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Ukraine is on the brink of civil war, Vladimir Putin has said, and he should know because the country is already in the midst of a covert intelligence war. Over the weekend, CIA director John Brennan travelled to Kiev, nobody knows exactly why, but some speculate that he intends to open US intelligence resources to Ukrainian leaders about real-time Russian military maneuvers. The US has, thus far, refrained from sharing such knowledge because Moscow is believed to have penetrated much of Ukraine’s communications systems – and Washington isn’t about to hand over its surveillance secrets to the Russians.
If you have any doubts that the battle is raging on the ‘covert ops’ front just consider today’s events in Pcholkino where Ukrainian soldiers from the 25th Airborn Division handed over their weapons and APC’s to pro-Russian militiamen and pretty much surrendered. The Ukrainian commander was quoted as saying “they’ve captured us and are using dirty tricks”. This is the kind of morale-busting incident that can spread quickly. It doesn’t happen spontaneously and it often begins with mixed messages, literally – messages purporting to come from the chain of command but actually originate from the enemy’s dirty tricks department.
So what kind of conversations did Brennan have during his visit? There’s no way of knowing for sure of course. But, according to my sources, and based on my experience of reporting on the Russian invasion of Georgia, the US-Ukraine information exchange would go a lot further than simply tracking numbers and motions of Russian tanks and soldiers. The operative term here is ‘non-lethal’ help – that remains Washington’s official position. But in today’s digital and virtual battlefield, the game can be over before the first shot gets fired. And if Moscow’s mastery over the digital domain can be countered, Putin might think twice about risking the expensive hardware that he has invested billions in upgrading since the Georgian war.
In that conflict, the US refused to sell air-cover missiles (Manpads) to Tbilisi while the Israelis deactivated the ones they’d sold after Putin threatened them with retaliation by selling Hezbollah comparable weapons. So Georgia was left with the Ukraine-made missiles it had purchased, which proved effective but not numerous enough. The Russians have undoubtedly rectified that vulnerability, especially as they and Ukraine share the same weapons systems. In effect, Russian warplanes have likely found ways to jam targeting vectors or to create illusory electronic clusters to decoy the manpads.
So Brennan might have shared data on how to get past the jamming. The same kind of forensic struggle applies to aerial combat, a rare thing these days but one that may become decisive if ground-based missiles prove ineffectual. Since the Russians can hack into any kind of long-distance chatter about such details between the US and Kiev, Brennan probably had to physically hand them over to his Ukrainian interlocutors. That is, to fully vetted individuals, because as we’ve seen repeatedly during the current crisis, not least in the Maidan, Russian spies masquerading as Ukrainian patriots are not uncommon. Ukraine’s politicians and military personnel (though not nearly as much) have a long history of divided loyalties.
Digital conflict, by its very nature, is a shadow conflict and therefore fundamentally psychological. If you lose touch with central command or you suspect the enemy is messing with your communications, you become isolated. You fire at your own side, shoot down your warplanes. In fact, you’re likely to stop shooting altogether, out of confusion and paralysis, as happened in some military bases in Georgia. And now is happening in Ukraine. You don’t know if the coded messages telling you to refrain from firing are a feint or genuine. In a modern war between two sides with hardware i.e. not a guerilla war, line-of-sight engagements occur less often than you’d think. Tanks and planes and artillery get knocked out from afar. Digital certainty is everything. The absence of it spells disaster.
So Brennan needed to reassure his hosts above all on that matter. Or perhaps vice-versa. They might need to reassure the US that Ukraine’s military position is not hopeless. If the US assessed the Ukrainian armed forces as too electronically compromised to use heavy weapons systems, then Washington might discourage a confrontation, might refuse to help in crucial ways, as happened in Georgia. Or Washington might suggest alternate methodologies, low-tech or asymmetrical alternatives, to create enough confusion or humiliation as to tarnish Putin’s popularity. The Russian side has clearly initiated such tactics already. Brennan will try to shore up the security of Ukraine’s military signals systems. He will suggest ways to retaliate in kind by hacking into the pro-Moscow militia’s comms.
To get an idea of how crucial is this stage of the confrontation, just witness how images of Ukrainian armored vehicles now driven by militias have gone global. Moscow will trumpet the news, claiming that even Ukrainian soldiers don’t want to fight, that the US is stoking artificial hatred. The government in Kiev will find itself snookered – either to admit that its signals channels are hopelessly compromised and therefore cannot mount a convincing military operation or that such incidents are spontaneous but limited. A tough position either way. One thing is certain, the war has begun.
Melik KaylanMelik Kaylan
WASHINGTON 4/16/2014 @ 4:30PM 9,980 views
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Military leaders in Ukraine charged Russia was deepening its foray into Ukrainian territory and sending new troops to the Crimean border.
Aug. 27, 2014 Bystanders watch a fire consuming a school in downtown Donetsk after being hit by shelling. Several civilians died when their car was completely burned after being hit by shell fragments in central Donetsk, the rebel-held city in eastern Ukraine. Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images
View Photo Gallery —Refugees flee the violence, some seeking shelter in Russia, while Ukraine says its army has penetrated the rebel stronghold of Luhansk in what could prove to be a breakthrough development in the months-long conflict.
Foreign fighters have become central to the narrative of the Islamic State and its fighting in Syria and Iraq: Just this week the distinct British accent of the man believed to have called American journalist James Foley was a grim reminder that thousands of foreigners have traveled to the Middle East to join the fight. It’s a big concern for many governments.
But foreigners have also flocked to other world conflicts, notably Ukraine.
This point was brought home this week, with the death of an American fighting in Ukraine. Mark Gregory Paslawsky, a 55-year-old born in New York, is believed to be the only U.S. citizen who has fought in Ukraine until he died in fighting on Aug. 19. His death was announced in a Facebook post by Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko.
Paslawsky, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, grew up in a Ukrainian-American family. He had moved to Ukraine decades ago, but his decision to fight in the Ukrainian Army’s volunteer Donbas Battalion this year earned him the fascination of the global media. Vice Media produced a documentary about him just a few weeks ago, which you can watch below:
Paslawsky was far from the only fighter with a foreign nationality in Ukraine: There seem to have been many from Russia and South Ossetia among the separatist ranks. But there are also reports of more unexpected guests.
Last month the BBC profiled Mikael Skillt, a Swedish military veteran who had joined the pro-Ukrainian volunteer force Azov Battalion. While Paslawsky’s decision to fight seems to have been motivated by an understandable Ukrainian nationalism, Skillt’s decision seemed to be motivated by something more extremist, even neo-Nazi.
“After World War II, the victors wrote their history,” Skillt told the BBC. “They decided that it’s always a bad thing to say I am white and I am proud.”
The force Skillt reportedly fights for, the Azov Battalion, has become a source of controversy for its use of neo-Nazi symbols and rhetoric. The commander of the group has told reporters that he has fighters from Ireland, Italy, Greece and Scandinavia, with as many as two dozen foreigners fighting for it by mid-summer. There were also reports that an exclusively Polish militia was fighting in Ukraine, though the Polish government later released a statement saying that the information it has “does not corroborate such allegations.”
The numbers may be small when compared to those who have gone to the Middle East, where there are estimated to be as many as 12,000 foreign fighters, but they are a reminder that foreign fighters are not a uniquely Islamist issue.
You certainly have to wonder if attracting fringe far right groups, even in small numbers, is a positive for Ukraine. The BBC says Interior Ministry adviser Herashchenko became angry when asked about the Azov Battalion’s alleged extremist links and denied foreigners were fighting with the group. It also plays into the early Kremlin narrative that the Euromaidan protests were influenced by outside forces – months ago, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused a private firm of sending American mercenaries to fight separatists in Ukraine, though those claims were deemed “rubbish” by the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.
Pro-Russian separatist forces have some unlikely foreign allies too, however. Earlier this month Reuters reported that a number of Spanish “civil war nostalgics” were fighting alongside pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. Two Spanish men, Rafael Muñoz Perez and Ángel, published a video on YouTube explaining their motivation for heading to Ukraine.
“We are here to defend civil people,” Muñoz Perez explains.
By Adam Taylor August 22
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Delta, a Ukrainian-born former IDF soldier, heads a force of 40 men and women, most of whom are not Jewish, against gov’t forces
Ukraine appeals to UNSC over Russian invasionKerry warns Russia against intervention in UkraineYanukovych blames fascists, West for Ukraine chaosUkraine Reform shul defaced by anti-Semitic graffitiSwitzerland, Austria freeze Yanukovych’s assetsUnidentified armed men patrol Crimea airport
He calls his troops “the Blue Helmets of Maidan,” but brown is the color of the headgear worn by Delta — the nom de guerre of the commander of a Jewish-led militia force that participated in the Ukrainian revolution. Under his helmet, he also wears a kippah.
Delta, a Ukraine-born former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, spoke to JTA Thursday on condition of anonymity. He explained how he came to use combat skills he acquired in the Shu’alei Shimshon reconnaissance battalion of the Givati infantry brigade to rise through the ranks of Kiev’s street fighters. He has headed a force of 40 men and women — including several fellow IDF veterans — in violent clashes with government forces.
Several Ukrainian Jews, including Rabbi Moshe Azman, one of the country’s claimants to the title of chief rabbi, confirmed Delta’s identity and role in the still-unfinished revolution.
The “Blue Helmets” nickname, a reference to the UN peacekeeping force, stuck after Delta’s unit last month prevented a mob from torching a building occupied by Ukrainian police, he said. “There were dozens of officers inside, surrounded by 1,200 demonstrators who wanted to burn them alive,” he recalled. “We intervened and negotiated their safe passage.”
The problem, he said, was that the officers would not leave without their guns, citing orders. Delta told JTA his unit reasoned with the mob to allow the officers to leave with their guns. “It would have been a massacre, and that was not an option,” he said.
The Blue Helmets comprise 35 men and women who are not Jewish, and who are led by five ex-IDF soldiers, says Delta, an Orthodox Jew in his late 30s who regularly prays at Azman’s Brodsky Synagogue. He declined to speak about his private life.
Delta, who immigrated to Israel in the 1990s, moved back to Ukraine several years ago and has worked as a businessman. He says he joined the protest movement as a volunteer on Nov. 30, after witnessing violence by government forces against student protesters.
“I saw unarmed civilians with no military background being ground by a well-oiled military machine, and it made my blood boil,” Delta told JTA in Hebrew laced with military jargon. “I joined them then and there, and I started fighting back the way I learned how, through urban warfare maneuvers. People followed, and I found myself heading a platoon of young men. Kids, really.”
Anti-government protesters take a break on a barricade at Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 21, 2014 (photo credit: AP/ Marko Drobnjakovic)
Anti-government protesters take a break on a barricade at Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 21, 2014 (photo credit: AP/ Marko Drobnjakovic)
The other ex-IDF infantrymen joined the Blue Helmets later after hearing it was led by a fellow vet, Delta said.
As platoon leader, Delta says he takes orders from activists connected to Svoboda, an ultra-nationalist party that has been frequently accused of anti-Semitism and whose members have been said to have had key positions in organizing the opposition protests.
“I don’t belong [to Svoboda], but I take orders from their team. They know I’m Israeli, Jewish and an ex-IDF soldier. They call me ‘brother,’” he said. “What they’re saying about Svoboda is exaggerated, I know this for a fact. I don’t like them because they’re inconsistent, not because of [any] anti-Semitism issue.”
The commanding position of Svoboda in the revolution is no secret, according to Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow at the Washington DC-based Heritage Foundation think tank.
“The driving force among the so-called white sector in the Maidan are the nationalists, who went against the SWAT teams and snipers who were shooting at them,” Cohen told JTA.
Still, many Jews supported the revolution and actively participated in it.
Earlier this week, an interim government was announced ahead of election scheduled for May, including ministers from several minority groups.
Volodymyr Groysman, a former mayor of the city of Vinnytsia and the newly appointed deputy prime minister for regional policy, is a Jew, Rabbi Azman said.
“There are no signs for concern yet,” said Cohen, “but the West needs to make it clear to Ukraine that how it is seen depends on how minorities are treated.”
On Wednesday, Russian State Duma Chairman Sergey Naryshkin said Moscow was concerned about anti-Semitic declarations by radical groups in Ukraine.
But Delta says the Kremlin is using the anti-Semitism card falsely to delegitimize the Ukrainian revolution, which is distancing Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence.
“It’s bullshit. I never saw any expression of anti-Semitism during the protests, and the claims to the contrary were part of the reason I joined the movement. We’re trying to show that Jews care,” he said.
Anti-government protesters lob stones during clashes with riot police outside Ukraine’s parliament in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2014. (photo credit: AP/Efrem Lukatsky)
Anti-government protesters lob stones during clashes with riot police outside Ukraine’s parliament in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2014. (photo credit: AP/Efrem Lukatsky)
Still, Delta’s reasons for not revealing his name betray his sense of feeling like an outsider. “If I were Ukrainian, I would have been a hero. But for me it’s better to not reveal my name if I want to keep living here in peace and quiet,” he said.
Fellow Jews have criticized him for working with Svoboda. “Some asked me if instead of ‘Shalom’ they should now greet me with a ‘Sieg heil.’ I simply find it laughable,” he said. But he does have frustrations related to being an outsider. “Sometimes I tell myself, ‘What are you doing? This is not your army. This isn’t even your country.’”
He recalls feeling this way during one of the fiercest battles he experienced, which took place last week at Institutskaya Street and left 12 protesters dead. “The snipers began firing rubber bullets at us. I fired back from my rubber-bullet rifle,” Delta said.
“Then they opened live rounds, and my friend caught a bullet in his leg. They shot at us like at a firing range. I wasn’t ready for a last stand. I carried my friend and ordered my troops to fall back. They’re scared kids. I gave them some cash for phone calls and told them to take off their uniform and run away until further instructions. I didn’t want to see anyone else die that day.”
Currently, the Blue Helmets are carrying out police work that include patrols and preventing looting and vandalism in a city of 3 million struggling to climb out of the chaos that engulfed it for the past three months.
But Delta has another, more ambitious, project: He and Azman are organizing the airborne evacuation of seriously wounded protesters — none of them Jewish — for critical operations in Israel. One of the patients, a 19-year-old woman, was wounded at Institutskaya by a bullet that penetrated her eye and is lodged inside her brain, according to Delta. Azman says he hopes the plane of 17 patients will take off next week, with funding from private donors and with help from Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel.
“The doctor told me that another millimeter to either direction and she would be dead,” Delta said. “And I told him it was the work of Hakadosh Baruch Hu.”
BY CNAAN LIPHSHIZ February 28, 2014, 9:37 pm 50
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About 400 elite mercenaries from the notorious US private security firm Academi (formerly Blackwater) are taking part in the Ukrainian military operation against anti-government protesters in southeastern regions of the country, German media reports.
The Bild am Sonntag newspaper, citing a source in intelligence circles, wrote Sunday that Academi employees are involved in the Kiev military crackdown on pro-autonomy activists in near the town of Slavyansk, in the Donetsk region.
On April 29, German Intelligence Service (BND) informed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government about the mercenaries’ participation in the operation, the paper said, RIA Novosti reported. It is not clear who commands the private military contractors and pays for their services, however.
In March, media reports appeared suggesting that the coup-imposed government in Kiev could have employed up to 300 mercenaries.That was before the new government launched a military operation against anti-Maidan activists, or “terrorists” as Kiev put it, in southeast Ukraine.
At the time, the Russian Foreign Ministry said then that reports claiming Kiev was planning to involve “involve staff from foreign military companies to ‘ensure the rule of law,’” could suggest that it wanted “to suppress civil protests and dissatisfaction.”
In particular, Greystone Limited, which is currently registered in Barbados and is a part of Academi Corporation, is a candidate for such a gendarme role. It is a similar and probably an affiliated structure of the Blackwater private army, whose staff have been accused of cruel and systematic violations of human rights in various trouble spots on many occasions.
“Among the candidates for the role of gendarme is the Barbados-registered company Greystone Limited, which is integrated with the Academi corporation,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “It is an analogue, and, probably and affiliated body of the Blackwater private army, whose employees have repeatedly been accused of committing grievous and systematic human rights abuses in different troubled regions.”
Allegations increased further after unverified videos appeared on YouTube of unidentified armed men in the streets of Donetsk, the capital of the country’s industrial and coalmining region. In those videos, onlookers can be heard shouting “Mercenaries!”“Blackwater!,” and “Who are you going to shoot at?”
(FILES) A picture taken on July 5, 2005 shows contractors of the US private security firm Blackwater securing the site of a roadside bomb attack near the Iranian embassy in central Baghdad. (AFP Photo / Ahmad Al-Rubaye)(FILES) A picture taken on July 5, 2005 shows contractors of the US private security firm Blackwater securing the site of a roadside bomb attack near the Iranian embassy in central Baghdad. (AFP Photo / Ahmad Al-Rubaye)
Academi denied its involvement in Ukraine, claiming on its website that “rumors” were posted by “some irresponsible bloggers and online reporters.”
“Such unfounded statements combined with the lack of factual reporting to support them and the lack of context about the company, are nothing more than sensationalistic efforts to create hysteria and headlines in times of genuine crisis,” the US firm stated.
The American security company Blackwater gained worldwide notoriety for the substantial role it played in the Iraq war as a contractor for the US government. In recent years it has changed its name twice – in 2009 it was renamed Xe Services and in 2011 it got its current name, Academi.
The firm became infamous for the alleged September 16, 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. The attack, which saw 20 others wounded, was allegedly without justification and in violation of deadly-force rules that pertained to American security contractors in Iraq at the time. Between 2005 and September 2007, Blackwater security guards were involved in at least 195 shooting incidents in Iraq and fired first in 163 of those cases, a Congressional report said at the time.
Published time: May 11, 2014 15:04
Edited time: May 12, 2014 21:59 Get short URL
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400 US-Söldner sollen in der Ostukraine gegen die Separatisten kämpfen. Das berichtet “Bild am Sonntag” und beruft sich dabei auf Geheimdienstinformationen. Die Kämpfer kommen demnach vom Militärdienstleister Academi, früher bekannt als Blackwater.
Berlin – Es war ein eindeutig formuliertes Dementi. “Unverantwortliche Blogger und ein Onlinereporter” hätten “Gerüchte” verbreitet, wonach Angestellte der Firma Academi in der Ukraine im Einsatz seien. Das sei falsch und nichts mehr als ein “sensationalistischer Versuch, eine Hysterie zu kreieren”. So äußerte sich der US-Militärdienstleister, ehemals unter dem Namen Blackwater zu unrühmlicher Bekanntheit gelangt, am 17. März auf seiner Webseite.
Die staatliche russische Nachrichtenagentur “Ria Novosti” legte freilich am 7. April nach: Blackwater-Kämpfer agierten in der Ostukraine – und zwar in der Uniform der ukrainischen Sonderpolizei “Sokol”. Eine unabhängige Bestätigung dafür gab es nicht.
Ein Zeitungsbericht legt nun nahe, dass an der Sache womöglich doch etwas dran sein könnte: Laut “Bild am Sonntag” werden die ukrainischen Sicherheitskräfte von 400 Academi-Elitesoldaten unterstützt. Sie sollen Einsätze gegen prorussische Rebellen rund um die ostukrainische Stadt Slowjansk geführt haben. Demnach setzte der Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) die Bundesregierung am 29. April darüber in Kenntnis. Wer die Söldner beauftragt habe, sei noch unklar.
Die Informationen sollen vom US-Geheimdienst stammen und seien während der sogenannten Nachrichtendienstlichen Lage, einer regelmäßigen Besprechung unter Leitung von Kanzleramtschef Peter Altmaier (CDU), vorgetragen worden. An dem Treffen hätten auch die Präsidenten der Nachrichtendienste und des Bundeskriminalamts, der Geheimdienstkoordinator des Kanzleramts und hochrangige Ministeriumsbeamte teilgenommen.
Angeblich Luftraum gezielt verletzt
Die Zeitung berichtet aus der Runde weiterhin, dass die US-Geheimdienstler auch über Informationen verfügten, wonach russische Flugzeuge absichtlich den Luftraum der Ukraine verletzt hätten. Die Regierung in Moskau hatte das dementiert. Der BND habe aber Informationen der Amerikaner, dass Moskaus Militärpiloten den Einsatzbefehl bekommen hätten, gezielt in den ukrainischen Luftraum einzudringen.
Eine Bestätigung für den Bericht gibt es bisher nicht. Der BND habe eine Stellungnahme abgelehnt, so “Bild am Sonntag”. Private Sicherheitsfirmen wie Academi gerieten insbesondere während des Irak-Kriegs in die Kritik. In den USA stehen mehrere ehemalige Blackwater-Angestellte im Zusammenhang mit der Tötung von irakischen Zivilisten vor Gericht. Academi hat sich mit einer Millionenzahlung von Ermittlungen in den USA freigekauft.
11. Mai 2014, 08:10 Uhr
11. Mai 2014, 08:10 Uhr
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Ukrainer, Russen oder doch auch US-Amerikaner? Wer kämpft wirklich auf welcher Seite im ukrainischen Bürgerkrieg?
Am Wochenende sorgte ein Bericht der „BILD am SONNTAG“ für Aufregung, wonach die ukrainischen Sicherheitskräfte von 400 Söldnern der US-Firma Academi unterstützt würden. Der Bundesnachrichtendienst habe die Bundesregierung am 29. April darüber in Kenntnis gesetzt. Die Informationen sollen vom US-Geheimdienst stammen.
Das Dementi kam prompt:
Academi habe nirgendwo in der Ukraine Personal präsent oder im Einsatz, sagte Vizeunternehmenschefin Suzanne Kelly „Zeit Online“. Es sei auch nicht geplant, in der Ukraine präsent zu sein oder einen Einsatz zu starten.
Doch wer steckt wirklich hinter Academi?
Das Unternehmen bezeichnet sich selbst als Anbieter von Sicherheitsdienstleistungen. Es verweist auf seine Erfahrung in den gefährlichsten Regionen der Welt, ein erstklassiges, weltweites Netzwerk von Sicherheitsexperten und seine vertrauensvolle Partnerschaft mit staatlichen und privaten Kunden.
Academi ist aus der 1997 gegründeten privaten US-Sicherheitsfirma Blackwater hervorgegangen.
Das Unternehmen erlangte traurige Berühmtheit, als im Irak-Krieg Blackwater-Mitarbeiter, die dort im Auftrag des Pentagon tätig waren, am 16. September 2007 im Westen von Bagdad 17 irakische Zivilisten erschossen. Zudem sollen Söldner an Folter-Verhören in Geheimgefängnissen der CIA beteiligt gewesen sein.
Blackwater wurde 2009 in Xe Services umbenannt, was laut Beobachtern dabei helfen sollte, die Makel der Vergangenheit zu loszuwerden. 2010 kaufte eine private Investorengruppe die Firma. Der Gründer Erik Prince, ein früherer Marinesoldat und Millionenerbe, verließ das Unternehmen.
VergrößernDer frühere Blackwater-Chef Erik Prince, Archivbild von 2007
Der frühere Blackwater-Chef Erik Prince, Archivbild von 2007
Foto: Reuters
2011 erfolgte die erneute Umbenennung in Academi. Geleitet wird die Firma nun vom Ex-Brigadegeneral der US Army, Craig Nixon. Im Aufsichtsrat sitzt auch der ehemalige Justizminister unter Präsident George W. Bush, John Ashcroft.
Das Management betont, rein gar nichts mehr mit Blackwater und Prince zu tun zu haben. Es sei „unglaublich unverantwortlich“, den Eindruck zu erwecken, Academi und Blackwater seien ein und dasselbe, schimpfte Vizechefin Kelly.
Doch in seiner auf der Webseite des Unternehmens abrufbaren Image-Broschüre verweist Academi auf seine langjährige, über ein Jahrzehnt zurückreichende Erfolgsgeschichte.
VergrößernMitarbeiter der privaten US-Sicherheitsfirma Blackwater schützen Paul Bremer, den zivilen US-Verwalter im Irak (Mitte), in Bagdad, Irak. Archivbild vom 8. September 2003
Mitarbeiter der privaten US-Sicherheitsfirma Blackwater schützen Paul Bremer, den zivilen US-Verwalter im Irak (Mitte), in Bagdad, Irak. Archivbild vom 8. September 2003
Foto: dpa
Das Unternehmen erhält weiterhin lukrative Aufträge der US-Regierung, unter anderem als Betreiber von Militäranlagen in Afghanistan.
Die Firma gibt an, pro Jahr rund 20 000 Mitarbeiter zu Aufträgen zu entsenden. Kunden seien Regierungen und private Einrichtungen. Nach brasilianischen Medienberichten schulte Academi zuletzt die Polizei des Landes für den Umgang mit terroristischen Bedrohungen bei der anstehenden Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft.
Ob tatsächlich Academi-Söldner in der Ukraine im Einsatz sind, lässt sich schwer nachprüfen. Auf den bereits im März bei Youtube hochgeladenen Videos, die als „Beweis“ angeführt werden, sind lediglich maskierte, schwer bewaffnete Männer zu sehen. Aus einer wütenden Menge sind „Blackwater“-Rufe zu hören.
Seit dem Erscheinen der Videos wird immer wieder spekuliert, dass Söldner die pro-westliche ukrainische Regierung unterstützen.
Die russische Nachrichtenagentur Interfax verbreitete die Äußerungen eines russischen Diplomaten in Kiew, wonach 300 Söldner bereits in der ukrainischen Hauptstadt eingetroffen seien. Die meisten seien aus den USA und zuvor im Irak und in Afghanistan im Einsatz gewesen. Dabei wird auch immer wieder die private US-Sicherheitsfirma Greystone genannt – früher ebenfalls ein Tochterunternehmen von Blackwater.
Die britische „Daily Mail“ fragte den Sicherheits-Experten Dr. Nafeez Amad vom unabhängigen Londoner Institut für Politikforschung und -entwicklung (IPRD), ob es sich bei den im Video gezeigten Soldaten um US-Söldner handeln könnte.
Seine Antwort: „Schwer zu sagen. Es ist sicherlich im Bereich des Möglichen.“ Die Uniformen der Männer glichen denen von US-Söldnern. Die Männer sähen auch nicht wie russische Söldner aus.
Andererseits sei die Frage, warum sich die Männer in dem Video so öffentlich zur Schau stellen, wird Dr. Amad weiter zitiert.
„Natürlich ist auch möglich, dass das alles russische Propaganda ist.“
14.05.2014 – 22:33 Uhr
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(Washington, DC) –The US Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have targeted American Muslims in abusive counterterrorism “sting operations” based on religious and ethnic identity, Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute said in a report released today. Many of the more than 500 terrorism-related cases prosecuted in US federal courts since September 11, 2001, have alienated the very communities that can help prevent terrorist crimes.
The 214-page report, “Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions,” examines 27 federal terrorism cases from initiation of the investigations to sentencing and post-conviction conditions of confinement. It documents the significant human cost of certain counterterrorism practices, such as overly aggressive sting operations and unnecessarily restrictive conditions of confinement.
“Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US,” said Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report. “But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”
Many prosecutions have properly targeted individuals engaged in planning or financing terror attacks, the groups found. But many others have targeted people who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them. And many of the cases involve due process violations and abusive conditions of confinement that have resulted in excessively long prison sentences.
The report is based on more than 215 interviews with people charged with or convicted of terrorism-related crimes, members of their families and their communities, criminal defense attorneys, judges, current and former federal prosecutors, government officials, academics, and other experts.
In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act. Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counterterrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases. Almost 30 percent were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.
In the case of the “Newburgh Four,” for example, who were accused of planning to blow up synagogues and attack a US military base, a judge said the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” and had, in the process, made a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”
The FBI often targeted particularly vulnerable people, including those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent. The government, often acting through informants, then actively developed the plot, persuading and sometimes pressuring the targets to participate, and provided the resources to carry it out.
“The US government should stop treating American Muslims as terrorists-in-waiting,” Prasow said. “The bar on entrapment in US law is so high that it’s almost impossible for a terrorism suspect to prove. Add that to law enforcement preying on the particularly vulnerable, such as those with mental or intellectual disabilities, and the very poor, and you have a recipe for rampant human rights abuses.”
Rezwan Ferdaus, for example, pled guilty to attempting to blow up a federal building and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Although an FBI agent even told Ferdaus’ father that his son “obviously” had mental health problems, the FBI targeted him for a sting operation, sending an informant into Ferdaus’ mosque. Together, the FBI informant and Ferdaus devised a plan to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol, with the FBI providing fake weaponry and funding Ferdaus’ travel. Yet Ferdaus was mentally and physically deteriorating as the fake plot unfolded, suffering depression and seizures so bad his father quit his job to care for him.
The US has also made overly broad use of material support charges, punishing behavior that did not demonstrate an intent to support terrorism. The courts have accepted prosecutorial tactics that may violate fair trial rights, such as introducing evidence obtained by coercion, classified evidence that cannot be fairly contested, and inflammatory evidence about terrorism in which defendants played no part – and asserting government secrecy claims to limit challenges to surveillance warrants.
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is a US citizen who alleged that he was whipped and threatened with amputation while detained without charge in Saudi Arabia – after a roundup following the 2003 bombings of Western compounds in the Saudi capital of Riyadh – until he provided a confession to Saudi interrogators that he says was false. Later, when Ali went to trial in Virginia, the judge rejected Ali’s claims of torture and admitted his confession into evidence. He was convicted of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy to assassinate the president. He received a life sentence, which he is serving in solitary confinement at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
The US has in terrorism cases used harsh and at times abusive conditions of confinement, which often appear excessive in relation to the security risk posed. This includes prolonged solitary confinement and severe restrictions on communicating in pretrial detention, possibly impeding defendants’ ability to assist in their own defense and contributing to their decisions to plead guilty. Judges have imposed excessively lengthy sentences, and some prisoners suffer draconian conditions post-conviction, including prolonged solitary confinement and severe restrictions on contact with families or others, sometimes without explanation or recourse.
Nine months after his arrest on charges of material support for terrorism and while he was refusing a plea deal, Uzair Paracha was moved to a harsh regime of solitary confinement. Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) – national security restrictions on his contact with others – permitted Paracha to speak only to prison guards.
“You could spend days to weeks without uttering anything significant beyond ‘Please cut my lights,’ ‘Can I get a legal call/toilet paper/a razor,’ etc., or just thanking them for shutting our light,” he wrote to the report’s researchers. After he was convicted, the SAMs were modified to permit him to communicate with other inmates. “I faced the harshest part of the SAMs while I was innocent in the eyes of American law,” he wrote.
These abuses have had an adverse impact on American Muslim communities. The government’s tactics to seek out terrorism suspects, at times before the target has demonstrated any intention to use violence, has undercut parallel efforts to build relationships with American Muslim community leaders and groups that may be critical sources of information to prevent terrorist attacks.
In some communities, these practices have deterred interaction with law enforcement. Some Muslim community members said that fears of government surveillance and informant infiltration have meant they must watch what they say, to whom, and how often they attend services.
“Far from protecting Americans, including American Muslims, from the threat of terrorism, the policies documented in this report have diverted law enforcement from pursuing real threats,” Prasow said. “It is possible to protect people’s rights and also prosecute terrorists, which increases the chances of catching genuine criminals.”
Find this report at 21 July 2014
© Copyright 2014, Human Rights Watch

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• Human Rights Watch documents ‘sting’ operations
• Report raises questions about post-9/11 civil rights
Nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the “direct involvement” of government agents or informants, a new report says.
Some of the controversial “sting” operations “were proposed or led by informants”, bordering on entrapment by law enforcement. Yet the courtroom obstacles to proving entrapment are significant, one of the reasons the stings persist.
The lengthy report, released on Monday by Human Rights Watch, raises questions about the US criminal justice system’s ability to respect civil rights and due process in post-9/11 terrorism cases. It portrays a system that features not just the sting operations but secret evidence, anonymous juries, extensive pretrial detentions and convictions significantly removed from actual plots.
“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act,” the report alleges.
Out of the 494 cases related to terrorism the US has tried since 9/11, the plurality of convictions – 18% overall – are not for thwarted plots but for “material support” charges, a broad category expanded further by the 2001 Patriot Act that permits prosecutors to pursue charges with tenuous connections to a terrorist act or group.
In one such incident, the initial basis for a material-support case alleging a man provided “military gear” to al-Qaida turned out to be waterproof socks in his luggage.
Several cases featured years-long solitary confinement for accused terrorists before their trials. Some defendants displayed signs of mental incapacity. Jurors for the 2007 plot to attack the Fort Dix army base, itself influenced by government informants, were anonymous, limiting defense counsel’s ability to screen out bias.
Human Rights Watch’s findings call into question the post-9/11 shift taken by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies toward stopping terrorist plots before they occur. While the vast majority of counterterrorism tactics involved are legally authorized, particularly after Congress and successive administrations relaxed restrictions on law enforcement and intelligence agencies for counterterrorism, they suggest that the government’s zeal to protect Americans has in some cases morphed into manufacturing threats.
The report focuses primarily on 27 cases and accordingly stops short of drawing systemic conclusions. It also finds several trials and convictions for “deliberate attempts at terrorism or terrorism financing” that it does not challenge.
The four high-profile domestic plots it found free of government involvement were the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Najibullah Zazi’s 2009 plot to bomb the New York subway; the attempted Times Square carbombing of 2010; and the 2002 shooting at Los Angeles International Airport’s El Al counter.
But the report is a rare attempt at a critical overview of a system often touted by the Obama administration and civil libertarian groups as a rigorous, capable and just alternative to the military tribunals and indefinite detention advocated by conservative critics. It comes as new pressure mounts on a variety of counterterrorism practices, from the courtroom use of warrantless surveillance to the no-fly list and law enforcement’s “suspicious activity reports” database.
In particular, Human Rights Watch examines the extent and impact of law enforcement’s use of terrorism informants, who can both steer people into attempted acts of violence and chill religious or civic behaviour in the communities they penetrate.
Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, a social services agency, told the Guardian she almost has a “radar for informants” sent to infiltrate her Brooklyn community.
While the FBI has long relied on confidential informants to alert them to criminal activity, for terrorism cases informants insert themselves into Muslim mosques, businesses and community gatherings and can cajole people toward a plot “who perhaps would never have participated in a terrorist act on their own initiative”, the study found.
Many trade information for cash. The FBI in 2008 estimated it had 15,000 paid informants. About 30% of post-9/11 terrorism cases are considered sting operations in which informants played an “active role” in incubating plots leading to arrest, according to studies cited in the Human Rights Watch report. Among those roles are making comments “that appeared designed to inflame the targets” on “politically sensitive” subjects, and pushing operations forward if a target’s “opinions were deemed sufficiently troubling”.
Entrapment, the subject of much FBI criticism over the years, is difficult to prove in court. The burden is on a defendant to show he or she was not “predisposed” to commit a violent act, even if induced by a government agent. Human Rights Watch observes that standard focuses attention “not on the crime, but on the nature of the subject”, often against a backdrop where “inflammatory stereotypes and highly charged characterizations of Islam and foreigners often prevail”.
Among the informants themselves there is less ambiguity. “It is all about entrapment,” Craig Monteilh, one such former FBI informant tasked with mosque infiltration, told the Guardian in 2012.
Informants, the study found, sometimes overcome their targets’ stated objections to engage in terrorism. A man convicted in 2006 of attempting to bomb the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan told an informant who concocted the plot he would have to check with his mother and was uncomfortable planting the bombs himself. One member of the “Newburgh Four” plot to attack synagogues and military planes – whose case is the subject of an HBO documentary airing on Monday – told his informant “maybe my mission hasn’t come yet”.
Once in court, terrorism cases receive evidentiary and pre-trial leeway rarely afforded to non-terrorism cases. A federal judge in Virginia permitted into evidence statements made by a defendant while in a Saudi jail in which the defendant, Amed Omar Abu Ali, alleged torture, a longstanding practice in Saudi Arabia. The evidence formed the basis for a conviction, and eventually a life sentence, for conspiracy to assassinate George W Bush. Mohammed Warsame, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, was held in solitary confinement for five years before his trial.
Another implication of the law-enforcement tactics cited the report is a deepening alienation of American Muslims from a government that publicly insists it needs their support to head off extremism but secretly deploys informants to infiltrate mosques and community centers.
“The best way to prevent violent extremism inspired by violent jihadists is to work with the Muslim American community – which has consistently rejected terrorism – to identify signs of radicalization and partner with law enforcement when an individual is drifting towards violence. And these partnerships can only work when we recognize that Muslims are a fundamental part of the American family,” Obama said in a high-profile 2013 speech.
Yet the Obama administration has needed to purge Islamophobic training materials from FBI counterterrorism, which sparked deep suspicion in US Muslim communities. It is now conducting a review of similar material in the intelligence community after a document leaked by Edward Snowden used the slur “Mohammed Raghead” as a placeholder for Muslims.
Spencer Ackerman in New York
The Guardian, Monday 21 July 2014 14.30 BST
Find this story at 21 July 2014
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Siraj was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2007 for conspiring to plant bombs in New York City. The way he got there is similar to a spate of US ‘stings’ to capture terror suspects since 9/11
Shawahar Matin Siraj was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2007 after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to plant bombs at a Manhattan subway station near the Republican National Convention in 2004. As is frequent in post-9/11 domestic counter-terrorism investigations, a new Human Rights Watch report documents, Siraj might never have gotten there but for the involvement of someone else: an older man at a mosque in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood who posed as a nuclear engineer and cancer patient with a deep knowledge of Islam.
When they met in September 2003, Siraj was 21, working at his father’s Islamic bookstore. New York magazine would later report that he “regularly engaged in virulent anti-American tirades”, piquing the curiosity of law enforcement. The older man would later testify that he and Siraj developed a father-son relationship, perhaps since he said he had cancer and Siraj’s father was disabled. Siraj, he judged, was “impressionable”.
When word of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke the next year, Siraj received a barrage of images from the older man of US forces abusing Muslims. Then his friend recommended inflammatory websites for Siraj to view. He intimated to Siraj that he lamented “dying without a purpose” as Siraj became “inflamed by emotions”.
The older man worked with Siraj and Siraj’s friend James Elshafay to fashion a “purpose” worth dying for: the bomb plot. He drove Siraj to Herald Square and instructed Siraj to place explosives in the trash cans. Only Siraj exhibited doubts, saying he had to “ask my mom’s permission” and saying he preferred to be a lookout. Soon after, Siraj was arrested.
His older friend, in reality, was a New York police department informant named Osama Eldawoody, who had taped their conversations. Eldawoody had been casing mosques in Brooklyn and Staten Island for behavior he deemed suspicious. It was a lucrative business: CBS reported in 2006 that Eldawoody made $100,000 over three years of informing.
“Thanks to the extraordinary work of law enforcement, the defendants’ plot did not advance beyond the planning stage, and the public was never at risk,” Rosylnn Mauskopf, then the US attorney for eastern New York, said after Siraj’s sentencing.
Spencer Ackerman in New York
theguardian.com, Monday 21 July 2014 17.53 BST
Find this story at 21 July 2014
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The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.
The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place entire “categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.
Over the years, the Obama and Bush Administrations have fiercely resisted disclosing the criteria for placing names on the databases—though the guidelines are officially labeled as unclassified. In May, Attorney General Eric Holder even invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent watchlisting guidelines from being disclosed in litigation launched by an American who was on the no fly list. In an affidavit, Holder called them a “clear roadmap” to the government’s terrorist-tracking apparatus, adding: “The Watchlisting Guidance, although unclassified, contains national security information that, if disclosed … could cause significant harm to national security.”
The rulebook, which The Intercept is publishing in full, was developed behind closed doors by representatives of the nation’s intelligence, military, and law-enforcement establishment, including the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and FBI. Emblazoned with the crests of 19 agencies, it offers the most complete and revealing look into the secret history of the government’s terror list policies to date. It reveals a confounding and convoluted system filled with exceptions to its own rules, and it relies on the elastic concept of “reasonable suspicion” as a standard for determining whether someone is a possible threat. Because the government tracks “suspected terrorists” as well as “known terrorists,” individuals can be watchlisted if they are suspected of being a suspected terrorist, or if they are suspected of associating with people who are suspected of terrorism activity.
“Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future,” says Hina Shamsi, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.” Shamsi, who reviewed the document, added, “These criteria should never have been kept secret.”
The document’s definition of “terrorist” activity includes actions that fall far short of bombing or hijacking. In addition to expected crimes, such as assassination or hostage-taking, the guidelines also define destruction of government property and damaging computers used by financial institutions as activities meriting placement on a list. They also define as terrorism any act that is “dangerous” to property and intended to influence government policy through intimidation.
This combination—a broad definition of what constitutes terrorism and a low threshold for designating someone a terrorist—opens the way to ensnaring innocent people in secret government dragnets. It can also be counterproductive. When resources are devoted to tracking people who are not genuine risks to national security, the actual threats get fewer resources—and might go unnoticed.
“If reasonable suspicion is the only standard you need to label somebody, then it’s a slippery slope we’re sliding down here, because then you can label anybody anything,” says David Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent with experience running high-profile terrorism investigations. “Because you appear on a telephone list of somebody doesn’t make you a terrorist. That’s the kind of information that gets put in there.”
The fallout is personal too. There are severe consequences for people unfairly labeled a terrorist by the U.S. government, which shares its watchlist data with local law enforcement, foreign governments, and “private entities.” Once the U.S. government secretly labels you a terrorist or terrorist suspect, other institutions tend to treat you as one. It can become difficult to get a job (or simply to stay out of jail). It can become burdensome—or impossible—to travel. And routine encounters with law enforcement can turn into ordeals.
nomination_chart
A chart from the “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance”
In 2012 Tim Healy, the former director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, described to CBS News how watchlists are used by police officers. “So if you are speeding, you get pulled over, they’ll query that name,” he said. “And if they are encountering a known or suspected terrorist, it will pop up and say call the Terrorist Screening Center…. So now the officer on the street knows he may be dealing with a known or suspected terrorist.” Of course, the problem is that the “known or suspected terrorist” might just be an ordinary citizen who should not be treated as a menace to public safety.
Until 2001, the government did not prioritize building a watchlist system. On 9/11, the government’s list of people barred from flying included just 16 names. Today, the no fly list has swelled to tens of thousands of “known or suspected terrorists” (the guidelines refer to them as KSTs). The selectee list subjects people to extra scrutiny and questioning at airports and border crossings. The government has created several other databases, too. The largest is the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), which gathers terrorism information from sensitive military and intelligence sources around the world. Because it contains classified information that cannot be widely distributed, there is yet another list, the Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, which has been stripped of TIDE’s classified data so that it can be shared. When government officials refer to “the watchlist,” they are typically referring to the TSDB. (TIDE is the responsibility of the National Counterterrorism Center; the TSDB is managed by the Terrorist Screening Center at the FBI.)
In a statement, a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center told The Intercept that “the watchlisting system is an important part of our layered defense to protect the United States against future terrorist attacks” and that “watchlisting continues to mature to meet an evolving, diffuse threat.” He added that U.S. citizens are afforded extra protections to guard against improper listing, and that no one can be placed on a list solely for activities protected by the First Amendment. A representative of the Terrorist Screening Center did not respond to a request for comment.
The system has been criticized for years. In 2004, Sen. Ted Kennedy complained that he was barred from boarding flights on five separate occasions because his name resembled the alias of a suspected terrorist. Two years later, CBS News obtained a copy of the no fly list and reported that it included Bolivian president Evo Morales and Lebanese parliament head Nabih Berri. One of the watchlists snared Mikey Hicks, a Cub Scout who got his first of many airport pat-downs at age two. In 2007, the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report identifying “significant weaknesses” in the system. And in 2009, after a Nigerian terrorist was able to board a passenger flight to Detroit and nearly detonated a bomb sewn into his underwear despite his name having been placed on the TIDE list, President Obama admitted that there had been a “systemic failure.”
Obama hoped that his response to the “underwear bomber” would be a turning point. In 2010, he gave increased powers and responsibilities to the agencies that nominate individuals to the lists, placing pressure on them to add names. His administration also issued a set of new guidelines for the watchlists. Problems persisted, however. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report that bluntly noted there was no agency responsible for figuring out “whether watchlist-related screening or vetting is achieving intended results.” The guidelines were revised and expanded in 2013—and a source within the intelligence community subsequently provided a copy to The Intercept.
tbu2
“Concrete facts are not necessary”
The five chapters and 11 appendices of the “Watchlisting Guidance” are filled with acronyms, legal citations, and numbered paragraphs; it reads like an arcane textbook with a vocabulary all its own. Different types of data on suspected terrorists are referred to as “derogatory information,” “substantive derogatory information,” “extreme derogatory information” and “particularized derogatory information.” The names of suspected terrorists are passed along a bureaucratic ecosystem of “originators,” “nominators,” “aggregators,” “screeners,” and “encountering agencies.” And “upgrade,” usually a happy word for travellers, is repurposed to mean that an individual has been placed on a more restrictive list.
The heart of the document revolves around the rules for placing individuals on a watchlist. “All executive departments and agencies,” the document says, are responsible for collecting and sharing information on terrorist suspects with the National Counterterrorism Center. It sets a low standard—”reasonable suspicion“—for placing names on the watchlists, and offers a multitude of vague, confusing, or contradictory instructions for gauging it. In the chapter on “Minimum Substantive Derogatory Criteria”—even the title is hard to digest—the key sentence on reasonable suspicion offers little clarity:
“To meet the REASONABLE SUSPICION standard, the NOMINATOR, based on the totality of the circumstances, must rely upon articulable intelligence or information which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrants a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been knowingly engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to TERRORISM and/or TERRORIST ACTIVITIES.”
The rulebook makes no effort to define an essential phrase in the passage—”articulable intelligence or information.” After stressing that hunches are not reasonable suspicion and that “there must be an objective factual basis” for labeling someone a terrorist, it goes on to state that no actual facts are required:
“In determining whether a REASONABLE SUSPICION exists, due weight should be given to the specific reasonable inferences that a NOMINATOR is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his/her experience and not on unfounded suspicions or hunches. Although irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are not necessary, to be reasonable, suspicion should be as clear and as fully developed as circumstances permit.”
While the guidelines nominally prohibit nominations based on unreliable information, they explicitly regard “uncorroborated” Facebook or Twitter posts as sufficient grounds for putting an individual on one of the watchlists. “Single source information,” the guidelines state, “including but not limited to ‘walk-in,’ ‘write-in,’ or postings on social media sites, however, should not automatically be discounted … the NOMINATING AGENCY should evaluate the credibility of the source, as well as the nature and specificity of the information, and nominate even if that source is uncorroborated.”
There are a number of loopholes for putting people onto the watchlists even if reasonable suspicion cannot be met.
One is clearly defined: The immediate family of suspected terrorists—their spouses, children, parents, or siblings—may be watchlisted without any suspicion that they themselves are engaged in terrorist activity. But another loophole is quite broad—”associates” who have a defined relationship with a suspected terrorist, but whose involvement in terrorist activity is not known. A third loophole is broader still—individuals with “a possible nexus” to terrorism, but for whom there is not enough “derogatory information” to meet the reasonable suspicion standard.
Americans and foreigners can be nominated for the watchlists if they are associated with a terrorist group, even if that group has not been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. They can also be treated as “representatives” of a terrorist group even if they have “neither membership in nor association with the organization.” The guidelines do helpfully note that certain associations, such as providing janitorial services or delivering packages, are not grounds for being watchlisted.
The nomination system appears to lack meaningful checks and balances. Although government officials have repeatedly said there is a rigorous process for making sure no one is unfairly placed in the databases, the guidelines acknowledge that all nominations of “known terrorists” are considered justified unless the National Counterterrorism Center has evidence to the contrary. In a recent court filing, the government disclosed that there were 468,749 KST nominations in 2013, of which only 4,915 were rejected–a rate of about one percent. The rulebook appears to invert the legal principle of due process, defining nominations as “presumptively valid.”
Profiling categories of people
While the nomination process appears methodical on paper, in practice there is a shortcut around the entire system. Known as a “threat-based expedited upgrade,” it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to elevate entire “categories of people” whose names appear in the larger databases onto the no fly or selectee lists. This can occur, the guidelines state, when there is a “particular threat stream” indicating that a certain type of individual may commit a terrorist act.
This extraordinary power for “categorical watchlisting”—otherwise known as profiling—is vested in the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, a position formerly held by CIA Director John Brennan that does not require Senate confirmation.
The rulebook does not indicate what “categories of people” have been subjected to threat-based upgrades. It is not clear, for example, whether a category might be as broad as military-age males from Yemen. The guidelines do make clear that American citizens and green card holders are subject to such upgrades, though government officials are required to review their status in an “expedited” procedure. Upgrades can remain in effect for 72 hours before being reviewed by a small committee of senior officials. If approved, they can remain in place for 30 days before a renewal is required, and can continue “until the threat no longer exists.”
“In a set of watchlisting criteria riddled with exceptions that swallow rules, this exception is perhaps the most expansive and certainly one of the most troubling,” Shamsi, the ACLU attorney, says. “It’s reminiscent of the Bush administration’s heavily criticized color-coded threat alerts, except that here, bureaucrats can exercise virtually standard-less authority in secret with specific negative consequences for entire categories of people.”
The National Counterterrorism Center declined to provide any details on the upgrade authority, including how often it has been exercised and for what categories of people.
Pocket litter and scuba gear
The guidelines provide the clearest explanation yet of what is happening when Americans and foreigners are pulled aside at airports and border crossings by government agents. The fifth chapter, titled “Encounter Management and Analysis,” details the type of information that is targeted for collection during “encounters” with people on the watchlists, as well as the different organizations that should collect the data. The Department of Homeland Security is described as having the largest number of encounters, but other authorities, ranging from the State Department and Coast Guard to foreign governments and “certain private entities,” are also involved in assembling “encounter packages” when watchlisted individuals cross their paths. The encounters can be face-to-face meetings or electronic interactions—for instance, when a watchlisted individual applies for a visa.
In addition to data like fingerprints, travel itineraries, identification documents and gun licenses, the rules encourage screeners to acquire health insurance information, drug prescriptions, “any cards with an electronic strip on it (hotel cards, grocery cards, gift cards, frequent flyer cards),” cellphones, email addresses, binoculars, peroxide, bank account numbers, pay stubs, academic transcripts, parking and speeding tickets, and want ads. The digital information singled out for collection includes social media accounts, cell phone lists, speed dial numbers, laptop images, thumb drives, iPods, Kindles, and cameras. All of the information is then uploaded to the TIDE database.
Screeners are also instructed to collect data on any “pocket litter,” scuba gear, EZ Passes, library cards, and the titles of any books, along with information about their condition—”e.g., new, dog-eared, annotated, unopened.” Business cards and conference materials are also targeted, as well as “anything with an account number” and information about any gold or jewelry worn by the watchlisted individual. Even “animal information”—details about pets from veterinarians or tracking chips—is requested. The rulebook also encourages the collection of biometric or biographical data about the travel partners of watchlisted individuals.
The list of government entities that collect this data includes the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is neither an intelligence nor law-enforcement agency. As the rulebook notes, USAID funds foreign aid programs that promote environmentalism, health care, and education. USAID, which presents itself as committed to fighting global poverty, nonetheless appears to serve as a conduit for sensitive intelligence about foreigners. According to the guidelines, “When USAID receives an application seeking financial assistance, prior to granting, these applications are subject to vetting by USAID intelligence analysts at the TSC.” The guidelines do not disclose the volume of names provided by USAID, the type of information it provides, or the number and duties of the “USAID intelligence analysts.”
A USAID spokesman told The Intercept that “in certain high risk countries, such as Afghanistan, USAID has determined that vetting potential partner organizations with the terrorist watchlist is warranted to protect U.S. taxpayer dollars and to minimize the risk of inadvertent funding of terrorism.” He stated that since 2007, the agency has checked “the names and other personal identifying information of key individuals of contractors and grantees, and sub-recipients.”
Death and the watchlist
The government has been widely criticized for making it impossible for people to know why they have been placed on a watchlist, and for making it nearly impossible to get off. The guidelines bluntly state that “the general policy of the U.S. Government is to neither confirm nor deny an individual’s watchlist status.” But the courts have taken exception to the official silence and footdragging: In June, a federal judge described the government’s secretive removal process as unconstitutional and “wholly ineffective.”
The difficulty of getting off the list is highlighted by a passage in the guidelines stating that an individual can be kept on the watchlist, or even placed onto the watchlist, despite being acquitted of a terrorism-related crime. The rulebook justifies this by noting that conviction in U.S. courts requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas watchlisting requires only a reasonable suspicion. Once suspicion is raised, even a jury’s verdict cannot erase it.
Not even death provides a guarantee of getting off the list. The guidelines say the names of dead people will stay on the list if there is reason to believe the deceased’s identity may be used by a suspected terrorist–which the National Counterterrorism Center calls a “demonstrated terrorist tactic.” In fact, for the same reason, the rules permit the deceased spouses of suspected terrorists to be placed onto the list after they have died.
For the living, the process of getting off the watchlist is simple yet opaque. A complaint can be filed through the Department of Homeland Security Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, which launches an internal review that is not subject to oversight by any court or entity outside the counterterrorism community. The review can result in removal from a watchlist or an adjustment of watchlist status, but the individual will not be told if he or she prevails. The guidelines highlight one of the reasons why it has been difficult to get off the list—if multiple agencies have contributed information on a watchlisted individual, all of them must agree to removing him or her.
If a U.S. citizen is placed on the no fly list while abroad and is turned away from a flight bound for the U.S., the guidelines say they should be referred to the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate, which is prohibited from informing them why they were blocked from flying. According to the rules, these individuals can be granted a “One-Time Waiver” to fly, though they will not be told that they are traveling on a waiver. Back in the United States, they will be unable to board another flight.
The document states that nominating agencies are “under a continuing obligation” to provide exculpatory information when it emerges. It adds that the agencies are expected to conduct annual reviews of watchlisted American citizens and green card holders. It is unclear whether foreigners—or the dead—are reviewed at the same pace. As the rulebook notes, “watchlisting is not an exact science.”
By Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux 23 Jul 2014, 2:45 PM EDT 378
Josh Begley, Lynn Dombek, and Peter Maass contributed to this story.
Find this story at 23 July 2014
© 2014 First Look Productions, Inc.

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“The Intercept” hat die vertraulichen Leitlinien für die Terrordatenbank der US-Regierung veröffentlicht. Demnach sind konkrete Fakten nicht nötig, um jemanden als suspekt einzustufen. Die Folgen können gravierend sein.
“The Intercept”, die Enthüllungswebsite, für die auch Glenn Greenwald arbeitet, hat am Mittwoch ein internes Dokument der US-Regierung im Volltext veröffentlicht. In den Leitlinien mit dem Titel “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance” wird auf 166 Seiten dargelegt, wie verdächtige Personen auf der nationalen Terrorliste landen und wieder entfernt werden können.
Die US-Regierung hatte vor der Veröffentlichung gewarnt. Die Anleitung sei ein “Fahrplan” in Sachen Terrorbekämpfung, heißt es von US-Justizminister Eric Holder. Eine Veröffentlichung könne der nationalen Sicherheit erheblichen Schaden zufügen.
Greenwalds Redaktion hält dagegen, das Dokument sei nicht als geheim eingestuft. An der Erstellung der Leitlinien hätten 19 Dienste und Regierungsbehörden mitgearbeitet, vom FBI über die CIA bis zur NSA. Das Papier richtet sich “The Intercept” zufolge an zahlreiche US-Behörden. Wer auf Grundlage des Dokuments einmal auf der allgemeinen Überwachungsliste landet, läuft demnach etwa Gefahr, mit einem Flugverbot belegt oder an Flughäfen und Grenzübergängen strenger kontrolliert zu werden.
Die Kriterien, die darüber entscheiden, ob jemand auf der Beobachtungsliste der US-Regierung landet, scheinen recht unscharf. So soll im Zweifel ein nicht näher zu begründender “angemessener Verdacht” reichen, “konkrete Fakten” oder “unumstößliche Beweise” seien nicht erforderlich. Zudem sei es selbst einzelnen Regierungsbeamten jederzeit möglich, “komplette Kategorien” von Verdächtigen der Terrorliste hinzuzufügen. Was man sich darunter konkret vorstellen darf, wird jedoch nicht ausgeführt.
Selbst Tote könnten in der Liste auftauchen. Die US-Regierung verweist hier auf die Gefahr, dass die Identität eines Verstorbenen von einem anderen Terrorverdächtigen angenommen werden könnte. Auch Familienangehörige von Verdächtigen können ohne eigenes Fehlverhalten auf der Liste landen.
1,5 Millionen Namen auf der Liste
Die großzügige Einschätzung von tatsächlicher oder nur angenommener Bedrohung hat dazu geführt, dass die Terror-Liste inzwischen 1,5 Millionen Namen enthält. Noch im August 2013 soll die Anzahl der erfassten Verdächtigen bei 700.000 gelegen haben, meldete die Nachrichtenagentur AP. Als Aktivität eines Terroristen definieren die Leitlinien übrigens nicht nur Bombenattentate, Flugzeugentführungen oder Geiselnahmen. Eine Aufnahme in die Liste hält die US-Regierung auch dann für gerechtfertigt, wenn jemand im Verdacht steht, Regierungseigentum zerstören zu wollen oder Computer zu beschädigen, die Finanzbehörden verwenden.
Amerikanische Bürgerrechtsgruppen kritisierten die schwammigen Kriterien der Regierung. “Anstatt die Watchlist auf aktuell bekannte Terroristen zu beschränken, hat die Regierung ein riesiges System geschaffen, das auf der unbewiesenen und fehlerhaften Annahme beruht, es sei möglich, künftige Terrorakte vorherzusagen”, sagte Hina Shamsi von der Bürgerrechtsorganisation American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Die Bürgerrechtler werfen der Regierung auch vor, dass es keine Möglichkeit gebe, sich gegen eine Nennung auf der Liste zu wehren. Ebenso sei es kaum möglich, die Gründe für eine Listen-Aufnahme herauszufinden. In den Leitlinien heißt es, ein Grundsatz der Regierung sei es, den Beobachtungslisten-Status einzelner Personen weder zu bestätigen noch zu dementieren.
Die Liste war nach den Terroranschlägen vom 11. September 2001 eingeführt worden. Ihr Umfang nahm rasant zu, nachdem im Dezember 2009 der Nigerianer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab versucht hatte, einen in seine Unterhose eingenähten Sprengsatz an Bord einer US-Passagiermaschine von Amsterdam nach Detroit zu zünden.
24. Juli 2014, 11:30 Uhr
Find this story at 24 July 2014
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2014

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Rezwan Ferdaus is a 26-year-old US citizen of Bangladeshi descent. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to blow up the Pentagon and the US Capitol. This plot was devised with the direct guidance of a federal agent who infiltrated Ferdaus’ mosque and even provided the fake explosives. An FBI agent said of Ferdaus to the convict’s father that he “obviously” is mentally ill. Ferdaus, who also suffered from severe depression, seizures, and had to wear adult diapers for bladder control problems, was the victim of the sort of FBI sting that crosses the fine line into entrapment. And these operations are no rarity.
In everyday parlance, the difference between a sting and an act of entrapment seems minimal. They carry the same gist: influencing an individual to carry out an act, in which they are then caught.
By the letter of the law, however, the difference between a sting and entrapment is significant. Sting operations are legal. A cursory glance at popular culture’s imagining of FBI work would suggest that stings are in fact the bread and butter of federal policing. It makes for entertainment — the unfolding of elaborate investigative schemes; an agent with a hunch and a five o’clock shadow catches dastardly criminals doing what they invariably would do anyway. Entrapment, meanwhile, is when law enforcement induces a person or group to commit a crime that they would otherwise have been unlikely to commit.
In the fanciful world of television policing, cops are the goodies, criminals are the baddies, stings are stings and stings are legal. In reality, sting operations regularly cross the line into entrapment. The line in US law is purportedly clear: entrapment is illegal, stings are legal. How this line is actually walked by law enforcement is, however, fuzzy at best.
A report released this week from Human Rights Watch highlights how, consistently, FBI sting operations are over aggressive and premised on the racist profiling of Muslim communities — that old building block of our contemporary national security state. Based on 215 interviews and focusing on 27 post-9/11 cases of alleged terror plot thwarting, HRW’s findings call into question the very legitimacy of the FBI’s counterterror work. The authors go as far as to call a number of stings “government-created” terror plots.
Introducing the report, HRW’s Andrea Prasow noted that “Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US… But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”
It is no secret that US counterterrorism is regularly prefigurative. Under the pretext of stopping terror attacks before they happen, federal agencies like the FBI, NSA, and CIA target networks based often on nothing more valid than religious affiliation. “Sting” operations perform a pernicious part of this equation by drawing otherwise harmless individuals into situations wherein they are framed, and then punished, as terrorists.
As HRW noted, “Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counterterrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases. Almost 30 percent were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.” This means that FBI involvement has been the sine qua non of nearly a third of federal terror convictions (and therefore plots). The government is creating the very terror it claims to fight.
The premise of a sting is that the operation catches criminals or terrorists doing what they would have done anyway. There is a dangerous counterfactual here that seemingly gives the state insurmountable leverage. Who can prove what anyone would have done anyway? How can it be shown that a group would have carried out a terror attack, when the feds provide the very conditions for a terror attack to be carried out?
US justice has set the burden of proof the feds must show for the “would-have-done-it-anyway” condition troublingly low. Consider the case of the “Newburgh Four.” Using incentives including money and food, the FBI convinced four Muslim men to agree to a plot to shoot down military planes and blow up two synagogues in the Bronx. The FBI took the lead at every stage of the so-called plot. One of the so-called terrorists was a schizophrenic who kept his own urine in a bottle. While a Second Circuit judge said that the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” and had, in the process, made a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope,” all of the Four were convicted and sentenced to 25 years. They maintain that the sting crossed the line into entrapment.
Since 9/11, Muslims in the US have been the focus of major counterterror stings. But other groups have been caught in the net where sting meets entrapment. A small group of self-identified anarchists in Cleveland were all convicted to around 10 years in prison for allegedly plotting to blow up a bridge in Ohio. But an FBI infiltrator provided the target and the fake C-4 explosives. Rick Perlstein wrote of the case in Rolling Stone, “the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.”
In the same 2012 article, Perlstein stresses an important point about FBI schemes in the still-rippling wake of 9/11. In previous decades, when defendants would claim entrapment, juries would sometimes listen. The 1972 indictment against Vietnam Vets Against the War was thrown out when a jury ruled that activists were entrapped by feds in a conspiracy to attack the RNC. However, not one terrorism indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since September 2001.
It is a sign of paranoid times, peppered with anti-Islamic sentiment. Federal agents can pick their terrorists and bring them into being. The government can provide every element of a terrorist plot, from target, to objective, to explosives. It appears to pass muster that suspects be Muslim to assert that they would have done it anyway.
By Natasha Lennard
July 22, 2014 | 11:50 pm
Find this story at 22 July 2014
Copyright https://news.vice.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

The use of informants to target communities is one of the most alarming trends to have developed since 9/11.
The FBI has used informants in its counterterrorism tactics [AP]
On the surface, the scene unfolds without any hint of intrigue. A young Muslim convert named Darren Griffin meets fellow congregants at a local mosque in northwest Ohio. In addition to sharing the same faith as his new friends, they enjoy similar interests: watching sports, playing video games, working out at the local gym, and discussing international affairs. Except the scene ends tragically with a string of arrests, a national media frenzy, and self-congratulation among federal officials claiming to have foiled yet another terrorist plot.
The only problem is that Griffin was an FBI plant and the terror plot he supposedly helped thwart was entirely manufactured by the United States government. Purely on the strength of Griffin’s aggressive recruitment tactics, three young American Muslims received prison sentences ranging from eight to 20 years.
Similar scenarios have played out in many cities across the US during the past decade. “Informants”, the new documentary film from Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, explores a phenomenon that has been far more pervasive than the media, government officials, or community leaders have acknowledged. In addition to sharing the heart-wrenching stories of the victims of these entrapment tactics, the film is unique because it shines a light on the informants themselves, highlighting the crucial role that they played in actively enlisting young men who never demonstrated any inclinations toward engaging in violence.
The informants
In order to understand how the use of paid informants became such a crucial cog in the FBI’s counterterrorism policy, one need only trace the major shift in the US national security paradigm after 9/11. Prior to the September 11 attacks, the FBI employed 10,500 agents, about 2,500 of whom were dedicated to national security investigations.
After 9/11, however, the overall number of agents expanded to 13,600, half of whom became devoted to national security. The annual budget of the FBI has risen dramatically from $3.1bn in 2001 to $8.4bn in the current fiscal year. Together, expanded budgets, the availability of advanced technological capabilities, and a permissive political climate combined to create an environment where federal law enforcement agencies enjoyed vastly expanded powers but were also expected to demonstrate immediate results.
In the course of investigating American Muslims for possible terrorist threats, the government cast a wide net. It placed tens of thousands of Muslims under constant surveillance, infiltrated community spaces, including mosques, dug through private records, interrogated many Muslims because of their political views and probed for any links to violent activities. These investigations largely turned up nothing, and that was a problem.
In order to continue to justify the robust expenditure of resources and the expansive investigative powers, officials needed results in the form of thwarted terrorist plots that demonstrated to American citizens that unless the FBI acted, the next attack was right around the corner. That climate of fear helped rationalise many of the country’s worst civil liberties violations committed under the Bush Administration and consolidated as standard practice during Obama’s presidency. To sustain the perception of the threat, one had to be created where it did not exist.
Meet the shady characters spying on American Muslims for the FBI.
Enter the informants. As Al Jazeera’s investigative film lays out, many of the most high-profile terrorism cases of the last decade were not a product of insidious Muslim sleeper cells uncovered by skillful investigators. Rather, in the absence of actual plots, the FBI actively targeted communities, identifying particularly vulnerable individuals, and sending them informants with the expressed purpose of ensnaring them in a conspiracy.
The informants are not government agents. Rather, they are almost always criminal offenders attempting to avoid prison time through their cooperation with the government. From drug dealing to fraud, their criminal history ostensibly provides them the tools they need to maintain their deception, though a crash course on basic Islamic beliefs and rituals is a must. With codenames like “The Trainer”, “The Closer”, and “The Bodybuilder”, they play to their particular strengths while identifying the weaknesses of those they are sent to entrap.
In the case of the latter, Craig Monteilh hung out in mosques where he hoped to meet Muslim youth and invite them to work out at a local gym. There, he could ostensibly engage them in conversation about volatile political subjects and broach the topic of terrorism over an intense workout regimen. When his aggressive posture provoked suspicion on the part of community members in southern California, local leaders reported Monteilh to the FBI, apparently not realising that it was the FBI which had sent him into their community in the first place.
The community’s experience with the “Bodybuilder” is particularly egregious, given the seeming vindictive nature of the FBI’s conduct in that case. The local imam, Sheikh Yassir Fazaga, dared to question publicly the veracity of claims made by a local FBI official at a town hall meeting. “The FBI does not take that lightly,” Monteilh recalled to Al Jazeera. “So they had me get close to Mr Fazaga, to get into his inner circle.” When Monteilh failed to ensnare Fazaga or any other local Muslims into a terrorist plot the FBI attempted to pursue immigration charges against Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, an Afghan immigrant who was one of those who reported Monteilh to the FBI for his suspicious behaviour. But the Department of Justice eventually dropped those charges and so Operation Flex, it seems, ended in failure.
This case, however, was the exception. The overwhelming majority of so-called “pre-emptive prosecutions” end in convictions on terrorism charges of individuals who the government is unable to prove would have ever entered into a violent plot on their own accord. More often than not, the FBI targets young Muslims with strong political opinions, usually concerning the role of the US in the plight of Muslims in places like Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Kashmir. As a former FBI special agent told Al Jazeera about the Ohio case, “The whole purpose was to verify whether it was more than just talk.”
By treating the political opinions of American Muslims as cause for suspicion, government investigators operate on the assumption that free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution do not extend to a particular segment of the American people. Over the years, the FBI’s actions have had a dramatic chilling effect on the ability of Muslims to express their political views. Motivated by such pressures from the government, many community leaders around the country have since attempted to suppress political expression in mosques and community centres.
But absent such healthy community spaces through which to channel passions for humanitarian concerns around the globe, it actually becomes more likely that young Muslims could channel their frustrations through alternative modes of oppositional politics. This type of quietist, disaffected atmosphere sanitised of all political expression is precisely the environment in which agent provocateurs thrive.
Exploiting poverty
In some cases, there is not even any “talk” to motivate the FBI into infiltrating communities. The Liberty City case with which Al Jazeera’s investigative film begins concerns a group of impoverished black men in Florida with no history of political activism or inflammatory speech. Nevertheless, the FBI sent in “The Closer” a fast-talking informant named Elie Assaad who operated as the ringleader for an alleged plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Swaying the impressionable and impoverished young men with promises of everything from shoes to wear to large sums of cash, Assaad enlists Rothschild Augustine and six others in his conspiracy.
The use of informants to target communities is one of the most alarming trends to have developed since 9/11, as it threatens to undo the fabric of a free society.
In relaying this story to Al Jazeera’s investigators, Assaad and Augustine reveal a number of disturbing practices in the concocted plot. The FBI specifically selected its own south Florida offices as a surveillance target, attempting to position itself as the victim of the conspiracy rather than the originator of it, despite the fact that there is no indication that the men even knew where or what it was. The ceremonial oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda that Assaad administered to the seven men displayed what can only be described as a symbol of the cartoonish imagery with which many in the US government associate Islam and Muslims.
Perhaps most worrisome in the case of the Liberty City 7, and an eerily similar case in New York, is the ways in which the FBI has exploited the endemic poverty and social problems from drug use to lack of education that are prevalent within some black communities across the US in order to construct the perception of a terrorist threat. In the latter case, the Newburgh Four were promised a payment of $250,000 by a government informant who they hoped to manipulate in turn. The Newburgh Sting is an HBO documentary, also premiering soon, which chronicles the government’s excesses in carrying out this plot and the devastation it has caused to an impoverished community.
A startling report utilising the Department of Justice’s internal statistics recently stated that in the decade after 9/11, 94.2 percent of federal terrorism convictions were obtained, at least in part, on the basis of preemptive prosecutions. Given how pervasive this practice has been, it is noteworthy that American Muslim civil rights groups have not developed a coordinated response to what has plainly become a widespread use of informants nationwide. In some instances, they have even attempted to downplay the problem of preemptive prosecutions, as in one report by a prominent American Muslim organisation that states that “while the numbers clearly show informants are frequently used by federal law enforcement, a majority of these cases do not involve them at all.”
The use of informants to target communities is one of the most alarming trends to have developed since 9/11, as it threatens to undo the fabric of a free society. That these recent investigative films have laid bare this troubling phenomenon and displayed its consequences for all to see, is a critical first step in confronting its damaging effect not only on the vulnerable American Muslim community but on American society as a whole.
Last updated: 21 Jul 2014 15:35
Find this documentary at 21 July 2014
copyright http://www.aljazeera.com
 

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Previously classified documents show federal agents continued to monitor Mandela and ANC even after his release from prison
The FBI monitored the interactions between Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress and leftwing groups in the US through the 1980s and 1990s as part of its ongoing investigations into what the bureau deemed to be the communist threat to US national security, new documents reveal.
The batch of 36 pages of previously classified documents, extracted from the FBI under freedom of information laws, show that federal agents continued to monitor Mandela’s and the ANC’s connections within the US even after the legendary South African leader was released from prison in February 1990. The bureau monitored meetings between Mandela and other world leaders, tracked the movements of senior ANC officials as they travelled across the US, and kept a close eye on the anti-apartheid activities of the Communist Party USA (CP-USA).
The declassified documents are marked “secret” under recognised codes for domestic and foreign counter-intelligence investigations. They include a record kept by federal agents of a meeting in Namibia just a month after Mandela’s release from jail between him and the then president of Yugoslavia, Janez Drnovsek. The record notes that a transcript of the proceedings was sent in Serbo-Croat to the FBI’s Cleveland office.
Another document records the FBI’s decision in June 1990, four months after Mandela was set free, to send an informant from Philadelphia to New York to snoop on a meeting that the bureau thought was about to take place between Mandela and Puerto Rican independence activists. “Information contained in this communication is extremely singular in nature and must not be disseminated outside the FBI or existing terrorism task forces,” it stated.
The newly declassified records are the second batch relating to FBI monitoring of Mandela to be obtained by Ryan Shapiro, a freedom of information expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the first set of documents, made public in May, it was disclosed that the bureau had used a confidential informant to gain an inside track on Mandela’s first visit to America in June 1990.
The new batch suggests that the FBI continued to see Mandela and the ANC through a paranoid cold war lens even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and after Mandela had emerged as one of the great democratic figureheads. The bureau’s obsession with categorising Mandela as a threat to domestic national security reached such a pitch that even elements within the FBI were driven to question the bureau’s prevailing analysis.
In August 1990, the FBI’s Chicago field office wrote a secret memo that highlighted the historical ignorance of its sister branch in New York which had classed the ANC as a “known Soviet front group”. The memo complained that “our description of the ANC as a Soviet front is an over-simplification which fails to recognize the complex and paradoxical nature of that particular organization (which was, of course, founded before the Russian revolution).”
Despite such enlightened interventions, the FBI carried on investigating links between the ANC and anti-apartheid and anti-racist groups in the US over many years. In 1984, federal agents kept watch over a senior ANC official, Makhenkesi Stofile, as he made a tour of the US meeting anti-apartheid groups. It also kept records of the involvement of Democratic Congress representatives in the Free Nelson Mandela campaign.
“The documents reveal that, just as it did in the 1950s and 60s with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, the FBI aggressively investigated the US and South African anti-apartheid movements as communist plots imperiling American security,” Shapiro said.
Many of the documents are heavily redacted, and Shapiro said he is now pressing for release of the complete uncensored records. He is also continuing to sue the CIA, National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency for all their paperwork on Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement.
Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Thursday 10 July 2014 18.10 BST
Find this story at 10 July 2014
© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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Ein BND-Mitarbeiter soll jahrelang für die CIA spioniert haben. In mehrstündigen nächtlichen Verhören gibt der mutmaßliche Doppelagent seine Geheimnisse preis, doch der Fall bleibt rätselhaft.
Dieser „Signal Intelligence“-Kontrollraum gehört zwar zur BND-Zentrale, ist aber außerhalb des Geländes an einem geheimen Standort.
Foto: Martin Schlüter
Dieser “Signal Intelligence”-Kontrollraum gehört zwar zur BND-Zentrale, ist aber außerhalb des Geländes an einem geheimen Standort.
Es war ein turbulenter Start für Silvia Reischer. Seit 25 Jahren arbeitet die Juristin beim Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Sie war Datenschutzbeauftragte, leitete das Rechtsreferat und war offizielle Vertreterin in Paris. Am 1. Juni übernahm Reischer im deutschen Auslandsdienst eine sensible Aufgabe. Präsident Gerhard Schindler ernannte die 54-jährige zur Leiterin der Abteilung Eigensicherung (SI). Als erste Frau in einer solchen Position ist sie fortan dafür zuständig, Mitarbeiter zu überprüfen.
Ihr Job beginnt gleich mit einer Herausforderung, wie sie größer kaum sein könnte. Ein Mitarbeiter, von dem nur der Vorname Markus bekannt ist, soll zwei Jahre lang als Maulwurf für den amerikanischen Geheimdienst CIA tätig gewesen sein und diesem über 200 geheime und streng geheime BND-Dokumente übergeben haben.
Vieles rund um diesen spektakulären Verrat ist noch nebulös, viele Fragen nicht beantwortet. Die “Welt” hat deshalb – soweit es im Moment überhaupt schon möglich ist – die Vorgänge rekonstruiert.
“Appetit-Häppchen” für die Russen
Der Verratsfall beginnt für die deutschen Sicherheitsbehörden, kurz bevor Reischer ihr Amt antritt, am 28. Mai. An diesem Tag schickt eine unbekannte Person eine E-Mail an das russische Generalkonsulat in München. Sie bietet den Russen streng geheime BND-Dokumente zum Kauf an. Um zu belegen, dass es sich nicht um einen Bluff handelt, fügt der anonyme Absender seinem Schreiben gleich drei BND-Papiere hinzu. Als “Appetit-Häppchen” sozusagen.
Der Verfassungsschutz fängt die Mail ab. Russlands Geheimdienste agieren häufig aus den Botschaften und Konsulaten heraus. Deshalb überwacht der Verfassungsschutz regelmäßig den Mail- und Telefonverkehr in und aus den diplomatischen Vertretungen. Und so ging der Abteilung 4 des Verfassungsschutzes, “Spionageabwehr, Geheim- und Sabotageschutz”, auch jene mysteriöse Mail ins Netz, in der BND-Interna zum Kauf angeboten wurden.
Beim Verfassungsschutz ist man sich sicher, auf einen Maulwurf gestoßen zu sein. Umgehend werden der BND und die Bundesanwaltschaft informiert. Am 10. Juni leitet Generalbundesanwalt Harald Range ein Ermittlungsverfahren wegen des “Verdachts der geheimdienstlichen Agententätigkeit” ein.
Wer ist der Verräter im BND?
Die Abteilung Eigensicherung des Auslandsgeheimdienstes schließt sich mit dem Verfassungsschutz zusammen. Was dann folgt, wird intern stolz als eine der besten Kooperationen bezeichnet, die es seit Langem zwischen den beiden Diensten, die nicht immer an einem Strang ziehen, gegeben haben soll. So lässt sich inzwischen vieles rekonstruieren.
Da der BND-Verräter aus dem russischen Generalkonsulat keine Antwort erhält, beschließen die Verfassungsschützer, ihm eine Falle zu stellen. Sie kontaktierten den Maulwurf und geben sich als Mitarbeiter des russischen Geheimdienstes aus. Ob er nicht Interesse an einem Treffen habe, fragen sie. Der mutmaßliche Verräter aus den eigenen Reihen aber ist misstrauisch. Er antwortet nicht.
Die Ermittler wissen allerdings, dass die Mail von einem Privatcomputer über einen Google-Account verschickt worden war. Und noch wichtiger: Er hat BND-Dokumente verschickt.
Die Amerikaner sind verdächtig still
“Wer hat Zugriff auf genau diese drei Dokumente? Und wer war an jenem Tag nicht an seinem Arbeitsplatz? Diese Fragen mussten wir klären”, erzählt ein BND-Mitarbeiter, der mit dem Fall betraut war.
Zeitgleich mit den internen Ermittlungen des BND bringt der Verfassungsschutz mehr über die Mail-Adresse des Maulwurfs in Erfahrung. Da der Anbieter Google in den USA ansässig ist, liegt es nahe, die amerikanischen Behörden um Mithilfe in dem Fall zu bitten. Es kam zu einer offiziellen Anfrage des deutschen Inlandsgeheimdienstes an die US-Kollegen.
Es folgte: keine Reaktion. “Das war sehr ungewöhnlich. Normalerweise bekommen wir in solchen Fällen schnell Amtshilfe”, berichtet ein Vertreter der Sicherheitsbehörden. Und noch etwas geschieht. Der BND-Maulwurf löscht urplötzlich sein Google-Mail-Konto. Die Spur ist auf einmal tot.
Maulwurf “Markus” wird angezapft
So konzentriert man sich beim BND weiter darauf, ausfindig zu machen, wer den Zugang zu den besagten internen Papieren hat. “Es war eine mühsame Puzzlearbeit”, heißt es im BND. Nach drei Tagen, am 10. Juni, ist der mutmaßliche Verräter schließlich eindeutig identifiziert: ein 31-jähriger BND-Mann mit dem Vornamen Markus, in der BND-Zentrale Bürosachbearbeiter in der Technischen Unterstützung der Abteilung EA (“Einsatzgebiete/Auslandsbeziehungen”), seit mehr als neun Jahren im Dienst.
Noch klicken keine Handschellen. Man will den Maulwurf weiter beobachten. Seine Telefone werden angezapft, E-Mails und SMS mitgelesen. Dabei erfahren die Ermittler nach Informationen der “Welt”, dass der BND-Mann offenbar am 9. Juli einen Kontaktmann in Prag treffen will. So lange will man dann aber nicht mehr warten.
Am Abend des 2. Juli verhaften Beamte des Bundeskriminalamtes (BKA) den Geheimdienstmitarbeiter, der sich gerade in Berlin aufhält, durchsuchen dessen Wohnung, beschlagnahmen Computer, Dokumente und Datenträger. Die Ermittler glauben zunächst, einen Zuträger für den russischen Geheimdienst geschnappt zu haben.
Der ultimative Vertrauensbruch
In einer ersten Befragung des Verdächtigen platzt dann aber die Bombe. “Ich arbeite seit 2012 für die Amerikaner”, sagt der BND-Mann offenbar. Ein amerikanischer Spion im deutschen Auslandsgeheimdienst? Das wäre ein Tabubruch unter westlichen Nachrichtendiensten. Der ultimative Vertrauensbruch. Und das bei vielen NSA-Veröffentlichungen von Edward Snowden, die auch den BND wegen seiner engen Zusammenarbeit mit den US-Geheimdiensten in die Kritik gebracht haben.
Der BND-Mitarbeiter erklärt in einer mehrstündigen, nächtlichen Vernehmung durch das BKA, dass er im Jahr 2012 per E-Mail Kontakt mit der US-Botschaft in Berlin aufgenommen habe. Er habe den Amerikanern demnach interne BND-Papiere zum Kauf angeboten. Ein Mitarbeiter der CIA habe sich schließlich bei ihm gemeldet und sei auf das Angebot eingegangen. Insgesamt 218 BND-Dokumente habe er im Laufe der zwei Jahre bei drei Treffen in Österreich an den US-Agenten übergeben.
Im Gegenzug soll er rund 25.000 Euro erhalten haben. Das Motiv für seinen Verrat sei Habgier gewesen, so der 31-jährige, der aufgrund einer schweren Erkrankung in seiner Jugend leicht sprach- und gehbehindert ist.
BND-Papiere sind überraschend billig
In den Sicherheitsbehörden ist die Skepsis über die Aussagen des enttarnten Verräters zunächst groß. Würden die Amerikaner wirklich derart plump einen deutschen Geheimdienstler anwerben? Wieso zahlte die CIA vergleichbar wenig Geld für die Papiere – umgerechnet 114,70 Euro pro Blatt? Waren diese Papiere tatsächlich den Aufwand konspirativer Treffen im Ausland wert?
“Die Möglichkeit stand im Raum, dass der Mann nur dachte, er würde für die Amerikaner spionieren”, sagte ein Vertreter der Sicherheitsbehörden der “Welt”. “Aber in Wahrheit könnten andere Geheimdienste dahinterstecken. Beispielsweise die Russen.”
“Anwerben unter falscher Flagge”, um das Vertrauen von Personen zu erschleichen und sie zur Zusammenarbeit zu bewegen, gehört zu den üblichen Methoden im Geschäft der Spione. Die angeblichen Treffpunkte – Salzburg, Wien, Prag – gelten zudem nicht als traditionelle Aktionsgebiete amerikanischer Dienste. Sondern eher des russischen Auslandsgeheimdienstes SWR.
Spezialauftrag NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss
Die vielen Fragen sind auch Thema in einer Sondersitzung des Parlamentarischen Kontrollgremiums am vergangenen Donnerstag. Verfassungsschutzpräsident Hans-Georg Maaßen und BND-Präsident Gerhard Schindler tragen den Obleuten hinter verschlossenen Türen den spektakulären Spionagefall im Detail vor. Noch sei unklar, ob die Angaben des BND-Mannes der Wahrheit entsprechen. Die deutschen Geheimdienstchefs halten sich mit einer abschließenden Bewertung zurück.
Doch inzwischen gibt es kaum noch Zweifel. Die vergangenen Tage haben die BND-Mitarbeiter genutzt, um sich ein möglichst klares Bild zu machen. Die BND-Papiere, die an die CIA verkauft worden sein sollen, wurden gefunden. Immer wieder hätten die Amerikaner bei ihm Dokumente regelrecht “bestellt”, erzählte ein BND-Mann. “Mal wollten sie Papiere mit Bezug zu den USA, mal zu Deutschland”, sagt ein Vertreter der Sicherheitsbehörden. Zuletzt habe der Doppelagent einen besonderen Auftrag bekommen. “Sie haben ihm wohl gesagt: Schau doch mal, ob du was zum NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss findest.”
Der BND-Mitarbeiter hatte die vertraulichen Papiere auf einem USB-Stick gespeichert. Und dann gibt es da noch einen seltsam präparierten Computer. Über eine Wetter-App konnte der Spion per Mausklick eine Kryptosoftware starten, die eine anonyme Kommunikation ermöglicht. Ein Werkzeug für Nerds – und für Spione.
Eine Notfall-Telefonnummer in New York
“Alle Hinweise sprechen dafür, dass der Mann die Wahrheit sagt. Er hat wohl tatsächlich für die Amerikaner gearbeitet”, heißt es in Sicherheitskreisen. In der Vergangenheit hätten die US-Dienste sich mehrfach bei ihren deutschen Kollegen gemeldet, wenn jemand deutsche Geheimdienstinterna an sie verkaufen wollte. In diesem Fall aber sei dies nicht erfolgt.
Im Verhör hat der Maulwurf den Ermittlern zudem gesagt, dass sein amerikanischer Kontaktmann ihn mit einer Notfall-Telefonnummer ausgestattet habe. “Es ist ein Anschluss in New York”, heißt es aus Sicherheitskreisen. Vermutlich tatsächlich zur Kontaktaufnahme mit dem US-Geheimdienst.
Es stellt sich die Frage, warum die Amerikaner derartige Risiken für das Verhältnis zwischen den USA und Deutschland eingegangen sind. Was wollten sie erfahren? Der Schaden mit Blick auf den Geheimnisverrat ist jedenfalls ziemlich gering. Zwei Dokumente mit Bezug zum Untersuchungsausschuss habe der BND-Mitarbeiter gestohlen und geliefert. Wirklich brisant sind aber offenbar auch diese Unterlagen nicht. “Was wollten die Amerikaner mit diesen Papieren?”, fragt ein BND-Mitarbeiter. “Sie hätten sie vermutlich auf Nachfrage sowieso bekommen.”
Von Florian Flade
25. Jul. 2014, 12:37
Find this story at 25 July 2014
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