conjecture cannot take the place of analysis and fact. They focused on the source of our funding rather than our reporting, in an attempt to tarnish our work. Judgments made in the cables are plainly erroneous, such as the assertion that we softened our coverage of Saudi Arabia and the Iranian elections due to political pressure – one needs only to look at our reporting of these events to see that this is not the case. We are journalists not politicians – we are not driven by political agendas, for or against anyone.

Journalists across the world picked up the story, and while some were careful to place it in context, many uncritically took the claims as fact. The Guardian’s report went well beyond even what was stated in the cables; the article clearly misunderstood the rhetorical statements reportedly made by Qatar’s prime minister, which then fed the false claim that al-Jazeera was being used as a “bargaining chip”. Those who understand the Middle East also know that Al-Jazeera’s coverage is no obstacle to a durable peace in the region. Context, analysis and a deep knowledge of the region are essential to a proper reading of the cables. Without these, journalism is another unwitting tool for centres of power.

The region where we are situated is host to some of the most repressive governments in the world, where freedom of expression is silenced, journalists languish in prisons, and independent civil institutions are rare. Allegations that we lack independence are part of our daily routine – they no longer surprise us.

But we take measures to protect our editorial integrity in spite of intimidation from governments and regimes – our journalists have been banned, imprisoned, tortured and killed. Al-Jazeera’s bureaus have routinely been closed, many times by Arab regimes with which Qatar has good relationships. Although banned in these countries, we continue to cover their stories with depth and balance. To institutionalise our independence we have ensured diversity among our staff, and have more than 50 nationalities represented – with no majority of any one nationality.

Questions about al-Jazeera’s independence and its relationship with Qatar, our primary source of funding, are asked in almost any interview I give. Because the region has a history of state-controlled media it’s assumed our host country must impact upon our editorial policy. But the Qatari government has kept its distance – it is similar to the kind of model one sees in other publicly funded arm’s length broadcasters such as the BBC. Qatar’s prime minister openly criticises al-Jazeera, and has talked about the “headaches” caused by our independence. But we subject state officials to the same hard questions and journalistic standards we have for everyone else. Al-Jazeera has strong editorial policies to protect its independence from the influence of power – one only has to look at the screen to witness this.

While we don’t claim to get it right all of the time (we are only human), we have got it right most of the time. We have placed a great deal of value on reporting from the field. Had the US diplomats actually watched al-Jazeera’s reports, they would have heard the voices and players who were shaping conflicts, wars and emerging democracies. By analysing our content they would have gained insights into the region. When George Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq and most media outlets echoed his simplistic version of events, al-Jazeera was providing pictures and analyses that predicted the coming storm. At the time we were roundly criticised, often by states who had friendly relations with Qatar. And in Afghanistan, while others broadcast images of progress and calm, al-Jazeera highlighted the growing influence of the Taliban, reflecting the politics on the ground. In these cases and many others, time has vindicated our reporting. Had these diplomats listened to the voices reflected in our coverage perhaps some of their mistakes could have been averted.

Those who lobby against al-Jazeera seek to delegitimise the work of dedicated and courageous journalists who put their lives on the line. For 14 years we have committed ourselves to safeguarding our editorial independence. Our audiences rely on us for this, and we will not be affected by pressure from regimes, states, media or other centres of power. We have full confidence in our mission as journalists.

Wadah Khanfar
The Guardian, Friday 10 December 2010 21.46 GMT

Find this story at 10 December 2010

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An al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network, the files disclose. Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman, was detained in Pakistan after working for the network in Afghanistan after 9/11, and flown to the prison camp where he was allegedly beaten and sexually assaulted.

His file makes clear that one of the reasons he was sent to Guantánamo was “to provide information on … the al-Jazeera news network’s training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of UBL [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with UBL”.

The file shows that the camp authorities were convinced that al-Hajj was an al-Qaida courier who had provided funds for a charity in Chechnya suspected of having links with Bin Laden.

However, the contents of the file also appear to support complaints made by al-Hajj to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that during his first 100-plus interrogations he was never once questioned about the allegations he faced, and that he eventually demanded that he be questioned about what he was supposed to have done wrong.

Stafford Smith believes the US military authorities were attempting to force al-Hajj to become an informer against his employers.

Al-Hajj was finally released in May 2008.

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 25 April 2011

Find this story at 25 April 2011

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Al-Jazeera quits Iraq as Americans accused over deaths

The Arab satellite television channel al-Jazeera is to pull its reporters out of Iraq after one of them was killed during a US air raid on Baghdad.

“I cannot guarantee anyone’s safety,” the news editor, Ibrahim Hillal, told reporters. “We still have four reporters in Baghdad, we will pull them out. We have one embedded with US forces in Nassiriya; we want to pull him out.”

The move followed a day in which three journalists were killed by US fire in separate attacks in Baghdad, leading to accusations that US forces were targeting the news media.

Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, 35, was killed when an American tank fired a shell directly at the Reuters suite on the 15th floor at the Palestine hotel, where many journalists are staying.

Jose Couso, 37, a cameraman for the Spanish television channel Tele 5, was wounded in the same attack and died later in hospital. Samia Nakhoul, the Gulf bureau chief of Reuters, was also injured, along with a British technician, Paul Pasquale, and an Iraqi photographer, Faleh Kheiber.

Earlier, al-Jazeera cameraman Tarek Ayyoub, a 35-year-old Palestinian who lived in Jordan, was killed when two bombs dropped during a US air raid hit the satellite station’s office in the Iraqi capital.

American forces also opened fire on the offices of Abu Dhabi television, whose identity is spelled out in large blue letters on the roof.

All the journalists were killed and injured in daylight at locations known to the Pentagon as media sites. The tank shell that hit the Palestine hotel slammed into the 18-storey building at noon, shaking the tower and spewing rubble and dirt into hotel rooms at least six floors below.

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The attack brought pandemonium in the hotel which lies on the east side of the Tigris. It was adopted by all remaining western journalists in the city after advice from the Pentagon to evacuate from the western side of the river.

Central command in Qatar said its troops had been responding in self-defence to enemy fire but witnesses dismissed that claim as false. According to a central command statement, “commanders on the ground reported that coalition forces received significant enemy fire from the hotel and consistent with the inherent right of self-defence, coalition forces returned fire”.

The statement added: “Sadly a Reuters and Tele 5 journalist were killed in this exchange. These tragic incidents appear to be the latest example of the Iraqi regime’s continued strategy of using civilian facilities for military purposes.”

But journalists in the hotel insisted there had been no Iraqi fire.

Sky’s correspondent, David Chater, said: “I never heard a single shot coming from the area around here, certainly not from the hotel,” he said.

BBC correspondent Rageh Omaar added that none of the other journalists in the hotel had heard any sniper fire.

Chater said he saw a US tank pointing its gun at the hotel and turned away just before the blast. “I noticed one of the tanks had its barrel pointed up at the building. We went inside and there was an almighty crash. That tank shell, if it was an American tank shell, was aimed directly at this hotel and directly at journalists. This wasn’t an accident. It seems to be a very accurate shot.”

Geert Linnebank, Reuters editor-in-chief, said the incident “raises questions about the judgment of the advancing US troops who have known all along that this hotel is the main base for almost all foreign journalists in Baghdad”.

Journalists, a watchdog group that defends press freedoms, demanded an invesigation in a letter to the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. “We believe these attacks violate the Geneva conventions,” the letter said, adding that even if US forces had been fired on from the Palestine hotel “the evidence suggests that the response of US forces was disproportionate and therefore violated humanitarian law”.

During the Afghan war, two supposedly smart US bombs hit the Reuters office in Kabul and many suspect the attack was no accident. It happened at a strategic moment, two hours before the Northern Alliance took over the city.

US military officials at central command said they were investigating and added that the casualties were “regrettable”. “We know that we don’t target journalists,” said Brigadier General Vince Brooks, deputy director of operations.

Al-Jazeera correspondent Tarek Ayyoub was broadcasting live to the satellite station’s 7am news bulletin when US aircraft fired two missiles at the bureau building, killing him and injuring a colleague. Two Iraqi staff are missing.

Ibrahim Hilal, al-Jazeera’s chief editor at its headquarters in Qatar, said a US warplane was seen above the building before the attack. “Witnesses saw the plane fly over twice before dropping the bombs. Our office is in a residential area and even the Pentagon knows its location,” he said.

Al-Jazeera correspondent Majed Abdul-Hadi said the bombardment was probably deliberate.

In Doha last night al-Jazeera’s chairman, Hamad bin Thamer, said the channel “could not ascertain” if its Baghdad bureau had been targeted by the US. But he dismissed American claims that there had been gunfire coming from the building at the time of the attack.

“This was absolutely and categorically denied by other reporters and our reporters present on the ground,” he said.

Mr Ayyoub, 35, a Palestinian born in Kuwait, had not intended to go to Baghdad but as the war dragged on he felt he had to work there, and al-Jazeera agreed to let him work in Baghdad.

His widow, Dima Ayyoub, launched a vitriolic attack on America: “My message to you is that hatred breeds hatred,” she said in a live telephone link-up from her home in Amman, Jordan. “I cannot see where is the cleanness in this war. All I see is blood, destruction and shattered hearts. The US said it was a war against terrorism. Who is committing terrorism now?”

Suzanne Goldenberg in Baghdad, Rory McCarthy in Doha, Jonathan Steele in Amman and Brian Whitaker
Wednesday 9 April 2003 07.30 BST

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