Naveed Shinwari is one of four American Muslims who filed suit against the government this week for placing them on the U.S. “no-fly list” in order to coerce them into becoming FBI informants. The plaintiffs say the government refuses to explain why they were named on the no-fly list. They also believe that their names continue to be listed because they would not agree to become FBI informants and spy on their local communities. “It’s very frustrating, you feel helpless,” Shinwari says. “No one will tell you how you can get off of it, how you got on it. It has a profound impact on people’s lives.” We are also joined by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is seeking to remove the men from the no-fly list and establish a new legal mechanism to challenge placement on it.

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

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with the story of four American Muslims who say they were placed on the U.S. no-fly list by the FBI after they refused to become government informants. They say they were barred from flying, not because they were accused of any crime, but because they refused government requests to spy on their own communities. On Tuesday night, the men filed a lawsuit seeking their removal from the no-fly list, as well as a new legal mechanism to challenge placement on it.

The New York Times reports the list, officially called the Terrorist Screening Database, has grown to at least 700,000 people. The government refuses to reveal who is on the list, how one can get off it, and what criteria are used to place someone on it in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by Naveed Shinwari, one of the four American Muslims filing a lawsuit accusing the FBI of unjustly placing them on the no-fly list and trying to coerce them to spy on their community. Also with us is Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR is representing the four men, along with the City University of New York’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility program, or CLEAR.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Naveed, let’s begin with you. Tell us your story. What happened?

NAVEED SHINWARI: Thank you, first of all, for having us. I’ve been a big fan of the show since college days.

Well, in October 2011, I went on a Hajj pilgrimage, religious pilgrimage, with my mother. And after that, we went to Afghanistan, and that’s where I got married, too. On the way coming back, late February of 2012, I got—I was trying to obtain a boarding pass in Dubai. My flight was from Kabul to Dubai and then to Houston. And I was denied boarding pass in Dubai. I was told that I had to go outside and meet with the immigration, U.S. immigrations, or the embassy, consulate. I had to obtain a temporary visa. And my mother and I, we went out, out of the airport.

And then I was interrogated by two FBI agents for roughly about four hours, and I was told to—I was pressured to give them everything that I knew in order to go back home. And then they will—the more that I give them, the better chances of me coming back home that I had. I was told to take a lie detector test, and they wanted to take photos with their phone of mine, and which, both of them, I refused, because I was very truthful to them from the beginning.

Finally, after five days, we were able to—we had to buy new tickets, and we were able to come to the U.S. Then I was interrogated at the airport in Washington by a couple of FBI agents. And then I had several visits in my house. In March of 2012, I found out that I was on the no-fly list, when I had a flight to Orlando for a job. And in the airport, I was escorted by police officers telling me that I could not fly anymore. That’s the first time I found out.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: When you say they interrogated you the first time around, what kinds of questions were they asking you?

NAVEED SHINWARI: They told me to “tell us everything. And where did you been—where have you been? And have you attended any training camps in Afghanistan, or even to Pakistan?” And to all of those questions, my answer was negative. If you met individuals that pose a threat to national security, and my answer was negative, of course.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your feelings about being on the no-fly list? How has it affected your life? Where is your wife now, by the way?

NAVEED SHINWARI: She’s in Afghanistan, and it’s been 26 months, counting, that I have not seen her.

AMY GOODMAN: For more than two years.

NAVEED SHINWARI: That’s correct. I spent a month with her, and then I had to leave. And then, ever since, I haven’t been able to go back.

AMY GOODMAN: Shayana Kadidal, what is the legality of this?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Well, I think it’s completely illegal. You know, most people find out that they’re on the list the same way Naveed did. They try to fly, and then they’re denied boarding, and sometimes a gate agent will tell them, “Well, you’re on this list.”

Now, there’s a process to challenge it, nominally, through the Department of Homeland Security, but when you file a complaint, you never get told whether or not you’re on the list or whether you’ve been removed from the list. The government never tells us what the criteria for being on the list is. We think it has something to do with whether you’re a threat to civil aviation, whatever that means, but they’ve never sort of published a definition, and they never tell you what evidence, you know, they’ve used to put you on there, right?

And a lot of times, I don’t think the government knows what evidence they’ve used to put you on there, because a field-level FBI agent, for all practical purposes, can nominate someone like Naveed. Those guys who interviewed him in Dubai could do it on their own discretion, just as if a New York City beat cop could put you on the no-fly list. And it’s basically a rubber stamp, the level of review that it gets once it goes into the Terrorist Screening Center that runs the list.

So, you know, you get this situation that’s ripe for abuse. And Naveed, like our other clients, you know, I think the FBI put him on the list basically because they knew there was no process where he could challenge it, where he could get off, other than coming to court, like we have now, and therefore they could use it very effectively to twist their arms to work and spy on completely innocent members of their Muslim community.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right, and this issue of some of your clients being—or your clients being asked to spy on their communities, could you elaborate on that?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. Well, so you see Naveed, you know, answered all those questions negatively and was still—and still ended up on the list, right? They are asking people not to spy on friends and family and acquaintances who the government suspects of involvement in crime or terrorism; they’re asking them to troll the Muslim community for information. You know, it’s the same mentality as underlies the NSA surveillance programs, right? Gather every bit of information on civil society, and then we’ll figure out why we wanted it later.

AMY GOODMAN: Aviation security specialist Glenn Winn told San Diego news station 6 that people are not put on the no-fly list arbitrarily.

GLENN WINN: There’s something has arisen in his background, and it has restricted his movement on a U.S. carrier of the United States, i.e. a threat.
AMY GOODMAN: Shayana Kadidal, your response?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: I mean, I think, you know, the most obvious response to that is to look at the Rahinah Ibrahim case that was just litigated out on the West Coast and where the government for eight years fought, you know, invoking every secrecy doctrine you can imagine, to resist telling a former Stanford Ph.D. student whether or not she was on the list. Turned out they had accidentally put her on the list because an FBI agent had kind of incompetently checked the “yes” box instead of not checking it as he intended to. They took her off the list in 2005, and yet they fought for eight years in court to avoid having to tell her that and to really avoid telling the public that they made a spectacular mistake.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in December, we spoke about the hidden cost of being placed on the no-fly list with the lawyer for Stanford University student Rahinah Ibrahim. Ibrahim sued the U.S. government after her name was placed on the no-fly list and she was barred from flying back from Malaysia to the United States in 2005 to complete her studies at Stanford. This is her attorney, Anya Bernstein.

ANYA BERNSTEIN: People are harmed by being on these watch lists. They’re harmed by being not allowed to fly. They’re also harmed by being subject to a lot more scrutiny from law enforcement officers every time they run into them. So if you’re on a watch list like this and you are stopped for speeding, the officer runs your license through a computer system, and he’s informed that you’re on the watch list. And then, naturally, he’s going to be paying a lot more attention to you; you’re much more likely to be arrested and to receive a certain kind of treatment. So, those are—those are more due process rights that may be infringed, and those are kind of the obvious costs of the terrorist watch lists.
The hidden costs are the systemic costs that people don’t really talk about as much, such as the effects on policy. So, one of the striking things about these watch lists is that, as far as we know, there is absolutely no mechanism for the agencies who run them to assess how well they’re doing. There’s nothing built into the system for people to review and say, “10 years ago we thought this was a bad guy. How did that turn out? How did our prediction pan out? And if it didn’t pan out, maybe we’re doing something wrong. What should we change?” So, one of the hidden costs is the bloating of the watch list with lots and lots of people who are most likely or even definitely not harmful and don’t pose a threat, and yet give us the impression that the main danger we face today is terrorism.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Anya Bernstein, attorney for the only person who has been able to successfully challenge being on the no-fly list. The impact on you and other people that you personally have been acquainted with who might have also been placed on the no-fly list?

NAVEED SHINWARI: It’s very frustrating, and you feel helpless. No one will tell you how you can get off of it, how you got on it. And it has a profound impact on people’s lives, and it has had a big impact on my life and on my family. And so, this is one of the reasons that I wanted to come out, was to—that there might be a lot of people that are afraid to speak up. And I wanted to—you know, I wanted to come out and show to everyone that, you know what, you don’t have to be afraid in this country, and you can come out and speak your mind, and we have to come together in order to resolve these kind of programs and these sort of issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Shayana, can you describe the other men who are suing?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. Well, you know, so Naveed hasn’t seen his wife in 26 months, right? We have another plaintiff who hasn’t seen his wife and his three small daughters for five years because he’s on the no-fly list. You know, all of our clients have family overseas. Two are Pakistani-American. Naveed’s Afghan-American. One’s Yemeni-American. And, you know, another client has a 93-year-old grandmother in Pakistan who’s begging to see him, because she’s gravely ill, she can’t travel here. You know, this woman raised him, and he can’t fly back there because he’s on this list. It’s devastating, you know, and there’s a stigmatic element to it, too. You know, there are people in the community who have turned away from some of our clients, because they wonder, you know, why did the government put them on this list. Surely there must be some reason, right?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about this in the context of the other instances of surveillance of the Muslim community in the United States? Obviously, in New York City we had the notorious example, now stopped by the de Blasio administration, of conducting random surveillances of the Muslim community.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Mm-hmm, right. Well, I think, you know, we have—you know, after 12 years since 9/11, 13 years, we have a huge, very well-financed infrastructure for counterterrorism, and it—you know, it generates a need, pressure to produce, quote-unquote, “results,” right? So FBI agents feel pressure to hit numerical quotas to produce a certain number of, quote-unquote, “informers.” Doesn’t matter whether the, you know, quote-unquote, “informers” have any tie to crime or terrorism or whether the people they know do, either, right? It’s, again, part of this program of just surveilling the community for surveillance’s sake.

AMY GOODMAN: A pro-Palestinian activist named Kevin Iraniha said he was mysteriously questioned by the FBI after a trip he took to the Middle East. He later found himself on a no-fly list while trying to fly to San Diego from Costa Rica. The law student reportedly returned to California by flying to Mexico and then walking across the border. He addressed supporters after returning home.

KEVIN IRANIHA: I’m happy to be home, finally, in my own hometown, you know, where I was born and raised. You see my bloodshot eyes. I’m still—I’m still going through it. It’s very tiring, and it was very depressing. This is very disappointing for anybody—to happen to anybody, you know, especially if they were born and raised here, or anybody on—outside also, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin is a U.S. citizen, and so he holds this news conference. Naveed, you’re here talking publicly. What about the repercussions for you? Are you concerned about any, about how people will view you?

NAVEED SHINWARI: Yes. Even within my household, there were—they were not in favor of me coming out. And they thought that this might make your situation difficult in bringing your wife here in the future. So that’s even within my house. Outside, many friends and family were against this, as well, too. But in every civil rights case, or whenever civil rights are violated or abused, people have to speak out. And if I don’t do it, who else will do it? So there are 16,000 to 21,000 people on this list, and the majority of them are innocent people, and they don’t know what they have done wrong. And I think we—it’s about time we need some openness to this program.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Naveed, we want to thank you for coming to Democracy Now! and telling your story. Naveed Shinwari is one of four American Muslims who filed a lawsuit accusing the FBI of unjustly placing them on the no-fly list and trying to coerce them to spy on their community. He has not seen his new wife in more than two years. Shayana Kadidal is senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, a federal court has ruled that a memo must be released that explains the rationale for killing the Awlakis, Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman, as well as other American citizen, Samir Khan. Stay with us.

THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 2014

Find this story at 24 April 2014

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Case highlights plight of people wrongfully added to database who face lengthy, secretive process to clear their names

Innocent people are being put on no-fly list as coercion or punishment by the FBI, a lawsuit alleges.

Naveed Shinwari hasn’t seen his wife in 26 months. He suspects it’s because he refused to become an informant for the FBI.

In February 2012 Shinwari, who has lived in the US since he was 14, flew to Afghanistan to get married. He says that before he could get home to Omaha, Nebraska, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents who wanted to know if he knew anything about national security threats. A third FBI visit followed when he got home.

The following month, after Shinwari bought another plane ticket for a temporary job in Connecticut, he couldn’t get a boarding pass. Police told him he had been placed on the US no-fly list, although he had never in his life been accused of breaking any law. Another FBI visit soon followed, with agents wanting to know about the “local Omaha community, did I know anyone who’s a threat”, he says.

“I’m just very frustrated, [and I said] what can I do to clear my name?” recalls Shinwari, 30. “And that’s where it was mentioned to me: you help us, we help you. We know you don’t have a job; we’ll give you money.”

Shinwari is one of four American Muslims in a new lawsuit who accuse the FBI of placing them on the no-fly list, either to intimidate them into becoming informants or to retaliate against them for declining.

Filed on Tuesday night in the US district court for the southern district of New York, the case accuses the US attorney general, Eric Holder, the FBI director, James Comey, the homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, and two dozen FBI agents of creating an atmosphere in which Muslims who are not accused of wrongdoing are forbidden from flying, apparently as leverage to get them snitching on their communities.

Their lawsuit seeks not only the plaintiffs’ removal from the no-fly list but also the establishment of a more robust legal mechanism to contest placement upon it.

“This policy and set of practices by the FBI is part of a much broader set of policies that reflect overpolicing in Muslim-American communities,” said Diala Shamas, one of the lawyers for the four plaintiffs.

In recent years Muslim community leaders in the US have stated that they feel law enforcement at times considers them a target, particularly thanks to mosque infiltrations and other surveillance practices. Material demonizing Muslims and Islam has been present in FBI counter-terrorism training, which the bureau has conceded was inappropriate. The New York police department recently shut down a unit tasked with spying on Muslim businesses, mosques and community centers in New York and New Jersey.

Like his co-plaintiffs Shinwari does not know for sure that the FBI deliberately placed him on the no-fly list as either a punitive measure or a pressure tactic.

Their four stories differ in important respects.

Jameel Algibhah of the Bronx alleges that the FBI explicitly asked him to infiltrate a Queens mosque and pose as an extremist in online forums. But they have in common an allegation of an implied quid pro quo. “We’re the only ones who can take you off the list,” an unnamed FBI agent who wanted Algibhah to inform to is alleged to have told him.

Their case follows at least one other, brought by the ACLU in Oregon, that alleges the FBI attempted to leverage no-fly selectees into informants. That case also challenges as insufficient the process afforded to people seeking to remove themselves from the list.

Shinwari, who now lives in Connecticut and works for a temp agency, has not attempted to return to Afghanistan to see his wife. While he was able to board a flight last month, he wonders if he received a reprieve from the no-fly list that the FBI offered to him in 2012 as enticement. Repeated attempts to formally remove himself from the list resulted in vague and inconclusive notifications from the government – which he, his co-plaintiffs and his lawyers contend feeds into the problem.

The no-fly list is among the most opaque post-9/11 measures. It is maintained by the FBI and implemented at airports by the Department of Homeland Security. Few know they’ve been placed on it, and those who do face a complicated redress process to have themselves removed. The new lawsuit alleges that the opacity contributes to watchlist abuse.

According to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the list, there were approximately 16,000 people, fewer than 500 of them Americans, on the no-fly list as of September 2011.

A larger pool of data that feeds the no-fly list and other government watchlists, known as the Terrorist Screening Database, contemporaneously contained records of 420,000 people. Famously it included Nelson Mandela until 2008. The government’s policy is to not to confirm or deny someone’s placement upon a watchlist.

Several earlier lawsuits have attempted to get people off the no-fly list. In February Rahinah Ibrahim became the first since 9/11 to win such a case, after demonstrating that the FBI adder her name by mistake. She had been unable to fly since 2004.

The criteria for inclusion on the list are unclear. In a March 2011 federal court filing Christopher Piehota, the current director of the Terrorist Screening Center, affirmed that FBI agents could nominate candidates to it.

Inclusion on the broader Terrorist Screening Database depends upon “whether there is reasonable suspicion to believe that a person is a known or suspected terrorist”, Piehota, then the deputy director of the Terrorist Screening Center, told the eastern district court of Virginia.

“Mere guesses or ‘hunches,’ or the reporting of suspicious activity alone is not enough to constitute a reasonable suspicion and are not sufficient bases to watchlist an individual.” Audits and other quality control measures were periodic, Piehota told the court.

An ACLU study last month challenged that criterion. “It is not at all clear what separates a reasonable-suspicion-based-on-a-reasonable-suspicion from a simple hunch,” it said, calling inclusion on a government watchlist a potentially “life-altering” experience.

A redress system for thwarted travelers was operated by the Department of Homeland Security and referred complaints to the FBI, Piehota further affirmed. A subsequent records check determined “whether the complainant’s current status in the TSDB [Terrorist Screening Database] is suitable based on the most current, accurate and thorough information available”.

The process was entirely internal, with DHS informing the would-be traveler what the system had determined “without disclosing the traveler’s status in the TSDB”, Piehota said.

A study by the justice department’s inspector general, partially declassified on 25 March, painted a mixed picture of the FBI’s watchlisting processes. “Subjects of closed terrorism investigations were removed from the watchlist when the case was closed,” it found, but it noted the FBI was “not timely in submitting watchlist nomination and removal packages for individuals not under investigation by the FBI”. In such cases it took the FBI a median of 78 days to remove people from the lists.

“Because non-investigative subjects may be retained on the watchlist for an extended period of time, this subset of watchlist practices will continue to grow throughout the years,” the inspector general’s report said.

The FBI declined to comment on the allegations in the new lawsuit, which was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project at the City University of New York.

Shinwari said his placement on the no-fly list and his dealings with the FBI had a chilling effect. “I don’t want to open up to people any more, or express myself politically or otherwise. It’s definitely had an effect on me participating in my local mosque,” he said.

“I just want to see some changes to this process, and openness and transparency would be good. That’s what Obama originally ran for.”

Spencer Ackerman in New York
theguardian.com, Wednesday 23 April 2014 03.00 BST

Find this story at 23 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Dr Rahinah Ibrahim is not a national security threat.

The federal government even said so.

It took a lawsuit that has stretched for eight years for the feds to yield that admission. It is one answer in a case that opened up many more questions.

Namely: How did an innocent Malaysian architectural scholar remain on a terrorism no fly-list – effectively branded a terrorist – for years after a FBI paperwork screw up put her there? The answer to that question – to paraphrase a particularly hawkish former Secretary of Defense – may be unknowable.

Last week, there was a depressing development in the case. A judge’s decision was made public and it revealed that the White House has created at least one “secret exception” to the legal standard that federal authorities use to place people on such lists. This should trouble anyone who cares about niggling things like legal due process or the US Constitution. No one is clear what the exception is – because it’s secret, duh – meaning government is basically placing people on terror watchlists that can ruin their lives without explaining why or how they landed on those lists in the first place.

This flies in the face of what the government has told Congress and the American public. Previously, federal officials said that in order to land on one of these terror watchlists, someone has to meet a “reasonable suspicion standard”. That means there have to be clear facts supporting the government’s assertion that the individual in question is, you know, doing some terrorist shit. Which seems like a good idea.

But not any more, apparently.

Dr Rahinah Ibrahim (Photo via University Putra Malaysia)

Ibrahim, a Muslim who is currently the Dean of Architecture at University Putra Malaysia, was placed on the federal no-fly list in late 2004. She was removed from that specific list the following year, but her name remained on federal terrorism watchlist databases. Her daughter, a US citizen, was also watchlisted. Ibrahim was arrested at San Francisco International Airport while she was enrolled as a PhD student at Stanford University. She was not charged with any crime, but her student visa was revoked; later attempts at obtaining a new visa were denied. She sued the US government in 2006, basically saying that what the federal authorities did was illegal. Eight long years of litigation followed.

She found herself in a guilty-until-proven innocent legal quagmire. Perhaps most importantly, she was never given an explanation as to what landed her on this list. For that answer, she is still waiting. The government would ultimately concede that she had never posed a national security threat. In January, the court found the US government violated her due process rights.

During the case, there was one clue as to what may have convinced the US that Ibrahim was a potential terrorist. She belongs to a women’s economic organisation called Jamaah Islah Malaysia – there have been rumours that the FBI confused this with the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah.

Which would obviously be a really, really dumb thing for an investigative agency to do.

Ibrahim’s attorney, Elizabeth Pipkin, says she can’t say for sure how the authorities first became interested in her client. “That was speculation on our part,” she said. “The sad thing is, even after eight years of litigation, we weren’t able to get to the bottom of what was the underlying information that lead an FBI agent to her door and brought this whole thing about.”

But as great as a “Feds Suck at Googling” headline would be, it could be even more simple and ridiculous. According to one judge, an FBI agent made a basic paperwork error by filling out the form the opposite way from the instructions – ticking the lists she thought Ibrahim should not be on rather than the ones that she should. That screw up might be to blame for turning eight years of her life into a hellish pit of litigation.

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The real criteria of the no-fly list – if there is one – remains cloaked in secrecy. In America’s post-9/11 fever dream, it’s looking increasingly like the government has targeted Muslims who have no connection to terrorism on such lists, in the hope of developing informants, according to multiple ongoing federal lawsuits. (More on that in a minute.) And once you’re on these lists and terrorist databases, it’s a bitch to clear your name, as Ibrahim found out.

Pipkin says the only historical precedent for a like-minded programme occurred during the McCarthy era back in the 1950s, when the government denied passports for people who were suspected communists. It would appear the G-men of the 21st century are ripping a page right out of J Edgar Hoover’s playbook. When the Red Scare was all the rage, a case challenging such a policy went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which found that if someone is deprived of their right to travel, the government has to say why – something the authorities have failed to do in Ibrahim’s case.

As head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover ran roughshod over civil liberties during the 1950s, during which time one US policy tried to prevent passports from being issued to suspected communists.
(Photo via)

In other words, it’s secret law: the government is deciding it doesn’t like you for some reason and punishing you, but declining to say what exactly you did to trigger the punishment. People like Ibrahim are stuck in a legal no-man’s land, where they can’t fly but they have not been charged with a crime.

“The assertion of executive privilege in this case was extreme and the secrecy that was asserted by the federal government with respect to its action here are really hard to stomach when you believe that this should be a democratic country,” said Pipkin.

Ibrahim is not the only Muslim to be caught in an extrajudicial limbo.

Gulet Mohamed, a US citizen of Somali descent, is also currently challenging his placement on a no-fly list. Mohamed has not been charged with any crime, but his placement on the list left him stranded in Kuwait for a month from December 2010 to January 2011. His designation prevented him from flying home. During his confinement, US authorities grilled him about his travels in Somalia and Yemen, but Mohamed denied having contact with militants. Mohamed, then still a teenager, says he was beaten and that federal agents made him an offer of becoming an informant, which he turned down. Ultimately, he was allowed back into the US in January 2011. This January, a federal judge ruled that he had a right to challenge his placement on the list.

His attorney, Gadeir Abbas, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the watchlist policy violates due process rights guaranteed by the US Constitution.

“We know that whatever it was that interested them in Gulet, it was not enough for them to press charges against him, and if you can’t test your allegations through the criminal process, then what, exactly, are you doing?” he asked.

Abbas said that Federal authorities have significantly expanded the use of such watchlists since that guy decided to ring in Christmas 2009 by stuffing explosives into his skivvies and boarding a plane that was bound for Detroit. The feds, he said, are now using the watchlists as a, “punitive tool that it can use as leverage [against] individuals that they want to interrogate, to become informants”.

Put another way: Federal authorities are using the watchlists to target Muslims in the hopes they will spy on their own communities on behalf of the US government.

Hina Shamsi, the director for the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) National Security Project, meanwhile, has said the US terrorist database is broken. Thousands of people, she said, have been added to a no-fly list without any explanation as to why and with no opportunity to correct “the error or innuendo” that landed them there in the first place.

Abe Mashal

Abe Mashal was one such instance. The married father of four grew up the son of an Italian-American mother and a Palestinian father in Illinois. He is a former Marine. He also happens to be Muslim. He believes the confluence of those last two factors may have caused him a considerable headache.

Mashal trains dogs for a living. Sometimes this requires him to fly around the country. One day in April 2010, he arrived at Chicago’s Midway International Airport to fly to Washington state for a dog training job. He wasn’t allowed to board, he learned, because he had been placed on a no-fly list.

He is now part of an ongoing ACLU lawsuit challenging the legality of the no-fly list. In a familiar story, he’s never been clear exactly about what landed him on the list. He says he can fly now; he was apparently taken off the list but was never told when, how or why. But for three-and-a-half years it hurt his business. About a third of his clientele required him to fly, he said.

Mashal has not been charged with a crime. He thinks federal authorities targeted him because he was a former Marine who identified himself on his military records as Muslim.

Authorities, he thought, saw him as someone whom they could groom to be a solid informant. He said during his attempts to get off the watchlist, federal authorities offered him a deal: become an informant, spy on your fellow Muslims and you’ll be off the list. He declined and lawyered up. There are several other ex-military Muslims who are part of the ACLU’s suit, he said.

“I think they feel that you’re a patriotic person and you’re used to taking orders. They want someone with that type of discipline as well,” he told me. “You start putting the pieces together and say, ‘They’re aiming for military people who claim to be Muslims.’”

He added, “The FBI is very good and trained at intimidating people and getting them to do what they want. It’s been a frustrating experience. It’s made me question whether we have these rights that they say we do.” When the government can put you on a terror-list without giving you a reason, that seems a fair question to raise.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security both declined to comment for this story, deferring to other agencies. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment before deadline.

By: Danny McDonald
Apr 23 2014

Find this story at 23 April 2014

© 2014 Vice Media Inc

Tony Blair speaks at Bloomberg in London on 23 April. ‘The liberal interventionists’ hero was once more demanding military action against the threat of radical Islam.’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
The neocons are back. That toxic blend of messianic warmongering abroad and McCarthyite witch-hunting at home – which gave us Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and the London bombings – is coursing through our public life again. Yesterday the liberal interventionists’ hero, Tony Blair, was once more demanding military action against the “threat of radical Islam”.

Reprising the theme that guided him and George Bush through the deceit and carnage of the “war on terror”, the former prime minister took his crusade against “Islamism” on to a new plane. The west should, he demanded, make common cause with Russia and China to support those with a “modern” view against the tide of political Islam.

But he also demanded military intervention against Syria – backed by Russia – along with more “active measures” to help the armed opposition, which is dominated by Islamists and jihadists. It’s a crazy combination with an openly anti-democratic core: the Middle East peace envoy also warmly endorsed the Egyptian dictatorship, along with the repressive autocracies of the Gulf.

Quite why the views of a man whose military interventions in the Muslim world have been so widely discredited, who has been funded by the Kazakhstan dictator and is regarded by up to a third of the British public as a war criminal, should be treated with such attention by the media isn’t immediately obvious. But one reason is that they chime with those of a powerful section of the political and security establishment.

In Britain, the campaign against Islamist “extremism” is once again in full flow. In fact, it is open season on the Muslim community. For the past few weeks reports have multiplied about an alleged “Islamic plot”, code-named Operation Trojan Horse, to take control of 25 state schools in Birmingham and run them on strict religious principles.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, a long-time neoconservative supporter of Blair’s wars and Islamist witchfinder general, responded by sending in an army of inspectors to hunt down extremists and appointing Peter Clarke, the former head of Scotland Yard counter-terrorism, to investigate.

But all the signs are that the anonymous dossier setting out the Salafist takeover plan is a hoax linked to an employment tribunal case. A headteacher the dossier claimed the plotters had ousted in fact left 20 years ago. The only individual named in the dossier isn’t a Salafist. Even the West Midlands chief constable described Clarke’s appointment as “desperately unfortunate”.

But there are now four official inquiries. Inspectors have gone round schools asking teachers whether they are homophobes and telling others their school will fail inspection because they’re not teaching “anti-terrorism”, while Gove’s media allies have been fed inflammatory titbits to justify the campaign.

Locals insist the reality is that Muslims, both liberal and conservative, have been getting more involved in their children’s schools to raise standards, not “Islamise” them. But the result of the uproar has been to poison community relations and deter ordinary Muslims from taking part in civic life for fear of being branded “extremist”.

William Shawcross, the Charity Commission chairman and another neocon ideologue, has meanwhile declared “Islamist extremism” the “most deadly” problem facing charities and promised tough measures to crack down on it, however it might be defined.

Then the Muslim mayor of Tower Hamlets, the former Labour councillor Lutfur Rahman – often described as “extremist-linked” in the media – has been the target of a new media onslaught. No wrongdoing has been uncovered, including by the police. The communities minister, Eric Pickles, has nevertheless sent in inspectors.

That follows David Cameron’s far more ominous announcement of an “investigation” into the Muslim Brotherhood and its links with “violent extremism” both in Britain and abroad, with the possibility of banning it as a terrorist organisation. The motivation for this inquiry into the most influential political organisation in the Muslim world was made transparently clear by the appointment of Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, to head it. The Saudi and Egyptian regimes both regard the election-winning Brotherhood as a mortal threat and have designated it a terrorist organisation.

So to appease Riyadh, finalise multi-billion pound arms contracts and align Britain with the emerging Egyptian-Saudi-Israeli axis, Cameron has tossed them a bone. If he really wanted to know about the Brotherhood he could have asked its envoy at the lunch he held for him last May at Chequers, before their elected president was overthrown in Cairo’s blood-drenched coup.

Alternatively, William Hague could have had a chat with the Brotherhood members of the Syrian rebel coalition Britain backs with cash and equipment, and the US supports with arms. But that might have caused embarrassment to Whitehall officials who insist that young British Muslims going to fight in Syria represent the greatest threat to the country’s security.

Which helps to explain the incoherence of Blair’s outpourings. Western policy in the Middle East now verges on the surreal. Britain, the US and their friends are in practice lined up with Islamist (and al-Qaida) Syrian rebel forces while claiming they only back “moderates” – but deny the rebels any decisive edge and support the suppression of Islamists across the region.

Muslims from Britain who volunteer to fight or send funds to Syria, in effective alliance with their government, are then arrested and charged with terrorism offences in Britain. Britons who went to fight in Libya in 2011, on the other hand, were allowed to come and go as they pleased.

It is beyond hypocritical and cynical, but is part of a pattern of manipulation, support for tyranny and military intervention in the Middle East over a century. That record has been the central factor in the rise of Islamist movements and the jihadist backlash since 2001. This week’s US missile attacks in Yemen, which left dozens dead, will generate more of it.

Meanwhile, in Britain and other countries preparing for next month’s Euro elections, denunciations of Islamic “extremism” and non-existent plots, along with dog-whistle talk about Christianity, are the small change of the contest with rightwing populists. But the fear and hatred they feed will be with us for many years to come.

Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Wednesday 23 April 2014 21.00 BST

Find this story at 23 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

World View: New claims say Ankara worked with the US and Britain to smuggle Gaddafi’s guns to rebel groups

The US’s Secretary of State John Kerry and its UN ambassador, Samantha Power have been pushing for more assistance to be given to the Syrian rebels. This is despite strong evidence that the Syrian armed opposition are, more than ever, dominated by jihadi fighters similar in their beliefs and methods to al-Qa’ida. The recent attack by rebel forces around Latakia, northern Syria, which initially had a measure of success, was led by Chechen and Moroccan jihadis.
America has done its best to keep secret its role in supplying the Syrian armed opposition, operating through proxies and front companies. It is this which makes Seymour Hersh’s article “The Red Line and The Rat Line: Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian rebels” published last week in the London Review of Books, so interesting.

Attention has focussed on whether the Syrian jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, aided by Turkish intelligence, could have been behind the sarin gas attacks in Damascus last 21 August, in an attempt to provoke the US into full-scale military intervention to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. “We now know it was a covert action planned by [Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s people to push Obama over the red line,” a former senior US intelligence officer is quoted as saying.

Critics vehemently respond that all the evidence points to the Syrian government launching the chemical attack and that even with Turkish assistance, Jabhat al-Nusra did not have the capacity to use sarin.

A second and little-regarded theme of Hersh’s article is what the CIA called the rat line, the supply chain for the Syrian rebels overseen by the US in covert cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The information about this comes from a highly classified and hitherto secret annex to the report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee on the attack by Libyan militiamen on the US consulate in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 in which US ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed. The annex deals with an operation in which the CIA, in cooperation with MI6, arranged the dispatch of arms from Mu’ammer Gaddafi’s arsenals to Turkey and then across the 500-mile long Turkish southern frontier with Syria. The annex refers to an agreement reached in early 2012 between Obama and Erdogan with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar supplying funding. Front companies, purporting to be Australian, were set up, employing former US soldiers who were in charge of obtaining and transporting the weapons. According to Hersh, the MI6 presence enabled the CIA to avoid reporting the operation to Congress, as required by law, since it could be presented as a liaison mission.

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The US involvement in the rat line ended unhappily when its consulate was stormed by Libyan militiamen. The US diplomatic presence in Benghazi had been dwarfed by that of the CIA and, when US personnel were airlifted out of the city in the aftermath of the attack, only seven were reportedly from the State Department and 23 were CIA officers. The disaster in Benghazi, which soon ballooned into a political battle between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, severely loosened US control of what arms were going to which rebel movements in Syria.

This happened at the moment when Assad’s forces were starting to gain the upper hand and al-Qa’ida-type groups were becoming the cutting edge of the rebel military.

The failure of the rebels to win in 2012 left their foreign backers with a problem. At the time of the fall of Gaddafi they had all become over-confident, demanding the removal of Assad when he still held all Syria’s 14 provincial capitals. “They were too far up the tree to get down,” according to one observer. To accept anything other than the departure of Assad would have looked like a humiliating defeat.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar went on supplying money while Sunni states turned a blind eye to the recruitment of jihadis and to preachers stirring up sectarian hatred against the Shia. But for Turkey the situation was worse. Efforts to project its power were faltering and all its chosen proxies – from Egypt to Iraq – were in trouble. It was evident that al-Qa’ida-type fighters, including Jahat al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) and Ahrar al-Sham were highly dependent on Turkish border crossings for supplies, recruits and the ability to reach safety. The heaviest intra-rebel battles were for control of these crossings. Turkey’s military intelligence, MIT, and the paramilitary Gendarmerie played a growing role in directing and training jihadis and Jabhat al-Nusra in particular.

The Hersh article alleges that the MIT went further and instructed Jabhat al-Nusra on how to stage a sarin gas attack in Damascus that would cross Obama’s red line and lead to the US launching an all-out air attack. Vehement arguments rage over whether this happened. That a senior US intelligence officer is quoted by America’s leading investigative journalist as believing that it did, is already damaging Turkey.

Part of the US intelligence community is deeply suspicious of Erdogan’s actions in Syria. It may also be starting to strike home in the US and Europe that aid to the armed rebellion in Syria means destabilising Iraq. When Isis brings suicide bombers from across the Turkish border into Syria it can as easily direct them to Baghdad as Aleppo.

The Pentagon is much more cautious than the State Department about the risks of putting greater military pressure on Assad, seeing it as the first step in a military entanglement along the lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel are the main opponents of a greater US military role. Both sides in the US have agreed to a programme under which 600 Syrian rebels would be trained every month and jihadis would be weeded out. A problem here is that the secular moderate faction of committed Syrian opposition fighters does not really exist. As always, there is a dispute over what weapons should be supplied, with the rebels, Saudis and Qataris insisting that portable anti-aircraft missiles would make all the difference. This is largely fantasy, the main problem being that the rebel military forces are fragmented into hundreds of war bands.

It is curious that the US military has been so much quicker to learn the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya than civilians like Kerry and Power. The killing of Ambassador Stevens shows what happens when the US gets even peripherally involved in a violent, messy crisis like Syria where it does not control many of the players or much of the field.

Meanwhile, a telling argument against Turkey having orchestrated the sarin gas attacks in Damascus is that to do so would have required a level of competence out of keeping with its shambolic interventions in Syria over the past three years.

PATRICK COCKBURN
Sunday 13 April 2014

Find this story at 13 April 2014

© independent.co.uk

President Barack Obama speaks to reporters about possible US action against Syria during a meeting with the leaders of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania at the White House in Washington, August 30, 2013. Obama said he was considering a “limited” attack and Secretary of State John Kerry earlier declared there was “clear” and “compelling” evidence that the Syrian government had used poison gas against its citizens. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times)
President Barack Obama speaks to reporters about possible US action against Syria during a meeting with the leaders of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania at the White House in Washington, August 30, 2013. Obama said he was considering a “limited” attack and Secretary of State John Kerry earlier declared there was “clear” and “compelling” evidence that the Syrian government had used poison gas against its citizens. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times)
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Eight months after an August 21 attack in the Damascus suburbs, the assumption that it was a Syrian government-sponsored attack continues to dominate discussion of the issue. But significant new information has become available that makes an attack by opposition forces far more plausible than appeared to be the case in the first weeks after the event.
Seymour Hersh’s revelation in an early April article in the London Review of Books that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had collected intelligence on a Jabhat al-Nusra cell working on a sarin weapons capability was far from being definitive evidence of a plot by jihadist groups to mount a false-flag sarin attack.
But the totality of the new information has eliminated or cast doubt on the major arguments that were advanced by the Obama administration and others in the aftermath as to why the attack must have been carried out by the Syrian regime. The new information suggests a much less lethal attack with munitions that were less effective and perhaps even using much less sarin than was initially assumed.
The “Smoking Guns” That Failed
The debate over the August 21 attacks has focused primarily on a series of assertions about “smoking guns” that allegedly proved Syrian government guilt. The first – and best known – of those “smoking guns” was the generally accepted belief that the rockets said to have delivered the sarin must have originated in a government-controlled area. The United Nations investigating team’s initial report, issued on September 16, gauged the angle of one rocket’s impact in Zamalka and its arc without reporting explicitly on its launch point. But Human Rights Watch immediately showed that the trajectory led to the Syrian Army Republican Guard 106th Brigade’s Base 9.6 km away. And it calculated that the UN report’s bearings for two other impact points in Moamadiyah showed trajectories ending in the same Syrian army base.
Those calculations depended on the assumption that the ranges of the rockets in question were more than 9 kilometers. But within weeks, a rocket specialist blogger at the website Who Attacked Ghouta, going by the name “Sasa Wawa,” had concluded that the maximum range of the rockets that hit Zamalka was 2.5 kilometers. And former UN weapons inspector Richard Lloyd and weapons analyst Theodore A. Postol of MIT determined that the maximum range of the previously unknown rockets that landed in Zamalka would have been 2 kilometers or 1.2 miles. In his press conference on the release of the second UN investigation report in December, the head of the UN investigating team, Ake Sellstrom, agreed that the estimate of 2 kilometers “could be a fair guess” for the maximum range of the rockets.
The debate over the August 21 attacks has focused primarily on a series of assertions about “smoking guns” that allegedly proved Syrian government guilt.
Blogger Eliot Higgins – better known as “Brown Moses” – who has achieved the status of favorite news media source on munitions issues in Syria, has argued in recent months that the rockets must have been fired from in or near the Jobar-Qaboun industrial zone, wedged in between Jobar and Qabun neighborhoods, which is between 2.2. and 2.5 km from the farthest impact points in Zamalka, over which he claimed the government had control. Still later, Higgins pinpointed an area near the cloverleaf east of that zone over which, he said, government had exercised control through a series of checkpoints.
But apart from the fact that those sites are all farther away from the impact sites than current research supports, the Higgins argument suffers from an additional problem: Charles Wood, a Perth, Australia-based forensic expert who has studied the military situation in that area at the time of the August 21 attack, told Inter Press Service (IPS) that, far from being government-controlled, the entire area in and around the industrial zone was actually thoroughly infiltrated by the rebels through tunnels they had built into the area. Based on videos posted by the rebels themselves, Wood said the rebels had fought off a government attack on a position in the area pinpointed by Higgins on August 21. He also pointed out that, three days later, the insurgents carried out a chemical IED attack against one of the government checkpoints very near the open field from which Higgins says the attack was launched.
The rocket found in Moadamiyah on the morning of August 21 was a BM-14 440 mm rocket manufactured in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. UN inspectors were taken to the scene where the BM-14 rocket hit and were told that it had killed everyone in an adjoining apartment. The BM-14 rocket was known to have a range of 9.8 km, so it was certainly capable of delivering an attack from the army base to Moadamiyah.
There is very serious question, however, whether that rocket actually held sarin. Of five swipes taken in the bedroom where an entire family was said to have perished in the attack, only one showed any trace of sarin or byproducts in the lab results from one of the labs, and none of them registered any trace of sarin or byproducts in the other laboratory’s test results. There were traces of sarin found on various items, including metal fragments sampled outside the building near the impact point. But the UN report complains about the fact that evidence had been moved and that the site may have been “manipulated.”
A second “smoking gun” was the discovery of traces of a form of hexamine (hexamethylenetetramine) that can be used as a stabilizer in sarin production, in some of the samples taken at rocket impact sites. UK-based chemical weapons analyst Dan Kaszeta noticed that the official Syrian declaration of chemical weapons listed 80 tons of hexamine and concluded that that combination of facts indicated government culpability. The head of the UN investigating team, Ake Sellstrom of Sweden, referred to the form of hexamine as being in Syria’s “formula” and as “their acid scavenger” in a portion of the interview with Gwyn Winfield, the editor of CBRNe World that was not published in the February 2014 issue due to lack of space, according to Kaszeta. (CBRN stands for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense.)
But further research revealed that hexamine is also used to make explosives, and a form of hexamine was found on a swipe taken from the central tube of one of the rockets – the location of the explosive in the rockets. Mark Bishop, who teaches chemistry at Monterey Peninsula College, Monterey, California and is the author of a college textbook on the subject, told Truthout he believes the presence of hexamethylenetetramine most likely means that it was an impurity formed in the making of the explosive.
The incriminating 80 tons of hexamine declared by the Syrian government to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) also turned out to have an another explanation: It is also used as a stabilizer for the form of mustard gas found in the Syrian chemical weapons arsenal.
The rockets would not have been difficult to duplicate.
The main argument that the attack had to be launched by the Syrian government was that the government alone possessed the 330 mm rockets with a long barrel and tail fins called “Volcanos” that were found at the sites of the attack and had used such weapons before August 21. That was misleading, however: The rockets that government forces had used, from late 2012 on, had been configured for high explosives, and none of the alleged chemical attacks involved that type of rocket.
The question is whether the rebels could have copied the type of rocket that had been used by the Syrian army over the previous year and made adjustments for chemical use. Certainly, the rebels had access to the remnants of the rockets configured for high explosives and white phosphorous payloads, as well as videos showing the intact rockets.
The rockets would not have been difficult to duplicate, according to Postol and Lloyd, based on both their own personal experience and video evidence. Postol recalled in an interview with Truthout that he had personally constructed comparable devices in his own machine shop as a graduate student. Lloyd pointed out in a separate interview that videos show that the insurgents had “production lines” for rockets. “I have pictures showing 40 to 60 rockets stacked in a row, with people working on the tail assemblies,” he said.
Who Had the Capability to Make Sarin?
After Seymour Hersh reported April 6 that DIA analysts had compiled a highly classified five-page “talking points” brief for Deputy Director David Shed in June 2013, outlining the intelligence indicating that Al Nusra had a Sarin production cell, the possibility of an opposition sarin program could not longer be dismissed out of hand.
The intelligence paper, from which Hersh was able to quote extensively, referred to intelligence reports from various agencies that Turkey- and Saudi-based “chemical facilitators” were attempting to obtain the “precursors” for sarin in quantities of tens of kilograms, prompting speculation about plans for “large-scale production” in Syria. It cited the reported plan of al Nustra’s “emir for military manufacturing for two associates to ‘perfect a process for making sarin, then go to Syria to train others to begin large-scale production at an unidentified lab in Syria.'”
The argument for Syrian government culpability has not been that the rebels could not make sarin, but that they would never be able to make enough of it.
The spokesperson for the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, issued what appeared to be a denial of the DIA document but was not. “No such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts,” the spokesperson said. But Hersh had not suggested that the paper had been “requested” or “produced” by “community analysts” – a term reserved for intelligence assessments arrived by a process coordinated by the office of the DNI.
A former intelligence official told Truthout he recalls papers such as the one described by Hersh being issued by DIA. “They were called talking points papers,” he said. Such papers were used to brief not only the top officials of the agency, but the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he said. “This one would have gone to Chairman [General Martin] Dempsey.”
The argument for Syrian government culpability has not been that the rebels could not make sarin, but that they would never be able to make enough of it. In a Foreign Policy magazine article by Higgins, Kaszeta compared the sarin requirements of the August 21 attack with the sarin program of the Japanese terrorist group Aum Ashinryko, which attacked the Tokyo subway system with sarin in 1995. “Even if the Aug. 21 attack is limited to the eight volcano rockets that we seem to be talking about,” said Kaszeta, “we’re looking at an industrial effort two orders of magnitude larger than the Aum Shinrikyo effort.”
But a study of the Aum Shinryko’s weapons programs, published by the pro-military think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS), shows that the Aum Shinryko facility in which sarin was to be made was intended to be a major factory for the production of as much as 70 tons of sarin. That would have been orders of magnitude greater than the largest amount that anyone has suggested might have been used in the August 21 attack. On the other hand, the CNAS account shows that the lab actually achieved a production of 40-50 liters of sarin within roughly a year, and with a minimal staff.
Kaszeta has estimated that as much as a ton of sarin may have been used in the attack, based on an old US military manual for planning a battlefield attack to achieve sufficient casualties – an amount presumed to be beyond the capability of the Syrian opposition. Postol and Lloyd have estimated, on the other hand, that 600 liters of sarin would have been required to launch the attack on August 21, based on a total capacity of 50 liters of sarin for each rocket and a total of 12 rockets.
That estimate was based on the volume of the rockets, which can hold roughly 50 liters of liquid. Postol told Truthout he believes they must have been fully loaded, because loading them only partially could have resulted in the rockets being unstable and “tumbling,” rather than traveling their full range.
But sarin is soluble in water, and if the pH of the water is neutral (i.e., pH=7), the sarin does not break down for roughly 5.4 hours, according to a 2002 article in the journal Critical Care Medicine. That means that each rocket could have contained as little as 5 to 10 liters of sarin mixed with 40 to 45 liters of water, thus reducing the total amount of sarin used in the attack to as little as 60 liters – the same order of magnitude of Sarin as produced by the clandestine Aum Shinryko laboratory.
How Lethal Was the Attack?
The use of a water solution to fill the rockets would have dramatically reduced the lethality of the attack compared with what has been widely assumed and would help explain anomalies in the data published in the UN investigation report that have puzzled chemical weapons experts. The data gathered by the UN team from a few dozen survivors showed that most of those claiming to have been most heavily exposed to sarin failed to present symptoms that would be expected from such exposure.
The UN team reported that the investigating team had asked an opposition leader to help identify a total of 80 people “who had been badly hurt but had survived.” The opposition leader chose the doctors who in turn identified the patients to be interviewed. The 36 individuals ultimately selected for detailed profiles of symptoms described themselves as among the most seriously exposed to sarin. Thirty of those 36 reported rocket strikes either on or near their homes. The remaining six said they had gone to a point of impact to help those suffering from the attack.
The UN report states that the data on symptoms collected on the 36 individuals are “consistent with organophosphate intoxication.” But both Kaszeta and Dr. Abbas Faroutan, who treated Iranian victims of Iraqi nerve gas attacks, have pointed to serious irregularities in the symptoms reported by these people.
Twenty-eight of the 36 victims – nearly four-fifths of the sample – said they had experienced loss of consciousness, according to the UN report. The second most frequent symptom was difficulty breathing, which was reported by 22 of the 36, followed by blurred vision, which 15 of them suffered. But only five of the 36 reported miosis, or constricted pupils.
Kaszeta explained to Truthout that miosis is the most basic and reliable indicator of nerve gas poisoning. And according to the 2002 Critical Care Medicine article, exposure of only 1 mg of sarin per cubic meter for as little as 3 minutes would have caused miosis. Yet it was the least prevalent symptom among these people claiming to have been very seriously exposed to sarin. Faroutan noted that the data were “not logical.”
“The objective was not to kill people, but to terrify people.”
Even stranger, seven of the 36 victims told investigators they had lost a combined total of 39 members of their immediate families killed in buildings they said were either points of impact of the rockets or only 20 meters (64 feet) away from one. Yet only one of the seven exhibited the most common symptom of exposure to sarin – the constriction of pupils – and only one reported nausea and vomiting.
The UN team found that six people who claimed high levels of exposure had no trace of sarin in their blood, but the rest all showed evidence of exposure to sarin. The fact that all but seven of them failed to exhibit the most basic sign of such exposure suggests that the amount of sarin to which they were exposed was extremely low. After comparing the data on the 36 survivors with comparable data on survivors of the Tokyo sarin attack, Kaszeta told Truthout that the people interviewed and evaluated by the UN “didn’t have serious exposure” to nerve gas.
The UN investigating team itself apparently came to a similar conclusion about the survivors who had supposedly experienced the most serious exposure to Sarin. The head of the UN Investigating team, Ake Sellstrom, appeared to suggest in a February 2014 interview with Gwyn Winfield, the editor of the CBRNe World Magazine, that many of the survivors to whom they had been steered by the opposition had merely imagined that they had been victims of sarin. “In any theater of war,” he told Winfield, “people will claim they are intoxicated. We saw it in Palestine, Afghanistan and everywhere else.”
The individuals claiming to have been victims of sarin were not necessarily falsifying their testimony. The symptoms they described were consistent with those associated with conventional weapons such as smoke and tear gas munitions known to be used by the Syrian military.
Another factor may also help to explain the evidence from the UN investigating team’s report indicating that the August 21 attack was much less lethal than was claimed by the opposition and the Obama administration. In research that has not yet been published but that the researchers have described to Truthout, Postol and Lloyd discovered that the amount of explosive in the rocket used to disperse the sarin may have been much smaller than they had originally assumed. The resulting explosion, they concluded, would not have created the large, dense cloud of droplets in the air that would normally characterize a sarin attack. Instead, the rocket would have dispensed a puddle of sarin on the ground that would then have evaporated into a much smaller and less dense plume of sarin.
They carried out computer simulations on the ground effects of the plumes that would have been created by such a rocket. They concluded that such a plume could still be lethal, but would result in much higher numbers of people who survived than who died – contrary to the usual pattern in a sarin attack.
Because of the new information about the attack, Postol now suspects that the attack was not planned to have the highest possible level of lethality – regardless of who was responsible. “The objective was not to kill people, but to terrify people,” he told Truthout. “Or it was to look as much like the Syrian government [attacking] as possible.”
The UN team found evidence that the total number of victims being claimed by the opposition was also exaggerated. Sellstrom told Winfield that the figures presented to the team by hospital administrators at the two hospitals it had visited could not possibly have been accurate. “[I]t is impossible that they could have turned over that amount of people they claim they did,” declared Sellstrom.
The Obama administration’s use of the figure of 1,429 fatalities in the August 21 attack in its August 30 intelligence summary has always been suspect. Despite the Obama administration’s claim that the figure was derived from a complicated methodology for counting bodies in videos and still pictures, the head of the independent, UK-based anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Rami Abdurrahman, told Associated Press that US officials had not consulted SOHR about the total casualty figure. Abdurrahman said US officials were “working with only one part of the opposition that is deep in propaganda”.
Capabilities vs. Motive
What is now known about the attack makes it highly questionable that only the government side had the capability to carry out the August 21 attack. The exaggerated numbers of sarin patients admitted by hospitals, the dubious data on symptoms from those supposedly most affected, and the new evidence that the attack was much less lethal than believed at first are all consistent with a sarin attack that a determined rebel group such as Al Nusra could have carried out.
The UN team’s Sellstrom was not convinced that only the regime had the capability to carry out the attack. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sellstrom said he believes both sides in the conflict had the “opportunity” and the “capability” to “carry out chemical weapons attacks.”
It was always easier to see the capability of the Syrian government to mount such an attack, but it was also easier to see the opposition’s motive for doing so. The rebels would have benefited dramatically from US military intervention in response to an ostensible crossing of the “red line” Obama had publicly adopted in August 2012. The opposition had charged the Syrian military with using chemical weapons repeatedly beginning in December 2012, with the obvious hope of provoking a major US military response.
The only motive attributed to support the argument of the Syrian regime’s guilt is that it was allegedly losing the war, especially around Damascus, and therefore used chemical weapons out of desperation. But the two-page assessment issued by the British Joint Intelligence Organisation August 29 appeared to contradict that argument. “There is no obvious political or military trigger,” it said, “for regime use of Chemical War on an apparently larger scale now, particularly given the current presence of the UN investigating team.”
Even more puzzling, were it the guilty party, was the Syrian regime’s agreeing within 24 hours of the United Nations request to allow UN investigators to have access to the areas where it was being accused of having launched sarin attacks, thus allowing the UN to take samples for traces of sarin.

Tuesday, 29 April 2014 10:13
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News Analysis

Find this story at 29 April 2014

Copyright, Truthout.

Slamming the door on refugees is not the way to deal with an increase in people seeking protection. The right way, simply, is for Bulgarian authorities to examine asylum seekers’ claims and treat them decently.

Bill Frelick, refugee rights program director
(Sofia) – Bulgaria has embarked on a “Containment Plan” to reduce the number of asylum seekers in the country, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The plan has been carried out in part by summarily pushing back Syrians, Afghans, and others as they irregularly cross the border from Turkey.

The 76-page report, “Containment Plan: Bulgaria’s Pushbacks and Detention of Syrian and other Asylum Seekers and Migrants,” documents how in recent months Bulgarian border police, often using excessive force, have summarily returned people who appear to be asylum seekers to Turkey. The people have been forced back across the border without proper procedures and with no opportunity to lodge asylum claims. Bulgaria should end summary expulsions at the Turkish border, stop the excessive use of force by border guards, and improve the treatment of detainees and conditions of detention in police stations and migrant detention centers.

“Slamming the door on refugees is not the way to deal with an increase in people seeking protection,” said Bill Frelick, refugee rights program director at Human Rights Watch. “The right way, simply, is for Bulgarian authorities to examine asylum seekers’ claims and treat them decently.”

In recent times, Bulgaria has not been a host country for significant numbers of refugees. On average, Bulgaria registered about 1,000 asylum seekers per year in the past decade. That changed in 2013 when more than 11,000 people, over half of them fleeing Syria’s deadly repression and war, lodged asylum applications. Despite ample early warning signs, Bulgaria was unprepared for the increase. A February 5, 2014 report by the Interior Ministry said, “Until mid-2013 Bulgaria was completely unprepared for the forecasted refugee flow.”

Human Rights Watch documented Bulgaria’s failure to provide new arrivals with basic humanitarian assistance in 2013, including adequate food and shelter at reception centers that often lacked heat, windows, and adequate plumbing. Human Rights Watch also found poor detention conditions and brutal treatment in detention centers; inadequacies in asylum procedures, including long delays in registering asylum claims; shortfalls in its treatment of unaccompanied migrant children, including failure to appoint legal guardians; and an absence of viable programs to support and integrate recognized refugees.

On November 6, the Bulgarian government established a new policy to prevent irregular entry at the Turkish border. This “containment plan” entailed deploying an additional 1,500 police officers at the border, supplemented by a contingent of guest guards from other EU member states through the EU’s external border control agency, Frontex. Bulgaria also began building a fence along a 33-kilometer stretch of the Turkish border.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 177 refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in various locations in both Bulgaria and Turkey. Of these, 41 gave detailed accounts of 44 incidents involving at least 519 people in which Bulgarian border police apprehended and returned them to Turkey, in some instances using violence.

“Abdullah,” an Afghan asylum seeker interviewed in Turkey in January 2014, said that the Bulgarian border police began beating him immediately after they caught him and a few others, and showed Human Rights Watch interviewers his scars.

“After beating me, the police brought me over to their superior who pointed to his boot as if because of me his boot was dirty,” he said. “So he ordered the soldier to beat me. First, he beat me with his fist in my stomach and then with the butt of his gun on my back so I fell down, then he kicked my ribcage while I was lying down. One of my bones in my lower back is broken…. They kept beating my head and my back. First one soldier and then another. I tried to escape but they caught me and beat me even more. They even beat me as they were dragging me to the car. They put three of us on the back seat of the jeep. I wasn’t even thinking about pain, all I was worried about was my wife and child,” who had become separated from him as the police approached.

Abdullah said that the police drove for about 30 to 45 minutes, stopped, and then started walking: “While we were walking he kept hitting me with his stick. The walk was about 200 meters and I was beaten all the way. When we reached the border, the soldier showed the direction to Turkey.”

With the help of the European Union, the humanitarian situation in Bulgaria has improved in 2014, but this coincides with the pushback policy, a precipitous drop in arrivals of new asylum seekers, and a 27 percent decrease from the number of refugees the country was hosting in late 2013. The European Commission has launched infringement proceedings against Bulgaria, calling on it to answer allegations that it broke EU rules by summarily returning Syrian refugees.

“Reception conditions in Bulgaria have improved compared with the abysmal conditions we witnessed in late 2013,” Frelick said. “But these improvements are less impressive when seen in the context of Bulgaria’s efforts to prevent asylum seekers from lodging refugee claims, which violate the country’s refugee law obligations.”

The Bulgarian Council of Ministers referred to their new policy as a “plan for the containment of the crisis.” But the migration “crisis” Bulgaria faced in 2013 should also be seen in context:In the first five weeks of 2014 – at a time when 99 asylum seekers succeeded in crossing from Turkey to Bulgaria – more than 20,000 Syrian refugees entered Turkey, the country to which Bulgaria was pushing back asylum seekers. Turkey is currently hosting more than 700,000 Syrians, according to UNHCR.

“Bulgaria, of course, is faced with a humanitarian challenge and its capacity to meet that challenge is limited,” Frelick said. “Even with limited capacity, however, shoving people back over the border is no way to respect the rights of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants.”

APRIL 29, 2014

Find this story at 29 April 2014

© Copyright 2014, Human Rights Watch

Prince Bandar bin Sultan replaced at his own request, reportedly after being sidelined in Saudi response to Syria crisis

Saudi Arabia has appointed a new intelligence chief to replace Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the official news agency SPA has announced.

It said Bandar was “exempted … from his position at his own request” and replaced by his deputy, Yousef al-Idrissi.

Bandar, a former ambassador to the United States, is widely regarded as among the most influential powerbrokers in the Middle East and headed the kingdom’s response to the Syrian conflict.

He went abroad for several months for health reasons, and diplomats said he had been sidelined in Saudi efforts to support Syrian rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

They said the Syria file had been transferred to the interior minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who cracked down on al-Qaida following a wave of deadly attacks in the Gulf state between 2003 and 2006.

Bandar’s management of the Syria file had triggered American criticism, diplomats said. The prince himself reproached Washington for its decision not to intervene militarily in Syria and for preventing its allies from providing rebels with weapons, according to diplomats.

Media run by the Syrian regime and its allies in Lebanon have repeatedly lashed out at Bandar, accusing him of supporting Sunni Islamist radicals in Syria.

theguardian.com, Tuesday 15 April 2014 20.05 BST

Find this story at 15 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Rebel videos show first U.S.-made rockets in Syria: Syrian opposition fighters carry a rocket launcher during clashes against government forces in the Sheikh Lutfi area, west of the airport in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in January 2014.

LONDON (Reuters) – Online videos show Syrian rebels using what appear to be U.S. anti-tank rockets, weapons experts say, the first significant American-built armaments in the country’s civil war.

They would signal a further internationalization of the conflict, with new rockets suspected from Russia and drones from Iran also spotted in the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

None of that equipment, however, is seen as enough to turn the tide of battle in a now broadly stalemated war, with Assad dominant in Syria’s central cities and along the Mediterranean coast and the rebels in the interior north and east.

It was not possible to independently verify the authenticity of the videos or the supplier of the BGM-71 TOW anti-tank rockets shown in the videos. Some analysts suggested they might have been provided by another state such as Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, probably with Washington’s acquiescence.

U.S. officials declined to discuss the rockets, which appeared in Syria around the same time Reuters reported that Washington had decided to proceed with plans to increase aid, including delivery of lower-level weaponry.

U.S. officials say privately there remain clear limits to American backing for the insurgency, given the widely dominant role played by Islamist militants. A proposal to supply MANPAD surface-to-air missiles was considered but rejected.

National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said the Obama administration was giving support she did not define.

“The United States is committed to building the capacity of the moderate opposition, including through the provision of assistance to vetted members of the moderate armed opposition,” she said in response to a query over the rocket videos.

“As we have consistently said, we are not going to detail every single type of our assistance,” she said.

While the number of U.S. rockets seen remains small, reports of their presence are steadily spreading, analysts say.

“With U.S.-made TOW anti-tank missiles now seen in the hands of three groups in the north and south of Syria, it is safe to say this is important,” said Charles Lister, visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution Doha Centre and one of the first to identify the weapons.

The first three videos were posted on April 1 and 5, Lister said. While two have since been removed, one remains on YouTube.

He posted clearer still images on a blog for Huffington Post last week.

Several other arms experts and bloggers on the Syrian conflict have also reviewed the videos. They include Eliot Higgins, a Britain-based, self-taught arms and video specialist who blogs under the name “Brown Moses” and has emerged as one of the leading authorities on foreign firepower reaching Syria.

The rebel faction shown operating the U.S. missiles in the first videos, a relatively secular and moderate group called Harakat Hazm, declined comment. But an opposition activist based in southeastern Turkey who is a former member of Harakat Hazm said that they were provided by the Americans.

The Syrian activist, who identified himself as Samer Muhammad, said Harakat Hazm received 10 anti-tank missiles earlier this month near Aleppo and Idlib, two cities torn by heavy fighting near the northern border with Turkey.

He said that Harakat Hazm had launched five of those rockets to destroy four tanks and win a battle in the Idlib suburbs of Babulin and Salheiya, and this was the first time such U.S. arms had figured in Syria’s fighting.

His information could not be confirmed independently.

SAUDI, QATARI SUPPLIES

More recent videos had shown the rockets in the hands of the Syrian Revolutionary Front and another group named Awliya wa Katalib al-Shaheed Ahmed al-Abdo, Lister said. Both are also seen as broadly moderate, in contrast with radical Islamists.

Western states have long been reluctant to make good on repeated talk of supplying weapons to Assad’s foes, nervous of arms falling into the hands of jihadi militants or simply abetting more bloodshed in a conflict that has killed over 150,000 people and displaced millions over the past three years.

Lister said that if Washington were unwilling to supply TOW rockets itself, the most likely point of origin was Saudi Arabia which has thousands of anti-tank projectiles in its arsenal.

Under terms of the original sale, Riyadh would be obliged to tell Washington if it were transferring them to any third party.

“Considering the groups already seen with these missile systems and considering Saudis’ already established reputation for providing weapons to moderate… groups, Saudi would seem the most likely candidate at this stage,” Lister said.

The other major regional supporter of the rebels, Qatar, apparently do not hold such rockets in its regular military stores, analysts say, and may have bought Chinese weaponry from elsewhere, perhaps Sudan, for shipment to rebels last year.

Chinese-built HJ-8 anti-tank guided missiles remain a relatively common part of the rebel arsenal, according to Syria arms experts. HJ-8s first popped up largely in the hands of Islamist groups early last year, possibly coming from Qatar.

More recent shipments have been noticed in the hands of relatively secular insurgent factions and are believed by analysts to have been supplied by Saudi Arabia instead.

RUSSIAN ROCKETS, IRANIAN DRONES

Use of Chinese MANPAD anti-aircraft missiles by Islamist militants has dwindled in recent months, monitors say. Such missiles arrived last year, again believed to have come from Qatar, a development that particularly worried Western states.

“I suspect there’s been two waves of Chinese weapons, the first from Qatar and the second from Saudi Arabia going to different groups,” said “Brown Moses” blogger Higgins.

The United States and other Gulf Arab states have bemoaned Qatar’s scattergun approach to arming rebel forces that has seen many weapons end up in the hands of fighters affiliated with al Qaeda linked and other radical Islamists. Qatari and Saudi officials will not discuss their Syria policy in detail.

Gulf states have also been alarmed by growing signs of support from Iran for Assad’s military. The latest new piece of Iranian equipment to appear on the battlefield, an unmanned Shahed 129 drone photographed over Damascus, is said by Tehran to carry weapons as well as conduct surveillance.

Higgins said the other most significant development in Syrian conflict firepower this year had been the government’s growing use of Russian-made BM-27 and BM-30 rocket launchers to deliver cluster munitions. While the former had long been known to be part of Assad’s armories, the latter was not.

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington, Dasha Afanasieva in Istanbul and Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Reuters 4/16/14 By Peter Apps of Reuters

Find this story at 16 April 2014

© 2014 Microsoft

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have supplied Syrian rebel groups with a small number of advanced American antitank missiles for the first time in a pilot program that could lead to larger flows of sophisticated weaponry, people briefed on the effort said.

The new willingness to arm these rebels comes after the failure of U.S.-backed peace talks in January and recent regime gains on the battlefield. It also follows a reorganization of Western-backed fighters aimed at creating a more effective military force and increasing protection for Christian and other religious minorities–something of particular importance to Washington.

This shift is seen as a test of whether the U.S. can find a trustworthy rebel partner able to keep sophisticated weapons out of the hands of extremists, Saudi and Syrian opposition figures said. The U.S. has long feared that if it does supply advanced arms, the weapons will wind up with radical groups–some tied to al Qaeda–which have set up bases in opposition-held territory.

The White House would neither confirm nor deny it had provided the TOW armor-piercing antitank systems, the first significant supply of sophisticated U.S. weapons systems to rebels. But U.S. officials did say they are working to bolster the rebels’ ability to fight the regime.

Rebels and their Saudi backers hope the Obama administration will be persuaded to ease its long-standing resistance to supplying advanced weaponry that could tip the balance in the grinding civil war–especially shoulder-fired missiles capable of bringing down planes.

Some of the TOWs provided to rebels since March are equipped with a complex, fingerprint-keyed security device that controls who can fire it, said Mustafa Alani, a senior security analyst at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center who is regularly briefed by Saudi officials on security matters.

“The U.S. is committed to building the capacity of the moderate opposition, including through the provision of assistance to vetted members of the moderate armed opposition,” White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said. “As we have consistently said, we are not going to detail every single type of our assistance.”

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states lobbied aggressively for the Obama administration to step up its support for the moderate opposition, especially since the collapse of the peace talks.

U.S. refusal to better arm the rebels has created strains with Saudi allies that President Barack Obama tried to mend on his recent visit to the kingdom. After the visit, senior administration officials said the two countries were collaborating more closely on material support for the rebels and the Central Intelligence Agency was looking at ways to expand its limited arming and training program based in Jordan.

A newly created moderate rebel group called Harakat Hazm said it had received about a dozen BGM-71 TOWs and was being trained on them by an unspecified allied country. It is the only group known to have received the weapons so far, though there may be others.

“To make it clear, our allies are only delivering these missiles to trusted groups that are moderate,” said one senior leader of Harakat Hazm. “The first step is showing that we can effectively use the TOWs, and hopefully the second one will be using antiaircraft missiles.”

Another Syrian opposition figure in the region confirmed the U.S., with Saudi assistance, supplied the TOW missiles.

Mr. Alani said the two countries oversaw the delivery through neighboring Jordan and Turkey to vetted rebels inside Syria. Rebels already had some types of recoilless rifles in their stocks, which can also be used against tanks and other targets. But U.S.-made TOWs are more reliable and accurate, opposition officials and experts say.

A senior Syrian opposition official in Washington who works closely with the Americans said the TOWs were part of a small, tailored program coordinated by U.S. and Saudi intelligence services to “test the waters” for a potentially larger arming effort down the road.

The official said the introduction of a small number of TOWs will have limited impact on the battlefield.

The main objective is to develop a relationship between vetted fighters and U.S. trainers that will give the Obama administration the confidence to increase supplies of sophisticated weaponry.

The U.S. has blocked Saudi Arabia from giving rebels Chinese-made man-portable air defense systems, known as Manpads.

Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia offered to give the opposition Manpads for the first time. But the weapons are still stored in warehouses in Jordan and Turkey because of U.S. opposition, according to Saudis and Syrian opposition figures.

“Basically, this is supposed to be the next step” in the eyes of rebels and their Saudi backers, Mr. Alani said of the hoped-for antiaircraft artillery.

Senior administration officials said the White House remains opposed to providing rebels with Manpads. Antiaircraft and antitank weapons could help the rebels chip away at the regime’s two big advantages on the battlefield–air power and heavy armor. The regime has used its air force to devastating effect in the civil war–frequently dropping crude barrel-bombs packed with explosives on opposition neighborhoods and cities.

In hopes of reinvigorating Western support, more moderate rebels began this year openly battling increasingly powerful extremist groups in their midst and reorganized their ranks in hopes of forming more effective fighting forces.

Harakat Hazm was created in January out of the merger of smaller secular-leaning rebel groups in the north, the main opposition stronghold. It was set up to assuage U.S. concerns that the Western-backed and secular-leaning Free Syrian Army was too fractured to be effective and that rebels weren’t doing enough to protect religious minorities.

The group is working closely with the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, another large formation of several rebel brigades that turned their guns on the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in January. The Front was created in January to address U.S. criticism that rebels were too fragmented and that they were turning a blind eye to extremist groups. “The agreement is that the Syrian Revolutionaries and Hazm work together to get support from the international community but not step on each other,” said a member of the political opposition based in Turkey.

The official added that Hazm started to receive lethal and nonlethal aid from Saudi and the U.S. in March “because [rebels] are organizing like a proper army.”

The Western- and Gulf-backed Free Syrian Army has shaken up its ranks and strategy to try to reverse the regime’s consistent battlefield gains since last year.

“The U.S. wants pragmatic groups within the Free Syrian Army that can deal with a post-Assad Syria and secure Alawites and Christians,” said a member of the political opposition with ties to Harakat Hazm.

Syria’s conflict has strong sectarian undertones. President Assad is a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and his regime is dominated by the minority group while the opposition is made up largely of Syria’s Sunni majority. Many Christians have remained loyal to the regime, hoping it will protect them.

The fate of religious minorities has been a major concern of the U.S. Several extremist rebel groups were involved in massacres of Alawite villagers last year, and desecration of Christian and Alawite religious sites, according to human rights groups.

The opposition made a point of trying to secure the Christian village of Kassab in northern Syria this month after it was overrun by extremist groups, prompting a mass exodus of its population.

Opposition leader Ahmad Jarba visited the village earlier this month and vowed that the FSA wasn’t fighting a sectarian war.

Rudayna El-Baalbaky and Mohammed Nour Alakraa contributed to this article.

April 18, 2014, 7:18 p.m. ET
By Ellen Knickmeyer, Maria Abi-Habib and Adam Entous

Find this story at 18 April 2014

Copyright ©2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Urgent action required to challenge impunity of perpetrators, protect citizens and address root causes of environmental crisis
Killings of people protecting the environment and rights to land increased sharply between 2002 and 2013 as competition for natural resources intensifies, a new report from Global Witness reveals. In the most comprehensive global analysis of the problem on record, the campaign group has found that at least 908 people are known to have died in this time. Disputes over industrial logging, mining and land rights the key drivers, and Latin America and Asia-Pacific particularly hard hit.
Released in the year of the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Brazilian rubber tapper and environmental activist Chico Mendes, Deadly Environment highlights a severe shortage of information or monitoring of this problem. This means the total is likely to be higher than the report documents, but even the known scale of violence is on a par with the more high profile incidence of journalists killed in the same period (1). This lack of attention to crimes against environment and land defenders is feeding endemic levels of impunity, with just over one per cent of the perpetrators known to have been convicted.
“This shows it has never been more important to protect the environment, and it has never been more deadly,” said Oliver Courtney of Global Witness. “There can be few starker or more obvious symptoms of the global environmental crisis than a dramatic upturn in killings of ordinary people defending rights to their land or environment. Yet this rapidly worsening problem is going largely unnoticed, and those responsible almost always get away with it. We hope our findings will act as the wake-up call that national governments and the international community clearly need.”
The key findings in Deadly Environment are as follows:
 At least 908 people were killed in 35 countries protecting rights to land and the environment between 2002 and 2013, with the death rate rising in the last four years to an average of two activists a week.
 2012 was the worst year so far to be an environmental defender, with 147 killings – nearly three times more than in 2002.
 Impunity for these crimes is rife: only 10 perpetrators are known to have been convicted between 2002 and 2013 – just over one per cent of the overall incidence of killings.
 The problem is particularly acute in Latin America and South East Asia. Brazil is the most dangerous place to defend rights to land and the environment, with 448 killings, followed by Honduras (109) and the Philippines (67).
The problem is exacerbated by a lack of systematic monitoring or information. Where cases are recorded, they are often seen in isolation or treated as a subset of other human rights or environmental issues. The victims themselves often do not know their rights or are unable to assert them because of lack of resources in their often remote and risky circumstances.
John Knox, UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and the Environment said, “Human rights only have meaning if people are able to exercise them. Environmental human rights defenders work to ensure that we live in an environment that enables us to enjoy our basic rights, including rights to life and health. The international community must do more to protect them from the violence and harassment they face as a result.”
Indigenous communities are particularly hard hit. In many cases, their land rights are not recognized by law or in practice, leaving them open to exploitation by powerful economic interests who brand them as ‘anti-development’. Often, the first they know of a deal that goes against their interests is when the bulldozers arrive in their farms and forests.
Land rights form the backdrop to most of the known killings, as companies and governments routinely strike secretive deals for large chunks of land and forests to grow cash crops like rubber, palm oil and soya. At least 661 – over two-thirds – of the killings took place in the context of conflicts over the ownership, control and use of land, in combination with other factors. The report focuses in detail on the situation in Brazil, where land disputes and industrial logging are key drivers, and the Philippines, where violence appears closely linked to the mining sector.
This week, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to issue a stark warning that governments are failing to reduce carbon emissions(2). It is likely to show the world is on course to miss the targets required to stay within the accepted 2C temperature increase that is generally considered a line that must not be crossed to avoid climatic upheaval. Global Witness’ research suggests that as well as failing to reduce their emissions, governments are failing to protect the activists and ordinary citizens who find themselves on the frontline of this problem.
“This rapidly worsening situation appears to be hidden in plain sight, and that has to change. 2012, the year of the last Rio Summit, was the deadliest on record. Delegates gathering for climate talks in Peru this year must heed this warning – protection of the environment is now a key battleground for human rights. While governments quibble over the text of new global agreements, at the local level more people than ever around the world are already putting their lives on the line to protect the environment,” said Andrew Simms of Global Witness, “At the very least, to start making good on official promises to stop climate change, governments should protect and support those personally taking a stand.”
The report also underlines that rising fatalities are the most acute and measurable end of a range of threats including intimidation, violence, stigmatization and criminalization. The number of deaths points to a much greater level of non-lethal violence and intimidation, which the research did not document but requires urgent and effective action.
Global Witness is calling for a more coordinated and concerted effort to monitor and tackle this crisis, starting with a resolution from the UN’s Human Rights Council specifically addressing the heightened threat posed to environmental and land defenders. Similarly, regional human rights bodies and national governments need to properly monitor abuses against and killings of activists, and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice. Companies must carry out effective checks on their operations and supply chains to make sure they do no harm.
/ENDS
For interviews, briefings, images and other information please contact:
Oliver Courtney, +44 (0)7912 517147, ocourtney@globalwitness.org;
Alice Harrison, +44 (0)7841 338792, aharrison@globalwitness.org
Notes to editors:
(1) According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (2014) Dataset: Journalists killed since 1992, 913 journalists were killed while trying to carry out their work in the same period. Available from: https://www.cpj.org/killed/cpj-database.xls
(2) “World needs Plan B on climate – IPCC”, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26922661 (Accessed 8 April 2014)
(3) The full report and infographics will be available from www.globalwitness.org/deadlyenvironment from 0001 GMT 15 April 2014.
Global Witness investigates and campaigns to prevent natural resource-related conflict and corruption and associated environmental and human rights abuses

Find this story at 15 April 2014

Copyright Global Witness

Hundreds of people have been killed while defending the environment and land rights around the world, international monitors said in a report released Tuesday, highlighting what they called a culture of impunity surrounding the deaths.

At least 908 people were killed in 35 countries from 2002 to 2013 during disputes over industrial logging, mining, and land rights – with Latin America and Asia-Pacific being particularly hard-hit – according to the study from Global Witness, a London-based nongovernmental organization that says it works to expose economic networks behind conflict, corruption and environmental destruction.

Only 10 people have ever been convicted over the hundreds of deaths, the report said.

The rate of such deaths has risen sharply – with an average of two activists killed each week – over the past four years as competition for the world’s natural resources has accelerated, Global Witness said in the report titled “Deadly Environment.”

“There can be few starker or more obvious symptoms of the global environmental crisis than a dramatic upturn in the killings of ordinary people defending rights to their land or environment,” said Oliver Courtney, a senior campaigner for Global Witness.

“This rapidly worsening problem is going largely unnoticed, and those responsible almost always get away with it,” Courtney said.

The report’s release followed a dire warning by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said global warming is driving humanity toward unprecedented risk due to factors such as food and water insecurity. Global Witness said this puts environmental activists in more danger than ever before.

Land rights are central to the violence, as “companies and governments routinely strike secretive deals for large chunks of land and forests to grow cash crops,” the report said. When residents refuse to give up their land rights to mining operations and the timber trade, they are often forced from their homes, or worse, it said.

The study ranked Brazil as the most dangerous place to be an environmentalist, with at least 448 killings recorded.

One case that especially shocked the country and the global environmental movement involved the 2011 killings of environmentalists Jose Claudio Ribeira da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espirito Santo da Silva.

“The couple had denounced the encroachment of illegal loggers in the reserve and had previously received threats against their lives,” the report said.

Masked men gunned down the couple near a sustainable reserve where they had worked for decades producing nuts and natural oils. The killers tore off one of Jose Claudio’s ears as proof of his execution.

Though killing of environmental defenders in Brazil has leveled off, killings worldwide have continued to increase.Source: Global Witness
Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable, the report said. In many cases, their land rights are not recognized by the state in law or practice. These communities are often branded as “anti-development” for not being willing to leave their land and sustainable environmental practices, Global Witness said.

It said such a label is ironic as these communities often have a strong incentive to practice sustainable development, since they earn their livelihood directly from the land. Since many of the communities are extremely remote, they often have no idea there are industrial plans for their land until bulldozers arrive, the report said.

Remote parts of Brazil’s Amazon rain forests are threatened by intensive industrial development plans, according to Amazon Watch, a nonprofit organization that says it works to protect the rain forest and advance the rights of its indigenous peoples.

Nearly 50 percent of the Amazon rain forest could be gone by 2020 if current levels of deforestation persist, Amazon Watch has warned, adding that almost 400 different indigenous peoples depend on the forest for their survival.

“We hope our findings will act as the wake-up call that national governments and the international community clearly need,” said Courtney, the campaigner from Global Witness.

April 15, 2014 6:07PM ET
by Renee Lewis

Find this story at 15 April 2014

© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC.

The FBI insists that it uses drone technology in the U.S. to conduct surveillance in “very limited circumstances.” What those particular circumstances are remain a mystery, because the Bureau refuses to identify instances where agents deployed unmanned aerial vehicles, even as far back as 2006.

The obscurity of the FBI drone missions, like that of other domestic law enforcement agencies, has frustrated advocates for transparency and privacy. In a letter to Senator Rand Paul in July 2013, the agency indicated that it had used drones a total of ten times since late 2006—eight criminal cases and two national security cases—and had authorized drone deployments in three additional cases, but did not actually fly them.

The only specific case where the FBI is willing to confirm using a drone was in February 2013, as surveillance support for a child kidnapping case in Alabama. After this and a previous flight in 2012, the agency found its drone missions “strikingly sucessful.”

But new documents obtained by MuckRock as part of the Drone Census flesh out the timeline of FBI drone deployments in detail that was previously unavailable. While heavily redacted—censors deemed even basic facts that were already public about the Alabama case to be too sensitive for release, apparently—these flight orders, after action reviews and mission reports contain new details of FBI drone flights.

New details, summarized in the timeline above, include FBI drone flights as part of investigations into dog fighting operations and drug trafficking rings in 2011, as well as to track a top ten most wanted fugitive in 2012. The documents confirm nine flown missions (ones with after action reports or actual flight orders), as well as five drone mission approvals and one mission proposal, without any confirmation that the FBI actually deployed the drone as proposed.

Previously, the FBI had acknowledged that its first operational deployment of drones took place in October 2006:

These new documents include confirmations of another eight drone operations between February 2011 and February 2013, plus an additional five drone mission approvals and one proposal without confirmation that the FBI actually deployed the drone as proposed.

There was also an instance in April 2011 where FBI aviation managers rejected a drone flight request based on safety concerns:

The FBI redacted location and case details from these operational documents save for the dates, even for operations now three year. This has been the normsince a judge ordered the release of thousands of pages of documents on FBI drone deployments last year. FBI records officers have tried redacting information from documents already published in full online, and withheldvirtually all UAV purchasing and invoice data.

But a handful of details escaped the censors in these latest documents.

In August 2011, the FBI’s Field Flight Operations Unit approved drone surveillance to investigate a “large-scale dog fighting operation” at a redacted location, based on “a review of the case Agent’s surveillance objectives and the nature of the terrain and airspace.”

While there are no after-action documents to confirm the mission took place, FBI aviation managers suggested that agents ask the Federal Aviation Administration for “as large a COA [Certificate of Authorization] as possible” for this mission, suggesting that the drone was meant to survey a wide region.

A few months later, in November 2011, the FBI held a meeting at Quantico to consider flying drones as part of Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) investigations of Mexican organizations:

Again, the FBI has not confirmed whether the proposed mission took place, or where.

In a mission hailed by agency officials as “a signal achievement in the history of the FBI,” the FBI drone team was deployed on short notice on May 9, 2012 as part of a kidnapping investigation. The mission was slated to “serve both as a tactical resource and a technology demonstration.”

The after-action report hails the operation as a “strikingly successful” milestone, in that it “marked the first use of a UAS [unmanned aerial system] to pursue a top ten fugitive.”

That same day, on May 9, 2012, the FBI added Adam Mayes to its Ten Most Wanted list. Mayes was wanted for the kidnap and murder of a Tennessee woman and one of her daughters, as well as for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

The FBI and state investigators found Mayes and the two remaining young girls the next day—the day after its drone team was scrambled to a kidnap-murder-unlawful-flight investigation—in heavy woods a few miles from Mayes’s home in Mississippi.

Media reports indicate that the long search was brought to an end after a Mississippi Highway Patrol officer “spotted a small blonde child peeking over a ridge.” No outlets reported the involvement of a drone in the manhunt. When law enforcement closed in, Mayes reportedly shot himself in the head, and the two girls were recovered without serious injuries.

While report details point to the involvement of drones in this manhunt, the FBI has refused to confirm whether its “signal achievement” centered around Mayes.

“Other than the hostage crisis site in Alabama, involving a kidnapper who abducted a boy and held him hostage in a bunker,” wrote FBI Special Agent Ann Todd in response to our request for confirmation, “we have not publicly identified specific cases where we have used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).”

It’s not only the general public that the FBI keeps in the dark regarding drone deployments. Even the FAA and agency partners do not receive details.

An FBI dossier on drone use from April 2007 indicates that the FAA has urged the FBI to maintain “the same standards as manned fixed-wing aircraft.” But it says the FBI may forgo notifying the FAA in “exigent circumstances”:

In a July 30, 2012 email to the FAA and a redacted agency at the close of a drone operation at a redacted location for a redacted purpose, an FBI aviation administrator begged pardon for keeping its partners in the dark:

“While details of the mission intent must remained guarded for now,” the aviation manager wrote, “I hope to release full details in the future.” As with most of the FBI’s drone deployments, those details have yet to see the light.

SHAWN MUSGRAVE
April 16, 2014 // 04:30 PM EST

Find this story at 16 April 2014

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(Reuters) – The United States is quietly expanding the number of intelligence officers in Iraq and holding urgent meetings in Washington and Baghdad to find ways to counter growing violence by Islamic militants, U.S. government sources said.

A high-level Pentagon team is now in Iraq to assess possible assistance for Iraqi forces in their fight against radical jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a group reconstituted from an earlier incarnation of al Qaeda, said two current government officials and one former U.S. official familiar with the matter.

The powerful ISIL, which seeks to impose strict sharia law in the Sunni majority populated regions of Iraq, now boasts territorial influence stretching from Iraq’s western Anbar province to northern Syria, operating in some areas close to Baghdad, say U.S. officials.

Senior U.S. policy officials, known as the “Deputies Committee,” met in Washington this week to discuss possible responses to the deteriorating security outlook in Iraq, said a government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter.

The source did not know the outcome of the meeting.

White House spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan declined to comment.

The meetings underscore how Iraq’s instability is posing a new foreign policy challenge for President Barack Obama, who celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops more than two years ago. Despite the concern, officials said it remains unclear whether Obama will commit significant new resources to the conflict.

Four months after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki declared war on Sunni militants in Iraq’s western Anbar province, the fighting has descended into brutal atrocities, often caught on video and in photographs by both militants and Iraqi soldiers.

Iraqi soldiers say they are bogged down in a slow, vicious fight with ISIL and other Sunni factions in the city of Ramadi and around nearby Falluja.

LIMITED OPTIONS

One former and two current U.S. security officials said the number of U.S. intelligence personnel in Baghdad had already begun to rise but that the numbers remained relatively small.

“It’s more than before, but not really a lot,” said one former official with knowledge of the matter.

Much of the pressure to do more is coming from the U.S. military, the former official said, but it is unclear if the White House wants to get more deeply involved.

After ending nearly nine years of war in Iraq, the United States has limited military options inside the country. About 100 U.S. military personnel remain, overseeing weapons sales and cooperation with Iraqi security forces.

The U.S. government has rushed nearly 100 Hellfire missiles, M4 rifles, surveillance drones and 14 million rounds of ammunition to the Iraqi military since January, U.S. officials said. The Obama administration has also started training Iraqi special forces in neighboring Jordan.

Before the U.S. military withdrew, it trained, equipped and conducted operations with Iraqi special forces.

Staff from the Pentagon’s Central Command are working closely with the Iraqi military but have advised it against launching major operations due to concerns Iraqi forces are not prepared for such campaigns, the former U.S. official said.

In Anbar, militants have a major presence in Falluja, while in Ramadi there is a stalemate, with territory divided among Iraqi government forces, ISIL and other Sunni armed groups.

In testimony before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee in February, Brett McGurk, the State Department’s top official on Iraq, described how convoys of up to 100 trucks, mounted with heavy weapons and flying al Qaeda flags, moved into Ramadi and Falluja on New Year’s Day.

Local forces in Ramadi subsequently succeeded in pushing militants back, but the situation in Falluja remained “far more serious,” McGurk said.

(Additional reporting by Phil Stewart in Washington and by Ned Parker in Baghdad. Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)

BY MARK HOSENBALL AND WARREN STROBEL
WASHINGTON Fri Apr 25, 2014 4:35pm EDT

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When U.S. Special Operations forces raided several houses in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in March 2006, two Army Rangers were killed when gunfire erupted on the ground floor of one home. A third member of the team was knocked unconscious and shredded by ball bearings when a teenage insurgent detonated a suicide vest.

In a review of the nighttime strike for a relative of one of the dead Rangers, military officials sketched out the sequence of events using small dots to chart the soldiers’ movements. Who, the relative asked, was this man — the one represented by a blue dot and nearly killed by the suicide bomber?

After some hesi­ta­tion, the military briefers answered with three letters: FBI.

The FBI’s transformation from a crime-fighting agency to a counterterrorism organization in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been well documented. Less widely known has been the bureau’s role in secret operations against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other locations around the world.

With the war in Afghanistan ending, FBI officials have become more willing to discuss a little-known alliance between the bureau and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that allowed agents to participate in hundreds of raids in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The relationship benefited both sides. JSOC used the FBI’s expertise in exploiting digital media and other materials to locate insurgents and detect plots, including any against the United States. The bureau’s agents, in turn, could preserve evidence and maintain a chain of custody should any suspect be transferred to the United States for trial.

The FBI’s presence on the far edge of military operations was not universally embraced, according to current and former officials familiar with the bureau’s role. As agents found themselves in firefights, some in the bureau expressed uneasiness about a domestic law enforcement agency stationing its personnel on battlefields.

The wounded agent in Iraq was Jay Tabb, a longtime member of the bureau’s Hostage and Rescue Team (HRT) who was embedded with the Rangers when they descended on Ramadi in Black Hawks and Chinooks. Tabb, who now leads the HRT, also had been wounded just months earlier in another high-risk operation.

James Davis, the FBI’s legal attache in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008, said people “questioned whether this was our mission. The concern was somebody was going to get killed.”

Davis said FBI agents were regularly involved in shootings — sometimes fighting side by side with the military to hold off insurgent assaults.

“It wasn’t weekly but it wouldn’t be uncommon to see one a month,” he said. “It’s amazing that never happened, that we never lost anybody.”

Others considered it a natural evolution for the FBI — and one consistent with its mission.

“There were definitely some voices that felt we shouldn’t be doing this — period,” said former FBI deputy director Sean Joyce, one of a host of current and former officials who are reflecting on the shift as U.S. forces wind down their combat mission in Afghanistan. “That wasn’t the director’s or my feeling on it. We thought prevention begins outside of the U.S.”

‘Not commandos’

In 1972, Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, exposing the woeful inadequacy of the German police when faced with committed hostage-takers. The attack jolted other countries into examining their counterterrorism capabilities. The FBI realized its response would have been little better than that of the Germans.

It took more than a decade for the United States to stand up an elite anti-terrorism unit. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team was created in 1983, just before the Los Angeles Olympics.

At Fort Bragg, N.C., home to the Army’s Special Operations Command, Delta Force operators trained the agents, teaching them how to breach buildings and engage in close-quarter fighting, said Danny Coulson, who commanded the first HRT.

The team’s mission was largely domestic, although it did participate in select operations to arrest fugitives overseas, known in FBI slang as a “habeas grab.” In 1987, for instance, along with the CIA, agents lured a man suspected in an airline hijacking to a yacht off the coast of Lebanon and arrested him.

In 1989, a large HRT flew to St. Croix, Virgin Islands, to reestablish order after Hurricane Hugo. That same year, at the military’s request, it briefly deployed to Panama before the U.S. invasion.

The bureau continued to deepen its ties with the military, training with the Navy SEALs at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, based in Dam Neck, Va., and agents completed the diving phase of SEAL training in Coronado, Calif.

Sometimes lines blurred between the HRT and the military. During the 1993 botched assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., three Delta Force operators were on hand to advise. Waco, along with a fiasco the prior year at a white separatist compound at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, put the FBI on the defensive.

“The members of HRT are not commandos,” then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh told lawmakers in 1995. “They are special agents of the FBI. Their goal has always been to save lives.”

After Sept. 11, the bureau took on a more aggressive posture.

In early 2003, two senior FBI counterterrorism officials traveled to Afghanistan to meet with the Joint Special Operations Command’s deputy commander at Bagram air base. The commander wanted agents with experience hunting fugitives and HRT training so they could easily integrate with JSOC forces.

“What JSOC realized was their networks were similar to the way the FBI went after organized crime,” said James Yacone, an assistant FBI director who joined the HRT in 1997 and later commanded it.

The pace of activity in Afghanistan was slow at first. An FBI official said there was less than a handful of HRT deployments to Afghanistan in those early months; the units primarily worked with the SEALs as they hunted top al-Qaeda targets.

“There was a lot of sitting around,” the official said.

The tempo quickened with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. At first, the HRT’s mission was mainly to protect other FBI agents when they left the Green Zone, former FBI officials said.

Then-Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal gradually pushed the agency to help the military collect evidence and conduct interviews during raids.

“As our effort expanded and . . . became faster and more complex, we felt the FBI’s expertise in both sensitive site exploitation and interrogations would be helpful — and they were,” a former U.S. military official said.

In 2005, all of the HRT members in Iraq began to work under JSOC. At one point, up to 12 agents were operating in the country, nearly a tenth of the unit’s shooters.

The FBI’s role raised thorny questions about the bureau’s rules of engagement and whether its deadly-force policy should be modified for agents in war zones.

“There was hand-wringing,” Yacone said. “These were absolutely appropriate legal questions to be asked and answered.”

Ultimately, the FBI decided that no change was necessary. Team members “were not there to be door kickers. They didn’t need to be in the stack,” Yacone said.

But the FBI’s alliance with JSOC continued to deepen. HRT members didn’t have to get approval to go on raids, and FBI agents saw combat night after night in the hunt for targets.

In 2008, with the FBI involved in frequent firefights, the bureau began taking a harder look at these engagements, seeking input from the military to make sure, in police terms, that each time an agent fired it was a “good shoot,” former FBI officials said.

‘Mission had changed’

Members of the FBI’s HRT unit left Iraq as the United States pulled out its forces. The bureau also began to reconsider its involvement in Afghanistan after nearly a dozen firefights involving agents embedded with the military and the wounding of an agent in Logar province in June 2010.

JSOC had shifted priorities, Joyce said, targeting Taliban and other local insurgents who were not necessarily plotting against the United States. Moreover, the number of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan had plummeted to fewer than 100, and many of its operatives were across the border, in Pakistan, where the military could not operate.

The FBI drew down in 2010 despite pleas from JSOC to stay.

“Our focus was al-Qaeda and threats to the homeland,” Joyce said. “The mission had changed.”

FBI-JSOC operations continue in other parts of the world. When Navy SEALs raided a yacht in the Gulf of Aden that Somali pirates had hijacked in 2011, an HRT agent followed behind them. After a brief shootout, the SEALs managed to take control of the yacht.

Two years later, in October 2013, an FBI agent with the HRT was with the SEALs when they stormed a beachfront compound in Somalia in pursuit of a suspect in the Nairobi mall attack that had killed dozens.

That same weekend, U.S. commandos sneaked into Tripoli, Libya, and apprehended a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist named Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai as he returned home in his car after morning prayers. He was whisked to a Navy ship in the Mediterranean and eventually to New York City for prosecution in federal court.

Word quickly leaked that Delta Force had conducted the operation. But the six Delta operators had help. Two FBI agents were part of the team that morning on the streets of Tripoli.

By Adam Goldman and Julie Tate, Published: April 10 E-mail the writers

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