The following is an excerpt from The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism [3] by Trevor Aaronson (Ig Publishing, 2012).

Antonio Martinez was a punk. The twenty-two-year-old from Baltimore was chunky, with a wide nose and jet-black hair pulled back close to his scalp and tied into long braids that hung past his shoulders. He preferred to be called Muhammad Hussain, the name he gave himself following his conversion to Islam. But his mother still called him Tony, and she couldn’t understand her son’s burning desire to be the Maryland Mujahideen.

As a young man, Martinez had been angry and lost. He’d dropped out of Laurel High School, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and spent his teens as a small-time thief in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. By the age of sixteen, he’d been charged with armed robbery. In February 2008, at the age of eighteen, he tried to steal a car. Catholic University doctoral student Daniel Tobin was looking out of the window of his apartment one day when he saw a man driving off in his car. Tobin gave chase, running between apartment buildings and finally catching up to the stolen vehicle. He opened the passenger-side door and got in. Martinez, in the driver’s seat, dashed out and ran away on foot. Jumping behind the wheel, Tobin followed the would-be car thief. “You may as well give up running,” he yelled at Martinez. Martinez was apprehended and charged with grand theft of a motor vehicle—he had stolen the vehicle using an extra set of car keys which had gone missing when someone had broken into Tobin’s apartment earlier. However, prosecutors dropped the charges against Martinez after Tobin failed to appear in court.

Despite the close call, Martinez’s petty crimes continued. One month after the car theft, he and a friend approached a cashier at a Safeway grocery store, acting as if they wanted to buy potato chips. When the cashier opened the register, Martinez and his friend grabbed as much money as they could and ran out of the store. The cashier and store manager chased after them, and later identified the pair to police. Martinez pleaded guilty to theft of one hundred dollars and received a ninety-day suspended sentence, plus six months of probation.

Searching for greater meaning in his life, Martinez was baptized and became a Christian when he was twenty-one years old, but he didn’t stick with the religion. “He said he tried the Christian thing. He just really didn’t understand it,” said Alisha Legrand, a former girlfriend. Martinez chose Islam instead. On his Facebook page, Martinez wrote that he was “just a yung brotha from the wrong side of the tracks who embraced Islam.” But for reasons that have never been clear to his family and friends, Martinez drifted toward a violent, extremist brand of Islam. When the FBI discovered him, Martinez was an angry extremist mouthing off on Facebook about violence, with misspelled posts such as, “The sword is cummin the reign of oppression is about 2 cease inshallah.” Based on the Facebook postings alone, an FBI agent gave an informant the “green light” to get to know Martinez and determine if he had a propensity for violence. In other words, to see if he was dangerous.

The government was setting the trap.

On the evening of December 2, 2010, Martinez was in another Muslim’s car as they drove through Baltimore. A hidden device recorded their conversation. His mother had called, and Martinez had just finished talking to her on his cell phone. He was aggravated. “She wants me to be like everybody else, being in school, working,” he told his friend. “For me, it’s different. I have this zeal for deen and she doesn’t understand that.” Martinez’s mother didn’t know that her son had just left a meeting with a purported Afghan-born terrorist who had agreed to provide him with a car bomb. But she wasn’t the only one in the dark that night. Martinez himself didn’t know his new terrorist friend was an undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that the man driving the car—a man he’d met only a few weeks earlier—was a paid informant for federal law enforcement.

Five days later, Martinez met again with the man he believed to be a terrorist. The informant was there, too. They were all, Martinez believed, brothers in arms and in Islam. In a parking lot near the Armed Forces Career Center on Baltimore National Pike, Martinez, the informant, and the undercover FBI agent piled into an SUV, where the undercover agent showed Martinez the device that would detonate the car bomb and how to use it. He then unveiled to the twenty-two-year-old the bomb in the back of the SUV and demonstrated what he’d need to do to activate it. “I’m ready, man,” Martinez said. “It ain’t like you seein’ it on the news. You gonna be there. You gonna hear the bomb go off. You gonna be, uh, shooting, gettin’ shot at. It’s gonna be real. … I’m excited, man.”

That night, Martinez, who had little experience behind the wheel of a car, needed to practice driving the SUV around the empty parking lot. Once he felt comfortable doing what most teenagers can do easily, Martinez and his associates devised a plan: Martinez would park the bomb-on-wheels in the parking lot outside the military recruiting center. One of his associates would then pick him up, and they’d drive together to a vantage point where Martinez could detonate the bomb and delight in the resulting chaos and carnage.

The next morning, the three men put their plan into action. Martinez hopped into the SUV and activated the bomb, as he’d been instructed, and then drove to the military recruiting station. He parked right in front. The informant, trailing in another car, picked up Martinez and drove him to the vantage point, just as planned. Everything was falling into place, and Martinez was about to launch his first attack in what he hoped would be for him a lifetime of jihad against the only nation he had ever known.

Looking out at the military recruiting station, Martinez lifted the detonation device and triggered the bomb. Smiling, he watched expectantly. Nothing happened. Suddenly, FBI agents rushed in and arrested the man they’d later identify in court records as “Antonio Martinez a/k/a Muhammad Hussain.” Federal prosecutors in Maryland charged Martinez with attempted murder of federal officers and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He faced at least thirty-five years in prison if convicted at trial.

“This is not Tony,” a woman identifying herself as Martinez’s mother told a reporter after the arrest. “I think he was brainwashed with that Islam crap.” Joseph Balter, a federal public defender, told the court during a detention hearing that FBI agents had entrapped Martinez, whom he referred to by his chosen name. The terrorist plot was, Balter said, “the creation of the government—a creation which was implanted into Mr. Hussain’s mind.” He added: “There was nothing provided which showed that Mr. Hussain had any ability whatsoever to carry out any kind of plan.”

Despite Balter’s claims, a little more than a year after his indictment, Martinez chose not to challenge the government’s charges in court. On January 26, 2012, Martinez dropped his entrapment defense and pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction under a deal that will require him to serve twenty-five years in prison—more years than he’s been alive. Neither Martinez nor Balter would comment on the reasons they chose a plea agreement, though in a sentencing hearing, Balter told the judge he believed the entire case could have been avoided had the FBI counseled, rather than encouraged, Martinez.

The U.S. Department of Justice touted the conviction as another example of the government keeping citizens safe from terrorists. “We are catching dangerous suspects before they strike, and we are investigating them in a way that maximizes the liberty and security of law-abiding citizens,” U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement announcing Martinez’s plea agreement. “That is what the American people expect of the Justice Department, and that is what we aim to deliver.”

Indeed, that is exactly what the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been delivering throughout the decade since the attacks of September 11, 2001. But whether it’s what the American people expect is questionable, because most Americans today have no idea that since 9/11, one single organization has been responsible for hatching and financing more terrorist plots in the United States than any other. That organization isn’t Al Qaeda, the terrorist network founded by Osama bin Laden and responsible for the spectacular 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. And it isn’t Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any of the other more than forty U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations. No, the organization responsible for more terrorist plots over the last decade than any other is the FBI. Through elaborate and expensive sting operations involving informants and undercover agents posing as terrorists, the FBI has arrested and the Justice Department has prosecuted dozens of men government officials say posed direct—but by no means immediate or credible—threats to the United States.

Just as in the Martinez case, in terrorism sting after terrorism sting, FBI and DOJ officials have hosted high-profile press conferences to announce yet another foiled terrorist plot. But what isn’t publicized during these press conferences is the fact that government-described terrorists such as Antonio Martinez were able to carry forward with their potentially lethal plots only because FBI informants and agents provided them with all of the means—in most cases delivering weapons and equipment, in some cases even paying for rent and doling out a little spending money to keep targets on the hook. In cities around the country where terrorism sting operations have occurred—among them New York City, Albany, Chicago, Miami, Baltimore, Portland, Tampa, Houston, and Dallas—a central question exists: Is the FBI catching terrorists or creating them?

In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal law enforcement profile of a terrorist has changed dramatically. The men responsible for downing the World Trade Center were disciplined and patient; they were also living and training in the United States with money from an Al Qaeda cell led by Kuwaiti-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. In the days and weeks following 9/11, federal officials anxiously awaited a second wave of attacks, which would be launched, they believed at the time, by several sleeper cells around the country. But the feared second wave never crashed ashore. Instead, the United States and allied nations invaded Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s home base, and forced Osama bin Laden and his deputies into hiding. Bruised and hunted, Al Qaeda no longer had the capability to train terrorists and send them to the United States.

In response, Al Qaeda’s leaders moved to what FBI officials describe as a “franchise model.” If you can’t run Al Qaeda as a hierarchal, centrally organized outfit, the theory went, run it as a franchise. In other words, export ideas—not terrorists. Al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations went online, setting up websites and forums dedicated to instilling their beliefs in disenfranchised Muslims already living in Western nations. A slickly designed magazine, appropriately titled Inspire, quickly followed. Article headlines included “I Am Proud to Be a Traitor to America,”9 and “Why Did I Choose Al-Qaeda?” Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born, high-ranking Al Qaeda official who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011, became something of the terrorist organization’s Dear Abby. Have a question about Islam? Ask Anwar! Muslim men in nations throughout the Western world would email him questions, and al-Awlaki would reply dutifully, and in English, encouraging many of his electronic pen pals to violent action. Al-Awlaki also kept a blog and a Facebook page, and regularly posted recruitment videos to YouTube. He said in one video:

I specifically invite the youth to either fight in the West or join their brothers in the fronts of jihad: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia.

I invite them to join us in our new front, Yemen, the base from which the great jihad of the Arabian Peninsula will begin, the base from which the greatest army of Islam will march forth.

Al Qaeda’s move to a franchise model met with some success. U.S. army major Nadal Hassan, for example, corresponded with al-Awlaki before he killed thirteen people and wounded twenty-nine others in the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings in 2009. Antonio Martinez and other American-born men, many of them recent converts to Islam, also sent al-Awlaki messages or watched Al Qaeda propaganda videos online before moving forward in alleged terrorist plots.

The FBI has a term for Martinez and other alleged terrorists like him: lone wolf. Officials at the Bureau now believe that the next terrorist attack will likely come from a lone wolf, and this belief is at the core of a federal law enforcement policy known variously as preemption, prevention, and disruption. FBI counterterrorism agents want to catch terrorists before they act, and to accomplish this, federal law enforcement officials have in the decade since 9/11 created the largest domestic spying network ever to exist in the United States. In fact, the FBI today has ten times as many informants as it did in the 1960s, when former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made the Bureau infamous for inserting spies into organizations as varied as Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s and the Ku Klux Klan. Modern FBI informants aren’t burrowing into political groups, however; they are focused on terrorism, on identifying today the terrorist of tomorrow, and U.S. government officials acknowledge that while terrorist threats do exist from domestic organizations, such as white supremacist groups and the sovereign citizen movement, they believe the greatest threat comes from within U.S. Muslim communities due, in large part, to the aftereffects of the shock and awe Al Qaeda delivered on September 11, 2001.

The FBI’s vast army of spies, located in every community in the United States with enough Muslims to support a mosque, has one primary function: to identify the next lone wolf. According to the Bureau, a lone wolf is likely to be a single male age sixteen to thirty-five. Therefore, informants and their FBI handlers are on the lookout for young Muslims who espouse radical beliefs, are vocal about their disapproval of U.S. foreign policy, or have expressed sympathy for international terrorist groups. If they find anyone who meets the criteria, they move him to the next stage: the sting, in which an FBI informant, posing as a terrorist, offers to help facilitate a terrorist attack for the target.

On a cold February morning in 2011, I met with Peter Ahearn, a retired FBI special agent who directed the Western New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, in a coffee shop outside Washington, D.C., to talk about how the FBI runs its operations. Ahearn was among the Bureau’s vanguard as it transformed into a counterterrorism organization in the wake of 9/11. An average-built man with a small dimple on his chin and close-cropped brown hair receding in the front, Ahearn oversaw one of the earliest post-9/11 terrorism investigations, involving the so-called Lackawanna Six—a group of six Yemeni-American men living outside Buffalo, New York, who attended a training camp in Afghanistan and were convicted of providing material support to Al Qaeda. “If you’re doing a sting right, you’re offering the target multiple chances to back out,” Ahearn told me. “Real people don’t say, ‘Yeah, let’s go bomb that place.’ Real people call the cops.”

Indeed, while terrorism sting operations are a new practice for the Bureau, they are an evolution of an FBI tactic that has for decades captured the imaginations of Hollywood filmmakers. In 1982, as the illegal drug trade overwhelmed local police resources nationwide and contributed to an increase in violent crime, President Ronald Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, gave the FBI jurisdiction over federal drug crimes, which previously had been the exclusive domain of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Eager to show up their DEA rivals, FBI agents began aggressively sending undercover agents into America’s cities. This was relatively new territory for the FBI, which, during Hoover’s thirty-seven-year stewardship, had mandated that agents wear a suit and tie at all times, federal law enforcement badge easily accessible from the coat pocket. But an increasingly powerful Mafia and the bloody drug war compelled the FBI to begin enforcing federal laws from the street level. In searching for drug crimes, FBI agents hunted sellers as well as buyers, and soon learned one of the best strategies was to become part of the action.

Most people have no doubt seen drug sting operations as portrayed in countless movies and television shows. At its most cliché, the scene is set in a Miami high-rise apartment, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the cresting waves of the Atlantic Ocean. There’s a man seated at the dining table; he’s longhaired, with a scruffy face, and he has a briefcase next to him. But that’s not all. Hidden on the other side of the room is a camera making a grainy black-and-white recording of the entire scene. The apartment’s door swings open and two men saunter in, the camera recording their every move and word. Everyone sits down at the table. The two men hand over bundles of cash. The scruffy man then hands over the briefcase. The two guests of course expect to find cocaine inside. Instead, the briefcase is empty, and as soon as they open it to find the drugs missing, FBI agents rush in, guns drawn for the takedown. Federal law enforcement officials call this type of sting operation a “no-dope bust,” and it has been an effective tool for decades. It’s also the direct predecessor to today’s terrorism sting. Instead of empty briefcases, the FBI today uses inert bombs and disabled assault rifles, and now that counter-terrorism is the Bureau’s top priority, the investigation of major drug crimes has largely fallen back to the DEA. Just as no-dope busts resulted in the arrest and prosecution of those in the drug trade in the twentieth century, terrorism sting operations are resulting in the arrest and prosecution of would-be terrorists in this century.

While the assumptions behind drug stings and terrorism stings are similar, there is a fundamental flaw in the assumption underpinning the latter. In drug stings, federal law enforcement officials assume that any buyer caught in a sting would have been able to buy or sell drugs elsewhere had that buyer not fallen into the FBI trap. The numbers support this assumption. In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, the DEA seized 29,179 kilograms, or 64,328 pounds, of cocaine in the United States. Likewise, in terrorism stings, federal law enforcement officials assume that any would-be terrorists caught in a sting would have been able to acquire the means elsewhere to carry out their violent plans had they not been ensnared by the FBI. The problem with this assumption is that no data exists to support it, and what data is available suggests would-be Islamic terrorists caught in FBI terrorism stings never could have obtained the capability to carry out their planned violent acts were it not for the FBI’s assistance.

In the ten years following 9/11, the FBI and the Justice Department indicted and convicted more than 150 people following sting operations involving alleged connections to international terrorism. Few of these defendants had any connection to terrorists, evidence showed, and those who did have connections, however tangential, never had the capacity to launch attacks on their own. In fact, of the more than 150 terrorism sting operation defendants, an FBI informant not only led one of every three terrorist plots, but also provided all the necessary weapons, money, and transportation.

The FBI’s logic to support the use of terrorism stings goes something like this: By catching a lone wolf before he strikes, federal law enforcement can take him off the streets before he meets a real terrorist who can provide him with weapons and munitions. However, to this day, no example exists of a lone wolf, by himself unable to launch an attack, becoming operational through meeting an actual terrorist in the United States. In addition, in the dozens of terrorism sting operations since 9/11, the would-be terrorists are usually uneducated, unsophisticated, and economically desperate—not the attributes of someone likely to plan and launch a sophisticated, violent attack without significant help.

Reprinted from The Terrorr Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism [3] — Copyright © 2012 by Trevor Aaronson. Reprinted with permission of Ig Publishing, Brooklyn, NY.

February 15, 2013 |

Find this story at 15 February 2013

Kathryn Bigelow given classified information by high ranking official
She was also briefed by CIA and military officials and Navy Seals
Campaign group said the White House has acted improperly

The director of an Oscar-nominated film about the killing of Osama bin Laden was given classified information about the operation by United States intelligence chiefs.

Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriting partner Mark Boal were provided with a complete ‘roadmap’ of how the raid was planned during a 45 minute meeting with Michael Vickers – the country’s highest ranking civilian intelligence official.

The filmmakers also received briefings from top CIA and military intelligence officers and Navy Seals who carried out Operation Neptune Spear – attacking bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in May 2011.

Secrecy: Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal were given classified information

The transcript of the interview, which took place three months after the terrorist leader’s death, has this week been published by the National Security Archive (NSA) at George Washington University in Washington.

Classified: Intelligence chief Michale Vickers gave information to the filmmakers during an interview

It follows a freedom of information request by campaign group Judicial Watch. Its president Tom Fitton had said the White House acted improperly by giving ‘politically-connected filmmakers extraordinary and secret access to bin Laden raid information’

Following the raid, the White House and Pentagon held a series of contradictory briefings and the NSA argues that an authoritative account of the operation has never been published.

The group accused the Obama administration of sharing the ‘intimate details’ to help the filmmakers release a movie ‘perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost’ last year’s re-election campaign.

The NSA said much of the operation in Abbottabad is still ‘shrouded in secrecy’, with many details of the raid having never been released.

Chris Farrell, of Judicial Watch, told The Independent: ‘Either you admit you gave special excess to your pet film directors, or you make the information available to everyone.’

A statement on the Judicial Watch website said that the film pushed the Obama narrative, and added: ‘Barack Obama comes off as a hero character.

‘We see him morally preening on a news program and hear him described as ‘thoughtful and analytical.’

Oscar nominated: Navy SEALs prepare to breach a locked door in bin Laden’s compound in Dark Zero Thirty

Raid: Pakistani security officials stand guard as workers demolish the compound in Abbottabad

‘Boal and Bigelow seemed to have gone out of their way (short of producing a two-hour campaign commercial) to project the Obama administration as ‘gutsy’ for ordering the raid.’

Hunted: Bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in May 2011

An investigation into whether Mr Vickers broke any rules by briefing Ms Bigelow and Mr Boal has been launched by the Department of Defense.

Mr Boal and Ms Bigelow, who spent several years working on the film, have insisted that they went through the proper official channels in the intelligence community and did not have access to any classified information.

Zero Dark Thirty opened across the U.S. on January 11 and has been nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actress for Jessica Chastain and Best Original Screenplay. It was nominated for four Golden Globes, with Chastain winning Best Actress.

Mr Boal and Ms Bigelow have both won Oscars fro the Hurt Locker. Ms Bigelow has defended her latest film’s torture scene, saying criticism of the practices might be better directed towards government policymakers.

After bin Laden – who was hunted by the US since the 9/11 terrorist attacks – was killed, the Obama administration said his body was buried at sea off the USS Carl Vinson in accordance with Islamic tradition.

The raid was completed shortly after 1am local time when he was shot once in the chest and once in the head by a Navy Seal who announced, ‘For God and country Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo’, because Geronimo was the code-name given to the al-Qaeda leader.

…

By Alex Gore

PUBLISHED: 17:53 GMT, 19 January 2013 | UPDATED: 09:00 GMT, 20 January 2013

Find this story at 19 January 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Oscar contender is triggering growing criticism from US senators that the movie supports ‘waterboarding’

It has received five Oscar nominations and created a buzz among movie fans around the world.

But Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which recounts the operation that traced and killed Osama bin Laden, is at the centre of growing controversy over the unprecedented access to classified information granted to the director and her screenwriter colleague, while most of these details remain unavailable to the general pubic.

Documents collected, collated and published this week by the National Security Archive of George Washington University in Washington show that only a portion of information about Operation Neptune Spear, the codename for the CIA-led, decade-long hunt for Bin Laden, has so far been declassified.

In contrast, Ms Bigelow and her colleague Mark Boal received briefings from high-ranking CIA and military intelligence officers, Navy SEALs who took part in the operation and other officials. A CIA spokeswoman said at the time, the agency had decided to support the director because “it makes sense to get behind a winning horse. Mark and Kathryn’s movie is going to be the first and the biggest”.

The attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington traumatised the US and led to various policy decisions whose ramifications are still being felt. The vow of then US President George Bush to capture the al-Qa’ida leader “dead or alive” led to the US and UK invasion of Afghanistan and a hunt for Bin Laden that concluded in May 2011 when US Special Forces raided a walled compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad where he had been hiding.

In the hours and days after the raid, White House and Pentagon officials briefed the media about aspects of the raid. Yet there were a number of contradictions contained within those briefings, and more than 18 months later many details remain unknown. Photographs of Bin Laden, for instance, supposedly taken after he was shot dead and when his body was buried at sea from aboard the USS Carl Vinson have not been made public, and the Obama administration has refused media requests under the Freedom of Information Act to release them.

Indeed, the National Security Archive said much of the operation was still “shrouded in secrecy”. It added: “The government’s recalcitrance over releasing information directly to the public about the 21 century’s most important intelligence search and military raid, and its decision instead to grant the film’s producers exclusive and unprecedented access to classified information about the operation, means that for the time being – for bad or good – Hollywood has become the public’s account of record for Operation Neptune Spear.”

Even before its release, Ms Bigelow’s film had already created controversy because of a scenes showing torture that the film suggests were essential to obtaining information that led the CIA to the garrison town of Abbottabad.

Such has been the furore that senior US senators Diane Feinstein and John McCain publicly complained the film was supporting the use of techniques such as “waterboarding”. Ms Bigelow has defended her film, recently telling the BBC: “It’s part of the story. To omit it would have been whitewashing history.”

Yet others say, the issue of the access given to the 61-year-old director is equally controversial. Chris Farrell, of Judicial Watch, a Washington-based non-profit organisation, said it had been involved in extensive litigation with the authorities to obtain withheld documents. He claimed the government was trying to have it both ways. “Either you admit you gave special access to your pet film director, or else you make the information available to everyone,” he said.

What has added to the perception that Ms Bigelow received special treatment are various moves by the authorities to halt other people releasing information about Operation Neptune Spear. The NSA said last November, seven US special forces soldiers involved in the Abbottabad operation were reprimanded for providing classified material to a video game manufacturer.

…

Andrew Buncombe
Friday, 18 January 2013

Find this story at 18 January 2013

© independent.co.uk

Efforts to bring Pakistan’s former spy masters before a New York court to face charges filed by relatives of American victims in the Mumbai terror attacks are getting nowhere with the US Government taking the stand that the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence and its top brass enjoy immunity under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

In response to a civil case filed on behalf of the American victims, a top official of the Department of Justice said the United States strongly condemns the 26/11 attacks and believes that Pakistan “must take steps to to dismantle Lashkar-e-Taiba and to support India’s efforts to counter this terrorist threat”.

But the ISI and its former chiefs Shuja Pasha and Nadeem Raj cannot be proceeded against in a US court because of immunity conferred under the American law, Principal Deputy Attorney General Stuart Delery informed the New York court.

In a 12-page affidavit, the official said the State Department has determined that Pasha and Taj are immune because the allegations by the plaintiffs relate to actions taken by them in their official capacities as directors of ISI, which is a fundamental part of the Government of Pakistan.

Six Americans were among the 166 people killed in the Mumbai attacks in 2008. Some, such as Linda Ragsdale of Tennessee, survived the attack. Ragsdale, who had been shot in her back at the Oberoi Trident Hotel, had filed a case in a New York court. Another lawsuit had been filed by the relatives of Rabbi Gavriel Noah Holtzberg and his pregnant wife Rivka.

Following the lawsuit, a US court did issue summons to Pasha, the ISI chief at the time and Lashkar’s top guns including founder Hafiz Saeed. But Pak moved to block the lawsuit by roping in top-notch US lawyers, who sought quashing the case on the grounds that the US had no jurisdiction in the matter. They argued that any US assertion of jurisdiction over Pakistani officials would be “an intrusion on its sovereignty, in violation of international law”.

Ragsdale, in her civil complaint, sought a compensation of a minimum of $75,000 from the ISI. The US Government’s affidavit in the case, filed on Monday, sought to emphasise that while making the immunity determination, it was not expressing any view on the merits of the claims put forth by the plaintiffs.

Besides the former ISI chiefs and Saeed, the case filed in the US court has also named other top Lashkar operatives involved in the Mumbai operation: Zaki-ur-Rahman, Sajid Mir and Azam Cheema.

…

Thursday, 20 December 2012 13:44 S Rajagopalan | Washington

Find this story at 20 December 2012

Copyright © 2011 The Pioneer. All Rights Reserved.

The United States government has argued in court that current and former officials of Pakistan’s intelligence service should be immune from prosecution in connection with the 2008 Mumbai attacks. At least 166 people, including 6 Americans, were killed and scores more were injured when members of Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba stormed downtown Mumbai, India, taking the city hostage between November 26 and 29, 2008. The Indian government has openly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) of complicity in the attack, which has been described as the most sophisticated international terrorist strike anywhere in the world during the last decade. Using evidence collected by the Indian government, several Americans who survived the bloody attacks sued the ISI in New York earlier this year for allegedly directing Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Mumbai strikes. But Stuart Delery, Principal Deputy Attorney General for the US Department of State, has told the court that the ISI and its senior officials are immune from prosecution on US soil under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. According to the 12-page ‘Statement of Interest’ delivered to the court by Delery, no foreign nationals can be prosecuted in a US court for criminal actions they allegedly carried out while working in official capacities for a foreign government. The affidavit goes on to suggest that any attempt by a US court to assert American jurisdiction over current or former Pakistani government officials would be a blatant “intrusion on [Pakistan’s] sovereignty, in violation of international law”. It appears that nobody has notified the US Department of State that the US routinely “intrudes on Pakistan’s sovereignty” several times a week by using unmanned Predator drones to bomb suspected Taliban militants operating on Pakistani soil. Washington also “intruded on Pakistan’s sovereignty” on May 2, 2011, when it clandestinely sent troops to the town of Abbottabad to kill al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. Reacting to the US position, the Indian government expressed “extreme and serious disappointment” on Thursday, arguing that “It cannot be that any organization, state or non-state, which sponsors terrorism, has immunity”. Indian media quoted Foreign Office spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin as saying that all those behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks “should be brought to justice irrespective of the jurisdiction under which they may reside or be operating”.

…

December 21, 2012 by Joseph Fitsanakis 2 Comments

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |

Find this story at 21 December 2012

The enhanced interrogation techniques portrayed in the film are being decried as inaccurate.

Acting CIA Director Michael Morell critized “Zero Dark Thirty” as a “dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts” in a letter to employees released Friday.

“Zero Dark Thirty” isn’t getting five stars from the CIA.

The acting head of the agency shot down the highly-anticipated movie that chronicles the hunt for Osama bin Laden in a rare letter to employees, adding to the controversy already brewing over the flick’s factuality.

“What I want you to know is that ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is a dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts,” Michael Morell wrote in a memo posted on the CIA’s website Friday.

“CIA interacted with the filmmakers through our Office of Public Affairs but, as is true with any entertainment project with which we interact, we do not control the final product.”

Morell slammed the Oscar-contender, which he said “departs from reality,” for suggesting that “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or what some would call torture, “were the key” to locating and killing the Al Qaeda leader.

MOVIE REVIEW: ‘ZERO DARK THIRTY’

The film, which hit theaters Dec. 19, shows agents using waterboarding and other extreme techniques to force Guantanamo Bay detainees to speak.

Jonathan Olley
The film, starring Jessica Chastain, follows the hunt and May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEAL Team 6.

“That impression is false,” Morell wrote. “And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.”

The acting CIA director also blasted “Zero Dark Thirty” for taking “considerable liberties in its depiction of CIA personnel and their actions, including some who died while serving our country.”

“We cannot allow a Hollywood film to cloud our memory of them,” he added.

Morell’s note comes just two days after three senators, Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), John McCain (R-Az.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), condemned the flick for being “grossly inaccurate and misleading” in suggesting that torture led to the May 2011 killing of bin Laden by Navy SEAL Team 6.

The trio sent a letter to Sony Pictures, the film’s distributor, calling for the studio to add a disclaimer to the film.

…

By Christine Roberts / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, December 23, 2012, 12:35 PM

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Find this story at 23 December 2012

© Copyright 2012 NYDailyNews.com. All rights reserved

Upcoming film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ claims that Bin Laden might not have been found if not for a young female CIA analyst
She devoted the best part of a decade to finding the terrorist
According to colleagues, she was one of the first to advance the theory that the key to finding Bin Laden was in Al Qaeda’s courier network

CIA agents were envious of the glamorous treatment given to the real-lief tenacious operative who tracked Osama bin Laden for the better part of a decade, it was revealed today.

Hollywood starlet Jessica Chastain plays the undercover analyst known as Maya, the woman who eventually finds the location of the then al-Qaeda leader. She is portrayed in a glamorous light – with wardrobes full of designer clothes and an enviable figure.

But the real-life ‘Maya’ didn’t have it as easy as the strawberry-blonde Chastain; despite being one of the key people responsible for bin Laden’s demise, Maya was passed over for a promotion.

Jealousy? Robert Baer, left, said that the CIA was and continues to be a boy’s club, left, Valerie Plame, a former CIA officer herself said that she’d love to get a drink with the real-life ‘Maya’

Former CIA operative Bob Baer told the ‘TODAY’ show that it was unsurprising that the female CIA operative was looked over for a promotion that would have given her an additional $16,000 per annum. ‘It’s an old-boy network,’ he explained.

‘You don’t know why people are promoted, why people are held back, and often people think the worst.’

Valerie Plame, a CIA officer whose identity was leaked, told the show that she admired the operative’s moxy. ‘I’d love to have a drink with her one day,’ she said.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius told the ‘TODAY’ show that the response from the CIA was not unusual, saying that operatives are often ‘quite contrary,’

The reality of America’s battle against terrorism couldn’t have been more different to the glamorized, politically-correct fiction of Homeland, the hit TV show in which Claire Danes plays a beautiful CIA agent who spots the Al Qaeda plot which her misguided male colleagues have missed.

CIA supersleuth: A attractive young female CIA agent, played by Jessica Chastain in the film Zero Dark Thirty, spent the best part of a decade to finding Bin Laden and became the SEALs’ go-to expert on intelligence matters about their target

The world’s most dangerous terror group foiled by a killer blonde in Calvin Klein who wars with her superiors? Only in Hollywood’s dreams, surely.

But, astonishingly, it has now emerged that truth may indeed be as strange as fiction. According to Zero Dark Thirty, a forthcoming film about the hunt for Bin Laden — whose makers were given top-level access to those involved — he might never have been found if it hadn’t been for an attractive young female CIA agent every bit as troublesome as Homeland’s Carrie Mathison.

CIA insiders have confirmed claims by the film’s director Kathryn Bigelow that she is entirely justified in focusing on the role played by a junior female CIA analyst, named Maya in the film and played by Jessica Chastain. And just as in Homeland, the real agent has been snubbed by superiors and fallen out with colleagues since the Bin Laden raid in May last year.

But who is this CIA supersleuth? Although the woman is still undercover and has never been identified, Zero Dark Thirty’s emphasis on Maya’s importance tallies with the account of a U.S. Navy SEAL involved in the raid who later wrote about it in a book.

Bin Laden hunt: A very different side of the agent was seen days after Bin Laden’s body was brought back. She even started crying

Matt Bissonnette writes in No Easy Day of flying out to Afghanistan before the raid with a CIA analyst he called ‘Jen’ who was ‘wicked smart, kind of feisty’ and liked to wear expensive high heels.

She had devoted the best part of a decade to finding Bin Laden and had become the SEALs’ go-to expert on intelligence matters about their target, he said.

And while her colleagues were only 60 per cent sure their quarry was in the compound in Abbottabad, she told the SEAL she was 100 per cent certain.

‘I can’t give her enough credit, I mean, she, in my opinion, she kind of teed up this whole thing,’ Bissonnette said later.

The commando saw a very different side of her days later when they brought Bin Laden’s body back to their Afghan hangar. Having previously told Bissonnette she didn’t want to see the body, ‘Jen’ stayed at the back of the crowd as they unzipped the terrorist’s body bag.

She ‘looked pale and stressed’ and started crying. ‘A couple of the SEALs put their arms around her and walked her over to the edge of the group to look at the body,’ wrote Bissonnette. ‘She didn’t say anything . . . with tears rolling down her cheeks, I could tell it was taking a while for Jen to process.

She’d spent half a decade tracking this man. And now there he was at her feet.’

Jen’s role in the operation passed largely unremarked when Bissonnette’s book came out but now the new film — which is released in the UK in January — has confirmed his estimation of her importance.

Although she remains active as a CIA analyst, it is believed Mark Boal, Bigelow’s screenwriter, was allowed to interview her at length. It has emerged that she is in her 30s and joined the CIA after leaving college and before the 9/11 attacks turned American security upside down.

On target: The agent was one of the first to advance the theory that the key to finding Bin Laden lay in Al Qaeda’s courier network which led to his compound (pictured is the attack scene in the movie)

According to the Washington Post, she worked in the CIA’s station in Islamabad, Pakistan, as a ‘targeter’, a role which involves finding people to recruit as spies or to obliterate in drone attacks.

But CIA insiders say she worked almost solely on finding Bin Laden for a decade. She was still in Pakistan when the hunt heated up after Barack Obama became President in 2008 and ordered a renewed effort to find him.

According to colleagues, the female agent was one of the first to advance the theory — apparently against the views of other CIA staff — that the key to finding Bin Laden lay in Al Qaeda’s courier network.

The agency was convinced Bin Laden, who never used the phone, managed to communicate with his disparate organisation without revealing his whereabouts by passing hand-delivered messages to trusted couriers.

The agent spent years pursuing the courier angle, and it was a hunch that proved spectacularly correct when the U.S. uncovered a courier known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and tracked him back to a compound in the sleepy Pakistan town of Abbottabad.

Fiesty: Jessica Chastain as agent Maya in Zero Dark Thirty about the hunt for Bin Laden

It was a stunning success for the dedicated agent, though she hardly endeared herself to her colleagues in the process.

As one might expect of a woman working in the largely male world of intelligence, colleagues stress she is no shrinking violet but a prickly workaholic with a reputation for clashing with anyone — even senior intelligence chiefs — who disagreed with her.

‘She’s not Miss Congeniality, but that’s not going to find Osama Bin Laden,’ a former colleague told the Washington Post.

Another added: ‘Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks? If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.’

In the film, Maya is portrayed as a loner who has a ‘her-against-the-world’ attitude and pummels superiors into submission by sheer force of will. CIA colleagues say the film’s depiction of her is spot-on.

If this is the case, then she shows little of the feminine tenderness that serves Carrie Mathison so well in Homeland and which Hollywood usually uses to soften female protagonists like Maya.

Instead, the film shows her happily colluding in the torture by waterboarding of an Al Qaeda suspect.

And Navy SEAL Bissonnette reported how she had told him she wasn’t in favour of storming the Bin Laden compound but preferred to ‘just push the easy button and bomb it’. Given that the bombing option would almost certainly have killed the women and children the CIA knew were inside, her comment suggests a cold indifference to ‘civilian’ casualties.

But then the real female agent is hardly your archetypal film heroine. She has reportedly been passed over for promotion since the Bin Laden raid, perhaps adding to her sense of grievance.

Although she was among a handful of CIA staff rewarded over the operation with the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency’s highest honour, dozens of other colleagues were given lesser gongs.

Fellow staff say this prompted her anger to boil over: she hit ‘reply all’ to an email announcing the awards and added her own message which — according to one — effectively said: ‘You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.’

Although colleagues say the intense attention she received from the film-makers has made many of them jealous, they are shocked she was passed over for promotion and merely given a cash bonus for her Bin Laden triumph.

Glamorised fiction: The reality of America’s battle against terrorism couldn’t have been more different to the politically-correct hit TV show Homeland, in which Claire Danes plays a beautiful CIA agent who spots the Al Qaeda plot which her misguided colleagues missed

She has also been moved within the CIA, reassigned to a new counter-terrorism role.

…

By Tom Leonard

PUBLISHED: 23:54 GMT, 13 December 2012 | UPDATED: 23:54 GMT, 13 December 2012

Find this story at 13 December 2012

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

She was a real-life heroine of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, a headstrong young operative whose work tracking the al-Qaeda leader serves as the dramatic core of a Hollywood film set to premiere next week.

Her CIA career has followed a more problematic script, however, since bin Laden was killed.

The operative, who remains undercover, was passed over for a promotion that many in the CIA thought would be impossible to withhold from someone who played such a key role in one of the most successful operations in agency history.

She has sparred with CIA colleagues over credit for the bin Laden mission. After being given a prestigious award for her work, she sent an e-mail to dozens of other recipients saying they didn’t deserve to share her accolades, current and former officials said.

The woman has also come under scrutiny for her contacts with filmmakers and others about the bin Laden mission, part of a broader internal inquiry into the agency’s cooperation on the new movie and other projects, former officials said.

Her defenders say the operative has been treated unfairly, and even her critics acknowledge that her contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial. But the developments have cast a cloud over a career that is about to be bathed in the sort of cinematic glow ordinarily reserved for fictional Hollywood spies.

The female officer, who is in her 30s, is the model for the main character in “Zero Dark Thirty,”a film that chronicles the decade-long hunt for the al-Qaeda chief and that critics are describing as an Academy Award front-runner even before its Dec. 19 release.

The character Maya, which is not the CIA operative’s real name, is portrayed as a gifted operative who spent years pursuing her conviction that al-Qaeda’s courier network would lead to bin Laden, a conviction that proved correct.

At one point in the film, after a female colleague is killed in an attack on a CIA compound in Afghanistan, Maya describes her purpose in near-messianic terms: “I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.”

Colleagues said the on-screen depiction captures the woman’s dedication and combative temperament.

“She’s not Miss Congeniality, but that’s not going to find Osama bin Laden,” said a former CIA associate, who added that the attention from filmmakers sent waves of envy through the agency’s ranks.

“The agency is a funny place, very insular,” the former official said. “It’s like middle-schoolers with clearances.”

The woman is not allowed to talk to journalists, and the CIA declined to answer questions about her, except to stress that the bin Laden mission involved an extensive team. “Over the course of a decade, hundreds of analysts, operators and many others played key roles in the hunt,” said agency spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood.

Friction over mission, movie

The internal frictions are an unseemly aspect of the ongoing fallout from a mission that is otherwise regarded as one of the signal successes in CIA history.

The movie has been a source of controversy since it was revealed that the filmmakers — including director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal — were given extensive access to officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA.

Members of Congress have called for investigations into whether classified information was shared. The movie’s release was delayed amid criticism that it amounted to a reelection ad for President Obama.

The film’s publicity materials say that Maya “is based on a real person,” but the filmmakers declined to elaborate. U.S. officials acknowledged that Boal met with Maya’s real-life counterpart and other CIA officers, typically in the presence of someone from the agency’s public affairs office. The character is played by Jessica Chastain.

Her real-life counterpart joined the agency before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, officials said, and served as a targeter — a position that involves finding targets to recruit as spies or for lethal drone strikes — in the CIA’s station in Islamabad, Pakistan.

She was in that country when the search for bin Laden, after years of being moribund, suddenly heated up. After Obama took office, CIA operatives reexamined several potential trails, including al-Qaeda’s use of couriers to hand-deliver messages to and from bin Laden.

“After this went right, there were a lot of people trying to take credit,” the former intelligence official said. But the female targeter “was one of the people from very early on pushing this” courier approach.

Lashing out in an e-mail

This spring, she was among a handful of employees given the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, its highest honor except for those recognizing people who have come under direct fire. But when dozens of others were given lesser awards, the female officer lashed out.

“She hit ‘reply all’ ” to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. The thrust of her message, the former official said, was: “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.”

Over the past year, she was denied a promotion that would have raised her civil service rank from GS-13 to GS-14, bringing an additional $16,000 in annual pay.

Officials said the woman was given a cash bonus for her work on the bin Laden mission and has since moved on to a new counterterrorism assignment. They declined to say why the promotion was blocked.

The move stunned the woman’s former associates, despite her reputation for clashing with colleagues.

“Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks?” the former official said. “If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.”

…

By Greg Miller, Published: December 11

Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

Find this story at 11 December 2012

© The Washington Post Company

Operative at heart of new film was ‘difficult’ and sent abusive emails

A picture of the real-life CIA agent at the heart of Zero Dark Thirty – director Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden – has emerged this week. But the young and determined agent named “Maya”, who is played by actress Jessica Chastain, has been described by colleagues as combative and difficult.

“She’s not Miss Congeniality, but that’s not going to find Osama bin Laden,” one of her former CIA colleagues told The Washington Post. “Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks?” said another. “If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.”

The woman, who remains undercover and is in her 30s, was reportedly passed over for promotion this year, and clashed with colleagues about who should take credit for tracking down the al-Qa’ida leader to the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed by US Special Forces in May 2011, in the 12.30am raid that gives Ms Bigelow’s film its title.

A CIA operative since before 9/11, she was stationed in Islamabad in the years before the raid, where she worked to uncover the network of couriers that would eventually lead to Bin Laden.

Though hundreds of people were involved in the decade-long search, the Post’s CIA sources acknowledge that “Maya’s” contribution was crucial. Following the raid, she was awarded the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, and given a cash bonus. But she riled colleagues by responding to the award with a group email, accusing others in the agency of having obstructed her in her work. Those colleagues were further irked by the amount of attention she has received. The woman also appears, as “Jen”, in No Easy Day, a book about the raid by former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, who took part in the mission.

Zero Dark Thirty is Ms Bigelow’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning Iraq war film The Hurt Locker (2008), and is expected to feature heavily during the 2013 awards season.

When Bin Laden was killed, the director was working on a project about the attempts to find him. Screenwriter Mark Boal tore up the script and started again, and the film began shooting in spring this year. It opens in US cinemas this week, delayed to avoid accusations that it would give an electoral boost to President Obama, who ordered the raid.

…

Tim Walker

Los Angeles

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Find this story at 11 December 2012

© independent.co.uk

Meeting at British embassy in US raises questions about repeated denials by MI5 and MI6 of connivance in torture

Within days of the 9/11 attacks on the US, the CIA told British intelligence officers of its plans to abduct al-Qaida suspects and fly them to secret prisons where they would be systematically abused.

The meeting, at the British embassy in Washington, is disclosed in a forthcoming book by the Guardian journalist Ian Cobain. It raises serious questions about repeated claims by senior MI5 and MI6 officers that they were slow to appreciate the US response to the attacks, and never connived in torture.

The meeting signalled to British officials that the US was preparing to embark on a global kidnapping programme which became known as extraordinary rendition. Cobain reveals that at the end of a three-hour presentation by Cofer Black, President George Bush’s top counter-terrorist adviser, Mark Allen – his opposite number in MI6 – commented that it all sounded “rather bloodcurdling”.

A few weeks later, in early October 2001, at a secret meeting at Nato headquarters in Brussels, US officials drew up a list of “necessary measures to increase security”, Cobain discloses. They included flights to and from secret prisons in Asia, Africa, and throughout Europe. “Quietly, Britain pledged logistics support for the rendition programme, which resulted in the CIA’s Gulfstream V and other jets becoming frequent visitors to British airports en route to the agency’s secret prisons,” writes Cobain.

Over the next four years CIA rendition flights used British airports at least 210 times. The book reveals that Washington asked the UK for permission to build a large prison on Diego Garcia, the British territory in the Indian Ocean where the US has a large bomber base. The project was dropped, for logistical rather than legal reasons.

However, Diego Garcia was used as a stopover for CIA flights taking detainees to secret prisons around the world. And in secret memos, Labour ministers said in early 2002 that their “preferred option” was to render British nationals to Guantánamo Bay, Cobain records. MI5 and MI6 officers carried out around 100 interrogations at the US prison on Cuba between 2002 and 2004.

Yet for years ministers emphatically denied any British involvement in America’s rendition programme. As late as December 2005, Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, was telling MPs there was “simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition”. Just a year earlier, we now know, MI6 – under Straw’s watch and with the blessing of ministers, officials say – helped to render two leading Libyan dissidents to Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

Despite the post-9/11 Washington embassy and Nato meetings, and other evidence of their early involvement in rendition, MI5 and MI6 witnesses told the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) that it was some time before they knew what the US was up to. As late as July 2007, the misinformed ISC stated in a report on rendition that MI5 and MI6 “were … slow to detect the emerging pattern of renditions to detention”.

…

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 October 2012 13.06 BST

Find this story at 22 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Police will seek to interview Sir Mark Allen, the former head of MI6’s counterterrorism unit, in connection with allegations of British complicity in the rendition to Libya and torture of two Libyan dissidents, Abdel Hakim Belhadj and Sami al-Saadi, during the Gaddafi era. Sir Mark suffered a stroke in July, and it is understood Metropolitan Police detectives were told that he was not fit enough at that stage to be interviewed over the allegations.

The two men, members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, were subjected to years of imprisonment and torture after they were returned to Libya in 2004.

Sir Mark’s health had improved sufficiently for him to address an audience of energy experts at Chatham House, London, last week. A spokeswoman for the British Institute of Energy Economics (BIEE), which organised the event, confirmed that it had taken place but, when asked for further details, stated: “Sir Mark gave a talk, not a presentation, and did not want this [the contents] published.”

A source at BP, where Sir Mark has an office, confirmed: “He had the stroke at the beginning of July and he’s making really good progress.”

Sir Mark’s talk was billed as “his personal reflections on the current situation in the Middle East, the advent of the Arab Spring and considerations about its fallout”.

Coincidentally, BIEE’s president is Lord Howell – a former Foreign Office minister who, in that capacity, fielded questions regarding the rendition scandal and who is now William Hague’s personal adviser on energy and resource security. When The Independent on Sunday broke the news of Sir Mark’s BIEE talk to Scotland Yard last week, a spokesman noted the details but declined to comment.

British police launched an inquiry in January after documents discovered during the Libyan uprising suggested that Sir Mark had conspired in the rendition. The allegations were so serious that the police and Director of Public Prosecutions issued a statement saying: “It is in the public interest for them to be investigated now.”

In one of the documents, a letter sent to Gaddafi’s head of intelligence, Moussa Koussa, in March 2004, Sir Mark states that helping get Mr Belhadj to Libya “was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years”. Sir Mark added: “I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week.”

Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, said: “A man with many secrets has a lot of favours he can call in. I hope he recovers soon enough to reveal some light on a very sordid page of British history. It is time to end the secrecy around Britain’s relationship with Gaddafi, and both the British and the Libyan public deserve some answers.”

Sir Mark is also facing a court battle as a result of a civil legal action that has been brought against him and the former foreign secretary Jack Straw, relating to the rendition and torture allegations. They are cited as key defendants in recently filed court documents that outline the abuse suffered by the two Libyan dissidents after they had been abducted and handed to Gaddafi’s regime with the help of British intelligence.

…

Jonathan Owen
Sunday, 21 October 2012

Find this story at 21 October 2012

© independent.co.uk

How would you feel if when you arrived at your holiday destination, security staff demanded to read your personal emails and look at your Facebook account?

Israel’s attorney general has been asked to look into claims that security officials have been doing just that – threatening to refuse entry to the country unless such private information is divulged by some tourists. Keith Wallace reports.

Find this story at 31 July 2012

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Afghan man who lost relatives in missile strike says UK role in supplying information to US military may be unlawful

Britain’s role in supplying information to an American military “kill list” in Afghanistan is being subjected to legal challenge amid growing international concern over targeted strikes against suspected insurgents and drug traffickers.

An Afghan man who lost five relatives in a missile strike started proceedings against the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and the Ministry of Defence demanding to know details of the UK’s participation “in the compilation, review and execution of the list and what form it takes”.

Legal letters sent to Soca and the MoD state the involvement of UK officials in these decisions “may give rise to criminal offences and thus be unlawful”. They say Britain’s contribution raises several concerns, particularly in cases where international humanitarian laws protecting civilians and non-combatants may have been broken.

“We need to know whether the rule of law is being followed and that safeguards are in place to prevent what could be clear breaches of international law,” said Rosa Curling from the solicitors Leigh Day & Co. “We have a family here that is desperate to know what happened, and to ensure this kind of thing never happens again.”

Targeting Taliban commanders in precision attacks has been an important part of Nato’s strategy in Afghanistan, and it has involved US, British and Afghan special forces, and the use of drones.

But who is put on the “kill list” and why remains a closely guarded secret – and has become a huge concern for human rights groups. They have questioned the legality of such operations and said civilians are often killed.

Soca refused to discuss its intelligence work, but the agency and the MoD said they worked “strictly within the bounds of international law”. Its role in the operation to compile a “kill list” was first explained in a report to the US Senate’s committee on foreign relations.

The report described how a new task force targeting drug traffickers, insurgents and corrupt officials was being set up at Kandahar air field in southern Afghanistan. “The unit will link the US and British military with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency], Britain’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency, and police and intelligence agencies from other countries.” The 31-page report from 2009 acknowledged the precise rules of engagement were classified.

But it said two generals in Afghanistan had explained they “have been interpreted to allow them to put drug traffickers with proven links to insurgency on a kill list, called the joint integrated prioritised target list”.

“The military places no restrictions on the use of force with these selected targets, which means they can be killed or captured on the battlefield,” the Senate report said. “It does not, however, authorise targeted assassinations away from the battlefield. The generals said standards for getting on the list require two verifiable human sources and substantial additional evidence.”

The legal challenge has been brought by an Afghan who believes his relatives were unlawfully killed in a case of mistaken identity during one “kill list” operation. A bank worker in Kabul, Habib Rahman lost two brothers, two uncles and his father-in-law in a US missile attack on their cars on 2 September 2010. They had been helping another member of the family who had been campaigning in Takhar province in northern Afghanistan in the runup to the country’s parliamentary elections. In total, 10 Afghans were killed and several others injured.

Rahman says most of those who died were election workers. But the attack was praised by Nato’s International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) which said the target had been a man in the convoy called Muhammad Amin. The US accused him of being a Taliban commander and member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and said the people who had been travelling with him had been insurgents.

A detailed study of the incident by the research group Afghanistan Analysts Network contradicted the official account, saying Isaf had killed Zabet Amanullah. Amin was tracked down after the incident and is still alive, said the study’s author, Kate Clark. “Even now, there does not seem to be any acknowledgment within the military that they may have got the wrong man,” she said. “It is really very bizarre. They think Amin and Amanullah are one and the same.”

Rahman’s lawyers acknowledge they do not know whether information provided by Britain contributed to this attack, but hope the legal challenge will force officials to be more open about the British contribution to the “kill list”.

The letters to Soca’s director general, Trevor Pearce, and the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, point to the Geneva conventions, which say that persons taking no active part in hostilities are protected from “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds”.

They also draw on the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has said anyone accompanying an organised group who is not directly involved in hostilities “remains civilian assuming support functions”.

The legal letters, the first step towards seeking judicial review, say “drug traffickers who merely support the insurgency financially could not legitimately be included in the list” under these principles. The lawyers believe that, even if Isaf had targeted the right man, it may have been unlawful for others to have been killed in the missile strike.

“The general practice of international forces in Afghanistan and the experience of our client suggest that proximity to a listed target is, on its own, sufficient for an individual to be considered a legitimate target for attack. Such a policy would be unlawful under the international humanitarian law principles,” they say.

Curling said: “Ensuring the UK government and its agencies are operating within their legal obligations could not be more important. Our client’s case suggests the establishment and maintenance of the ‘killing list’ is not in line with the UK’s duties under international humanitarian law. Our client lost five of his relatives in an attack by the international military forces as a result of this list. It is important that the Ministry of Defence and Soca provide us with the reassurances sought.”

…

Find this story at 9 August 2012

Nick Hopkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 August 2012 19.56 BST

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

DENVER — As Chris Lindley drove to work that morning in August 2008, a call set his heart pounding.

The Democratic National Convention was being held in Denver, and Barack Obama was to accept his party’s presidential nomination before a crowd of 80,000 people that night.

The phone call was from one of Lindley’s colleagues at Colorado’s emergency preparedness agency. The deadly bacterium that causes tularemia — long feared as a possible biological weapon — had been detected at the convention site.

Should they order an evacuation, the state officials wondered? Send inspectors in moon suits? Distribute antibiotics? Delay or move Obama’s speech?

Another question loomed: Could they trust the source of the alert, a billion-dollar government system for detecting biological attacks known as BioWatch?

Six tense hours later, Lindley and his colleagues had reached a verdict: false alarm.

BioWatch had failed — again.

President George W. Bush announced the system’s deployment in his 2003 State of the Union address, saying it would “protect our people and our homeland.” Since then, BioWatch air samplers have been installed inconspicuously at street level and atop buildings in cities across the country — ready, in theory, to detect pathogens that cause anthrax, tularemia, smallpox, plague and other deadly diseases.

But the system has not lived up to its billing. It has repeatedly cried wolf, producing dozens of false alarms in Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Louis, Phoenix, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

Worse, BioWatch cannot be counted on to detect a real attack, according to confidential government test results and computer modeling.

The false alarms have threatened to disrupt not only the 2008 Democratic convention, but also the 2004 and 2008 Super Bowls and the 2006 National League baseball playoffs. In 2005, a false alarm in Washington prompted officials to consider closing the National Mall.

Federal agencies documented 56 BioWatch false alarms — most of them never disclosed to the public — through 2008. More followed.

The ultimate verdict on BioWatch is that state and local health officials have shown no confidence in it. Not once have they ordered evacuations or distributed emergency medicines in response to a positive reading.

Federal officials have not established the cause of the false alarms, but scientists familiar with BioWatch say they appear to stem from its inability to distinguish between dangerous pathogens and closely related but nonlethal germs.

BioWatch has yet to face an actual biological attack. Field tests and computer modeling, however, suggest it would have difficulty detecting one.

In an attack by terrorists or a rogue state, disease organisms could well be widely dispersed, at concentrations too low to trigger BioWatch but high enough to infect thousands of people, according to scientists with knowledge of the test data who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Even in a massive release, air currents would scatter the germs in unpredictable ways. Huge numbers of air samplers would have to be deployed to reliably detect an attack in a given area, the scientists said.

Many who have worked with BioWatch — from the Army general who oversaw its initial deployment to state and local health officials who have seen its repeated failures up close — call it ill-conceived or unworkable.

“I can’t find anyone in my peer group who believes in BioWatch,” said Dr. Ned Calonge, chief medical officer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment from 2002 to 2010.

“The only times it goes off, it’s wrong. I just think it’s a colossal waste of money. It’s a stupid program.”

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that would be chiefly responsible for rushing medications to the site of an attack, told White House aides at a meeting Nov. 21 that they would not do so unless a BioWatch warning was confirmed by follow-up sampling and analysis, several attendees said in interviews.

Those extra steps would undercut BioWatch’s rationale: to enable swift treatment of those exposed.

Federal officials also have shelved long-standing plans to expand the system to the nation’s airports for fear that false alarms could trigger evacuations of terminals, grounding of flights and needless panic.

BioWatch was developed by U.S. national laboratories and government contractors and is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security. Department officials insist that the system’s many alerts were not false alarms. Each time, BioWatch accurately detected some organism in the environment, even if it was not the result of an attack and posed no threat to the public, officials said.

At the same time, department officials have assured Congress that newer technology will make BioWatch more reliable and cheaper to operate.

The current samplers are vacuum-powered collection devices, about the size of an office printer, that pull air through filters that trap any airborne materials. In more than 30 cities each day, technicians collect the filters and deliver them to state or local health labs for genetic analysis. Lab personnel look for DNA matches with at least half a dozen targeted pathogens.

The new, larger units would be automated labs in a box. Samples could be analyzed far more quickly and with no need for manual collection.

Buying and operating the new technology, known as Generation 3, would cost about $3.1 billion over the next five years, on top of the roughly $1 billion that BioWatch already has cost taxpayers. The Obama administration is weighing whether to award a multiyear contract.

Generation 3 “is imperative to saving thousands of lives,” Dr. Alexander Garza, Homeland Security’s chief medical officer, told a House subcommittee on March 29.

But field and lab tests of automated units have raised doubts about their effectiveness. A prototype installed in the New York subway system in 2007 and 2008 produced multiple false readings, according to interviews with scientists. Field tests last year in Chicago found that a second prototype could not operate independently for more than a week at a time.

Most worrisome, testing at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state and at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah found that Generation 3 units could detect a biological agent only if exposed to extremely high concentrations: hundreds of thousands of organisms per cubic meter of air over a six-hour period.

Most of the pathogens targeted by BioWatch, scientists said, can cause sickness or death at much lower levels.

A confidential Homeland Security analysis prepared in January said these “failures were so significant” that the department had proposed that Northrop Grumman Corp., the leading competitor for the Generation 3 contract, make “major engineering modifications.”

A spokesman for the department, Peter Boogaard, defended the performance of BioWatch. Responding to written questions, he said the department “takes all precautions necessary to minimize the occurrence of both false positive and false negative results.”

“Rigorous testing and evaluation” will guide the department’s decisions about whether to buy the Generation 3 technology, he said.

Representatives of Northrop Grumman said in interviews that some test results had prompted efforts to improve the automated units’ sensitivity and overall performance.

“We had an issue that affected the consistency of the performance of the system,” said Dave Tilles, the company’s project director. “We resolved it. We fixed it…. We feel like we’re ready for the next phase of the program.”

In congressional testimony, officials responsible for BioWatch in both the Bush and Obama administrations have made only fleeting references to the system’s documented failures.

“BioWatch, as you know, has been an enormous success story,” Jay M. Cohen, a Homeland Security undersecretary, told a House subcommittee in 2007.

In June 2009, Homeland Security’s then-chief medical officer, Dr. Jon Krohmer, told a House panel: “Without these detectors, the nation has no ability to detect biological attacks until individuals start to show clinical symptoms.” Without BioWatch, “needless deaths” could result, he said.

Garza, the current chief medical officer, was asked during his March 29 testimony whether Generation 3 was on track. “My professional opinion is, it’s right where it needs to be,” he said.

After hearing such assurances, bipartisan majorities of Congress have unfailingly supported additional spending for BioWatch.

Olympic prototype

The problems inherent in what would become BioWatch appeared early.

In February 2002, scientists and technicians from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory deployed a prototype in and around Salt Lake City in preparation for the Winter Olympics. The scientists were aware that false alarms could “cause immense disruptions and panic” and were determined to prevent them, they later wrote in the lab’s quarterly magazine.

Sixteen air samplers were positioned at Olympic venues, as well as in downtown Salt Lake City and at the airport. About 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 12, a sample from the airport’s C concourse tested positive for anthrax.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt was at an Olympic figure skating competition when the state’s public safety director, Bob Flowers, called with the news.

“He told me that they had a positive lead on anthrax at the airport,” Leavitt recalled. “I asked if they’d retested it. He said they had — not just once, but four times. And each time it tested positive.”

The Olympics marked the first major international gathering since the Sept. 11, 2001, airliner hijackings and the deadly anthrax mailings that fall.

“It didn’t take a lot of imagination to say, ‘This could be the real thing,'” Leavitt said.

But sealing off the airport would disrupt the Olympics. And “the federal government would have stopped transportation all over the country,” as it had after Sept. 11, Leavitt said.

Leavitt ordered hazardous-materials crews to stand by at the airport, though without lights and sirens or conspicuous protective gear.

“He was ready to close the airport and call the National Guard,” recalled Richard Meyer, then a federal scientist assisting with the detection technology at the Olympics.

After consulting Meyer and other officials, Leavitt decided to wait until a final round of testing was completed. By 9 p.m., when the results were negative, the governor decided not to order any further response.

“It was a false positive,” Leavitt said. “But it was a live-fire exercise, I’ll tell you that.”

Pressing ahead

The implication — that BioWatch could deliver a highly disruptive false alarm — went unheeded.

After the Olympics, Meyer and others who had worked with the air samplers attended meetings at the Pentagon, where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was building a case for rapidly deploying the technology nationwide.

On Jan. 28, 2003, Bush unveiled BioWatch in his State of the Union address, calling it “the nation’s first early-warning network of sensors to detect biological attack.”

The next month, a group of science and technology advisors to the Defense Department, including Sidney Drell, the noted Stanford University physicist, expressed surprise that “no formal study has been undertaken” of the Salt Lake City incident. The cause of that false alarm has never been identified.

“It is not realistic to undertake a nationwide, blanket deployment of biosensors,” the advisory panel, named the JASON group, concluded.

The warning was ignored in the rush to deploy BioWatch. Administration officials also disbanded a separate working group of prominent scientists with expertise in the pathogens.

That group, established by the Pentagon, had been working to determine how often certain germs appear in nature, members of the panel said in interviews. The answer would be key to avoiding false alarms. The idea was to establish a baseline to distinguish between the natural presence of disease organisms and an attack.

The failure to conduct that work has hobbled the system ever since, particularly in regard to tularemia, which has been involved in nearly all of BioWatch’s false alarms.

The bacterium that causes tularemia, or rabbit fever, got its formal name, Francisella tularensis, after being found in squirrels in the early 20th century in Central California’s Tulare County. About 200 naturally occurring infections in humans are reported every year in the U.S. The disease can be deadly but is readily curable when treated promptly with antibiotics.

Before BioWatch, scientists knew that the tularemia bacterium existed in soil and water. What the scientists who designed BioWatch did not know — because the fieldwork wasn’t done — was that nature is rife with close cousins to it.

The false alarms for tularemia appear to have been triggered by those nonlethal cousins, according to scientists with knowledge of the system.

That BioWatch is sensitive enough to register repeated false alarms but not sensitive enough to reliably detect an attack may seem contradictory. But the two tasks involve different challenges.

Any detection system is likely to encounter naturally occurring organisms like the tularemia bacterium and its cousins. Those encounters have the potential to trigger alerts unless the system can distinguish between benign organisms and harmful ones.

Detecting an attack requires a system that is not only discriminating but also highly sensitive — to guarantee that it won’t miss traces of deadly germs that might have been dispersed over a large area.

BioWatch is neither discriminating enough for the one task nor sensitive enough for the other.

The system’s inherent flaws and the missing scientific work did not slow its deployment. After Bush’s speech, the White House assigned Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Reeves, whose office was responsible for developing defenses against chemical and biological attacks, to get BioWatch up and running.

Over the previous year, Reeves had overseen placement of units similar to the BioWatch samplers throughout the Washington area, including the Pentagon, where several false alarms for anthrax and plague later occurred.

Based on that work and computer modeling of the technology’s capabilities, Reeves did not see how BioWatch could reliably detect attacks smaller than, for example, a mass-volume spraying from a crop duster.

Nevertheless, the priority was to carry out Bush’s directive, swiftly.

“In the senior-level discussions, the issue of efficacy really wasn’t on the table,” recalled Reeves, who has since retired from the Army. “It was get it done, tell the president we did good, tell the nation that they’re protected.… I thought at the time this was good PR, to calm the nation down. But an effective system? Not a chance.”

Why no illness?

It wasn’t long before there was a false alarm. Over a three-day period in October 2003, three BioWatch units detected the tularemia bacterium in Houston.

Public health officials were puzzled: The region’s hospitals were not reporting anyone sick with the disease.

Dr. Mary desVignes-Kendrick, the city’s health director, wanted to question hospital officials in detail to make sure early symptoms of tularemia were not being missed or masked by a flu outbreak. But to desVignes-Kendrick’s dismay, Homeland Security officials told her not to tell the doctors and nurses what she was looking for.

“We were hampered by how much we could share on this quote-unquote secret initiative,” she said.

After a week, it was clear that the BioWatch alarm was false.

In early 2004, on the eve of the Super Bowl in Houston, BioWatch once again signaled tularemia, desVignes-Kendrick said. The sample was from a location two blocks from Reliant Stadium, where the game was to be played Feb. 1.

DesVignes-Kendrick was skeptical but she and other officials again checked with hospitals before dismissing the warning as another false alarm. The football game was played without interruption.

Nonetheless, three weeks later, Charles E. McQueary, then Homeland Security’s undersecretary for science and technology, told a House subcommittee that BioWatch was performing flawlessly.

“I am very pleased with the manner in which BioWatch has worked,” he said. “We’ve had well over half a million samples that have been taken by those sensors. We have yet to have our first false alarm.”

Asked in an interview about that statement, McQueary said his denial of any false alarm was based on his belief that the tularemia bacterium had been detected in Houston, albeit not from an attack.

“You can’t tell the machine, ‘I only want you to detect the one that comes from a terrorist,'” he said.

Whether the Houston alarms involved actual tularemia has never been determined, but researchers later reported the presence of benign relatives of the pathogen in the metropolitan area.

Fear in the capital

In late September 2005, nearly two years after the first cluster of false alarms in Houston, analysis of filters from BioWatch units on and near the National Mall in Washington indicated the presence of tularemia. Tens of thousands of people had visited the Mall that weekend for a book festival and a protest against the Iraq War. Anyone who had been infected would need antibiotics promptly.

For days, officials from the White House and Homeland Security and other federal agencies privately discussed whether to assume the signal was another false alarm and do nothing, or quarantine the Mall and urge those who had been there to get checked for tularemia.

As they waited for further tests, federal officials decided not to alert local healthcare providers to be on the lookout for symptoms, for fear of creating a panic. Homeland Security officials now say findings from lab analysis of the filters did not meet BioWatch standards for declaring an alert.

Six days after the first results, however, CDC scientists broke ranks and began alerting hospitals and clinics. That was little help to visitors who already had left town, however.

“There were 100 people on one conference call — scientists from all over, public health officials — trying to sort out what it meant,” recalled Dr. Gregg Pane, director of Washington’s health department at the time.

Discussing the incident soon thereafter, Jeffrey Stiefel, then chief BioWatch administrator for Homeland Security, said agency officials were keenly aware that false alarms could damage the system’s credibility.

“If I tell a city that they’ve got a biological event, and it’s not a biological event, you no longer trust that system, and the system is useless,” Stiefel said on videotape at a biodefense seminar at the National Institutes of Health on Oct. 6, 2005. “It has to have a high reliability.”

Ultimately, no one turned up sick with tularemia.

Culture of silence

Homeland Security officials have said little publicly about the false positives. And, citing national security and the classification of information, they have insisted that their local counterparts remain mum as well.

Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Los Angeles County’s public health director, whose department has presided over several BioWatch false positives, referred questions to Homeland Security officials.

Dr. Takashi Wada, health officer for Pasadena from 2003 to 2010, was guarded in discussing the BioWatch false positive that occurred on his watch. Wada confirmed that the detection was made, in February 2007, but would not say where in the 23-square-mile city.

“We’ve been told not to discuss it,” he said in an interview.

Dr. Karen Relucio, medical director for the San Mateo County Health Department, acknowledged there was a false positive there in 2008, but declined to elaborate. “I’m not sure it’s OK for me to talk about that,” said Relucio, who referred further questions to officials in Washington.

In Arizona, officials kept quiet when BioWatch air samplers detected the anthrax pathogen at Super Bowl XLII in February 2008.

Nothing had turned up when technicians checked the enclosed University of Phoenix Stadium before kickoff. But airborne material collected during the first half of the game tested positive for anthrax, said Lt. Col. Jack W. Beasley Jr., chief of the Arizona National Guard’s weapons of mass destruction unit.

The Guard rushed some of the genetic material to the state’s central BioWatch lab in Phoenix for further testing. Federal and state officials convened a 2 a.m. conference call, only to be told that it was another false alarm.

Although it never made the news, the incident “caused quite a stir,” Beasley said.

The director of the state lab, Victor Waddell, said he had been instructed by Homeland Security officials not to discuss the test results. “That’s considered national security,” he said.

The dreaded call

In the months before the 2008 Democratic National Convention, local, state and federal officials planned for a worst-case event in Denver, including a biological attack.

Shortly before 9 a.m. on Aug. 28, the convention’s final day, that frightening scenario seemed to have come true. That’s when Chris Lindley, of the Colorado health department, got the phone call from a colleague, saying BioWatch had detected the tularemia pathogen at the convention site.

Lindley, an epidemiologist who had led a team of Army preventive-medicine specialists in Iraq, had faced crises, but nothing like a bioterrorism attack. Within minutes, chief medical officer Ned Calonge arrived.

Calonge had little faith in BioWatch. A couple of years earlier, the health department had been turned upside down responding to what turned out to be a false alarm for Brucella, a bacterium that primarily affects cattle, on Denver’s western outskirts.

“The idea behind BioWatch — that you could put out these ambient air filters and they would provide you with the information to save people exposed to a biological attack — it’s a concept that you could only put together in theory,” Calonge said in an interview. “It’s a poorly conceived strategy for doing early detection that is inherently going to pick up false positives.”

Lindley and his team arranged a conference call with scores of officials, including representatives from Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Secret Service and the White House.

None of the BioWatch samplers operated by the state had registered a positive, and no unusual cases of infection appeared to have been diagnosed at area hospitals, Lindley said.

The alert had come from a Secret Service-installed sampler on the grounds of the arena where the convention was taking place. The unit was next to an area filled with satellite trucks broadcasting live news reports on the Democratic gathering. Soon, thousands of conventioneers would be walking from Pepsi Center to nearby Invesco Field to hear Obama’s acceptance speech.

Had Lindley and Calonge been asked, they said in interviews, they wouldn’t have put the BioWatch unit at this spot, where foot and vehicle traffic could stir up dust and contaminants that might set off a false alarm. As it turned out, a shade tree 12 yards from the sampler had attracted squirrels, potential carriers of tularemia.

The location near the media trailers posed another problem: how to conduct additional tests without setting off a panic.

EPA officials “said on the phone, ‘We have a team standing by, ready to go,'” Lindley recalled. But the technicians would have to wear elaborate protective gear.

The sight of emergency responders in moon suits “would have derailed the convention,” Calonge said.

…

Find this story at 7 July 2012

By David Willman, Los Angeles Times

July 7, 2012Advertisement

david.willman@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Secret documents reveal British intelligence concerns and raise damaging questions about UK’s targeting of Gaddafi opponents
Britain already faces legal action over its involvement in the plot to seize Abdul Hakim Belhaj, who is now the military commander in Tripoli. Photograph: Francois Mori/AP

British intelligence believes the capture and rendition of two top Libyan rebel commanders, carried out with the involvement of MI6, strengthened al-Qaida and helped groups attacking British forces in Iraq, secret documents reveal.

The papers, discovered in the British ambassador’s abandoned residence in Tripoli, raise new and damaging questions over Britain’s role in the seizure and torture of key opponents of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

Britain is already facing legal actions over its involvement in the plot to seize Abdul Hakim Belhaj, leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) who is now the military commander in Tripoli, and his deputy, Sami al-Saadi. Both men say they were tortured and jailed after being handed over to Gaddafi.

The documents reveal that British intelligence believe the pair’s rendition boosted al-Qaida by removing more moderate elements from the insurgency’s leadership. This allowed extremists to push “a relatively close-knit group” focused on overthrowing Gaddafi into joining the pan-Islamist terror network.

One document, headed “UK/Libya eyes only – Secret”, showed the security services had monitored LIFG members since their arrival in Britain following a failed attempt to kill Gaddafi in 1996, and understood their aim was the replacement of his regime with an Islamic state.

The briefing paper, prepared by the security service for a four-day MI5 visit in February 2005, said that following the seizure of its two key leaders the year before the group had been cast into a state of disarray.

“The extremists are now in the ascendancy,” the paper said, and they were “pushing the group towards a more pan-Islamic agenda inspired by AQ [al-Qaida]”.

Their “broadened” goals, it continued, were now also the destabilisation of Arab governments that were not following sharia law and the liberation of Muslim territories occupied by the west.

The 58-page document, which included names, photographs and detailed biographies of a dozen alleged LIFG members in the UK, went on to highlight “conclusions of concern” in the light of these changes.

These included the sending of money and false documents to a contact in Iran to help smuggle fighters into Iraq, where British and US forces were coming under fierce attack. “UK members have long enjoyed a reputation as the best suppliers of false documents in the worldwide extremist community,” said the report. It added that British LIFG members were becoming “increasingly ambitious” at fundraising through fast-food restaurants, fraud, property and car dealing, and raised nearly all the money for the group outside of Libya.British security also asked Gaddafi’s security forces for access to detainees and their debriefs.

Asked about the document, a Foreign Office spokesman said: “It is the government’s longstanding policy not to comment on intelligence matters.”

The LIFG eventually merged with al-Qaida in 2007. However, a second document, a secret update on Libyan extremist networks in the UK from August 2008, says the response of British members was “subdued and mixed”.

It concluded that those already supporting the wider aims of al-Qaida continued to do so, but “those with reservations retain their focus on Libya”. It added, however, that some money raised by members in Manchester may have gone to “assist operational activity”.

The cache of confidential documents – which included private letters to Gaddafi from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and key Downing Street aides – was abandoned when the three-story residence was attacked by Gaddafi loyalists in April. .

There was also a dossier prepared by British intelligence with suggested questions for the captured men. The 39-page document, entitled Briefs for Detainees and labelled “UK Secret” on each page, was written in three sections in March, June and October 2004.

The first section is dated the month of Belhaj’s arrest, and sought answers on everything from his private life to his military training, activities in Afghanistan and links to al-Qaida. There were also personalised questions for Saadi.

The LIFG, founded by veterans of the mujahideen’s war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was for many years the most serious internal threat to Gaddafi, coming close to blowing up the dictator with a car bomb in his home town of Sirte in 1996. The government denied claims by David Shayler, the renegade British spy, that this assassination attempt was funded by British intelligence.

After Gaddafi’s clampdown on the group, dozens of dissidents were allowed to settle in Britain. London only designated the LIFG a terrorist organisation after Libya said it was abandoning its weapons of mass destruction programme in 2003. The move is understood to have been agreed as part of the negotiations with Gaddafi’s regime that paved the way to the controversial Blair deal.

Belhaj, now a key figure in liberated Libya, is preparing to sue Britain after other documents discovered in the wake of Gaddafi’s fall indicated that MI6 assisted in his rendition to torture and brutal treatment from the CIA and Gaddafi’s regime.

MI6 informed the CIA of his whereabouts after his associates told British diplomats in Malaysia he wanted to claim asylum in Britain.

He was allowed to board a flight to London, then abducted when his aircraft landed at Bangkok.

…

Find this story at 24 October 2011 

Ian Birrell
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 October 2011 20.28 BST

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