LRB : Whose sarin?

Whose sarin?

Seymour M. Hersh | December 8, 2013

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.

In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.’ Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.

He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.

But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’

The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report includes no political or economic information, but provides a summary of important military events around the world, with all available intelligence about them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two days – 20 and 21 August – there was no mention of Syria. On 22 August the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal change in the command structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day. It was not until 23 August that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the administration knew no more than the public.

Obama left Washington early on 21 August for a hectic two-day speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania; according to the White House press office, he was briefed later that day on the attack, and the growing public and media furore. The lack of any immediate inside intelligence was made clear on 22 August, when Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, told reporters: ‘We are unable to conclusively determine [chemical weapons] use. But we are focused every minute of every day since these events happened … on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.’ The administration’s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific information – that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not responsible ‘are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn’t occur’.

The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.

On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad’s office. The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)

The Post report also provided the first indication of a secret sensor system inside Syria, designed to provide early warning of any change in status of the regime’s chemical weapons arsenal. The sensors are monitored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that controls all US intelligence satellites in orbit. According to the Post summary, the NRO is also assigned ‘to extract data from sensors placed on the ground’ inside Syria. The former senior intelligence official, who had direct knowledge of the programme, told me that NRO sensors have been implanted near all known chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are designed to provide constant monitoring of the movement of chemical warheads stored by the military. But far more important, in terms of early warning, is the sensors’ ability to alert US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for changes in the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American intelligence on early warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin, has a shelf life of a few days or less – the nerve agent begins eroding the rocket almost immediately: it’s a use-it-or-lose-it mass killer. ‘The Syrian army doesn’t have three days to prepare for a chemical attack,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘We created the sensor system for immediate reaction, like an air raid warning or a fire alarm. You can’t have a warning over three days because everyone involved would be dead. It is either right now or you’re history. You do not spend three days getting ready to fire nerve gas.’ The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21 August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.

The sensors had worked in the past, as the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system picked up signs of what seemed to be sarin production at a chemical weapons depot. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian army was simulating sarin production as part of an exercise (all militaries constantly carry out such exercises) or actually preparing an attack. At the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that using sarin was ‘totally unacceptable’; a similar message was also passed by diplomatic means. The event was later determined to be part of a series of exercises, according to the former senior intelligence official: ‘If what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the same warning three days before the gas attack in August?’

The NSA would of course monitor Assad’s office around the clock if it could, the former official said. Other communications – from various army units in combat throughout Syria – would be far less important, and not analysed in real time. ‘There are literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,’ he said, ‘and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in – and the useful return would be zilch.’ But the ‘chatter’ is routinely stored on computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.

*

The White House needed nine days to assemble its case against the Syrian government. On 30 August it invited a select group of Washington journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay, the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited), and handed them a document carefully labelled as a ‘government assessment’, rather than as an assessment by the intelligence community. The document laid out what was essentially a political argument to bolster the administration’s case against the Assad government. It was, however, more specific than Obama would be later, in his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it stated, knew that Syria had begun ‘preparing chemical munitions’ three days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel were on the ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.’ The government assessment and Kerry’s comments made it seem as if the administration had been tracking the sarin attack as it happened. It is this version of events, untrue but unchallenged, that was widely reported at the time.
London Review Bookshop

An unforseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the Free Syrian Army’s leadership and others about the lack of warning. ‘It’s unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the crime,’ Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail was more blunt: ‘Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people – including more than 400 children.’ (The number of deaths attributable to the attack varied widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by the Obama administration, to many fewer. A Syrian human rights group reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans Frontières put it at 355; and a French report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In other words, it was little more than a guess.)

Five days later, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement to the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: ‘Let’s be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible attack took place. The intelligence community was able to gather and analyse information after the fact and determine that elements of the Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to using chemical weapons.’ But since the American press corps had their story, the retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post, relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the Syrian army attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials’. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the narrative.

So when Obama said on 10 September that his administration knew Assad’s chemical weapons personnel had prepared the attack in advance, he was basing the statement not on an intercept caught as it happened, but on communications analysed days after 21 August. The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops. The White House’s government assessment and Obama’s speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical attack. ‘They put together a back story,’ the former official said, ‘and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used was the template that goes back to December.’ It is possible, of course, that Obama was unaware that this account was obtained from an analysis of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas attack, rather than from direct evidence. Either way he had come to a hasty judgment.

The press would follow suit. The UN report on 16 September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note that its investigators’ access to the attack sites, which came five days after the gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces. ‘As with other sites,’ the report warned, ‘the locations have been well travelled by other individuals prior to the arrival of the mission … During the time spent at these locations, individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.’ Still, the New York Times seized on the report, as did American and British officials, and claimed that it provided crucial evidence backing up the administration’s assertions. An annex to the UN report reproduced YouTube photographs of some recovered munitions, including a rocket that ‘indicatively matches’ the specifics of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket. The New York Times wrote that the existence of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack ‘because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency’.

Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.

*

The White House’s misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned al-Nusra, the Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist organisation. Al-Nusra is known to have carried out scores of suicide bombings against Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim sects inside Syria, and to have attacked its nominal ally in the civil war, the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA). Its stated goal is to overthrow the Assad regime and establish sharia law. (On 25 September al-Nusra joined several other Islamist rebel groups in repudiating the FSA and another secular faction, the Syrian National Coalition.)
Chicago University Press - The Present Hour by Yves Bonnefoy

The flurry of American interest in al-Nusra and sarin stemmed from a series of small-scale chemical weapons attacks in March and April; at the time, the Syrian government and the rebels each insisted the other was responsible. The UN eventually concluded that four chemical attacks had been carried out, but did not assign responsibility. A White House official told the press in late April that the intelligence community had assessed ‘with varying degrees of confidence’ that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks. Assad had crossed Obama’s ‘red line’. The April assessment made headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation. The unnamed official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence community assessments ‘are not alone sufficient’. ‘We want,’ he said, ‘to investigate above and beyond those intelligence assessments to gather facts so that we can establish a credible and corroborated set of information that can then inform our decision-making.’ In other words, the White House had no direct evidence of Syrian army or government involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted in the press coverage. Obama’s tough talk played well with the public and Congress, who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.

Two months later, a White House statement announced a change in the assessment of Syrian culpability and declared that the intelligence community now had ‘high confidence’ that the Assad government was responsible for as many as 150 deaths from attacks with sarin. More headlines were generated and the press was told that Obama, in response to the new intelligence, had ordered an increase in non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But once again there were significant caveats. The new intelligence included a report that Syrian officials had planned and executed the attacks. No specifics were provided, nor were those who provided the reports identified. The White House statement said that laboratory analysis had confirmed the use of sarin, but also that a positive finding of the nerve agent ‘does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination’. The White House further declared: ‘We have no reliable corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.’ The statement contradicted evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies.

Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.

On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we believes”.’ He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin. A sample of the sarin that had been used was also recovered – with the help of an Israeli agent – but, according to the consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic.

Independently of these assessments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuming that US troops might be ordered into Syria to seize the government’s stockpile of chemical agents, called for an all-source analysis of the potential threat. ‘The Op Order provides the basis of execution of a military mission, if so ordered,’ the former senior intelligence official explained. ‘This includes the possible need to send American soldiers to a Syrian chemical site to defend it against rebel seizure. If the jihadist rebels were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that Assad would not fight us because we were protecting the chemical from the rebels. All Op Orders contain an intelligence threat component. We had technical analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I & W [indications and warnings] people working on the problem … They concluded that the rebel forces were capable of attacking an American force with sarin because they were able to produce the lethal gas. The examination relied on signals and human intelligence, as well as the expressed intention and technical capability of the rebels.’

There is evidence that during the summer some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by the prospect of a ground invasion of Syria as well as by Obama’s professed desire to give rebel factions non-lethal support. In July, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provided a gloomy assessment, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in public testimony that ‘thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces’ would be needed to seize Syria’s widely dispersed chemical warfare arsenal, along with ‘hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers’. Pentagon estimates put the number of troops at seventy thousand, in part because US forces would also have to guard the Syrian rocket fleet: accessing large volumes of the chemicals that create sarin without the means to deliver it would be of little value to a rebel force. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, Dempsey cautioned that a decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could have unintended consequences: ‘We have learned from the past ten years, however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state … Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.’

The CIA declined to comment for this article. Spokesmen for the DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American intelligence agency, including the DIA, ‘assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin’.

The administration’s public affairs officials are not as concerned about al-Nusra’s military potential as Shedd has been in his public statements. In late July, he gave an alarming account of al-Nusra’s strength at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. ‘I count no less than 1200 disparate groups in the opposition,’ Shedd said, according to a recording of his presentation. ‘And within the opposition, the al-Nusra Front is … most effective and is gaining in strength.’ This, he said, ‘is of serious concern to us. If left unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements’ – he also cited al-Qaida in Iraq – ‘will take over.’ The civil war, he went on, ‘will only grow worse over time … Unfathomable violence is yet to come.’ Shedd made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he was not allowed to: the reports his office received were highly classified.

*

A series of secret dispatches from Syria over the summer reported that members of the FSA were complaining to American intelligence operatives about repeated attacks on their forces by al-Nusra and al-Qaida fighters. The reports, according to the senior intelligence consultant who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is ‘more worried about the crazies than it is about Assad’. The FSA is largely composed of defectors from the Syrian army. The Obama administration, committed to the end of the Assad regime and continued support for the rebels, has sought in its public statements since the attack to downplay the influence of Salafist and Wahhabist factions. In early September, John Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing with a sudden claim that al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority players in the Syrian opposition. He later withdrew the claim.

In both its public and private briefings after 21 August, the administration disregarded the available intelligence about al-Nusra’s potential access to sarin and continued to claim that the Assad government was in sole possession of chemical weapons. This was the message conveyed in the various secret briefings that members of Congress received in the days after the attack, when Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive against Syrian military installations. One legislator with more than two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came away from one such briefing persuaded that ‘only the Assad government had sarin and the rebels did not.’ Similarly, following the release of the UN report on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: ‘It’s very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.’

It is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power’s office, but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration. ‘The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: “Look at what I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama’s hand: “This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react.” Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were alerted that he was going to attack weren’t so sure it was a good thing.’

The proposed American missile attack on Syria never won public support and Obama turned quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare complex. Any possibility of military action was definitively averted on 26 September when the administration joined Russia in approving a draft UN resolution calling on the Assad government to get rid of its chemical arsenal. Obama’s retreat brought relief to many senior military officers. (One high-level special operations adviser told me that the ill-conceived American missile attack on Syrian military airfields and missile emplacements, as initially envisaged by the White House, would have been ‘like providing close air support for al-Nusra’.)

The administration’s distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.

The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September by the Security Council, dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces such as al-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm: ‘no party in Syria should use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer [chemical] weapons.’ The resolution also calls for the immediate notification of the Security Council in the event that any ‘non-state actors’ acquire chemical weapons. No group was cited by name. While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone. There may be more to negotiate.

Deseret News : In our opinion: Letting Afghanistan revert to pre-9/11 condition would be dangerous

In our opinion: Letting Afghanistan revert to pre-9/11 condition would be dangerous

December 5, 2013

Twelve years of U.S.-led fighting in Afghanistan is on the verge of being wasted because of the pride of one man.

Hamid Karzai convened a council of respected elders, known as a Loya Jirga, to advise him on a proposed agreement with the United States to allow a residual force to remain in place after 2014. The council advised him to sign it. And yet now Karzai is saying he will let Afghanistan’s next president decide whether to sign after elections in April.

But even that deadline now seems uncertain, given that Karzai said this week he would like to postpone April’s elections in order to avoid heavy snowfall.

The Obama administration has said that without an agreement in place by the end of this year, it would pull out all troops and let the Afghan security forces fend for themselves. Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said he will have no choice but to also withdraw forces from a training and advisory mission unless an agreement is reached with the Americans.

No doubt the United States would feel somewhat of a sense of relief if it no longer had to worry about losing lives in what has become an unpopular conflict in a far-away land. But the United States has lost more than 2,200 of its people in Afghanistan since the conflict began following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. They should not be allowed to have died in vain.

The conflict was waged to overthrow the Taliban — the ruling party that had terrorized Afghan citizens and created a safe haven for terrorists. The 9/11 terror attacks were plotted there under Taliban cover. And while the United States and coalition forces succeeded in forcing the Taliban from power, they never have succeeded in forcing a surrender. Nor has Afghanistan’s new government, led by Karzai, succeeded in gaining sufficient strength to withstand Taliban insurgents on its own.

An agreement with the United States had snagged over U.S. demands that its soldiers be granted immunity from Afghan laws. U.S. soldiers would remain subject to U.S. laws and justice for any crimes committed. That conflict seemed to have been settled to the satisfaction of both sides before Karzai suddenly decided to be stubborn.

Many observers believe Karzai still holds a grudge for what he feels was a lack of U.S. support for his re-election 2009. His behavior lately, however, seems to cross the line into petulance. Reports over the weekend said he was accusing U.S. forces of withholding fuel supplies from Afghan forces.

Without the help of U.S. and coalition forces, Afghanistan’s army has little chance against the Taliban. The Loya Jirga understands this, as do many Afghanis. Were the Taliban to regain control of Afghanistan, there is little reason to believe it would not simply pick up where it left off before 9/11, reinstating harsh laws and harboring terrorists.

More than just a sad failure for the West, that would put the United States at risk.

FOX CT : In A Reversal, Terror Suspects Agree To Plead Guilty

In A Reversal, Terror Suspects Agree To Plead Guilty

By EDMUND H. MAHONY | emahony@courant.com | The Hartford Courant | December 5, 2013

NEW HAVEN -— Two British nationals have agreed to plead guilty next week to terror-related charges accusing them of developing a ground-breaking Internet network to raise money, recruits and equipment for groups waging holy war in the Middle East.

The decisions to admit guilt by Babar Ahmad, 38, and Syed Talha Ahsan, 34, both of London, appear to end a decade-long legal fight by the two. They challenged extradition to the U.S., first in the British courts and later in the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that long sentences in high-security U.S. prisons would violate their human rights.

Ahmad and Ahsan are accused of operating a groundbreaking network of Internet sites known as Azzam publications that attracted sympathizers and support to the jihadist cause from around the world. Terror experts said the operators of the Azzam sites had direct access to leaders of the Chechen mujahedeen, the Taliban in Afghanistan and associated groups, and used it to support radical holy warriors.

Among other things, U.S. and British authorities found a document describing the classified movements of a U.S. Navy battle group operating in the Middle East during a search of Ahmad's home in London in 2003.

Ahmad and Ahsan are being prosecuted in the U.S. and, in particular, Connecticut, because of the role U.S. authorities played in closing the Azzam network and because the computer network's electronic communications passed through a Connecticut-based Internet service provider.

They were extradited to the U.S. a year ago, with three other men suspected of terror plots in the U.S. or targeting U.S. citizens abroad,

Ahmad and Ahsan faced life sentences if convicted after a trial. In their agreements with federal prosecutors, the two agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and providing material support to terrorists. The charges carry maximum sentences of 15 years.

Indictments in the case accuse the two, through their network of Azzam websites, of promoting violent jihad and distributing jihadi training manuals, interviews with al-Qaida and Chechen leaders and martyrdom videos of fallen jihadists.

Azzam also raised money through the sale of violent video recordings, filmed by jihadists, of battle scenes and the executions of Russian prisoners in Chechnya, formerly part of the Soviet Union.

Ahmad and Ahsan are accused of providing, directly or through the Azzam network, military equipment, communications equipment, lodging, training, safe houses, transportation, false identity documents and other supplies to terrorists and their recruits.

The Azzam network previously was a subject of a federal terror trial in New Haven in 2008, in a case that resulted in the conviction of Hassan Abu-jihaad, a Californian and convert to Islam. While serving as a signalman in the U.S. Navy, Abu-jihaad transmitted to Azzam the anticipated movements of U.S. warships as they moved through the 21-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz in 2001.

Abu-jihaad, drawn to Azzam through its bloody battlefield videos, was convicted of providing material support to terrorists and disclosing national defense information. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

A government terror expert who testified against Abu-jihaad said that Azzam was the premier jihadist site on the Internet while it operated.

"The reason the website was so credible was that it had real access," said Evan Kohlmann, a terror consultant who has worked with the U.S. government. "It wasn't just reprocessing material that it had gotten elsewhere. It was generating original jihadist content and it was incredibly powerful material."

Ahmad and Ahsan, computer engineers in London before their arrests, are accused of working on the Azzam network from about 1997 until authorities closed it in 2004. Before that, Ahmad fought with Islamist forces in Bosnia.

Tens of thousands of Britons joined their fight against extradition to the U.S. The men and their supporters believe that the two should be tried in the United Kingdom because that is where they are accused of committing offenses.

Copyright © 2013, The Hartford Courant

Wichita Eagle : Billboard sparks debate, shows 9/11 feelings still raw

Billboard sparks debate, shows 9/11 feelings still raw

By James Rosen | McClatchy Washington Bureau | December 5, 2013

WASHINGTON — If there’s such a thing as an old-fashioned billboard going viral, it’s happened to a poster ad showing a U.S. soldier and a Muslim woman embracing.

After weeks of slowing traffic on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, the billboard is now up in downtown Chicago, where cars honk and passersby stop to stare.

But there will be no similar sensation in New York City.

Clear Channel, citing “community standards” at a site not far from the Ground Zero memorial to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, refused to let the photo run on its billboard at Times Square. An ad agency could not find other billboard owners willing to display the controversial image near the spot where the illuminated ball slowly drops every New Year’s Eve to a throng at Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

The place where most people have seen the billboard is online. With widely divergent responses ranging from praise for its diversity to derisive and, at times, disturbing anti-Islam slurs, the striking photo has sparked thousands of digital postings, tweets, comments, Facebook entries and other expressions in the Internet universe.

The billboard, which advertises an anti-snoring device made by a California company, shows a soldier in an Army camouflage uniform with an American flag patch on his right shoulder and a black beret on his head. His left arm is draped around the shoulders of a woman wearing a black niqab headdress that reveals only her eyes. Her left hand is on his chest, a wedding band on her ring finger.

Next to the couple is the product name SnoreStop, with the slogan, “Keeping you together,” beneath. The Twitter hashtag #betogether floats alongside the soldier’s beret in the billboard’s left corner.

William Andres, an Iraq war veteran who now lives in Clinton, Ill., believes that the billboard’s message is important, and he reached out to the company to applaud its efforts

“It brings to life some of the issues Muslims face here in America,” Andres told McClatchy. “A lot of people associate Muslims with terrorists. They have the wrong idea.”

McClatchy e-mailed, tweeted or called a dozen people who’d criticized the billboard, some of them in overtly racist terms, but none responded.

A typical negative comment, posted on the company’s website at snorestop.com, reads: “If you were the LAST company on F––– EARTH , I would not buy from you. I hope a Muslim cuts your head off.”

A positive comment reads: “I am a lesbian, been with my partner for 33 years now, and it is so nice to see an ad with diversity, and making it OK. Thank you so much!!!”

Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the American-Muslim Council, an Islamic civil rights group in Washington, said the billboard has evoked a fascinating mix of reactions in his religious and ethnic community.

“Those who support it see it as a Muslim soldier and his wife and say, `What could be wrong with that?'“ Hooper said. “Those who are critical view it as an exploitation of the shock value of seeing this juxtaposition of a soldier and a Muslim woman. We’re choosing to take the most positive interpretation of the ad.”

Christian de Rivel, marketing director for SnoreStop, based in Camarillo, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles, came up with the idea for the billboard.

“We want to show that we are embracing diversity,” he said. “We wanted something unique. This is the ultimate diversity.”

Boston : Lawmakers: Declassify documents detailing foreign support for 9/11 hijackers

Lawmakers: Declassify documents detailing foreign support for 9/11 hijackers

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | December 3, 2013

WASHINGTON — Representative Stephen F. Lynch introduced a resolution Monday urging President Obama to make public 28 pages from a congressional investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that remain secret.

Lynch said he believes it will shed new light on the worst terrorist assault in US history. The South Boston Democrat, along with Representative Walter B. Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, recently reviewed the findings, which were almost entirely blacked out when the panel issued its final report in December 2002.

“These pages contain information that is vital to a full understanding of the events and circumstances surrounding this tragedy,” the South Boston Democrat said in a statement Tuesday.

The withheld pages have long been a source of controversy and have fueled conspiracy theories that the US government covered up certain aspects of the plot to fly hijacked civilian airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.

The final report of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees — called the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 2001 — did give some indication of what was contained.

The introduction stated the investigation uncovered “information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States.”

Many specialists have suggested that those sources of support for the Al Qaeda terrorists, most of whom were from Saudi Arabia, could have come from their home governments. But all the details were withheld on national security grounds.

Eleanor Hill, who served as the staff director of the inquiry and is now a Washington-based attorney, recalled Tuesday that the findings, gleaned through a combination of interviews at the time with FBI and CIA officials and a review of agency files, were alarming.

“It was disturbing,” she said. “Even back then I personally felt they could have released more of it. Somebody needs to look at it again.”

The Blaze : CIA Turned Gitmo Prisoners Into Double Agents After 9/11

CIA Turned Gitmo Prisoners Into Double Agents After 9/11

Associated Press | November 26, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the early years after 9/11, the CIA turned some Guantanamo Bay prisoners into double agents then sent them home to help the U.S. kill terrorists, current and former U.S. officials said.

The CIA promised the prisoners freedom, safety for their families and millions of dollars from the agency’s secret accounts.

It was a risky gamble. Officials knew there was a chance that some prisoners might quickly spurn their deal and kill Americans.

For the CIA, that was an acceptable risk in a dangerous business. For the American public, which was never told, the program was one of the many secret trade-offs the government made on its behalf. At the same time the government used the risk of terrorism to justify imprisoning people indefinitely, it was releasing dangerous people from prison to work for the CIA.

The program was carried out in a secret facility built a few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The eight small cottages were hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus.

The program and the handful of men who passed through these cottages had various official CIA code names.

But those who were aware of the cluster of cottages knew it best by its sobriquet: Penny Lane.

It was a nod to the classic Beatles song and a riff on the CIA’s other secret facility at Guantanamo Bay, a prison known as Strawberry Fields.

Nearly a dozen current and former U.S officials described aspects of the program to The Associated Press. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the secret program publicly by name, even though it ended in about 2006.

Some of the men who passed through Penny Lane helped the CIA find and kill many top al-Qaida operatives, current and former U.S. officials said. Others stopped providing useful information and the CIA lost touch with them.

When prisoners began streaming into Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, the CIA recognized it as an unprecedented opportunity to identify sources. That year, 632 detainees arrived at the detention center. The following year 117 more arrived.

“Of course that would be an objective,” said Emile Nakhleh, a former top CIA analyst who spent time in 2002 assessing detainees but who did not discuss Penny Lane. “It’s the job of intelligence to recruit sources.”

By early 2003, Penny Lane was open for business.

Candidates were ushered from the confines of prison to Penny Lane’s relative hominess, officials said. The cottages had private kitchens, showers and televisions. Each had a small patio.

Some prisoners asked for and received pornography. One official said the biggest luxury in each cottage was the bed – not a military-issued cot but a real bed with a mattress.

The cottages were designed to feel more like hotel rooms than prison cells, and some CIA officials jokingly referred to them collectively as the Marriott.

Current and former officials said dozens of prisoners were evaluated but only a handful, from a variety of countries, were turned into spies who signed agreements to work for the CIA.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment.

The U.S. government says it has confirmed that about 16 percent of former Guantanamo Bay detainees rejoined the fight against America. Officials suspect but have not confirmed that 12 percent more rejoined.

It’s not clear whether the men from Penny Lane are included in those figures. But because only a small number of people went through the program, it would not likely change the figures significantly either way. None of the officials interviewed by the AP knew of an instance in which any double agent killed Americans.

Though the number of double agents recruited through Penny Lane was small, the program was significant enough to draw keen attention from President George W. Bush, one former official said. Bush personally interviewed a junior CIA case officer who had just returned home from Afghanistan, where the agency typically met with the agents.

President Barack Obama took an interest the program for a different reason. Shortly after taking office in 2009, he ordered a review of the former detainees working as double agents because they were providing information used in Predator drone strikes, one of the officials said.

Infiltrating al-Qaida has been one of the CIA’s most sought-after but difficult goals, something that other foreign intelligence services have only occasionally accomplished. Candidates for Penny Lane needed legitimate terrorist connections. To be valuable to the CIA, the men had to be able to reconnect with al-Qaida.

From the Bush administration descriptions of Guantanamo Bay prisoners at the time, the CIA would have seemingly had a large pool to draw from. Vice President Dick Cheney called the prisoners “the worst of a very bad lot.” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said they were “among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth.”

In reality, many were held on flimsy evidence and were of little use to the CIA.

While the agency looked for viable candidates, those with no terrorism ties sat in limbo. It would take years before the majority of detainees were set free, having never been charged. Of the 779 people who were taken to Guantanamo Bay, more than three-fourths have been released, mostly during the Bush administration.

Many others remain at Guantanamo Bay, having been cleared for release by the military but with no hope for freedom in sight.

“I do see the irony on the surface of letting some really very bad guys go,” said David Remes, an American lawyer who has represented about a dozen Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo.

But Remes, who was not aware of Penny Lane, said he understands its attraction.

“The men we were sending back as agents were thought to be able to provide value to us,” he said.

Prisoners agreed to cooperate for a variety of reasons, officials said. Some received assurances that the U.S. would resettle their families. Another thought al-Qaida had perverted Islam and believed it was his duty as a Muslim to help the CIA destroy it. One detainee agreed to cooperate after the CIA insinuated it would harm his children, a former official said, similar to the threats interrogators had made to admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

All were promised money. Exactly how much each was paid remains unclear. But altogether, the government paid millions of dollars for their services, officials said. The money came from a secret CIA account, codenamed Pledge, that’s used to pay informants, officials said.

The arrangement led to strategic discussions inside the CIA: If the agency’s drones had a shot at Osama bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, would officials take the shot if it meant killing a double agent on the American payroll?

It never came to that.

The biggest fear, former officials involved with the program recalled, was that a former detainee would attack Americans then publicly announce that he had been on the CIA payroll.

Al-Qaida suspected the CIA would attempt a program like this and its operatives have been very suspicious of former Guantanamo Bay detainees, intelligence officials and experts said.

In one case, a former official recalled, al-Qaida came close to discovering one of the double agents in its midst.

The U.S. government had such high hopes for Penny Lane that one former intelligence official recalled discussions about whether to secretly release a pair of Pakistani men into the United States on student or business visas. The hope was that they would connect with al-Qaida and lead authorities to members of a U.S. cell.

Another former senior intelligence official said that never happened.

Officials said the program ended in 2006, as the flow of detainees to Guantanamo Bay slowed to a trickle. The last prisoner arrived there in 2008.

Penny Lane still stands and can be seen in satellite photos. A dirt road winds its way to a clearing. The special detachment of Marines that once provided security is gone. The complex is surrounded by two fences and hidden among the trees and shrubs of Guantanamo Bay.

It has long been abandoned.

—-

Associated Press writer Ben Fox in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report.

Boston Globe : Troves of files on JFK assassination remain secret

Troves of files on JFK assassination remain secret

By Bryan Bender | Globe Staff | November 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — There were the Pentagon’s top-secret reviews of Lee Harvey Oswald, the former US Marine — before and after the assassination. The files about the CIA operative who monitored the alleged assassin and whose knowledge of him was purposely hidden from congressional investigators. The sworn testimony of dozens of intelligence officials and organized crime figures dating back nearly four decades. And the government personnel files of multiple figures officially designated as relevant to the investigation.

The documents, which could amount to tens of thousands of pages, are just some of the collections that government archivists acknowledge have still not been released a half-century after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

As the nation marks the anniversary of JFK’s murder, there is a new push, including lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act, to shake loose these and other classified materials that may shed light on one of the most unsettled debates of modern history: Was the murder of the nation’s 35th president the work of a lone assassin or a conspiracy, and did elements of the US government know about it, or cover it up, or knowingly destroy evidence to prevent other dirty laundry from being aired?

“A lot of questions remain,” said John R. Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board, which oversaw the review and disclosure of some five million records related to the JFK assassination in the 1990s. “We only put a few pieces of the puzzle together. Lots of the jigsaw is missing.”

The National Archives and Records Administration, which is tasked with working with the agencies that originally generated the files, reports that some 1,100 distinct documents that Tunheim and his team did not have access to remain shielded from public view.

The so-called 1992 JFK Records Act, the law that established Tunheim’s records review board, stipulated that all the files have to be released by October 2017 unless the president of the United States grants permission to keep them secret — something many researchers fear could happen if there isn’t more public pressure.

“There is no mechanism to implement the JFK Records Act,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and author who is suing the CIA to release more documents. The National Archives, he said, “has little leverage with the CIA to release stuff.”

Morley and others advocate an additional step that could help dislodge the remaining JFK assassination materials: allow any former government officials with direct knowledge of the secret records to discuss them publicly without the threat of jail.

“We need to make sure disclosure is legal,” Morley told a conference of JFK assassination researchers at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh last month. “That should be part of the agenda going forward.”

Just like the competing theories of who was responsible for JFK’s assassination — whether pro-communist or anti-communist Cubans; members of the American Mafia; elements of US intelligence; or some murky amalgam of all three — assassination researchers disagree on which of the withheld files could prove most illuminating.

Some believe it is the files on US attempts to launch a coup in Cuba with the help of Castro’s internal opponents in late 1963. Others say it is the files on leading Mafia figures who were previously hired by the CIA to kill Castro but never testified before congressional investigations because they were slain just before they were about to appear.

But there are several categories of files that they agree offer the prospect of bringing into better focus a plot that most Americans believe involved more than Oswald acting alone. Just as importantly, researchers say, the files could clear some individuals or agencies that have been suspected of involvement.

Among them are the repeated references to a pair of security reviews that were conducted by the Navy on Oswald, a former Marine who defected to Russia before returning to the United States.

The information is considered by researchers to be critical to understanding what the military discovered about Oswald before and immediately after the assassination.

In the 1990s the Assassination Records Review Board interviewed former military investigators who said they were involved in investigating Oswald. One former official reported that among the findings were that “Oswald was incapable of committing the assassination alone,” according to the board’s final report, issued in 1998 when the congressionally mandated panel expired.

Tunheim said he thought he had been making progress in getting the information. Indeed, the Navy at the time told the board that it had located more than 1,000 cubic feet of documents that might be relevant — including, according to a memo drafted by the review board staff, a box of files that “has to do with defections, both Cuban and Soviet; they plan on turning this box over ‘in toto.’ ”

Soon after, however, the Navy officer tasked with responding to the review board’s requests was removed from her position, and Tunheim confirmed in an interview that his group ultimately received nothing.

A spokesman for the Office of Naval Intelligence told the Globe that the agency does not keep records that old but said he would make additional inquiries. Repeated follow-up calls were not returned.

Yet it is the CIA that remains the major focus of most disclosure efforts by journalists, scholars, and other researchers.

“Most sealed records belong to the CIA,” said Miriam Kleinman, a spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration.

One category of records that researchers are anxious to see are the files related to George Joannides, a CIA officer who came to public light when he served as the agency’s liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, which concluded the president’s death was likely the result of a conspiracy.

But what the CIA didn’t tell the oversight panel was that Joannides had been monitoring Oswald when was living in New Orleans prior to the assassination and was involved with a series of Cuban exile groups with ties to the CIA as well as leftist organizations sympathetic to Castro.

“It really was an example of treachery,” Tunheim said in a recent interview of the CIA’s handling of the Joannides affair. “If [the CIA] fooled us on that, they may have fooled us on other things.”

He called on the agency to make public everything it knows about the Joannides, who is now dead.

“I think they should release them now because they clearly have become relevant to the assassination,” Tunheim said.

The CIA maintains that it has provided all relevant documents to the Archives.

“CIA has followed the provisions of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, and the National Archives has all of the agency’s documents and files on the Kennedy assassination,” said CIA spokesman Todd D. Ebitz. “The classified information contained in the files remains subject to the declassification provisions of the act.”

Other withheld records, according to the National Archives, are from the files of several congressional inquiries of the assassination, beginning with a small number of documents from the original Warren Commission investigation that fingered Oswald as the sole suspect.

More are from the so-called Church Committee that investigated CIA abuses in 1975 and in the process stumbled upon several JFK-related revelations, including that the CIA hired the Mafia to assist in his war against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and that the president was sharing the same girlfriend as a leading Mafia figure involved in those plots.

Rex Bradford, who runs the Mary Ferrell Foundation in Ipswich and has digitized more than one million records related to the JFK case, has identified numerous depositions before the Church Committee that are referenced in the panel’s final report but have yet to be made public.

They include the testimony on secret plots to assassinate Castro from CIA officers; Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy; and the head of the CIA, John McCone.

Also withheld are the panel’s interviews with CIA officials about “JM/WAVE,” the code name for the secret CIA station overseeing covert operations in Cuba that was located on the campus of the University of Miami.

Other still-secret files were compiled in the late 1970s by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded there was a conspiracy to kill JFK.

“The [withheld] collection includes records from Church Committee and House Select Committee on Assassination — there are records from both series that are withheld either in part or in full,” the National Archives’ Kleinman said in response to Globe queries.

Longtime researchers of the Kennedy assassination assert that the fact that the files remain secret doesn’t mean the government wants to protect those who might have been responsible for the assassination.

“There are plenty of documented reasons that agencies like the CIA, FBI, and Naval Intelligence would cover up material from investigators or other agencies,” said Lamar Waldron, author of several books on the Kennedy assassination. “Some crucial information . . . was covered up for reasons of national security. Other times agencies were hiding intelligence failures that could have embarrassed their organization or even cost some officials their careers. On other occasions, officials were hiding unauthorized operations.”

Still, Waldron and many other researchers believe that what is left to be learned just might shed new light on a case that has been picked apart like virtually no other.

“This is not a fishing expedition,” Morley said. “These are records that we know exist. There isn’t going to be a big smoking gun. But there might be a small one.”

Mark Lane, author of “Rush to Judgment,” one of the first books to question the official narrative that Oswald was the lone assassin, also believes there still could be useful information hidden in government vaults.

“The government says, ‘Oswald did it and did it alone. But we can’t show you everything for national security,’ ” offers Lane. “Which one of those statements is true?”

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.

Boston Herald : Cohen: Military hub works to prevent the next 9/11

Cohen: Military hub works to prevent the next 9/11

Rachelle Cohen | November 25, 2013

COLORADO SPRINGS — “A great wrong was perpetrated in our homeland. We will never forget.”

The words are inscribed on the walls where no one reporting for duty here can miss them. They drive everything that is done here at the joint headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM).

NORTHCOM was born out of 9/11 — out of the government’s failure to “connect the dots,” a failure that allowed a terrorist attack on American soil.

Today it is the mission of NORTHCOM and its commander, Gen. Charles J. Jacoby Jr., to day in, day out, 24/7 connect the dots — bringing together the resources of the Pentagon, Homeland Security and working with civilian authorities in every community that calls on them for help.

“We’re stuck with the reality that we can be touched in the homeland,” Jacoby told a group of journalists and security experts in a visit arranged by the Heritage Foundation.

Then the briefing room grows dark and the screen fills with an all-too-familiar image — that of two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The moment is as real for this general and his operations staff 2,000 miles away as it was for those of us who lived through it that day.

“You couldn’t have had a better [local] response,” Jacoby assures.

But when the “incident” showed up on NORTHCOM’s systems — one of about a thousand such “incidents” that get their attention each year — Jacoby’s team went to work.

The initial reports of as many as seven possible bombs in the area set off a chain reaction of checks with both military and civilian partners. Was there any further activity on the air or the ground? Was this part of something larger? Was the homeland once again under attack?

Ruling that out was what they did here.

“Ten years ago we didn’t have that capacity,” he adds, and 10 years ago Boston’s own response teams would not have been bolstered by a decade of Homeland Security grants and training.

Sure this time it was homegrown terrorists — or at least adopted ones. But what about the next time?

“I’m often asked what keeps me up at night,” Jacoby said, “In the end what keeps me up at night is being late.

“I want to know about that threat before the finish line at the Boston Marathon.”

And so, ahead of next April’s Marathon, NORTHCOM is likely to play a supporting role. It does, after all, have the resources to keep watch on no-fly lists, and along with the FBI check networks of known terrorists. And if a surveillance drone or two would help, why NORTHCOM could do that too — if asked.

“Our job is to get left of the boom on this one,” he adds, using a military expression for prevention and for disrupting insurgents before they can do their dirty work.

And NORTHCOM does this all while helping interdict drugs, provide relief during natural disasters — fires, hurricanes, floods — and keeping the skies safe.

Oh and keeping an eye on some particularly bad actors like, say, North Korea, recently upgraded from a “theoretical threat” to a “practical threat” in the minds and operations of our military.

And right now all that is being done in an era of sequestration-mandated budget cuts.

It’s a blending of what Jacoby called the “home game and the away game.” Because that’s what it takes now.

So here in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain a twisted girder from the World Trade Center rises from a Pentagon-shaped planter anchored in soil from a Shanksville, Pa., field. It provides a reminder — as if one were needed — that constant vigilance is the price we pay for our freedom. There’s no longer room for error.

Rachelle Cohen is editor of the editorial pages.

Guardian : Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media

Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media

Pulitzer Prize winner explains how to fix journalism, saying press should 'fire 90% of editors and promote ones you can't control'

Lisa O'Carroll | September 27, 2013

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an "independent" Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. "The Pakistanis put out a report, don't get me going on it. Let's put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It's a bullshit report," he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.

The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.

"It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]," he declares in an interview with the Guardian.

"It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.

He isn't even sure if the recent revelations about the depth and breadth of surveillance by the National Security Agency will have a lasting effect.

Snowden changed the debate on surveillance

He is certain that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden "changed the whole nature of the debate" about surveillance. Hersh says he and other journalists had written about surveillance, but Snowden was significant because he provided documentary evidence – although he is sceptical about whether the revelations will change the US government's policy.

"Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we've all written the notion there's constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate, it's real now," Hersh says.

"Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn't touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game," he adds, before qualifying his remarks.

"But I don't know if it's going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters 'al-Qaida, al-Qaida' and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic," he says.

Holding court to a packed audience at City University in London's summer school on investigative journalism, 76-year-old Hersh is on full throttle, a whirlwind of amazing stories of how journalism used to be; how he exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, how he got the Abu Ghraib pictures of American soldiers brutalising Iraqi prisoners, and what he thinks of Edward Snowden.

Hope of redemption

Despite his concern about the timidity of journalism he believes the trade still offers hope of redemption.

"I have this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever … Not that journalism is always wonderful, it's not, but at least we offer some way out, some integrity."

His story of how he uncovered the My Lai atrocity is one of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism and doggedness. Back in 1969, he got a tip about a 26-year-old platoon leader, William Calley, who had been charged by the army with alleged mass murder.

Instead of picking up the phone to a press officer, he got into his car and started looking for him in the army camp of Fort Benning in Georgia, where he heard he had been detained. From door to door he searched the vast compound, sometimes blagging his way, marching up to the reception, slamming his fist on the table and shouting: "Sergeant, I want Calley out now."

Eventually his efforts paid off with his first story appearing in the St Louis Post-Despatch, which was then syndicated across America and eventually earned him the Pulitzer Prize. "I did five stories. I charged $100 for the first, by the end the [New York] Times were paying $5,000."

He was hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years later, Hersh made global headlines all over again with his exposure of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Put in the hours

For students of journalism his message is put the miles and the hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their families asking them to come and kill them because they had been "despoiled".

"I went five months looking for a document, because without a document, there's nothing there, it doesn't go anywhere."

Hersh returns to US president Barack Obama. He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.

"Do you think Obama's been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What's going on [with journalists]?" he asks.

He says investigative journalism in the US is being killed by the crisis of confidence, lack of resources and a misguided notion of what the job entails.

"Too much of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It's journalism looking for the Pulitzer Prize," he adds. "It's a packaged journalism, so you pick a target like – I don't mean to diminish because anyone who does it works hard – but are railway crossings safe and stuff like that, that's a serious issue but there are other issues too.

"Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren't we doing more? How does he justify it? What's the intelligence? Why don't we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don't we do our own work?

"Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here's a debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who's right and who's wrong about issues. That doesn't happen enough. It costs money, it costs time, it jeopardises, it raises risks. There are some people – the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."

He says in some ways President George Bush's administration was easier to write about. "The Bush era, I felt it was much easier to be critical than it is [of] Obama. Much more difficult in the Obama era," he said.

Asked what the solution is Hersh warms to his theme that most editors are pusillanimous and should be fired.

"I'll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can't control," he says. I saw it in the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don't get promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye and say 'I don't care what you say'.

Nor does he understand why the Washington Post held back on the Snowden files until it learned the Guardian was about to publish.

If Hersh was in charge of US Media Inc, his scorched earth policy wouldn't stop with newspapers.

"I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let's start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won't like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that's what we're supposed to be doing," he says.

Hersh is currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which undoubtedly will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush and Obama.

"The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple." And he implores journalists to do something about it.

St. Petersburg Times : Russia Must Stop U.S. Aggression

Russia Must Stop U.S. Aggression

By Sergei Markov | September 26, 2013

Russia's dream is coming true: The peace-loving people of the world support Moscow's plan for resolving the Syrian crisis. What's more, Group of 20 member states have split into two camps. Тhe majority, headed by President Vladimir Putin, favor a peaceful resolution and the minority, led by U.S. President Barack Obama, advocate military intervention. The Russian plan has the advantage of thwarting the West from bombing Syria, reducing the number of chemical weapons in the world and preventing Islamic extremists from coming to power in Damascus. Russia has no vested interests in Syria, but it does have principles that it is upholding with firm determination. And amidst the growing chaos in the world, this turns out to be a winning strategy.

Most important, everything must conform to the framework of international law. This is not only a matter of respecting the law, but also a means of curbing the ambitions of NATO and the U.S. In this way, a temporarily weakened world power appeals to the law to contain the actions of a rival that is, at least for now, more powerful. And that is achieved by strengthening the authority of the United Nations. All foreign actions against Syria must be approved by the UN Security Council.

Above all, we must avoid war at all costs, a conviction born of Russia's suffering through the terrible war with Adolf Hitler. But Moscow has become especially firm on its anti-war principle during the last 10 years after seeing how readily the U.S. and NATO resort to military force. All U.S. military interventions over the past decade have led to negative results. These bombings deliver blows against not only the targeted countries but against the entire world order, as well.

Another principle is that the world community must respect the sovereignty of states. We must give each state the right to decide its own destiny. And the Syrians should be given the chance to negotiate peace and compromise. Russia defends its own sovereignty in the same way.

Another important principle is that the U.S. lied to Russia concerning Libya. Russia supported a no-fly zone, but not a massive bombing campaign and the overthrow of the regime. Our Western partners lied to Russian diplomats and then-President Dmitry Medvedev, an idealist who sincerely wanted Russia to be part of a united front with Western states. But in place of a united front, Russia was lied to and made party to an unauthorized use of force.

Moscow wants to avoid creating the military and political conditions in which jihadi can thrive, and which would prompt them to send militants from Iraq, Libya or Syria into Russia to continue their jihad. Confrontations with radical jihadi only tend to strengthen them. Russian analysts are convinced that Islamic extremists have become the dominant force among the Syrian rebels and that destabilizing actions by the West may let them seize power.

Russia is also opposed to the overthrow of governments. By contrast, the West works deliberately toward that goal, using a combination of soft power, like color revolutions, and hard power in the form of direct or threatened military intervention. This has been the case in Serbia, Georgia, Lebanon, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Who will be next? Belarus? Russia? That is why it is important that those advocating the overthrow of foreign governments pay the highest possible price for their actions and become mired down far away from Russia's borders.

The West has lost its moral legitimacy in the eyes of Russian leaders and public opinion. Its lies concerning Iraq, South Ossetia and Syria make it impossible for Russia to expect that the West's actions will be bound by any moral constraints or common sense. After all, they are strengthening their enemy, the jihadi, with their own hands. Many believe that the West is on a suicidal path toward the end of its civilization.

Chemical weapons were used in Syria, but by whom? Given the fact that the Syrian army is vanquishing the rebels, why would Syrian President Bashar Assad use chemical weapons? To do so on the very day that international inspectors arrived in Syria would make no political sense. Yet Russia is expected to take the word of the West that this is what happened, despite the fact that ample evidence indicates anti-government forces staged a provocation on Aug. 21. The West is unwilling to even discuss that, and it continues to block discussion of clear evidence that rebels used chemical weapons back in March.

That is why many observers believe that the U.S. and NATO are deliberately falsifying the facts, just as they did on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, intent on pressuring the international community and crushing Syria without regard to anyone or anything else. Why is Washington so persistent in its anti-Syria policy? Why is Obama willing to commit political suicide over Syria? A possible explanation is that he has become a hostage to his previous mistake of supporting the Syrian rebels and now cannot admit that they used chemical weapons. He spoke of a red line and fell hostage to his promises. What's more, any war against Syria means war against Iran, a regime that Washington has long dreamed of overthrowing.

Many observers also believe that Washington has fallen too heavily under the influence of Saudi Arabia, a regime that wants to depose Assad as a secular military dictator that the Wahhabist monarchy has feared for decades. In Syria, Sunni-dominated Riyadh is waging battle against the Shiites and a proxy war against Shiite Iran. The problem is that the war between the Sunnis and the Shiites has the potential to destabilize the entire region for decades, even possibly spreading to Europe and Russia.

Could Washington bomb Syria even after the fiasco with the Iraqi invasion? Yes, because the U.S. has not stopped talking of intervention even after the Russian peace initiative and its proven incapability of garnering support for its policies from Congress, public opinion or its NATO allies. The U.S. will coerce others into lending support, just as it did when it was discovered that Baghdad did not possess chemical weapons.

The Russian response to a U.S. missile strike against Syria would be asymmetrical. The Russian army would not go anywhere. Moscow would deploy its best air defense systems to the likely targets of any future U.S. strikes, starting with Iran. Moscow would also take the opportunity to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, an agreement that many consider disadvantageous for Russia and one that it was pressured into signing in 1987.

In addition, Russia will move to rapidly upgrade its army with the latest weapons systems and reconstruct its military-industrial complex because such policies by the U.S. and its NATO allies will inevitably lead to a new war that is likely to expand in scope.

At the very least, Russia must have a strong army to avoid getting drawn into such a major new war. Ideally, Russia would work to prevent any actions that could undermine the current situation and set the world into a downward slide toward such a large-scale war. This is primarily what Putin is seeking to accomplish in the Syrian crisis, and he has the support of public opinion not only in Russia but in most countries of the world — including NATO member states.

Sergei Markov is vice-rector of Plekhanov Economic University in Moscow.

LAROUCHEPAC : Rep. Jones Sends Letter Urging Release of 9/11 Report's Redacted 28 Pages

Rep. Jones Sends Letter Urging Release of 9/11 Report's Redacted 28 Pages

February 27, 2013

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) yesterday posted on his website the following letter, calling for the release of the infamous redacted 28 pages of Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11. Dated Feb. 14, the letter is addressed to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence:

Dear Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Ruppersberger:

I want to thank you for conducting the very important hearings last week on the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and the three other State Department officials during the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012.

In light of those hearings, I urge you, as chairman and ranking member, to recommend a declassification of the 28 pages of the Congressional Joint Inquiry report describing what role the Saudi Arabian government had in the terrorist attack on 9/11. As you know, former Senator Bob Graham has conducted extensive research into this issue and has been nationally recognized and interviewed for his belief that these 28 pages should be declassified.

The families of the victims of 9/11 have a right to this information, as do the American people. Since your committee has jurisdiction over this matter, I ask you and the ranking member to please review the attached correspondence from Mr. Mike Low, who lost a daughter on American Airlines flight 11 on that tragic day. As Mr. Low states, "Our hope is that over time, history will have the total truth of all the events of 9/11."

Mr. Chairman, the American people have a right to know the truth. It is critical for the citizens of this country to have trust in their government. I hope that you will take this into consideration and I look forward to hearing back from you.

Sincerely,
Walter B. Jones Member of Congress

Also, at the beginning of the 113th Congress, Jones reintroduced his resolution, now H. Con. Res. 3, expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress, constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution.

Birmingham Mail : Al-Qaida terror plots on New York and Manchester linked to Alum rock murder suspect Rashid Rauf

Al-Qaida terror plots on New York and Manchester linked to Alum rock murder suspect Rashid Rauf

Amardeep Bassey | January 6, 2013

A suspected Islamic terrorist accused of plotting attacks in the UK and the New York subway was being directed by a Birmingham Al Qaida mastermind, security sources claim.The allegation comes after the USA successfully applied for Pakistani student Abid Naseer to be extradited to face terror charges.

Naseer, 26, had originally come to Britain from his native Pakistan on a student visa to study in Manchester.

But US prosecutors believe they can prove Naseer was part of an Al-Qaida cell sent to the UK and US by former Alum Rock murder suspect Rashid Rauf, who planned for them to attack targets on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Americans claim Naseer had shopped for bomb ingredients, conducted reconnaissance and was in frequent contact with other al-Qaida operatives as part of a foiled plot to kill Easter shoppers at the Trafford and Arndale centres in Manchester in 2009, and a second suspected plot to blow up the New York subway.

An FBI source told the Sunday Mercury that investigators believe that both plots were directed by Birmingham baker’s boy turned terrorist Rauf, who had climbed the Al Qaida ranks to become a chief planner of its operations in the West.

He said: “It is highly likely that it was Rauf who briefed and sent the two teams to launch attacks in the US and the UK.

“Messages from Pakistan were remarkably similar in content and tone, suggesting they were emanating from the same person, namely Rauf, who had a very distinct and colloquially English style.”

Rauf is believed to have been killed by the CIA in a drone attack in Pakistan’s tribal areas in 2008. He fled the UK to join Islamic terror groups in Pakistan in 2002 after being implicated in the murder of his uncle in Alum Rock.

Security service investigators believe he was a vital link for foreign Al Qaida recruits because of his Western background and upbringing.

The Portsmouth University drop-out is said to have been the point of contact for the London 7/7 bombers, as well as being implicated in several Al Qaida plots across Europe.

The US source said: “Evidence suggests Rauf was directing a terror cell in the US which was eventually smashed after it was discovered they were planning to bomb the New York subway.

“Rauf was killed in late 2008 but by then the terror cells had been dispatched and briefed.”

After two years of legal arguments stalling his extradition, Naseer was finally taken from his cell at Belmarsh high security jail and put on a plane at Luton airport by officers from the Metropolitan police extradition unit last week.

Naseer was one of 12 people arrested in April 2009 in co-ordinated raids in Liverpool and Manchester after police uncovered the alleged Manchester plot. But all were released without charge because of lack of evidence.

They were ordered to leave Britain, but Naseer escaped deportation to Pakistan after a judge ruled it was likely he would be mistreated if he were sent home.

Naseer was re-arrested in July 2010 at the request of the prosecutors in Brooklyn where a federal indictment named him as a co-defendant with Adis Medunjanin.

In January 2011, a British judge approved Naseer’s extradition but acknowledged there was a “very real risk” Naseer would be tortured if the US ultimately returned him to Pakistan.

US authorities allege Medunjanin and his former high school friends Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay travelled to Pakistan in 2008 to seek terror training from al-Qaida.

Authorities say the trio were planning co-ordinated suicide bombings on Manhattan subway lines during rush hour near the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in what Zazi called a “martyrdom operation”.

The alleged plot was disrupted when police stopped Zazi’s car as it entered New York.

Bellingham Herald : Pentagon rebuffs request to televise 9/11 trial from Guantanamo

Pentagon rebuffs request to televise 9/11 trial from Guantanamo

By CAROL ROSENBERG — The Miami Herald | November 26, 2012

MIAMI — A surrogate of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday rejected a request by the Sept. 11 defense lawyers to let media organizations televise the Sept. 11 trial from the war court at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

William Lietzau, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy, wrote the defense lawyers that the Pentagon provides ample transparency for the trials through news coverage, a remote viewing site at Fort Meade, Md., and a website that posts transcripts of the pre-trial proceedings within 24 hours of hearings.

"At this time, there are no plans to televise military commission proceedings," Lietzau wrote in a single-page response to the lawyers for five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A total of 13 defense lawyers for the former CIA prisoners now facing military capital penalty proceedings wrote Panetta on Nov. 1 requesting that he use his authority as secretary of defense to enable the broadcasts.

The chief military commissions judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, said at a hearing earlier this year that only Panetta could make that decision.

Lietzau said he was responding for Panetta.

The lawyers, who defend alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men, argued that the trial, likely a year away, "is the most significant criminal trial in the history of our country." They argued there's a "pervasive distrust of these proceedings," and that the Guantanamo system has harmed the reputation of the United States.

"Allow the entire country, and world, to observe the proceedings for themselves," they wrote.

Lietzau responded that the war court was following U.S. military courts-martial and federal criminal practice. His letter was dated Nov. 20, but the defense lawyers said they received the reply Monday and provided a copy to The Miami Herald.

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the chief war crimes prosecutor, has opposed broadcasts in remarks that suggest cameras in the court could harm the dignity of the death-penalty proceedings.

Defense lawyers have said that the public might be surprised to realize how much of the proceedings will be held in closed session.

They also want wider scrutiny on the hybrid nature of the proceedings that borrow from both military and civilian justice.

The Local (Germany) : Cops: 'Mafia-style killing' was complex suicide

Cops: 'Mafia-style killing' was complex suicide

November 22, 2012

Police in Hamburg investigating the death of a man who was found shot in the head in a tied-up sack floating in a river, suspect that rather than having been the victim of a Mafia hit, he killed himself.

The body of 43-year-old Uwe Sattler was found in the River Elbe in July by a fisherman. He was wearing a rucksack full of rocks and had been shot in the head and put into a sack fastened with cable ties before he hit the water.

Local media was rife with speculation about a Mafia murder - but after extensive investigation, the police now say they are nearly certain that the Sattler killed himself.

"We are 99.999 percent certain it was suicide," a Hamburg police spokeswoman told The Local.

"There is no other explanation; no other motive and no other evidence."

Detectives have worked out that there was enough of an opening in the sack between the cable ties for Sattler to get an arm out and shoot himself so that afterwards the gun would fall to the ground. He would have had to have done this while perched on the edge of a bridge or jetty to ensure falling into the water.

Why he would make such an effort to do this remains a mystery - as does the whereabouts of the gun, which was never found. "It just goes to show, there is nothing that does not exist," the police spokeswoman said.

After using fingerprints to identify the body, police went to his flat in Hamburg which reportedly looked newly renovated - and held absolutely no furniture. Officers found only a small box of documents, including a note to say that the belongings in the cellar should be given to the building landlord, Die Welt said.

Back in the summer when detectives were trying to piece together Sattler's life, they also found little to work with. He was single and unemployed, and seemed to have no friends, nor any contact with his family. Despite intensive efforts, the police admitted in July that they had been unable to find a single friend or acquaintance.

He had moved from Berlin to Hamburg in September 2008, but no friends could be found in the capital either. Die Welt said that he had rented a van in 2004 and crashed head-long into a bridge pillar. He survived the crash but was seriously injured. When police went to his flat after the crash they found it was completely empty just like his place in Hamburg.

This would seem to be reason to suggest he was suicidal - although might leave open some questions about the immensely complicated method he supposedly chose in Hamburg.

The investigation has been put on ice, but the case remains open.

The Local/hc

---

see also: Anorak : The mysterious death of Uwe Sattler – Germany’s Gareth Williams

Cynthia McKinney: Open Letter

Open Letter on the Occasion of the Seating of the New York Session of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Cynthia McKinney | October 7, 2012

This weekend, anti-war protests are taking place all over the world. I do believe that the position of the vast majority of the world’s people is one that is utterly tired of a hungry war machine ignited by gangster bankers concomitantly devouring the money resources of the world’s people. There is a growing awareness of exactly where the problem lies: it is not in the millions of working people who struggle every month just to make ends meet; it is not in the immigrant fleeing the intentional destabilization of her homeland; it is not in the descendants of Africans imported from Africa for enslavement; it is not in the right-wing White person misled to believe that individuals from the foregoing groups are his enemy; it is not in the group of people who pray to Allah; it is not in the people on the street this weekend demanding peace and an end to war. It is clear that those who helped construct this current society and now preside over it are also the ones who benefit from having things as they are today. Increasingly, more and more of us are paying an even higher price for them to continue their privilege because enough is never enough for them. Real change, then, requires not only changes in the names, color, ethnicities, languages spoken, religion, or gender of those who preside over the current political state of affairs. Real change requires dismantling the current political, economic, and social structures that serve only the interests of an elite to whom current elected office holders answer. In short, the kind of change that people thought they were voting for in 2008. I have consistently drawn attention to the need for this kind of deep, structural change. Therefore, this Open Letter addresses what is happening to me as I challenge a system that no longer serves the interests of the people and push for the kind of change that will really make a difference.

As I write this, I note the irony that I am currently conducting research in order to write a paper on the violent repression carried out by individuals acting on behalf of the United States government against certain political actors of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was during this research that I came across the notion of “soft repression” and immediately recognized myself in what I was reading. I said to myself as I read, “Hey, that’s me.” So, I decided to write this Open Letter in order to blow the cover off a secret that I have walked with for years.

“Soft repression” tactics include ridicule, stigma, and silencing. I have experienced and continue to experience each one of these types of targeting. I routinely receive hate mail and withstand very active organized attempts to ridicule, stigmatize, and eventually silence me. I routinely experience strange occurrences with my computer (typing by itself) and telephone (answered by someone before it even rings on my end), and more. Strange things happen to my friends and to the friends of my friends (like police stops for nothing, and worse, calls to remote immigrant acquaintances asking for information about me).

Not too long ago, I received a call from a lawyer with the ACLU who tracks politically-inspired civil liberties violations and he told me that my name came up in a Texas Fusion Center of the Department of Homeland Security document as someone, associating with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and traveling to Lebanon with him, who should be surveilled for any attempts engaged in by me to push Sharia law for the U.S. It’s ludicrous, I know. It’s even more ludicrous that U.S. tax dollars are being spent to surveil people for this stupidity. But there it is.

More recently, Congresswoman Maxine Waters courageously asked the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Robert Mueller, at a Congressional Hearing if the FBI was surveilling me because she had documents that suggested that due to my political beliefs and inflammatory words uttered by others after my 2006 campaign election theft that placed blame for the unfortunate election results on Jewish Israel partisans inside the U.S.

I have been stalked (unfortunately, the prosecution occurred under a false identity as a Muslim Pakistani) and thank goodness to local authorities, the perpetrator spent time in jail until his high-priced lawyer bailed him out, and the individual with the false identity was convicted of stalking. Upon my return to the U.S. from Cape Town, South Africa at which the Russell Tribunal found that Israel practices its own unique form of apartheid, I was notified by my local FBI office that I was [the] subject of a terroristic threat, along with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama, by some poor hillbillies from the north Georgia mountains. The FBI offered to protect me from any other hillbillies who might get funny ideas.

Well, I’ve been through this before with the FBI, when a journalist called for my lynching on my way to vote. My alarmed Congressional staff alerted the FBI--only for us all to learn, years later, that this particular “journalist” was on the FBI payroll at the time that he made those reprehensible remarks.

I have lived with this “soft repression” since, as a Member of Congress-elect in 1992, I refused to sign the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) pledge of support for Israel. I will begin to document and make public what has heretofore been covert activity carried out by bullies who pick on the weak. The members of my inner circle and I are extremely weak compared to the power and resources of those orchestrating and carrying out this “soft repression.”

What could they possibly be afraid of?

I will answer my own question: values whose time has come—truth, justice, peace, and dignity. Not only for the elite few, but also for the rest of us: everybody’s truth and everybody’s dignity.

I am honored to serve as a juror on the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. I am honored to serve with Angela Davis and Alice Walker and Dennis Means as the U.S. contingent of jurors here in New York City. Davis, Walker, and Means are giants in U.S. activism, demonstrating self-sacrifice, dignity, and great love for community. I have been with this Tribunal from its opening Session in Barcelona, where I was the only U.S. member. At these New York Sessions so far, we have spoken of colonialism, oppression, murder, and war with impunity. Therefore, I in no way want to equate the unusual events occurring around me with the violence of the situation faced by Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, the particular focus of this Tribunal. I seek merely to expose covert actions directed at me, and people close to me, that constitute bullying and soft repression that would otherwise go unnoted and whose purpose I surmise is to punish me for my values and political beliefs that favor justice and peace, and, most probably, to dissuade me from future political activities.

Their plan will not work. I believe in hearing everyone’s truths, especially from those whose voices have been shut down. I believe that we can only achieve justice when we are willing to face everyone’s truths. I believe that peace is achievable when justice is prevalent. And I believe that human and planetary dignity will exist during such time as we all live together in peace. My work, every day, is to advance this cause in the best way that I know, using the tools at my disposal at this time.

I have already received some requests for these documents that have been made available to me; I will make them available to anyone who asks.

Toronto Star : Al Qaeda airline bomber was secret informant

Al Qaeda airline bomber was secret informant

Reuters | May 8, 2012

WASHINGTON—A bomber from the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen sent to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner last month was actually a Saudi intelligence agent who infiltrated the group and volunteered for the suicide mission, U.S. media reported on Tuesday.

Working closely with the CIA, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency placed the operative inside Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, with the goal of convincing his handlers to give him a new type of non-metallic bomb for the mission, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Western intelligence agencies have identified AQAP as among the most dangerous and determined Al Qaeda affiliates in the world, dedicated in part to attacks on the West.

The explosive device was intended to be smuggled aboard an aircraft undetected and then detonated.

The double agent arranged instead to deliver the device to U.S. and other intelligence authorities waiting outside Yemen, the L.A. Times reported. The agent arrived safely in an unidentified country and is being debriefed.

Experts at the FBI’s bomb laboratory in Quantico, Va., are now analyzing the device to determine if it really could have evaded airport security, the newspaper said.

If such a device could be brought on board an aircraft, it could in theory be detonated without the knowledge of aircraft passengers and crew.

The main charge was a high-grade military explosive that “undoubtedly would have brought down an aircraft,” the New York Times reported, citing a senior American official.

It appeared to be an upgraded version of the so-called “underwear bomb” that failed to down a passenger jet over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, the L.A. Times said.

“Like that bomb, this device bears the forensic signature of feared Al Qaeda bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan Asiri,” who is believed to be hiding in Yemen, the L.A. Times website reported.

The operation relied not on the high-tech and satellite surveillance for which the CIA has been known in recent years, but old-fashioned human intelligence work.

It did, however, produce intelligence that helped the CIA locate top Al Qaeda operative Fahd al-Quso, who was killed on Sunday when a CIA drone targeted him with a missile as he stepped out of his car in Yemen, the newspapers reported.

Quso was thought by intelligence analysts to have played a role in the bombing of guided missile destroyer USS Cole in a Yemeni port in 2000.