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Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2006, 10:27:26 AM

Title: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2006, 10:27:26 AM
http://public.cq.com/public/20061027_homeland.html

Terrorists Strain for a New Audience With an English-Language Study of U.S. Intelligence
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

The holy warriors? intelligence shop may need a shake-up, by the looks of a new analysis of White House responses to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, circulating among password-protected jihad Web sites.

?Myth of Delusion: Exposing the U.S. Intelligence? (sic), authored by a rising star in the al Qaeda hierarchy, relies on openly available materials ? congressional and other official investigations of intelligence failures related to the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq, along with media exposes and scholarly studies ? for its wide-ranging book-length report on the operations of American spy agencies.

But when it comes to analyzing the Bush administration?s emergency responses to the al Qaeda hijackings on 9/11, it reads like an Oliver Stone script.

In the analysis of Mohammed al-Hakaymah, an obscure Egyptian radical until he won plaudits from al Qaeda for leading a revolt against the main Islamic movement there last August, President Bush was forced to scurry about the country on Air Force One for fear of assassination by a hazy cabal of Texas oil interests and renegade U.S. military leaders.

If that weren?t enough conspiracy theory, Hakaymah also portrays the president as a captive of ? pay attention now ? right-wing activists and think tanks, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon?s Washington Times newspaper and the South Korean intelligence service.

All of which, along with factual errors on the history and operations of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and the reorganization of U.S. intelligence as a result of the 9/11 attacks, has prompted some observers to dismiss Hakaymah?s study as ?drivel,? as former CIA officer Robert Baer put it in an e-mail to me last week (although he volunteered he had only read ?parts of it?).

But other experts on al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism say the English-language study marks a breakthrough in the jihadists? efforts to understand the missions and operations of the sprawling U.S. intelligence community.

?I would suggest that those behind this are working directly to influence English speakers [and] present themselves to a broader audience of potential terrorism actors,? says Marvin Hutchens, a former marine who runs the threatswatch.com blog that circulated the study here.

?I think it?s a pretty big deal,? says John Rollins, a former counterterrorism operative who was Tom Ridge?s chief of staff for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security.

?It shows an intense focus on the capabilities and tactics of the U.S. intelligence community,? says Rollins, now a terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service. ?[It?s] a concerted effort to understand what our capabilities are.?

?There is no question about the authenticity of the book and the author,? says Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, an authoritative source on terrorist developments.

And if there was ever a holy warrior who wanted to be an al Qaeda goodfella, it?s Hakaymah. But until he?s a made man, says Evan Kohlmann, a scholar on Islam and consultant to U.S. agencies, analysts should ?be careful? about attributing the book to al Qaeda.

?This document,? agrees Rollins, ?is not reflective of corporate al Qaeda and what they know about the U.S. intelligence community. . .I wouldn?t take this as a bible of their assessment of U.S. intelligence.? But ?it shows a desire and intention to understand the U.S. intelligence community.?

Katz says the study has immense value as ?propaganda . . . because he is explaining that al Qaeda was able to conduct 9/11 in spite of the tightened security and the enormous intelligence budget the U.S. has.?

The message, she says: ?Jihadists should not be intimidated by the American/British security measures,? particularly restive Muslim youth who might be sitting on the fence about joining the ranks of suicide bombers.

They are the prized assets in al Qaeda?s new field of battle. And judging by the swelling ranks of holy warriors from London to Iraq, the bad guys are a lot better at getting out their message, as nasty as it is, than we are.

Where?s Karl Rove when we need him?

Training Manual
Some intelligence veterans are particularly disturbed by the book?s matter-of-fact explanations of how the CIA operates abroad, such as its use of State Department cover in U.S. embassies and the methods it employs to spot potential spies among foreign officials and groups ? including disaffected jihadists.

With a level of detail that could have been copied from a CIA training manual, the book explains the common techniques the agency uses to recruit and manage spies by manipulating their emotions and weaknesses. It also offers an overview of the CIA?s espionage curriculum.

It wrongly places the CIA?s training facility in West Virginia in one passage, but gets it right in another ? demonstrating not that Hakaymah lacks a grasp of his topic, but rather that he could use a good copy editor.

Hekaymah also covers the FBI?s dramatic expansion abroad since 9/11 and its alliances with local security services, particularly in Egypt, which he explores in fine detail.

The origins and operations of the NSA come in for scrutiny, too, based on published sources in the United States and Europe. It locates some of the NSA?s ground stations and its array of techniques for eavesdropping on the world?s telephone lines, computers and cell phones, but it does not discuss The New York Times? revelations of the NSA?s warrantless wiretapping program, a sign that the book was written more than a year ago.

Its discussion of cell phone chip technology, gained from open sources here, amounts to instructions on how to minimize the chance of being tracked.

Hakaymah also lays out details on the efforts of the CIA to undermine the regime in Iran.

Traitors?
All of which raises a dilemma for Congress, not to mention the media: Can it meet its constitutional obligation to ride herd on the government, including U.S. intelligence, without giving material support to the enemy?

Bush administration officials have already delivered their verdict, coming close to calling the media (and putative congressional leakers) traitors.

Retired U.S. Army Col. Rich Reynolds, who spent most of his career in Middle East intelligence assignments, calls the previously published information recycled by Hakaymah ?useful to terrorists.?

?Anything that helps them identify intelligence personnel and those that they recruit is detrimental to the intelligence collection effort. We have very few [spies] assets in contact with terrorists and it is not useful to have people trying to figure them out and eliminate them.

?The same goes with [NSA] communications [intercepts],? Reynolds said. ?As the press and others publish our efforts to monitor terror communications in all their forms, we see the bad guys moving away from the most easily exploited forms.?

It ?would certainly bolster the administration?s position that there should be less public information about intelligence community efforts,? says Rollins.

?However, at the most senior levels of government one walks a very fine line between suppressing intelligence for the sake of national security and concealing information from the Congress and the general public for purposes of political expediency.?

One solution, of course, is to kill the messenger ? literally.

No, not U.S. reporters or leaky members of Congress. But Hakatmah is fair game.

His book ?was published on the AlMaqreze.com Web site, which is run by Hani el-Sebai, an Islamist living in London,? explains Laura Mansfield, who has worked for U.S. government agencies in the Middle East and translated several jihad tomes.

While el-Sebai ?has not made a public declaration of alignment with Al Qaeda,? she told me, ?the U.S. Treasury, the United Nations and Interpol have recognized his connections to Al Qaeda.?

Hakaymah, the experts say, also wrote last summer?s jihad literary hit, ?How to Fight Alone,? an instructional guide for the single holy warrior.

So let?s give him a chance at it, since he wants to be a star: Our intelligence against his.

Jeff Stein can be reached via jstein@cq.com.
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http://counterterrorismblog.org/site-resources/images/Myth-of-Delusion.pdf
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2006, 04:42:58 PM
U.K.: The Puzzling Polonium-210 Attack
Former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died of radiation poisoning in a London hospital Nov. 23, was exposed to high levels of the polonium-210 isotope, according to British health authorities. Although radiation has been discussed in the past as a possible assassination weapon, very few, if any, incidents of its successful use have occurred -- until now. British authorities, who already are dealing with thousands of active terrorism investigations, must now confront the fact that someone in London has acquired polonium-210, and knows how to use it to kill.

Litvinenko was admitted to a London hospital Nov. 17, 16 days after falling ill following a meeting with an Italian academic at a London sushi restaurant. Medical personnel first suspected Litvinenko had been dosed with thallium, an element in rat poison, because he showed a classic symptom of thallium poisoning: hair loss. Scotland Yard then began investigating the incident as a deliberate act. Later, however, the British Health Protection Agency said tests had revealed high levels of polonium-210 in Litvinenko?s system.

Polonium, also known as radium F, was discovered in 1897 by Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre. It is an alpha emitter, meaning that although it is highly radioactive, it cannot penetrate human skin or a sheet of paper. Although the element is common in nature (it is found in such things as dirt and tobacco), it does not naturally occur in lethal concentrations. Only about 100 micrograms of the polonium-210 isotope can be found in one metric ton of dirt, for example. Once concentrated, however, it is lethal. Polonium-210 emits 5,000 times more alpha particles than radium, and an amount the size of the period at the end of this sentence would contain about 3,400 times the lethal dose. A dose like that which killed Litvinenko would probably have been manufactured at a nuclear facility.

Although polonium-210 can be made into crystallized or powdered form and then disseminated via a spray, that method would have endangered the attacker as well. More likely, Litvinenko ingested the polonium-210 either through food or drink. The radiation killed Litvinenko?s cells, eventually causing his organs to shut down.

According to a 2002 database produced by Stanford University?s Institute for International Studies, approximately 88 pounds of radioactive material, including weapons-usable uranium and plutonium, were removed without authorization from nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union, although most of that material has been recovered. The International Atomic Energy Agency listed 827 confirmed incidents involving the trafficking of radioactive material reported by participating member states from January 1993 to December 2005. Of these, 224 incidents involved nuclear materials, 516 involved other radioactive materials (mainly radioactive sources), 26 involved both nuclear and other radioactive materials, 50 involved radioactively contaminated materials and 11 involved other materials. Sixteen of the nuclear material incidents involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium.

Polonium-210 is difficult to detect unless it is being specifically sought, thereby making the substance easy to smuggle. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working on methods to detect the substance in water samples, but current methods are time-consuming and require an experienced analyst.

Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin?s government, accused Putin of personally ordering his assassination in the weeks following the poisoning. Russian dissidents in London also hold the Russian government responsible for the attack. A source in the London Metropolitan Police Counterterrorism Command cited by the United Kingdom's Daily Mirror suggested the polonium-210 could have been smuggled into the United Kingdom in a diplomatic pouch from a ?former Soviet Union embassy.? This method, which would have nearly eliminated the risk of the material?s discovery while in transit, reportedly was used to smuggle in the materials used to poison Bulgarian dissident poet Georgi Markov in London in 1978. Russian authorities have dismissed charges of Moscow?s involvement in the Litvinenko attack as "silly."

Litvinenko?s death, regardless of who is behind it, has raised the stakes for British security and counterterrorism officials. Scotland Yard has had more active terrorism investigations in 2006 than at any other time in its history, and must now attempt to track down the source of this attack. Meanwhile, if this was a covert operation by Russian intelligence, London's sizable Russian dissident community has reason to be quite concerned indeed.
www.stratfor.com
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 27, 2006, 10:32:52 PM
**One of the USGs biggest pre-9/11 blunders that the FBI/US Army/CIA would rather the general public not know about is below.**

http://www.peterlance.com/Peter%20Lance/Ali%20Mohamed.html

Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed The Spy of Many Names

In the years leading to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than a former Egyptian army captain turned CIA operative, Special Forces advisor, and FBI informant named Ali Mohamed. Spying first for the Central Intelligence Agency and later the FBI, Mohamed even succeeded in penetrating the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg?while simultaneously training the cell that blew up the World Trade Center in 1993. He went on to train Osama bin Laden?s personal bodyguard, and photographed the U.S. embassy in Kenya taking the surveillance pictures bin Laden himself used to target the suicide truck bomb that killed 224 and injured thousands in 1998.
Mohamed accomplished all that fully nine years after the FBI first photographed the cell he trained using automatic weapons at a firing range on Long Island. He lived the quiet life of a Silicon Valley computer executive while slipping off to Afghanistan and the Sudan to train some of al Qaeda?s most lethal terrorists in bomb-making and assassination tradecraft. He was so trusted by bin Laden that Ali was given the job of moving the Saudi ?Emir? from Afghanistan to Khartoum in 1991 and then back to Jalalabad in 1996?much of that time maintaining his status as an FBI informant who worked his Bureau control agent like a mole.
Mohamed twice played host to al Qaeda?s second-in-command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who traveled to the U.S. in the 1990s to raise money for the Jihad. He used his Army vacation to hunt down elite Soviet Spetsnaz commandos in Afghanistan, and later toyed with gullible special agents in New York and San Francisco while he learned the inner workings of the FBI?s al Qaeda playbook.
In the annals of espionage, few men have moved in an out of the deep black world between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed?known to his al Qaeda brothers as Ali Amiriki, or ?Ali the American.? A deep-penetration al Qaeda sleeper, he succeeded as a triple agent, gaining access to the most sensitive intelligence in the U.S. counter-terrorism arsenal.
Next to Ramzi Yousef, the bomb maker who plotted both attacks on The Twin Towers, Mohamed remains the greatest enigma in the war on terror. Brazenly slipping past watch lists, he moved in and out of the U.S. with impunity for years, marrying an American woman, becoming a naturalized citizen, seeking top secret security clearance from a Silicon Valley defense contractor and working for the FBI while servicing the top echelons of al Qaeda.
The story of Ali Mohamed holds the key to the full truth about how bin Laden planned, financed, and executed the 9/11 attacks. He?s also a living witness to how the best and the brightest in the U.S. intelligence community were repeatedly outflanked for two decades, from the death of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 through the attacks of September 11, 2001.
My conclusion in Cover Up was that the FBI had buried key al Qaeda intelligence to avoid a scandal over tainted Mafia evidence. But as unbelievable as that story seemed, the investigation took on even stranger twists and turns when Ali Mohamed came into focus. For example, almost from the moment the Bureau ?opened? him as an informant back in 1992, Ali?s main control agent on the West Coast became embroiled in a grisly triple murder case that distracted him from fully appreciating Mohamed?s lethal dedication to stealing America?s secrets for the jihad. Patrick Fitzgerald himself called Ali ?the most dangerous man I ever met,? and soon, as I began to fill in the blanks on him, I encountered evidence more astonishing than any fiction I had ever written. Continued in Chapter One of Triple Cross.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 27, 2006, 10:36:07 PM
http://www.peterlance.com/Peter%20Lance/Home/43F10BD6-3...C5-BD5235B08E8B.html

al Qaeda?s master spy... TRIPLE CROSS is the third book in my investigative trilogy on the FBI and the road to Sept. 11th. Why spend five years on the probe? Because 9/11 has become a cold case...
...the untold story The biggest mass murder in U.S. history remains unsolved, and five years after the attacks that killed 2,973 Americans in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, few in official Washington or New York seem determined to ?clear? it. The only federal case associated directly with the attacks?that of Zacarias Moussaoui?ended in a plea bargain, and in the the penalty phase, one of the FBI?s own agents accused the Bureau of ?criminal negligence.?
Just a week before the fifth anniversary of 9/11 President Bush, pledged that he would seek authority to try terror suspects in ?military tribunals.? But many of those same ?high value? detainees ? including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 ?mastermind? ? have been held in secret CIA prisons and subjected to torture for years without giving up any substantive intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Now any effort to try them in U.S. courts would take a significant change in constitutional due process guarantees ? an outcome that this strict constructionist Supreme Court is unlikely to approve. So the case stays cold as the war on terror heats up.
As recently as August 2006, al Qaeda resurrected a fiendish plan to smuggle liquid-based explosive bombs aboard a series of transatlantic flights?mimicking the notorious Bojinka plot designed in 1994 by Ramzi Yousef, the true 9/11 mastermind. Probative evidence derived from Yousef in 1996 was covered up on President Clinton?s watch when multiple opportunities to eliminate Osama bin Laden were squandered. Meanwhile, al Qaeda?s post 9/11 bombings in Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London, Casablanca and Riyadh, along with its deadly involvement in the ongoing Iraqi insurgency, are stark testimony to the terror network?s lethal resilience.
With each new audio recording or video fatwa Bin Laden and his second in command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri seem to get bolder. Yet the Bush administration recently closed the bin Laden unit at CIA and astonishingly, to this day, the Saudi billionaire has never even been charged for the 9/11 attacks.
The final report of the 9/11 Commission, the last official body to investigate the 9/11 attacks, has proven vastly incomplete. Although the idea of a plot using planes-as-missiles had its genesis with Yousef in Manila during the fall of 1994, the Commission elected to focus its investigation from 1998 forward, leaving out major elements of the story. Their report reduced to a footnote, details of the three major war games being conducted on 9/11, including an exercise by the Northeast Air Defense Sector of NORAD that initially confused officials charged with protecting New York. Worse, it ignored a remarkable account cited earlier by the Commission?s own chairman, Thomas Kean, that F-16s from his home state of New Jersey were moments away from Lower Manhattan but never called by NORAD to interdict the Twin Towers attack.
Now, more than five years after ?Black Tuesday,? a number of crucial questions remain unanswered. Could the attacks have been prevented? If so, who in our government should be blamed for the failure? Most importantly, have our intelligence agencies undergone sufficient reform to prevent future assaults on America by al Qaeda?

Since 9/11 I have devoted virtually every working moment to an investigation designed to answer those questions. For me like most Americans that day started out uneventfully. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was on the west coast. I got up early to write and turned on CNN.
Then, as I watched the South Tower go down, a cold dull pain formed at the base of my spine. My son Christopher?s high school, was located just a few blocks away from Ground Zero. After several agonizing hours fighting my way through jammed phone circuits, word came from a relative out-of-state that Chris was safe. After he was released with his classmates, he walked more than ninety blocks uptown to join his mother and sisters in safety.
But the next morning, I learned that Ronnie Bucca, a fire marshal I?d met years before, wasn?t so lucky. I had called the FDNY headquarters at Brooklyn?s Metrotech complex, hoping for word about another friend of mine, chief fire marshal Lou Garcia. As it turned out, Garcia had escaped, if narrowly: He had rushed to Ground Zero as soon as he saw smoke licking from the North Tower, and almost died when the South Tower collapsed. I had known Louie for years. In fact, he?d introduced me to Ronnie Bucca back in 1997.
One of the house marshals answered the phone when I called.
?Lou?s okay,? he said. ?But we lost Ronnie.?
?Ronnie Bucca?? I said in disbelief. Ronnie wasn?t just an arson investigator. He was a member of an Army Reserve intelligence unit with Top Secret clearance and he?d been predicting, for years, that terrorists would return to hit the Towers again.
?He?s still missing,? said the house marshal. ?Our guys are down at the pile right now searching.?
The loss of Ronnie Bucca turned out to be one of the cruelest ironies of all the bitter stories from September 11. I?d met Ronnie in September of 1997 when I?d attended a fund raiser for the FDNY?s burn fund at the Fire Museum in Soho. I?d just written First Degree Burn, a novel about a fictional New York City fire marshal and was signing some copies when Ronnie walked up to the table and handed me one.
He cocked his head, smiled and said, ?I?m expecting something really clever now. After all, you?re a writer.?
I hesitated for a moment, then inside on the cover page I wrote: ?This is fiction. You?re the real thing.?
I had no idea at the time what an understatement that was.

THE PAUL REVERE OF THE WAR ON TERROR
In the months that followed, I was astonished by the contours of Bucca?s story. He was a former Green Beret paratrooper who worked Rescue One, the oldest heavy rescue company in the world. In 1986 he had survived a four-story fall from a burning tenement on the Upper West Side, while trying to rescue a lieutenant trapped above the fire floor. Bucca emerged from the fall with a broken back, wrists, and legs. Back then he could have retired on a three-quarter, tax-free pension, the Holy Grail for members of service in New York City. But Ronnie vowed to go back, not just to the fire department but to Rescue One, the ?special forces? of the FDNY. And within a year he did just that? earning legendary status in a company of legendary men.
Henceforth, Ronnie was known to his ?brothers? in ladder and engine companies throughout the city as ?The Flying Firefighter.?
By 1992, tired of pulling bodies out of buildings where the fires were intentionally set,Ronnie Bucca had become a marshal with the FDNY?s Bureau of Fire Investigation. On the night of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he promised one of his buddies from Rescue One who?d been injured in the blast that he?d find out who did it.
The Feds would later learn that the device had been planted beneath the Twin Towers by Ramzi Yousef, an engineer trained in Wales who grew up in Kuwait with an abiding hatred of Israel. In the early days after the bombing, however, Yousef remained a phantom, known only by the code name ?Rashed.? He fled New York for Pakistan the night of the blast and was the object of a worldwide manhunt, but the FBI seemed stymied. Bucca wanted in on the investigation, but the Bureau excluded FDNY arson investigators from the official probe.
So Ronnie Bucca, who was in an army reserve intelligence detachment, got himself assigned to the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC) at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. There, as he began to examine the intel, he learned that the FBI actually had an informant inside the bombing cell months before the blast, but after a falling-out with a Bureau ASAC, he?d withdrawn. Yousef was then sent to New York by al Qaeda. His 1,500?pound, urea-nitrate-fuel oil bomb, driven to the Towers in a yellow Ryder truck, killed six and injured one thousand.
Working back-to-back tours so that he could go to the New York Public Library and educate himself on the history of Islamic terror, Bucca made a shocking discovery: an accountant who appeared to be an al Qaeda mole working inside the FDNY. The man, an Egyptian American and an intimate of the radical cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, had obtained the blueprints of the WTC from the FDNY back in 1992?a year before the Trade Center bombing. Ronnie even found videotape of the man on the arm of the Sheikh, who was the spiritual mufti behind Yousef?s cell. But the FBI?s New York Office ignored his evidence.
Now, days after the greatest mass murder in American history, I learned from Chief Garcia that one of the New York dead was this heroic fire marshal who had warned everybody it was coming.
One night in the late 1990s, while standing outside a bar on First Avenue Ronnie had actually pointed to the Towers and and referenced King Richard the Lionhearted. This was payback, he said. Osama bin Laden had been referring to the West collectively as the ?Crusaders.? The way Ronnie saw it, this modern terror war was just the latest round in a thousand-year grudge match.
He reminded his fellow firefighters?who wear the Maltese Cross on their uniforms?that the worldwide symbol of firefighting had derived from the Knights of Malta. They had organized the first fire brigades in the eleventh century as they stormed the battlements of Saladin and the other Islamic princes.
Outside the bar, looking down First Avenue at the Towers that night, Ronnie said, ?We took their castles and now they?re gonna come back and take ours.?
When word came that they?d found Ronnie?s remains, I thought back to what he?d said and began asking the same questions millions of Americans were then asking: How could his happen? How could the best and brightest in U.S. intelligence ignore year after year of warnings? How did they get caught so off guard? Or did they?

BACK TO INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
Now, after more than a decade writing fiction, I was back developing sources inside and outside of the Bureau, pouring over the 40,000-plus pages of trial transcripts from the al Qaeda cases in the Southern District of New York and cashing in markers from my days as a trial preparation assistant in the Manhattan D.A.?s office when I was at Fordham Law School. The hunt took me from Ground Zero to the teeming slums of Manila in search of al Qaeda turncoats who might talk. I was the first print reporter to do an extensive interview with Col. Rodolfo B. Mendoza, the chief interrogator of Ramzi Yousef?s partner Abdul Hakim Murad, a pilot trained in four U.S. flight schools. It was Murad who first revealed that Yousef and his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had sent up to ten jihadis to aviation schools back then in the winter of 1995.
Out of that work came 1000 Years for Revenge. That book presented documentary evidence that Yousef, the original WTC bomber, was also the architect of 9/11. After Yousef?s conviction in 1997, responsibility for the plot had merely been shifted to his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom the Feds called KSM. I also proved, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the FBI could have stopped Yousef in 1992 before his first date with the Trade Center.
From Iraq, Dan Rather reported two stories on the book on consecutive nights for The CBS Evening News in September 2003. They can be viewed on the News Videos page of this site.


1000 Years answered many questions but there were significant questions that remained unanswered:


1) Why did the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department ignore probative evidence from Col. Mendoza and the Philippines National Police in 1995 that the Yousef-KSM cell had set in motion this planes-as-missiles plot?
2) Yousef had been brought to ground in Islamabad in 1995 via a tip to the Rewards for Justice program, He?d been arrested after a worldwide search in which his want poster was plastered on tens of thousands of matchbook covers air dropped throughout the Middle East. Yet the Justice Department and the Bureau had kept secret the identity of KSM?not even mentioning him in the press?until 1998, when the planes-as-missles plot was well underway. Again, why?

?TESTIFYING? BEFORE THE 9/11 COMMISSION
After reading 1000 Years for Revenge, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, suggested that I share my findings with his staff. As it turned out, however, the commission elected to take my ?testimony? in secret, in a windowless conference room at 26 Federal Plaza on March 15, 2004. In fact, the man who interviewed me, Dietrich Snell, was the former prosecutor of Ramzi Yousef, whose very office had failed to act on the evidence from the Philippines National Police that Yousef was tied to the planes operation.
As I saw it, Dietrich Snell should have been a witness before the 9/11 Commission, subpoenaed to testify under oath in open session. Instead he was hired as its senior counsel, and given the job of determining ?the origin of the plot??the most important question facing the 9/11 Commission. After all, f they couldn?t tell when the plot commenced, they couldn?t rightfully hold U.S. intelligence agencies responsible for not stopping it. But it soon became clear that the commissioners, and investigators like Snell, had little interest in assessing blame. Almost half of the commission?s staff was made up of alumni from the very agencies that failed to stop the attacks. In short, the foxes had been hired to guard the chicken coop.
In the end, Snell relegated the evidence I submitted from the Philippines National Police to a footnote in the 9/11 Commission?s final report. Worse, he flushed remarkable documentary evidence that al Qaeda may have been involved in the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. A cache of memos from the Bureau?s own files strongly suggested a bomb had been planted aboard the Paris-bound flight in order to secure a mistrial for Yousef in the first of two federal prosecutions. The forensic investigator who had shared the documents with me had also presented them to the Commission, but there wasn?t a word about that 1996 al Qaeda-related evidence from Ramzi Yousef in their final report.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 27, 2006, 10:36:56 PM
**Continued from above.**

OPERATION ABLE DANGER
What I didn?t know at the time was that, in late 1999 and early 2000, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the U.S. Army?s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had authorized a data mining operation called Able Danger, in which vast amounts of classified and open-source intelligence on al Qaeda was being processed using powerful ?search bots? that surfed the Web around the clock. Within months, the Able Danger analysts had amassed 2.5 terabytes of data, equal to 12 percent of all the printed pages in the Library of Congress.
By early 2000, working out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center -- the very center where Ronnie Bucca had served -- the Able Danger investigators had found key links to four of the 9/11 hijackers. They also found direct ties between bin Laden and the New York cell of Ramzi Yousef and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. This dovetailed with my findings that the two attacks on the World Trade Center were perpetrated by the same core group of al Qaeda operatives. The Abel Danger data miners later found a major al Qaeda presence in the port city of Aden, Yemen.
The active pursuit of that intelligence in the early fall of 2000 could have prevented the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October, and tipped Bureau agents to the 9/11 plot more than a year before the attacks. For reasons as yet undetermined, though, the vast cache of data-mined intelligence was ordered destroyed in April 2000. Worse, when two decorated Able Danger operatives, an army lieutenant colonel and a navy captain, sought to share this scandal with the 911 Commission, they were effectively spurned.
The senior counsel on the 9/11 Commission staff who rejected the Able Danger intel, and kept it out of the final report, was Dietrich Snell?the same ex-prosecutor who had buried my evidence that the two attacks on the Twin Towers were directly funded and controlled by bin Laden and al Qaeda.

A DIFFERENT FINDING
The 9/11 Commission Report, published in July 2004 and later nominated for a National Book Award, concluded that the original World Trade Center bombing cell was made up of a ?loosely based group of Sunni Islamists?; further, that the 9/11 plot had originated not with Ramzi Yousef in Manila in 1994, as I had demonstrated, but with Yousef?s uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who?according to Snell?s account?merely pitched the planes-as-missiles operation to Osama bin Laden in 1996. The evidence I?d obtained from the Philippines National Police demonstrated that the Yousef-KSM Manila cell was funded directly by bin Laden via his brother-in-law, but the Commission, with the backing of Snell and other ex-Feds, concluded that KSM wasn?t even a member of al Qaeda in 1996.
By mid-2004 I was getting closer to the truth. The 1996 FBI 302 memos I?d tried to share with the commission showed that the Bureau, and prosecutors from the Justice Department, had affirmatively covered up evidence of an active al Qaeda cell in New York City. The same intelligence revealed the existence of a bin Laden-sponsored plot to hijack U.S. airliners, designed to pressure the U.S. to free the blind Sheikh and Ramzi Yousef, who was locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Similar threat reporting would show up in Presidential Daily Briefings in 1998 and 2001?a fact that later made headlines?but my findings revealed that the FBI had buried identical intelligence years before.
Why would America?s most elite law enforcement and investigative agencies suppress such critical intel?
Their motive could be traced to a most surprising quarter: organized crime. As a phone book-sized file of documentary evidence from prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York reveals FBI investigators and federal prosecutors were desperate to avoid a scandal over an alleged corrupt relationship between R. Lindley DeVecchio, a senior supervisory special agent in the Bureau?s New York Office, (NYO) and a notorious hit man named Gregory Scarpa Sr., whose two-year war of succession in the Colombo crime family had left twelve people dead, including two innocent bystanders.
Through a bizarre turn of events, the Yousef evidence came from the killer?s son, Greg Scarpa Jr., a junior wiseguy who happened to inhabit a jail cell adjacent to Yousef?s at the MCC. But rather than risk losing a series of sixty Mafia cases in the Eastern District built on tainted evidence from Scarpa Sr., the Feds decided to bury the intel.
One of the lead prosecutors who disconnected those dots, I learned, was Patrick Fitzgerald, then the head of Organized Crime and Terrorism in New York?s Southern District. Considered the Justice Department?s leading authority on bin Laden, Fitzgerald would go on to become U.S. Attorney in Chicago, and special prosecutor in he ongoing investigation of media leaks regarding former CIA operative Valerie Plame, which ultimately cleared White House aide Karl Rove, while indicting Lewis ?Scooter? Libby, top aide to Vice President Cheney.

AL QAEDA MEETS THE MOB
Much of this tangled tale was laid out in great detail in my second investigative book Cover Up, published in September of 2004. It documented an ends/means decision by senior FBI and Justice Department officials to suppress the DeVecchio scandal, preserve those mob cases, and brand the Yousef-Scarpa Jr. intelligence a ?hoax? and a ?scam.? Until the cover up, that intelligence?chronicled in dozens of FBI 302s and notes from Yousef?was considered so important to the Feds that they gave Scarpa Jr. a camera to photograph it and even set up a phony Mafia front company, the ?Roma Corporation,? allowing them to monitor Yousef?s outside calls.
By the fall of 1996, the Bureau?s internal affairs probe on DeVecchio was closed and Yousef was convicted along with Murad and a third conspirator. Dietrich Snell and Mike Garcia, the current U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, had won a decisive victory\and the Feds soon began to believe that they were winning the war against al Qaeda. But the burial of that evidence, which prevented other U.S. intelligence agencies from appreciating al Qaeda?s true breadth and depth, would have shocking repercussions.
As I looked back on the Justice Department?s counter-terrorism track record, I concluded that many of the dots left unconnected by the FBI and DOJ on the road to 9/11 appeared to have been the result of an intentional obscuring of the evidence.
Continuing to work sources and examine the reams of documentary evidence generated in the SDNY al Qaeda cases, I came to the conclusion that the FBI?s failure to prevent the African embassy bombings in 1998, the deadly assault on U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and the 9/11 attacks themselves, went beyond gross negligence. It seemed as if a number of FBI officials and federal prosecutors at the heart of the bin Laden hunt realized that they had been outgunned for years. So they had acted affirmatively to partition the intelligence.
I believe that their motive was to sanitize the record and thus prevent the public from understanding the full depth of the FBI/DOJ missteps in the years leading up to September 11. So ?walls? were intentionally built, and key intelligence was withheld from other agencies, including the CIA and DIA. In any other government enterprise, the consequences might have been more benign. but in the realm of national security that compartmentalization of intelligence proved fatal.
By the third anniversary of 9/11, the Scarpa-Yousef evidence had been published in Cover Up. Sixteen months later, DeVecchio would finally be arraigned on murder charges stemming, in part, from that investigation. But many unanswered questions remained. I wanted to know the names of the men and women in the shadows at Justice who had suppressed the evidence and hidden the truth behind al Qaeda all those years. I also wanted to learn why the Bush 43 Administration would act to obstruct an investigation into the destruction of the Able Danger intel, a scandal that took place during the Clinton years? It took me months of further digging before the depth of the government?s deception started to become clear.

ALI MOHAMED WAS THE KEY
In the years leading to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than a former Egyptian army captain turned CIA operative, Special Forces advisor, and FBI informant named Ali Mohamed. Spying first for the Central Intelligence Agency and later the FBI, Mohamed even succeeded in penetrating the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg?while simultaneously training the cell that blew up the World Trade Center in 1993. He went on to train Osama bin Laden?s personal bodyguard, and photographed the U.S. embassy in Kenya taking the surveillance pictures bin Laden himself used to target the suicide truck bomb that killed 224 and injured thousands there in 1998.
Mohamed accomplished all that fully nine years after the FBI first photographed the cell he trained using automatic weapons at a firing range on Long Island. He lived the quiet life of a Silicon Valley computer executive while slipping off to Afghanistan and the Sudan to train some of al Qaeda?s most lethal terrorists in bomb-making and assassination tradecraft. He was so trusted by bin Laden that Ali was given the job of moving the Saudi ?Emir? from Afghanistan to Khartoum in 1991?much of that time maintaining his status as an FBI informant who worked his Bureau control agent like a mole.
Mohamed twice played host to al Qaeda?s second-in-command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who traveled to the U.S. in the 1990s to raise money for the Jihad. He used his Army vacation to hunt down elite Soviet Spetsnaz commandos in Afghanistan, and later toyed with gullible special agents in New York and San Francisco while he learned the inner workings of the FBI?s al Qaeda playbook. In the annals of espionage, few men have moved in an out of the deep black world between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed?known to his al Qaeda brothers as Ali Amiriki, or ?Ali the American.? A deep-penetration al Qaeda sleeper, he succeeded as a triple agent, gaining access to the most sensitive intelligence in the U.S. counter-terrorism arsenal.
Next to Ramzi Yousef, the bomb maker who plotted both attacks on The Twin Towers, Mohamed remains the greatest enigma in the war on terror. Brazenly slipping past watch lists, he moved in and out of the U.S. with impunity for years, marrying an American woman, becoming a naturalized citizen, seeking top secret security clearance from a Silicon Valley defense contractor and working for the FBI while servicing the top echelons of al Qaeda.
The story of Ali Mohamed holds the key to the full truth about how bin Laden planned, financed, and executed the 9/11 attacks. He?s also a living witness to how the best and the brightest in the U.S. intelligence community were repeatedly outflanked for two decades, from the death of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 through the attacks of September 11, 2001.
My conclusion in Cover Up was that the FBI had buried key al Qaeda intelligence to avoid a scandal over tainted Mafia evidence. But as unbelievable as that story seemed, the investigation took on even stranger twists and turns when Ali Mohamed came into focus. For example, almost from the moment the Bureau ?opened? him as an informant back in 1992, Ali?s main control agent on the West Coast became embroiled in a grisly triple murder case that distracted him from fully appreciating Mohamed?s lethal dedication to stealing America?s secrets for the jihad. Patrick Fitzgerald himself called Ali ?the most dangerous man I ever met,? and soon, as I began to fill in the blanks on him, I encountered evidence more astonishing than any fiction I had ever written.

WORKING THE ?MURDER BOOK?
For this phase of the investigation I decided to work the research the way cold case detectives work a homicide file, known in many squad rooms as ?the murder book.? To begin with, I reread more than twenty-five four-inch thick three-ring binders of research from my first two books. I then went back through the summaries I?d made of the forty thousand pages of trial testimony in the SDNY?s al Qaeda-related cases, including the first World Trade Center bombing trial in 1994; the Day of Terror trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in 1995; the Bojinka trial of Ramzi Yousef and his Manila coconspirators in 1996; the second WTC trial?this one with Yousef as a defendant?in 1997; and the African embassy bombing trial, known formally as United States v. bin Laden, which began in February 2001, seven months before 9/11.
Then, as cold case detectives do, I read the ?book? out of order, examining whole files randomly in the hope that the exercise would provoke a new lead. I soon realized that there was still a major case still missing: the 1991 murder trial of El Sayyid Nosair, who had gunned down Rabbi Meier Kahane the night of November 5, 1990. Incredibly, despite a wealth of evidence pointing to an international terrorist conspiracy with al Qaeda at its core, that case had been tried as a ?lone gunman? shooting by the office of the New York County District Attorney. Examining that transcript, and the later coverage of the trial by The New York Times, led me to the discovery of a New Jersey check cashing store where Nosair had rented a mailbox in 1990. As unbelievable as it may seem, that precise location, doors away from the blind Sheikh?s New Jersey mosque, was where two of the 9/11 hijackers associated with AA #77 pilot Hani Hanjour, picked up their fake IDs in July 2001.
All the Bureau had to do was sit on that check cashing business and they would have been able
to penetrate the 9/11 plot.
The Nosair mailbox discovery was proof positive that in order to fully understand the 9/11 plot, any thorough investigation had to go back years before the time period covered by the 9/11 Commission. When I did that, and reread the ?murder book? on Yousef?s suicide-hijack plot, the eureka moment came when I realized that the key to the FBI failures?and to the subsequent cover-up of evidence that disconnected the dots?was Ali Mohamed. With further probing, I discovered that this man, known by fifteen aliases, was the enigma behind the destruction of the Able Danger intelligence as well.
Ali Mohamed could have been a one-man 9/11 Commission. He held the key to how the best and the brightest in the FBI and Department of Justice failed to stop bin Laden?s juggernaut. And yet the Feds had him buried, confined in witness protection somewhere near New York?the perfect al Qaeda spy who knew all the secrets. When I had finished reworking the ?murder book? on 9/11, I knew that if I could tell his story, I would get closer to the truth.

THE INVESTIGATORS WHO PAVED THE WAY
All investigative reporters stand on the shoulders of those who came before them, and the Ali Mohamed story is no exception. As I began to piece together the fragments of intelligence on his triple life, a series of seminal news pieces helped me form a grid. Among the first investigators to fully appreciate Mohamed?s deception was Steven Emerson, who examined him in American Jihad back in 2002. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Lance Williams and Erin McCormick did an outstanding series on Ali and his Silicon Valley cohort Khalid Dahab. Joseph Neff and John Sullivan did a pair of excellent investigative stories for the Raleigh News & Observer on Ali?s years at Fort Bragg. Additional pieces that helped form my initial blueprint came from Associated Press writers Tom Hays and Sharon Theimer, Peter Waldman, Gerald F. Seib and Jerry Markon in the Wall Street Journal, and Chicago Tribune reporters Andrew Martin and Michael J. Berens.
But by far the most comprehensive reporting on Mohamed was done by Benjamin Weiser, who covers the SDNY for the New York Times. His co-writer on several key pieces was Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen. To the degree I?ve been able to add to the body of knowledge on al Qaeda?s master spy, I remain indebted to all of them.

THE SPY OF MANY NAMES
TRIPLE CROSS represents the most thorough examination to date of one of the most secret espionage failures in American history: the story of Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, aka Ali Abul Saoud Mustafa, aka Ali Aboualacoud, aka Abu Omar, aka Haydara, aka Ahmed Bahaa Adam, aka Abu Mohammed ali Amriki, aka Ali Nasser Mohamed Taymour, aka Abu Osama, aka Bakhbola, aka Bili Bili. Diamond merchant, Army sergeant, leather dealer, suburban husband, special ops assassin, security guard, computer specialist, CIA asset, FBI informant?and the man who literally wrote al Qaeda?s book on terror?Ali Mohamed wore many faces, perhaps none as secretive as the one he presented to his American wife, Linda, who talked to me for the first time.
Because Ali Mohamed supplies the puzzle pieces that complete the story of FBI negligence on the road to 9/11 I will briefly cover some of the ground examined in 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up. It?s now clear that Ramzi Yousef was Osama bin Laden?s chief operational point man, followed after his capture by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But over the years Ali Mohamed emerged as al Qaeda?s chief intelligence officer, and the man bin Laden trusted with his life. In bin Laden?s ingenious but diabolical plan to attack America, the roles of these two men meshed perfectly. The bomb maker and the spy, two lethal components in al Qaeda?s thirteen-year war against the ?Crusaders.? Which terrorist was more important? That is for the reader to decide. But as Sun Tzu wrote in the 6th century B.C., ?all war is deception,? and Ali Mohamed was one of the most capable deceivers this nation has ever embraced.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 27, 2006, 10:42:15 PM
Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI
Ex-Silicon Valley resident plotted embassy attacks
- Lance Williams and Erin McCormick, Chronicle Staff Writers
Sunday, November 4, 2001


A former U.S. Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden's bodyguards and helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya was a U.S. government informant during much of his terrorist career, according to sources familiar with his case.

Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen and longtime Silicon Valley resident who pleaded guilty last year to terrorism charges, approached the Central Intelligence Agency more than 15 years ago and offered to inform on Middle Eastern terrorist groups, a U.S. government official said.

Later, according to the sources, Mohamed spent years as an FBI informant while concealing his own deep involvement in the al Qaeda terrorist band: training bin Laden's bodyguards and Islamic guerrillas in camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan; bringing Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is bin Laden's chief deputy, to the Bay Area on a covert fund-raising mission; and planning the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, in which more than 200 people died.

The story of Mohamed's dual roles as FBI informant and bin Laden terrorist - - and the freedom he had to operate unchecked in the United States -- illustrates the problems facing U.S. intelligence services as they attempt to penetrate the shadowy, close-knit world of al Qaeda, experts said.

Mohamed "clearly was a double agent," Larry C. Johnson, a former deputy director in the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism and a onetime CIA employee, said in an interview.

Johnson said the CIA had found Mohamed unreliable and severed its relationship with him shortly after Mohamed approached the agency in 1984. Johnson faulted the FBI for later using Mohamed as an informant, saying the bureau should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist, deeply involved in plotting violence against the United States and its allies.

"It's possible that the FBI thought they had control of him and were trying to use him, but what's clear is that they did not have control," Johnson said. "The FBI assumed he was their source, but his loyalties lay elsewhere."

The affair was "a study in incompetence, in how not to run an agent," Johnson said.

FBI spokesman Joseph Valiquette declined to comment on Mohamed, as did a spokesman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose office prosecuted the case of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

A law enforcement source familiar with the case said the FBI had followed appropriate procedures in attempting to obtain crucial information from Mohamed, whom he conceded was "double-dealing" and difficult.

"When you operate assets and informants, they're holding the cards," this source said. "They can choose to be 100 percent honest or 10 percent honest. You don't have much control over them.

"Maybe (the informant) gives you a great kernel of information, and then you can't find him for eight weeks. Is that a management problem? Hindsight is 20/20."

Mohamed, 49, is a former Egyptian Army major, fluent in Arabic and English, who after his arrest became known as bin Laden's "California connection." Last year, when he pleaded guilty in the embassy bombing case, he told a federal judge that he first was drawn to terrorism in 1981, when he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group implicated in that year's assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

For almost as long as he was a terrorist, Mohamed also was in contact with U.S. intelligence, according to court records and sources.

In 1984, he quit the Egyptian Army to work as a counterterrorism security expert for EgyptAir. After that, he offered to become a CIA informant, said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The agency tried him out, but because he told other possible terrorists or people possibly associated with terrorist groups that he was working for the CIA, clearly he was not suitable," the official said.

The CIA cut off contact with Mohamed and put his name on a "watch list" aimed at blocking his entrance to the United States, according to the official.

Nevertheless, Mohamed got a visa one year later. He ultimately became a U.S.

citizen after marrying a Santa Clara woman. In 1986, he joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. He was posted to Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the elite Special Forces.

There he worked as a supply sergeant for a Green Beret unit, then as an instructor on Middle Eastern affairs in the John F. Kennedy special warfare school.

Mohamed's behavior and his background were so unusual that his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, became convinced that he was both a "dangerous fanatic" and an operative of U.S. intelligence.

Anderson, now a businessman in North Carolina, said that on their first meeting in 1988, Mohamed told him, "Anwar Sadat was a traitor and he had to die."

Later that year, Anderson said, Mohamed announced that -- contrary to all Army regulations -- he intended to go on vacation to Afghanistan to join the Islamic guerrillas in their civil war against the Soviets. A month later, he returned, boasting that he had killed two Soviet soldiers and giving away as souvenirs what he claimed were their uniform belts.

Anderson said he wrote detailed reports aimed at getting Army intelligence to investigate Mohamed -- and have him court-martialed and deported -- but the reports were ignored.

"I think you or I would have a better chance of winning Powerball (a lottery), than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a visa, getting to California . . . getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit," he said. "That just doesn't happen. "

It was equally unthinkable that an ordinary American GI would go unpunished after fighting in a foreign war, he said.

Anderson said all this convinced him that Mohamed was "sponsored" by a U.S. intelligence service. "I assumed the CIA," he said.

In 1989, Mohamed left the Army and returned to Santa Clara, where he worked as a security guard and at a home computer business.

Between then and his 1998 arrest, he said in court last year, Mohamed was deeply involved in bin Laden's al Qaeda. He spent months abroad, training bin Laden's fighters in camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. While in Africa, he scouted the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, target of the 1998 bombing. In this country,

he helped al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top aide, enter the country with a fake passport and tour U.S. mosques, raising money later funneled to al Qaeda.

According to Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert and author who has written about the case, Mohamed by the early 1990s had also established himself as an FBI informant.

"He agreed to serve (the FBI) and provide information, but in fact he was working for the bad guys and insulating himself from scrutiny from other law enforcement agencies," Emerson said in an interview.

One particularly troubling aspect of the case, Emerson says, was that Mohamed's role as an FBI informant gave bin Laden important insights into U.S. efforts to penetrate al Qaeda.

The case shows "the sophistication of the bin Laden network, and how they were toying with us," he said.

Some information about the nature of Mohamed's contacts with the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies is contained in an FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in New York at the time of his 1998 arrest. The document describes contacts between Mohamed and the FBI and Defense Department officials.

At times, Mohamed made alarming admissions about his links to the al Qaeda terrorists, seemingly without fear of being arrested. Mohamed willfully deceived the agents about his activities, according to the affidavit.

In 1993, the affidavit says, Mohamed was questioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after a bin Laden aide was caught trying to enter the United States with Mohamed's driver's license and a false passport.

Mohamed acknowledged traveling to Vancouver to help the terrorist sneak into the United States and admitted working closely with bin Laden's group. Yet he was so unconcerned about being arrested that he told the Mounties he hoped the interview wouldn't hurt his chances of getting a job as an FBI interpreter.

(According to the affidavit, he had indeed applied for the FBI position but never got it.)

Later that year, Mohamed -- again seemingly without concern for consequences -- told the FBI that he had trained bin Laden followers in intelligence and anti-hijacking techniques in Afghanistan, the affidavit says.

In January 1995, Mohamed applied for a U.S. security clearance, in hopes of becoming a security guard with a Santa Clara defense contractor. His application failed to mention ever traveling to Pakistan or Afghanistan, trips he had told the FBI about earlier. In three interviews with Defense Department officials, who conducted a background check on him, he claimed he had never been a terrorist.

"I have never belonged to a terrorist organization, but I have been approached by organizations that could be called terrorist," he told the interviewers.

According to the affidavit, he told FBI agents in 1997 that he had trained bin Laden's bodyguards, saying he loved bin Laden and believed in him. Mohamed also said it was "obvious" that the United States was the enemy of Muslim people.

In August 1998, after the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, he told the FBI that he knew who did it, but refused to provide the names.

Two weeks later, after lying to a U.S. grand jury investigating the embassy bombings, he was arrested. He pleaded guilty last year, but he has never been sentenced and is once again believed to be providing information to the government -- this time from a prison cell.

"There's a hell of a lot (U.S. officials) didn't know about Ali Mohamed," said Harvey Kushner, a terrorism expert and criminology professor at the University of Long Island. "He infiltrated our armed services and duped them."

Yet, Kushner said, such duplicitous interactions may be a necessary component of intelligence work.

"I hate to say it, but these relationships are something we should be involved in more of. That's the nasty (part) of covert operations. We're not dealing with people we can trust."

E-mail the reporters at emccormick@sfchronicle.com and lmwilliams@sfchronicle. com.

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/11/04/MN117081.DTL


Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 27, 2006, 11:36:13 PM
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/

Today's Reading Assignment

From A.J. Strata, on the seamy side of the Litvinenko file--the stuff you won't find in the MSM. Thanks to A.J.'s digging, we know that Mr. Litvinenko, the ex-KGB officer who was assassinated in London last week, had extensive ties to Chechen terrorists and a corrupt Russian oligarch with his own Chechen connection. In Vladimir Putin's world view, that was apparently sufficient reason to kill Litvinenko, with a lethal dose of polonium-210. Readers will note that the latest MSNBC article notes the presence of the oligarch and Chechen leaders in Britain (as reason for "strained relations between London and Moscow). But the MSNBC account fails to connect them to Mr. Litvinenko, who (in death) is becoming the poster boy for human rights and individual liberties.

Litvinenko's death is another reminder that things are rarely black-and-white in the spook world. Getting chummy with a corrupt oligarch and his Chechen friends made Litvinenko a threat to the Russians, his former KGB colleagues (now running the show in Moscow) certainly know how to deal with that sort of problem. Looks like the boys from Active Means Branch (Department T of the KGB's old First Chief Directorate) are still in business.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 27, 2006, 11:39:33 PM
**Links/article from the above article.**

http://www.strata-sphere.com/blog/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Radioactive substance found in London
Two new sites probed; 3 people sent to clinic, but health risk said to be low
The Associated Press
Updated: 12:27 p.m. MT Nov 27, 2006

LONDON - Traces of radiation linked to the poisoning death of a former KGB agent turned up Monday at two more sites in London, and three people who showed symptoms of contamination were being tested for the deadly toxin. The government has ordered a formal inquest into the death.

Britain?s Home Secretary John Reid appealed for calm, saying the tests on the three people were only a precaution. High doses of polonium-210 ? a rare radioactive element usually manufactured in specialized nuclear facilities ? were found in the body of Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-spy turned Kremlin critic who died Thursday at a London hospital.

?The nature of this radiation is such that it does not travel over long distances, a few centimeters at most, and therefore there is no need for public alarm,? Reid said in a special address to the House of Commons.

Litvinenko, 43, died of heart failure Thursday after falling ill from what doctors said was polonium-210 poisoning. The substance is deadly if ingested or inhaled.

Six sites showed traces of radiation linked to the poisoning, including a bar in London?s Millennium Hotel, a branch of Itsu Sushi near Piccadilly Circus, Litvinenko?s house in North London and a section of the hospital where he was treated when he fell ill on Nov. 1. Two other sites ? an office block in London?s west end and an address in the posh neighborhood of Mayfair ? also showed traces of radiation, according to residents.

All the locations except Litvinenko?s home are in west London, separated by about a mile.

The sushi restaurant and part of the hospital have been closed for decontamination.

Low public health risk
Of hundreds of people who called a hot line over concerns they may be at risk, three exhibited symptoms that health officials thought should be examined, said Katherine Lewis, a spokeswoman for the Health Protection Agency. She refused to elaborate.

Derek Hill, an expert in radiological science at the University College London, said the public health risk was low.

Although an autopsy has not started yet because of concerns over radioactivity, an inquest into his death could begin as early as Thursday, according to Matt Cornish, a spokesman for Camden Council. The local government body oversees the North London Coroner?s Court. The opening is a legal formality, and such inquests are almost always adjourned immediately, sometimes for months.

Coroner?s inquests in Britain are meant to determine the cause of death but they sometimes cast blame.

British officials have avoided blaming Moscow for the Litvinenko?s death but emergency talks continued Monday and the issue threatened to overshadow negotiations over energy and Russia?s cooperation on Iran?s nuclear ambitions.

In the strongest comments leveled at Moscow since Litvinenko?s death, Cabinet minister Peter Hain on Sunday accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of presiding over ?huge attacks on individual liberty and on democracy? and said that relations between London and Moscow were at a difficult stage.

Earlier 'murky murder'
Hain said Putin?s tenure had been clouded by incidents ?including an extremely murky murder of the senior Russian journalist? Anna Politkovskaya. Litvinenko had been investigating her murder.

The Kremlin has denied any involvement.

Reid, responding to opposition demands for an explanation of how the deadly polonium-210 came to be in Britain, said the radioactive element is strictly regulated and is used by about 130 sites in Britain. He did not elaborate.

?There has been no recent report of the loss or theft of a polonium-210 source in England or Wales,? Reid said.

Litvinenko told police he believed he was poisoned Nov. 1 while investigating the October slaying of Politkovskaya, another critic of Putin?s government. The ex-spy was moved to intensive care last week after his hair fell out, his throat became swollen and his immune and nervous systems suffered severe damage.

London?s Metropolitan Police said they were investigating it as a ?suspicious death? rather than murder. They have not ruled out the possibility that Litvinenko may have poisoned himself.

? 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15917680/

==============

Comment inserted by CD:  Note that GM has several posts this morning on this thread, beginning with Reply #2, not just this one.


Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 28, 2006, 12:57:07 PM
http://www.douglasfarah.com/

Monday November 27, 2006
What is Russia's Real Game (Again-With Viktor Bout)

What is Russia?s real role in the efforts to combat terrorism? While the Bush administration seems to cling to the notion that Russia is an ally, there are several developments that point in the opposite direction.

The first, of course, is the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, where the foul play of the Russian security apparatus, closely tied to Mr. Putin, is the prime suspect. The fact that the murder was committed in London and dismissed out of hand as unimportant by Mr. Putin show both a new boldness and the lack of any pretense of accountability by the Russians.

There is also the arming of Iran and help with the Iranian nuclear program, and the close intelligence ties to Hezbollah.

But there is another, barely noticed development in the United States that should be extremely worrisome. A small sporting goods store in rural Pennsylvania was just busted for selling telescopic rifle scopes, binoculars and optics, which need State Department export authorization, to a Russian company that did not have such a license.

As the my colleauge and co-author Stephen Braun write in the Los Angeles Times, the affidavit for carrying out the search states that the Russian company is ?Tactica Ltd., a Moscow firm that was described by investigators as ?a member of the ?Vympel Group,? which is a known identifier for an elite counter-terrorism unit that is controlled by the Russian Federal Security Service [formerly the KGB].??

So, we have Russian intelligence agents illegally buying restricted items in the United States. But it gets better.

A good chunk of the money for the purchases, according to federal officials, came from (hold on Bout fans) Rockman Ltd, a Bulgarian firm owned by Sergei Bout, who has often run Bout companies involved in weapons transactions. As one U.S official told the Times, ?Sergei and Viktor?s companies are all under the same umbrella.?

The rest of the money came from Haji Ibrahim, a Pakistani man wanted on federal charges of heroin trafficking. Nice bunch!

But the United States, despite the publicly-available affidavit, has said nothing about the case. It was unsealed just as Bush was preparing for his sit-down with Putin on his way to Southeast Asia.

Another factor: The Russian weapons used by Hezbollah in the July fighting with Israel were new and routed through Syria. Intelligence sources say Bout was spotted in Beirut during the fighting, shortly before the sophisticated armor-piercing Fagot and Kornet anti-tank missiles were discovered. Interesting coincidence. When the Israelis presented the Russians with overwhelming evidence of the armament, it was publicly dismissed, but a senior official in the Russian arms export enterprise was reportedly dismissed to placate the outside world.

Finally, there are Bout?s actions in the Horn of Africa where, again with official Russian support, his aircraft have been spotted delivering weapons to the Islamic Court militias in Somalia and arming the Islamist allies in Eritrea.

If Putin in our ally we sure don?t need any enemies.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2006, 10:44:13 AM
Today's NY Times:
=============

When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003, he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long been interested in international relations: he had studied Russian politics and interned at the U.S. consulate in Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications of politically persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek fluent in Web-page engineering, and he spent hours every day chatting online with friends and updating his own blog. When he was hired by the D.I.A., he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with: search engines that can read minds, he figured. Desktop video conferencing with colleagues around the world. If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. “The reality,” he later wrote ruefully, “was a colossal letdown.”
The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink — the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network — the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three-letter agency — from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands — used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog — that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.

Something had gone horribly awry, Burton realized. Theoretically, the intelligence world ought to revolve around information sharing. If F.B.I. agents discover that Al Qaeda fund-raising is going on in Brooklyn, C.I.A. agents in Europe ought to be able to know that instantly. The Internet flourished under the credo that information wants to be free; the agencies, however, had created their online networks specifically to keep secrets safe, locked away so only a few could see them. This control over the flow of information, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks. All the clues were there — Al Qaeda associates studying aviation in Arizona, the flight student Zacarias Moussaoui arrested in Minnesota, surveillance of a Qaeda plotting session in Malaysia — but none of the agents knew about the existence of the other evidence. The report concluded that the agencies failed to “connect the dots.”

By way of contrast, every night when Burton went home, he was reminded of how good the everyday Internet had become at connecting dots. “Web 2.0” technologies that encourage people to share information — blogs, photo-posting sites like Flickr or the reader-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia — often made it easier to collaborate with others. When the Orange Revolution erupted in Ukraine in late 2004, Burton went to Technorati, a search engine that scours the “blogosphere,” to find the most authoritative blog postings on the subject. Within minutes, he had found sites with insightful commentary from American expatriates who were talking to locals in Kiev and on-the-fly debates among political analysts over what it meant. Because he and his fellow spies were stuck with outdated technology, they had no comparable way to cooperate — to find colleagues with common interests and brainstorm online.

Burton, who has since left the D.I.A., is not alone in his concern. Indeed, throughout the intelligence community, spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind — and talk among themselves about how to catch up. Some of the country’s most senior intelligence thinkers have joined the discussion, and surprisingly, many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the world’s teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker online about their favorite bands. Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn’t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it’ s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?

The job of an analyst used to be much more stable — even sedate. In the ’70s and ’80s, during the cold war, an intelligence analyst would show up for work at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., or at the National Security Agency compound in Fort Meade, Md., and face a mess of paper. All day long, tips, memos and reports from field agents would arrive: cables from a covert-ops spy in Moscow describing a secret Soviet meeting, or perhaps fresh pictures of a missile silo. An analyst’s job was to take these raw pieces of intelligence and find patterns in the noise. In a crisis, his superiors might need a quick explanation of current events to pass on to their agency heads or to Congress. But mostly he was expected to perform long-term “strategic analysis” — to detect entirely new threats that were still forming.

And during the cold war, threats formed slowly. The Soviet Union was a ponderous bureaucracy that moved at the glacial speed of the five-year plan. Analysts studied the emergence of new tanks and missiles, pieces of hardware that took years to develop. One year, an analyst might report that the keel for a Soviet nuclear submarine had been laid; a few years later, a follow-up report would describe the submarine’s completion; even more years later, a final report would detail the sea trials. Writing reports was thus a leisurely affair, taking weeks or months; thousands of copies were printed up and distributed via interoffice mail. If an analyst’s report impressed his superiors, they’d pass it on to their superiors, and they to theirs — until, if the analyst was very lucky, it landed eventually in the president’s inner circle. But this sort of career achievement was rare. Of the thousands of analyst reports produced each year, the majority sat quietly gathering dust on agency shelves, unread by anyone.

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Published: December 3, 2006
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Analysts also did not worry about anything other than their corners of the world. Russia experts focused on Russia, Nicaragua ones on Nicaragua. Even after the cold war ended, the major spy agencies divided up the world: the F.B.I. analyzed domestic crime, the C.I.A. collected intelligence internationally and military spy agencies, like the National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, evaluated threats to the national defense. If an analyst requested information from another agency, that request traveled through elaborate formal channels. The walls between the agencies were partly a matter of law. The charters of the C.I.A. and the defense intelligence agencies prohibited them from spying on American citizens, under the logic that the intrusive tactics needed to investigate foreign threats would violate constitutional rights if applied at home. The F.B.I. even had an internal separation: agents investigating terrorist activity would not share information with those investigating crimes, worried that secrets gleaned from tailing Al Qaeda operatives might wind up publicly exposed in a criminal trial.

 

Then on Sept. 12, 2001, analysts showed up at their desks and faced a radically altered job. Islamist terrorists, as 9/11 proved, behaved utterly unlike the Soviet Union. They were rapid-moving, transnational and cellular. A corner-store burglar in L.A. might turn out to be a Qaeda sympathizer raising money for a plot being organized overseas. An imam in suburban Detroit could be recruiting local youths to send to the Sudan for paramilitary training. Al Qaeda operatives organized their plots in a hivelike fashion, with collaborators from Afghanistan to London using e-mail, instant messaging and Yahoo groups; rarely did a single mastermind run the show. To disrupt these new plots, some intelligence officials concluded, American agents and analysts would need to cooperate just as fluidly — trading tips quickly among agents and agencies. Following the usual chain of command could be fatal. “To fight a network like Al Qaeda, you need to behave like a network,” John Arquilla, the influential professor of defense at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me.

It was a fine vision. But analysts were saddled with technology that was designed in the cold war. They now at least had computers, and intelligence arrived as electronic messages instead of paper memos. But their computers still communicated almost exclusively with people inside their agencies. When the intelligence services were computerized in the ’90s, they had digitally replicated their cold-war divisions — each one building a multimillion-dollar system that allowed the agency to share information internally but not readily with anyone outside.

The computer systems were designed to be “air gapped.” The F.B.I. terminals were connected to one another — but not to the computers at any other agency, and vice versa. Messages written on the C.I.A.’s network (which they still quaintly called “cables”) were purely internal. To get a message to the F.B.I. required a special communication called a “telegraphic dissemination.” Each agency had databases to amass intelligence, but because of the air gap, other agencies could not easily search them. The divisions were partly because of turf battles and partly because of legal restrictions — but they were also technological. Mike Scheuer, an adviser to the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit until 2004, told me he had been frustrated by the inability of the systems to interpenetrate. “About 80 percent of C.I.A.-F.B.I. difficulties came from the fact that we couldn’t communicate with one another,” he said. Scheuer told me he would often send a document electronically to the F.B.I., then call to make sure the agents got it. “And they’d say, ‘We can’t find it, can you fax it?’ And then we’d call, and they’d say, ‘Well, the system said it came in, but we still can’t find it — so could you courier it over?’ ” “

These systems have served us very well for five decades,” Dale Meyerrose told me when I spoke with him recently. But now, he said, they’re getting in the way. “The 16 intelligence organizations of the U.S. are without peer. They are the best in the world. The trick is, are they collectively the best?”

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Last year, Meyerrose, a retired Air Force major general, was named the chief information officer — the head computer guy, as it were — for the office of the director of national intelligence. Established by Congress in 2004, the D.N.I.’s office has a controversial mandate: it is supposed to report threats to the president and persuade the intelligence agencies to cooperate more closely. Both tasks were formerly the role of the C.I.A. director, but since the C.I.A. director had no budgetary power over the other agencies, they rarely heeded his calls to pass along their secrets. So the new elevated position of national-intelligence director was created; ever since, it has been filled by John Negroponte. Last December, Negroponte hired Meyerrose and gave him the daunting task of developing mechanisms to allow the various agencies’ aging and incompatible systems to swap data. Right away, Meyerrose ordered some sweeping changes. In the past, each agency chose its own outside contractor to build customized software — creating proprietary systems, each of which stored data in totally different file formats. From now on, Meyerrose said, each agency would have to build new systems using cheaper, off-the-shelf software so they all would be compatible. But bureaucratic obstacles were just a part of the problem Meyerrose faced. He was also up against something deeper in the DNA of the intelligence services. “We’ve had this ‘need to know’ culture for years,” Meyerrose said. “Well, we need to move to a ‘need to share’ philosophy.”


There was already one digital pipeline that joined the agencies (though it had its own limitations): Intelink, which connects most offices in each intelligence agency. It was created in 1994 after C.I.A. officials saw how the Web was rapidly transforming the way private-sector companies shared information. Intelink allows any agency to publish a Web page, or put a document or a database online, secure in the knowledge that while other agents and analysts can access it, the outside world cannot.

So why hasn’t Intelink given young analysts instant access to all secrets from every agency? Because each agency’s databases, and the messages flowing through their internal pipelines, are not automatically put onto Intelink. Agency supervisors must actively decide what data they will publish on the network — and their levels of openness vary. Some departments have created slick, professional sites packed full of daily alerts and searchable collections of their reports going back years. Others have put up little more than a “splash page” announcing they exist. Operational information — like details of a current covert action — is rarely posted, usually because supervisors fear that a leak could jeopardize a delicate mission.

Nonetheless, Intelink has grown to the point that it contains thousands of agency sites and several hundred databases. Analysts at the various agencies generate 50,000 official reports a year, many of which are posted to the network. The volume of material online is such that analysts now face a new problem: data overload. Even if they suspect good information might exist on Intelink, it is often impossible to find it. The system is poorly indexed, and its internal search tools perform like the pre-Google search engines of the ’90s.“

One of my daily searches is for words like ‘Afghanistan’ or ‘Taliban,’ ” I was told by one young military analyst who specializes in threats from weapons of mass destruction. (He requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak to reporters.) “So I’m looking for reports from field agents saying stuff like, ‘I’m out here, and here’s what I saw,’ ” he continued. “But I get to my desk and I’ve got, like, thousands a day — mountains of information, and no way to organize it.”

Adding to the information glut, there’s an increasingly large amount of data to read outside of Intelink. Intelligence analysts are finding it more important to keep up with “open source” information — nonclassified material published in full public view, like newspapers, jihadist blogs and discussion boards in foreign countries. This adds ever more calories to the daily info diet. The W.M.D. analyst I spoke to regularly reads the blog of Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor known for omnivorous linking to, and acerbic analysis of, news from the Middle East. “He’s not someone spies would normally pay attention to, but now he’s out there — and he’s a subject-matter expert, right?” the analyst said.

Intelligence hoarding presented one set of problems, but pouring it into a common ocean, Meyerrose realized soon after moving into his office, is not the answer either. “Intelligence is about looking for needles in haystacks, and we can’t just keep putting more hay on the stack,” he said. What the agencies needed was a way to take the thousands of disparate, unorganized pieces of intel they generate every day and somehow divine which are the most important.

Intelligence heads wanted to try to find some new answers to this problem. So the C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?

Title: Part Two
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2006, 10:45:41 AM
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Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors — some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details — began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. “You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,” Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.


Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.

A profusion of spy blogs and wikis would have another, perhaps even more beneficial impact. It would drastically improve the search engines of Intelink. In a paper that won an honorable mention in the Galileo Awards, Matthew Burton — the young former D.I.A. analyst — made this case. He pointed out that the best Internet search engines, including Google, all use “link analysis” to measure the authority of documents. When you type the search “Afghanistan” into Google, it finds every page that includes that word. Then it ranks the pages in part by how many links point to the page — based on the idea that if many bloggers and sites have linked to a page, it must be more useful than others. To do its job well, Google relies on the links that millions of individuals post online every day.

This, Burton pointed out, is precisely the problem with Intelink. It has no links, no social information to help sort out which intel is significant and which isn’t. When an analyst’s report is posted online, it does not include links to other reports, even ones it cites. There’s no easy way for agents to link to a report or post a comment about it. Searching Intelink thus resembles searching the Internet before blogs and Google came along — a lot of disconnected information, hard to sort through. If spies were encouraged to blog on Intelink, Burton reasoned, their profuse linking could mend that situation. “

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Imagine having tools that could spot emerging patterns for you and guide you to documents that might be the missing pieces of evidence you’re looking for,” Burton wrote in his Galileo paper. “Analytical puzzles, like terror plots, are often too piecemeal for individual brains to put together. Having our documents aware of each other would be like hooking several brains up in a line, so that each one knows what the others know, making the puzzle much easier to solve.”



With Andrus and Burton’s vision in mind, you can almost imagine how 9/11 might have played out differently. In Phoenix, the F.B.I. agent Kenneth Williams might have blogged his memo noting that Al Qaeda members were engaging in flight-training activity. The agents observing a Qaeda planning conference in Malaysia could have mentioned the attendance of a Saudi named Khalid al-Midhar; another agent might have added that he held a multi-entry American visa. The F.B.I. agents who snared Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota might have written about their arrest of a flight student with violent tendencies. Other agents and analysts who were regular readers of these blogs would have found the material interesting, linked to it, pointed out connections or perhaps entered snippets of it into a wiki page discussing this new trend of young men from the Middle East enrolling in pilot training.

As those four original clues collected more links pointing toward them, they would have amassed more and more authority in the Intelink search engine. Any analysts doing searches for “Moussaoui” or “Al Qaeda” or even “flight training” would have found them. Indeed, the original agents would have been considerably more likely to learn of one another’s existence and perhaps to piece together the topography of the 9/11 plot. No one was able to prevent 9/11 because nobody connected the dots. But in a system like this, as Andrus’s theory goes, the dots are inexorably drawn together. “Once the intelligence community has a robust and mature wiki and blog knowledge-sharing Web space,” Andrus concluded in his essay, “the nature of intelligence will change forever.”

At first glance, the idea might seem slightly crazy. Outfit the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. with blogs and wikis? In the civilian world, after all, these online tools have not always amassed the most stellar reputations. There are many valuable blogs and wikis, of course, but they are vastly outnumbered by ones that exist to compile useless ephemera, celebrity gossip and flatly unverifiable assertions. Nonetheless, Andrus’s ideas struck a chord with many very senior members of the office of the director of national intelligence. This fall, I met with two of them: Thomas Fingar, the patrician head of analysis for the D.N.I., and Mike Wertheimer, his chief technology officer, whose badge clip sports a button that reads “geek.” If it is Meyerrose’s job to coax spy hardware to cooperate, it is Fingar’s job to do the same for analysts.

Fingar and Wertheimer are now testing whether a wiki could indeed help analysts do their job. In the fall of 2005, they joined forces with C.I.A. wiki experts to build a prototype of something called Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance could read and contribute to. To kick-start the content, C.I.A. analysts seeded it with hundreds of articles from nonclassified documents like the C.I.A. World Fact Book. In April, they sent out e-mail to other analysts inviting them to contribute, and sat back to see what happened.

By this fall, more than 3,600 members of the intelligence services had contributed a total of 28,000 pages. Chris Rasmussen, a 31-year-old “knowledge management” engineer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, spends part of every day writing or editing pages. Rasmussen is part of the younger generation in the intelligence establishment that is completely comfortable online; he regularly logs into a sprawling, 50-person chat room with other Intellipedians, and he also blogs about his daily work for all other spies to read. He told me the usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist act. “In the intelligence community, there are so many ‘Stay off the grass’ signs,” Rasmussen said. “But here, you’re free to do what you want, and it works.”

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By the late summer, Fingar decided the Intellipedia experiment was sufficiently successful that he would embark on an even more high-profile project: using Intellipedia to produce a “national intelligence estimate” for Nigeria. An N.I.E. is an authoritative snapshot of what the intelligence community thinks about a particular state — and a guide for foreign and military policy. Nigeria, Fingar said, is a complex country, with issues ranging from energy to Islamic radicalism to polio outbreaks to a coming election. Intellipedia’s Nigeria page will harness the smarts of the dozen or so analysts who specialize in the country. But it will also, Fingar hopes, attract contributions from other intelligence employees who have expertise Fingar isn’t yet aware of — an analyst who served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, or a staff member who has recently traveled there. In the traditional method of producing an intelligence estimate, Fingar said, he would call every agency and ask to borrow their Africa expert for a week or two of meetings. “And they’d say: ‘Well, I only got one guy who can spell Nigeria, and he’s traveling. So you lose.’ ” In contrast, a wiki will “change the rules of who can play,” Fingar said, since far-flung analysts and agents around the world could contribute, day or night.



Yet Intellipedia also courts the many dangers of wikis — including the possibility of error. What’s to stop analysts from posting assertions that turn out to be false? Fingar admits this will undoubtedly happen. But if there are enough people looking at an entry, he says, there will always be someone to catch any grave mistakes. Rasmussen notes that though there is often strong disagreement and debate on Intellipedia, it has not yet succumbed to the sort of vandalism that often plagues Wikipedia pages, including the posting of outright lies. This is partly because, unlike with Wikipedia, Intellipedia contributors are not anonymous. Whatever an analyst writes on Intellipedia can be traced to him. “If you demonstrate you’ve got something to contribute, hey, the expectation is you’re a valued member,” Fingar said. “You demonstrate you’re an idiot, that becomes known, too.”

While the C.I.A. and Fingar’s office set up their wiki, Meyerrose’s office was dabbling in the other half of Andrus’s equation. In July, his staff decided to create a test blog to collect intelligence. It would focus on spotting and predicting possible avian-flu outbreaks and function as part of a larger portal on the subject to collect information from hundreds of sources around the world, inside and outside of the intelligence agencies. Avian flu, Meyerrose reasoned, is a national-security problem uniquely suited to an online-community effort, because information about the danger is found all over the world. An agent in Southeast Asia might be the first to hear news of dangerous farming practices; a medical expert in Chicago could write a crucial paper on transmission that was never noticed by analysts.

In August, one of Meyerrose’s assistants sat me down to show me a very brief glimpse of the results. In the months that it has been operational, the portal has amassed 38,000 “active” participants, though not everyone posts information. In one corner was the active-discussion area — the group blog where the participants could post their latest thoughts about avian flu and others could reply and debate. I noticed a posting, written by a university academic, on whether the H5N1 virus could actually be transmitted to humans, which had provoked a dozen comments. “See, these people would never have been talking before, and we certainly wouldn’t have heard about it if they did,” the assistant said. By September, the site had become so loaded with information and discussion that Rear Adm. Arthur Lawrence, a top official in the health department, told Meyerrose it had become the government’s most crucial resource on avian flu.

The blog seemed like an awfully modest thing to me. But Meyerrose insists that the future of spying will be revolutionized as much by these small-bore projects as by billion-dollar high-tech systems. Indeed, he says that overly ambitious projects often result in expensive disasters, the way the F.B.I.’s $170 million attempt to overhaul its case-handling software died in 2005 after the software became so complex that the F.B.I. despaired of ever fixing the bugs and shelved it. In contrast, the blog software took only a day or two to get running. “We need to think big, start small and scale fast,” Meyerrose said.

Moving quickly, in fact, is crucial to building up the sort of critical mass necessary to make blogs and wikis succeed. Back in 2003, a Department of Defense agency decided to train its analysts in the use of blog software, in hopes that they would begin posting about their work, read one another’s blogs and engage in productive conversations. But the agency’s officials trained only small groups of perhaps five analysts a month. After they finished their training, those analysts would go online, excited, and start their blogs. But they’d quickly realize no one else was reading their posts aside from the four other people they’d gone through the training with. They’d get bored and quit blogging, just as the next trainees came online.
Title: Part Three
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2006, 10:46:50 AM
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There was never a tipping point — “never a moment when two people who never knew each other could begin discussing something,” as Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who was hired to consult on the project, explained to me. For the intelligence agencies to benefit from “social software,” he said, they need to persuade thousands of employees to begin blogging and creating wikis all at once. And that requires a cultural sea change: persuading analysts, who for years have survived by holding their cards tightly to their chests, to begin openly showing their hands online.

Is it possible to reconcile the needs of secrecy with such a radically open model for sharing? Certainly, there would be merit in a system that lets analysts quickly locate like-minded colleagues around the world to brainstorm new ideas about how the Iraqi insurgency will evolve. But the intelligence agencies also engage in covert operations that ferret out truly incendiary secrets: the locations of Iranian nuclear facilities, say, or the name of a Qaeda leader in Pakistan. Is this the sort of information that is safe to share widely in an online network?

Many in the intelligence agencies suspect not. Indeed, they often refuse to input sensitive intel into their own private, secure databases; they do not trust even their own colleagues, inside their own agencies, to keep their secrets safe. When the F.B.I. unveiled an automated case-support system in 1995, agents were supposed to begin entering all information from their continuing cases into it, so that other F.B.I. agents could benefit from the collected pool of tips. But many agents didn’t. They worried that a hard-won source might be accidentally exposed by an F.B.I. agent halfway across the country. Worse, what would happen if a hacker or criminal found access to the system?

These are legitimate concerns. After the F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for selling the identities of undercover agents to Russia, it turned out he had found their names by trawling through records on the case-support system. As a result, many F.B.I. agents opted to keep their records on paper instead of trusting the database — even, occasionally, storing files in shoeboxes shoved under their desks. “When you have a source, you go to extraordinary lengths to protect their identities,” I. C. Smith, a 25-year veteran of the bureau, told me. “So agents never trusted the system, and rightly so.”

Worse, data errors that allow information to leak can often go undetected. Five years ago, Zalmai Azmi — currently the chief information officer of the F.B.I. — was working at the Department of Justice on a data-sharing project with an intelligence agency. He requested data that the agency was supposed to have scrubbed clean of all classified info. Yet when it arrived, it contained secret information. What had gone wrong? The agency had passed it through filters that removed any document marked “secret” — but many documents were stamped “SECRET,” in uppercase, and the filter didn’t catch the difference. The next time Azmi requested documents, he found yet more secret documents inadvertently leaked. This time it was because the documents had “S E C R E T” typed with a space between each letter, and the filter wasn’t programmed to catch that either.

A spy blogosphere, even carefully secured against intruders, might be fundamentally incompatible with the goal of keeping secrets. And the converse is also true: blogs and wikis are unlikely to thrive in an environment where people are guarded about sharing information. Social software doesn’t work if people aren’t social.

Virtually all proponents of improved spy sharing are aware of this friction, and they have few answers. Meyerrose has already strained at boundaries that make other spies deeply uneasy. During the summer, he set up a completely open chat board on the Internet and invited anyone interested to participate in a two-week-long discussion of how to improve the spy agencies’ policies for acquiring new technology.

The chat room was unencrypted and unsecured, so anyone could drop in and read the postings or mouth off. That way, Meyerrose figured, he’d be more likely to get drop-ins by engineers from small, scrappy start-up software firms who might have brilliant ideas but no other way to get an audience with intelligence chiefs. The chat room provoked howls of outrage. “People were like, ‘Hold it, can’t the Chinese and North Koreans listen in?’ ” Meyerrose told me. “And, sure, they could. But we weren’t going to be discussing state secrets. And the benefits of openness outweigh the risks.”

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For something like Intellipedia, though, which trafficks in genuinely serious intelligence, hard decisions had to be made about what risks were acceptable. Fingar says that deeply sensitive intel would never be allowed onto Intellipedia — particularly if it was operational information about a mission, like a planned raid on a terrorist compound. Indeed, Meyerrose’s office is building three completely separate versions of Intellipedia for each of the three levels of secrecy: Top Secret, Secret and Unclassified. Each will be placed on a data network configured so that only people with the correct level of clearance can see them — and these networks are tightly controlled, so sensitive information typed into the Top Secret Intellipedia cannot accidentally leak into the Unclassified one.


But will this make the Intellipedia less useful? There are a few million government employees who could look at the relatively unsecret Intellipedia. In contrast, only a few thousand intelligence officials qualify for a Top Secret clearance, and thus will be allowed into the elite version. This presents a secrecy paradox. The Unclassified Intellipedia will have the biggest readership and thus will grow the most rapidly; but if it’s devoid of truly sensitive secrets, will it be of any use?

Fingar says yes, for an interesting reason: top-secret information is becoming less useful than it used to be. “The intelligence business was initially, if not inherently, about secrets — running risks and expending a lot of money to acquire secrets,” he said, with the idea that “if you limit how many people see it, it will be more secure, and you will be able to get more of it. But that’s now appropriate for a small and shrinking percentage of information.” The time is past for analysts to act like “monastic scholars in a cave someplace,” he added, laboring for weeks or months in isolation to produce a report.

Fingar says that more value can be generated by analysts sharing bits of “open source” information — the nonclassified material in the broad world, like foreign newspapers, newsletters and blogs. It used to be that on-the-ground spies were the only ones who knew what was going on in a foreign country. But now the average citizen sitting in her living room can peer into the debates, news and lives of people in Iran. “If you want to know what the terrorists’ long-term plans are, the best thing is to read their propaganda — the stuff out there on the Internet,” the W.M.D. analyst told me. “I mean, it’s not secret. They’re telling us.”

Fingar and Andrus and other intelligence thinkers do not play down the importance of covert ops or high-tech satellite surveillance in intercepting specific jihadist plots. But in a world that is awash in information, it is possible, they say, that the meaning of intelligence is shifting. Beat cops in Indiana might be as likely to uncover evidence of a terror plot as undercover C.I.A. agents in Pakistan. Fiery sermons printed on pamphlets in the U.K. might be the most valuable tool in figuring out who’s raising money for a possible future London bombing. The most valuable spy system is one that can quickly assemble disparate pieces that are already lying around — information gathered by doctors, aid workers, police officers or security guards at corporations.

The premise of spy-blogging is that a million connected amateurs will always be smarter than a few experts collected in an elite star chamber; that Wikipedia will always move more quickly than the Encyclopaedia Britannica; that the country’s thousand-odd political bloggers will always spot news trends more quickly than slow-moving journalists in the mainstream media. Yet one of the most successful new terrorism-busting spy organizations since 9/11 does in fact function like a star chamber. The National Counterterrorism Center was established by Congress in 2004 and charged with spotting the most important terrorism threats as they emerge. The counterterrorism center is made up of representatives from every intelligence agency — C.I.A., F.B.I., N.S.A. and others — who work together under one roof. Each analyst has access to details particular to his or her agency, and they simply share information face to face. The analysts check their personal networks for the most dire daily threats and bring them to the group. In three meetings a day, the officials assess all the intel that has risen to their attention — and they jointly decide what the nation’s most serious threats are. “We call it carbon-based integration,” said William Spalding, the center’s chief information officer.

===============

(Page 9 of 10)



When I raised the idea of collaborative tools like blogs and wikis, Spalding and Russ Travers, one of the center’s deputy directors, were skeptical. The whole reason the center works, they said, is that experts have a top-down view that is essential to picking the important information out of the surrounding chatter. The grass roots, they’ve found, are good at collecting threats but not necessarily at analyzing them. If a lot of low-level analysts are pointing to the same inaccurate posting, that doesn’t make it any less wrong.“


The key is to have very smart people culling” the daily tips, Travers told me. In October, for example, nervous rumors that a football stadium in the United States would be subject to a nuclear attack flooded the National Counterterrorism Center; analysts there immediately suspected it was spurious. “The terrorist problem has the worst signal-to-noise ratio,” Travers said. Without the knowledge that comes from long experience, he added, a fledgling analyst or spy cannot know what is important or not. The counterterrorism center, he said, should decide which threats warrant attention. “That’s our job,” he said.

The Spying 2.0 vision has thus created a curious culture battle in intelligence circles. Many of the officials at the very top, like Fingar, Meyerrose and their colleagues at the office of the director of national intelligence, are intrigued by the potential of a freewheeling, smart-mobbing intelligence community. The newest, youngest analysts are in favor of it, too. The resistance comes from the “iron majors” — career officers who occupy the enormous middle bureaucracy of the spy agencies. They might find the idea of an empowered grass roots to be foolhardy; they might also worry that it threatens their turf.

And the critics might turn out to be right. As Clay Shirky of N.Y.U. points out, most wikis and blogs flop. A wiki might never reach a critical mass of contributors and remain anemic until eventually everyone drifts away; many bloggers never attract any attention and, discouraged, eventually stop posting. Wikipedia passed the critical-mass plateau a year ago, but it is a rarity. “The normal case for social software is failure,” Shirky said. And because Intellipedia is now a high-profile experiment with many skeptics, its failure could permanently doom these sorts of collaborative spy endeavors.

There is also the practical question of running a huge civil-service agency where you have to assess the performance of your staff. It might be difficult to measure contributions to a wiki; if a brilliant piece of analysis emerges from the mob, who gets credit for it? “A C.I.A. officer’s career is advanced by producing reports,” notes David Weinberger, a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, who consulted briefly with the C.I.A. on its social software. “His ability is judged by those reports. And that gets in the way of developing knowledge socially, where it becomes very difficult to know who added or revised what.”

In addition, civil libertarians are alarmed by the idea of spies casually passing sensitive information around from one agency to another. “I don’t want the N.S.A. passing on information about innocent Americans to local cops in San Diego,” Weinberger said. “Those laws exist for good reasons.”

In many ways, the new generation of Web-savvy spies frames the same troubling questions as the Patriot Act, which sought to break down the barriers preventing military spy agencies from conducting operations inside the United States, on American citizens, and then sharing that information with domestic groups. On a sheerly practical level, it makes sense to get rid of all barriers: why not let the N.S.A. wiretap American conversations? Vice President Cheney has argued forcefully that these historical barriers between agencies hobble the American military and intelligence forces; the Patriot Act was designed in part to eliminate them. Terrorist groups like Al Qaeda heed no such boundaries, which is precisely why they can move so quickly and nimbly.

===============

Page 10 of 10)



Then again, there’s a limit to how much the United States ought to emulate Al Qaeda’s modus operandi. “The problems the spies face are serious; I sympathize with that,” Shirky told me. “But they shouldn’t be wiping up every bit of information about every American citizen.” The Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness program, which came to light in 2002, was intended to scoop up information on citizens from a variety of sources — commercial purchase databases, government records — and mine it for suggestive terrorism connections. But to many Americans, this sort of dot-connecting activity seemed like an outrageous violation of privacy, and soon after it was exposed, the program was killed. James X. Dempsey, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, maintains that the laws on spying and privacy need new clarity. The historic morass of legislation, including the Patriot Act, has become too confusing, he says; both spies and the public are unsure what walls exist. While Dempsey agrees that agencies should probably be allowed to swap more information than they currently do, he says that revamped rules must also respect privacy — “otherwise, we’ll keep on producing programs that violate people’s sense of what’s right, and they’ll keep getting shut down.”

For all the complaints about hardware, the challenges are only in part about technology. They are also about political will and institutional culture — and whether the spy agencies can be persuaded to change. Some former intelligence officials have expressed skepticism about whether Meyerrose and Fingar and their national-intelligence colleagues have the clout and power to persuade the agencies to adopt this new paradigm. Though D.N.I. officials say they have direct procurement authority over technology for all the agencies, there’s no evidence yet that Meyerrose will be able to make a serious impact on the eight spy agencies in the Department of Defense, which has its own annual $38 billion intelligence budget — the lion’s share of all the money the government spends on spying. When I spoke to Wilson P. Dizard III, a writer with Government Computer News who has covered federal technology issues for two decades, he said, “You have all these little barons at N.S.A. and C.I.A. and whatever, and a lot of people think they’re not going to do what the D.N.I. says, if push comes to shove.”
Today’s spies exist in an age of constant information exchange, in which everyday citizens swap news, dial up satellite pictures of their houses and collaborate on distant Web sites with strangers. As John Arquilla told me, if the spies do not join the rest of the world, they risk growing to resemble the rigid, unchanging bureaucracy that they once confronted during the cold war. “Fifteen years ago we were fighting the Soviet Union,” he said. “Who knew it would be replicated today in the intelligence community?”

END
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2006, 11:44:26 PM
Reliability of this source is unknown. 

===========================



Spy Death Tied To American Hiroshima?
By Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. and Lee Boyland
Source - Family Security Matters

The death of Alexander Litvinenko by radiological poisoning points to the possibility that the former Soviet spy may have been involved with Islamic terrorists in the preparation of tactical nuclear weapons for use in the jihad against the United States and its NATO allies.

Litvenenko, a former KGB agent, died in London on November 23 after ingesting a microscopic amount of polonium-210. In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the poisoning - - an accusation which the Kremlin has vehemently denied. The denial is fortified by the fact that polonium-210 is a very rare radiological substance that is man-made by bombarding Bismuth-209 with neutrons within a nuclear reactor.

It is expensive to produce and difficult to handle. When Russian officials resorted to nuclear poisoning in the past - - including the assassination of two Swiss intelligence officials who were engaged with Russia and South Africa in the nuclear black market - - they relied on such readily available radiological substances as cesium-137 in salt form. According to nuclear expert David Morgan, killing a spy or political dissident with a grain or two of polonium-210 is as ludicrous as shooting a rat with a howitzer.


Litvinenko, who was born an orthodox Christian, was a convert to Islam with close ties to the Chechen rebels. His last words consisted of his desire to be buried “according to Muslim tradition.”

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to suitcase nukes that were developed by U.S. and Soviet forces during the Cold War. Reliable sources, including Hans Blix of the United Nation, have confirmed that bin Laden purchased several of these devises from the Chechen rebels in 1996. According to Sharif al-Masri and other al Qaeda operatives who have been taken into custody, several of these weapons have been forward deployed to the United States in preparation for al Qaeda’s next attack on American soil.

This brings us to the mysterious case of Litvinenko.

The neutron source or “triggers” of the suitcase nukes are composed of beryllium-9 and polonium-210. When these two elements are combined, the alpha particle is absorbed by the nucleus of the beryllium causing it to decay by emitting a neutron. Such “triggers” were a feature of early nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Soviet stockpiles.

Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, necessitating the replacement of the triggers every six months. For this reason, the suitcase nukes are far from maintenance-free. In addition, the nuclear core of these devises emit a temperature in excess of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit - - further exposing the weapons to oxidation and rust. Small wonder that al Qaeda operatives including Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who are spearheading “the American Hiroshima” have received extensive training in nuclear technology.

Polonium-beryllium triggers are packaged in foil packs about the size of a package of sugar on a restaurant table. When the twin foil packages are crushed, the elements mix and the neutrons are emitted. A courier transporting nuclear triggers could have had a mishap causing the packages to rupture and a trail of contamination to occur.

Polonium-210 is a fine powder, easily aerosolized. Litvinenko could have inhaled the powder, or had a grain or two on his fingers when he ate the sushi.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ColoradoFirearmsTrainingGroup/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 08, 2006, 10:08:31 AM
Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. regularly predicts nuclear terrorism events, which luckily have yet to happen. I'm not overly impressed with what i've read of his thus far.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2006, 01:50:38 PM
BUSTED!!! 

=====================

http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/blogs/po...nce-chief.html


Quote:
Monday, December 11, 2006
Incoming House intelligence chief botches easy intel quiz
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, who incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tapped to head the Intelligence Committee when the Democrats take over in January, failed a quiz of basic questions about al Qaeda and Hezbollah, two of the key terrorist organizations the intelligence community has focused on since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

When asked by CQ National Security Editor Jeff Stein whether al Qaeda is one or the other of the two major branches of Islam -- Sunni or Shiite -- Reyes answered "they are probably both," then ventured "Predominantly -- probably Shiite."

That is wrong. Al Qaeda was founded by Osama bin Laden as a Sunni organization and views Shiites as heretics.

Reyes could also not answer questions put by Stein about Hezbollah, a Shiite group on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations that is based in Southern Lebanon.

Stein's column about Reyes' answers was published on CQ's Web site Friday evening.

In an interview with CNN, Stein said he was "amazed" by Reyes' lack of what he considers basic information about two of the major terrorists organizations.

"If you're the baseball commissioner and you don't know the difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox, you don't know baseball," Stein said. "You're not going to have the respect of the people you work with."

While Stein said Reyes is "not a stupid guy," his lack of knowledge said it could hamper Reyes' ability to provide effective oversight of the intelligence community, Stein believes.

"If you don't have the basics, how do you effectively question the administration?" he asked. "You don't know who is on first."

Stein said Reyes is not the only member of the House Intelligence Committee that he has interviewed that lacked what he considered basic knowledge about terrorist organizations.

"It kind of disgusts you, because these guys are supposed to be tending your knitting," Stein said. "Most people are rightfully appalled."

Pelosi picked Reyes over fellow Californian Rep. Jane Harman, who had been the Intelligence Committee's ranking member, and Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, who had been impeached as a federal judge after being accused of taking a bribe.

Calls from CNN to Reyes' office asking for reaction to Stein's column have not been returned.

Full story from CQ
 
Title: Taliban Rule Book
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 11, 2006, 03:07:38 PM
I post this here as I think Taliban goals and tactic towards them can be derived from this:

Mon 11 Dec 2006
No smoking - but killing teachers is fine, says new Taleban rulebook
TIM ALBONE IN KABUL
KILLING a teacher is no problem as long as they have received a warning and a solid beating, but taking a beardless boy into your private quarters or spending money without your commander's permission is likely to cause big trouble.

These are just three of the 30 rules the Taleban ruling council have insisted their fighters follow in Afghanistan.


The rules have been approved by "the highest leader of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan", Taleban-speak for Mullah Omar, the one-eyed reclusive leader of the regime who has a £5 million bounty on his head.

The rules were agreed by the 33 members of the Taleban shura, or council, and were posted on the internet.

Rule No 19 states: "Mujahideen are not allowed to take young boys with no facial hair on to the battlefield or into their private quarters."

Young boys often bear the brunt of sexually frustrated fighters and commanders who, because of strict social rules and the fact they are on the frontlines, are unable to mix with women. One of the first things the Taleban movement did when it rose to power in the 90s was to punish commanders who kept boys for sexual pleasure.

One of the most terrifying rules is No 25 which says: "Anyone who works as a teacher for the current puppet regime must receive a warning. If he nevertheless refuses to give up his job, he must be beaten. If the teacher still continues to instruct contrary to the principles of Islam, the district commander or a group leader must kill him."

Increasingly, insurgents have been targeting schools. This year alone 198 have been burnt to the ground - an increase from 150 last year.

They have also been targeting and killing teachers. The most recent attack on Saturday in the eastern province of Kunar killed five people, including two female teachers, who were sisters. It is unclear if they were given a warning and a beating first.

According to Zuhur Afghan, a spokesman for the education ministry, the death of the woman brought the number of teachers killed by insurgents this year to 20.

Despite showing no mercy for foreigners, who are described as infidels, the rules show a concern for the fighters' health. Rule No 18 asks them to refrain from smoking cigarettes.

It is made clear that the rules are obligatory and "anyone who offends this code must be judged according to the laws of the Islamic Emirates".

Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a Taleban spokesman, confirmed the authenticity of the rules in an interview.

Ignore at your peril: the regulations in full

Every Mujahid must abide by the following rules:

• 1. A Taleban commander is permitted to extend an invitation to all Afghans who support infidels so that they may convert to Islam.

• 2. We guarantee to any man, who turns his back on infidels, personal security and the security of his possessions. But if he becomes involved in a dispute, or someone accuses him of something, he must submit to our judiciary.

• 3. Mujahideen who protect new Taleban recruits must inform their commander.

• 4. A convert to the Taleban, who does not behave loyally and becomes a traitor, forfeits our protection.

• 5. A Mujahid who kills a new Taleban recruit will be punished according to Islamic law.

• 6. If a Taleban fighter wants to move to another district he must get permission from his group leader.

• 7. A Mujahid who takes a foreign infidel as prisoner with the consent of a group leader may not exchange him for other prisoners or money.

• 8. A provincial, district or regional commander may not work for a non-governmental organisation or accept money from an NGO.

• 9. Taleban may not use Jihad equipment or property for personal ends.

• 10. Every Taleb is accountable to his superiors in matters of money spending and equipment usage.

• 11. Mujahideen may not sell equipment.

• 12. A group of Mujahideen may not take in Mujahideen from another group to increase their own power.

• 13. Weapons and equipment taken from infidels or their allies must be fairly distributed among the Mujahideen.

• 14. If someone who works with infidels wants to co-operate with Mujahideen, he should not be killed. If he is killed, his murderer must stand before an Islamic court.

• 15. A Mujahid or leader who torments an innocent person must be warned by his superiors. If he does not change he must be thrown out of the Taleban movement.

• 16. It is strictly forbidden to search houses or confiscate weapons without the permission of a district or provincial commander.

• 17. Mujahideen have no right to confiscate money or personal possessions of civilians.

• 18. Mujahideen should refrain from smoking cigarettes.

• 19. Mujahideen are not allowed to take young boys with no facial hair on to the battlefield or into their private quarters.

• 20. If members of the opposition or the civil government wish to be loyal to the Taleban, we may take their conditions into consideration.

• 21. Anyone with a bad reputation or who has killed civilians during the Jihad may not be accepted into the Taleban movement.

• 22. If a Mujahid is found guilty of a crime and his commander has barred him from the group, no other group may take him in.

• 23. If a Mujahid is faced with a problem that is not described in this book, his commander must find a solution in consultation with the group.

• 24. It is forbidden to work as a teacher under the current puppet regime, because this strengthens the system of the infidels. True Muslims should apply to study with a religiously trained teacher and study in a Mosque. Textbooks must come from the period of the Jihad or from the Taleban regime.

• 25. Anyone who works as a teacher for the current puppet regime must receive a warning. If he nevertheless refuses to give up his job, he must be beaten. If the teacher still continues to instruct contrary to the principles of Islam, the district commander or a group leader must kill him.

• 26. Those NGOs that come to the country under the rule of the infidels must be treated as the government is treated. We tolerate none of their activities, whether it be building of streets, bridges, clinics, schools, madrases [schools for Koran study] or other works. If a school fails to heed a warning to close, it must be burned. But all religious books must be secured beforehand.

• 27. [With alleged criminality] As long as a person has not been convicted of espionage and punished for it, no one may take up the issue on their own. Only the district commander is in charge. Witnesses who testify must be in good psychological condition, possess an untarnished religious reputation, and not have committed a major crime.

• 28. No lower-level commander may interfere with contention among the populace. If an argument cannot be resolved, the district or regional commander must handle the matter. The case should be discussed by religious experts or a council of elders. If they find no solution, the case must be referred to religious authorities.

• 29. Every Mujahid must post a watch, day and night.

• 30. The above 29 rules are obligatory. Anyone who offends this code must be judged according to the laws of the Islamic Emirates.

Signed by the highest leader of the Islamic Emirates of Afghan-istan.

Related topic

Afghanistan
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=444
This article: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1835732006
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2006, 09:00:04 AM
U.S. tries Google for intelligence on Iran
Internet search yields names cited in U.N. draft resolution
 NBC VIDEO

 
• Googling Iran intel?
Dec. 11: NBC Andrea Mitchell reports on the State Department using Google to find information on Iran's nuclear program.
MSNBC
 

  By Dafna Linzer

Updated: 1:24 a.m. PT Dec 11, 2006
When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way -- by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as "Iran and nuclear," three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations.

 
Policymakers and intelligence officials have always struggled when it comes to deciding how and when to disclose secret information, such as names of Iranians with suspected ties to nuclear weapons. In some internal debates, policymakers win out and intelligence is made public to further political or diplomatic goals. In other cases, such as this one, the intelligence community successfully argues that protecting information outweighs the desires of some to share it with the world.


But that argument can also put the U.S. government in the awkward position of relying, in part, on an Internet search to select targets for international sanctions.

None of the 12 Iranians that the State Department eventually singled out for potential bans on international travel and business dealings is believed by the CIA to be directly connected to Iran's most suspicious nuclear activities.

"There is nothing that proves involvement in a clandestine weapons program, and there is very little out there at all that even connects people to a clandestine weapons program," said one official familiar with the intelligence on Iran. Like others interviewed for this story, the official insisted on anonymity when discussing the use of intelligence.

What little information there is has been guarded at CIA headquarters. The agency declined to discuss the case in detail, but a senior intelligence official said: "There were several factors that made it a complicated and time-consuming request, not the least of which were well-founded concerns" about revealing the way the CIA gathers intelligence on Iran.

That may be why the junior State Department officer, who has been with the nonproliferation bureau for only a few months, was put in front of a computer.

More than 100 names
An initial Internet search yielded over 100 names, including dozens of Iranian diplomats who have publicly defended their country's efforts as intended to produce energy, not bombs, the sources said. The list also included names of Iranians who have spoken with U.N. inspectors or have traveled to Vienna to attend International Atomic Energy Agency meetings about Iran.

It was submitted to the CIA for approval but the agency refused to look up such a large number of people, according to three government sources. Too time-consuming, the intelligence community said, for the CIA's Iran desk staff of 140 people. The list would need to be pared down. So the State Department cut the list in half and resubmitted the names.
 
In the end, the CIA approved a handful of individuals, though none is believed connected to Project 1-11 -- Iran's secret military effort to design a weapons system capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The names of Project 1-11 staff members have never been released by any government and doing so may have raised questions that the CIA was not willing or fully able to answer. But the agency had no qualms about approving names already publicly available on the Internet.

"Using a piece of intel on project 1-11, which we couldn't justify in open-source reporting, or with whatever the Russians had, would have put us in a difficult position," an intelligence official said. "Inevitably, someone would have asked, 'Why this guy?' and then we would have been back to the old problem of justifying intelligence."

A senior administration official acknowledged that the back-and-forth with the CIA had been difficult, especially given the administration's desire to isolate Iran and avoid a repeat of flawed intelligence that preceded the Iraq war.

"In this instance, we were the requesters and the CIA was the clearer," the official said. "It's the process we go through on a lot of these things. Both sides don't know a lot of reasons for why either side is requesting or denying things. Sources and methods became their stated rationale and that is what they do. But for policymaking, it can be quite frustrating."

Washington's credibility in the U.N. Security Council on weapons intelligence was sharply eroded by the collapse of prewar claims about Iraq. A senior intelligence official said the intelligence community is determined to avoid mistakes of the past when dealing with Iran and other issues. "Once you push intelligence out there, you can't take it back," the official said.

CONTINUED

U.S., French and British officials came to agree that it was better to stay away from names that would have to be justified with sensitive information from intelligence programs, and instead put forward names of Iranians whose jobs were publicly connected to the country's nuclear energy and missile programs. European officials said their governments did not rely on Google searches but came up with nearly identical lists to the one U.S. officials offered.

"We do have concerns about Iranian activities that are overt, and uranium enrichment is a case in point," said a senior administration official who agreed to discuss the process on the condition of anonymity. "We are concerned about what it means for the program, but also because enrichment is in violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution."

The U.S.-backed draft resolution, formally offered by Britain and France, would impose a travel ban and freeze the assets of 11 institutions and 12 individuals, including the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the directors of Iran's chief nuclear energy facilities, and several people involved in the missile program. It would prohibit the sale of nuclear technologies to Iran and urges states to "prevent specialised teaching or training" of Iranian nationals in disciplines that could further Tehran's understanding of banned nuclear activities.


The text says the council will be prepared to lift the sanctions if Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA's director general, concludes within 60 days that Iran has suspended its enrichment and reprocessing of uranium and has halted efforts to produce a heavy-water nuclear energy reactor.

Uneasy about sanctions
Many Security Council members are uneasy about the sanctions. The Russians and the Chinese -- whose support is essential for the resolution to be approved -- have told the United States, Britain and France they will not support the travel-ban element of the resolution, according to three officials involved in the negotiations. Russia is building a light-water nuclear reactor in Iran and some people on the sanctions list are connected to the project.

"The Russians have already told us it would be demeaning for people to ask the Security Council for permission to travel to Russia to discuss an ongoing project," a European diplomat said yesterday.

U.S. and European officials said there is room for negotiation with Russia on the names and organizations, but they also said it is possible that by the time the Security Council approves the resolution, the entire list could be removed.

"The real scope of debate will be on the number of sanctions," one diplomat said. "Companies and individuals could go off the list or go on."

Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2007, 06:44:14 AM
From today's NY Slimes:

y DAVID S. CLOUD and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: February 9, 2007
WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — A Pentagon investigation into the handling of prewar intelligence has criticized civilian Pentagon officials for conducting their own intelligence analysis to find links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, but said the officials did not violate any laws or mislead Congress, according to Congressional officials who have read the report.

Skip to next paragraph
The Reach of War
Go to Complete Coverage » The long-awaited report by the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, was sent to Congress on Thursday. It is the first major review to rebuke senior officials working for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for the way intelligence was used before the invasion of Iraq early in 2003.

Working under Douglas J. Feith, who at the time was under secretary of defense for policy, the group “developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers,” the report concluded. Excerpts were quoted by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who has long been critical of Mr. Feith and other Pentagon officials.

The report, and the dueling over its conclusions, shows that bitter divisions over the handling of prewar intelligence remain even after many of the substantive questions have been laid to rest and the principal actors have left the government.

In a rebuttal to an earlier draft of Mr. Gimble’s report, Eric S. Edelman, the under secretary of defense, said the group’s activities were authorized by Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz. They did not produce formal intelligence assessments, and they were properly shared, the rebuttal said.

In a statement issued Thursday, Mr. Feith, who left the Pentagon in 2005, made similar points. Mr. Rumsfeld did not respond to telephone messages seeking comment.

According to Congressional officials, Mr. Feith’s statement and the policy office’s rebuttal, the report concluded that none of the Pentagon’s activities were illegal and that they did not violate Defense Department directives.

But the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, said in a statement that because the inspector general considered the work of Mr. Feith’s group to be “intelligence activities,” the committee would investigate whether the Pentagon violated the National Security Act of 1947 by failing to notify Congress about the group’s work.

Senator Levin, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the report a “very strong condemnation” of the Pentagon’s activities.

“I think they sought this kind of intelligence. They made it clear they wanted any kind of possible connections, no matter how skimpy, and they got it,” he said.

Mr. Feith and other officials in his Pentagon office have been accused by critics of the administration of distorting intelligence data to justify the invasion of Iraq. When Democrats were in the minority in Congress, Mr. Levin conducted an inquiry and issued a report excoriating Mr. Feith and others at the Pentagon for their conduct.

The conclusions the Pentagon team reached in the year or so before the invasion of Iraq have been generally known for some time and were largely discredited by the Sept. 11 commission, which found “no evidence” that contacts between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda “ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship.”

According to Mr. Levin, the inspector general’s report did not make any specific recommendations, and he said that interagency coordination “will significantly reduce the opportunity for the inappropriate conduct of intelligence activities outside of intelligence channels.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, is completing work on its own investigation into the use of intelligence by policy makers in the months before the Iraq war. Under Republican leadership, it had delayed an examination of Mr. Feith’s activities pending the outcome of the inspector general’s report.

The Pentagon’s rebuttal vehemently rejected the report’s contention that there was “inappropriate” use of intelligence by Pentagon civilians and said the effort to identify links between Saddam Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda was done at the direction of Mr. Wolfowitz, who was deputy defense secretary at the time.

Describing the work as a “fresh, critical look” at intelligence agency conclusions about Al Qaeda and Iraq, the Pentagon rebuttal said, “It is somewhat difficult to understand how activities that admittedly were lawful and authorized (in this case by either the secretary of defense or the deputy secretary of defense) could nevertheless be characterized as ‘inappropriate.’ ”

The Feith operation dates to shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the Pentagon established a small team of civilians to sift through existing intelligence with the aim of finding possible links between terror networks and governments. Bush administration officials contended that intelligence agencies were ignoring reports of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

By the summer of 2002, the group, whose membership evolved over time, was aimed at identifying links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq.

The inspector general’s report criticizes a July 25, 2002, memo, written by an intelligence analyst detailed to Mr. Feith’s office, titled, “Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case.”

The memo said that, while “some analysts have argued” that Osama bin Laden would not cooperate with secular Arab entities like Iraq, “reporting indicates otherwise.”

The inspector general concluded that the memo constituted an “alternative intelligence assessment” from that given by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies and that it led to a briefing on links between Al Qaeda and Iraq that was given to senior Bush administration officials in August 2002, according to excerpts of the draft inspector general report quoted by Mr. Edelman.

It is not clear whether the inspector general revised his report after receiving the rebuttal.

The draft inspector general report said Mr. Feith’s office should have followed intelligence agency guidelines for registering differing views, “in those rare instances where consensus could not be reached.”

In his statement Thursday, Mr. Feith said he was pleased that the inspector general had cleared him of violating laws or Defense Department policies, but he called it “wrong” and “bizarre” for the report to criticize civilian officials for scrutinizing intelligence agency conclusions and passing along their findings to senior officials.

Mr. Feith also said that the inspector general’s findings reflected “confusion about the way policy and intelligence officials relate to one another in the real world.”
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2007, 10:42:51 PM
WSJ

Senator Ahab
February 12, 2007; Page A14
In a reasonable world, Douglas Feith would have received an apology late last week from Senator Carl Levin. But the obsessive Democrat won't let go of his story that the Bush Administration "politicized" pre-war Iraq intelligence no matter how many times the facts disprove it. Senator Ahab is now going even further and suggesting behavior standards that would make the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy less accountable to elected officials; this could get Americans killed.

The familiar accusation against Mr. Feith is that the former Undersecretary of Defense was responsible for all the government's intelligence failures on Iraq because his office had the temerity to review and critique intelligence on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. His alleged pressure to find a strong link is said to have so influenced apparently weak-kneed CIA analysts that they made a false case for war. Senate Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller went so far as to accuse Mr. Feith of "running a private intelligence failure [sic], which is not lawful."

This preposterous narrative has already been debunked many times -- notably in a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee itself. That 2004 report found that not only had CIA analysts not been pressured to change their views but that Mr. Feith's review had sometimes "actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's products." A year later the Robb-Silberman commission also found no evidence that prewar intelligence had been politicized. And last week the Defense Department's Inspector General delivered to Congress a report that likewise exonerates Mr. Feith of doing anything unlawful and acknowledges that his actions were authorized by the Secretary or Deputy Secretary of Defense.

But instead of moving on to more important things, Mr. Levin is still chasing his great white whale. He's grabbed on to an odd bit of editorializing by the Inspector General that Mr. Feith "was inappropriately performing Intelligence Activities . . . that should be performed by the Intelligence Community."

"Inappropriately"? What on Earth does that mean? The charge is so vague that it has the air of a political sop that Acting Inspector General Thomas Gimble tossed to Mr. Levin to avoid being hauled in front of the Senate and accused of a cover-up. The myth persists that Inspectors General are King Solomons who are above politics, but in this case Mr. Gimble split the baby, and in a way that could harm U.S. security.

He and Mr. Levin are essentially saying that officials appointed by an elected President aren't allowed to question the "consensus" of the "intelligence community." Yet the work of Mr. Feith's office on al Qaeda had nothing to do with what everyone now concedes was the main intelligence failure on Iraq, which was the lack of WMD stockpiles. Former CIA Director George Tenet said it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam Hussein had such stockpiles, and it was this intelligence "consensus" that the Bush Administration relied on in making its main case for war. Any links between al Qaeda and Iraq is a separate issue that was barely mentioned in the run-up to war.

Make no mistake, the people "politicizing" intelligence here are Senators Levin and Rockefeller, whose smears against Mr. Feith will have a chilling effect on anyone who wants to question "consensus" judgments in the future. This is dangerous, because if recent experience has taught us anything it is that we need far more such questioning.

It was the intelligence community that underestimated Saddam's nuclear capabilities before the first Gulf War, only to overestimate them later. It was the CIA "consensus" that also vastly overestimated the strength of the Soviet economy even as Moscow was about to sue for peace. Before 9/11 it was also the intelligence consensus -- led by former CIA Near East chief analyst Paul Pillar -- that terrorism was a minor and manageable problem. Too bad Mr. Feith and his team weren't around to scrub those judgments.

We learned much of what we know about intelligence from the late, great Cold War strategists, Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter. And what they taught was that in the intelligence business almost nothing is certain. Albert Wohlstetter especially disliked "national intelligence estimates," which were always the product of lowest-common-denominator judgments -- or group-think. These judgments, in turn, often lead to public pronouncements that claim a degree of certainty that simply doesn't exist -- and then to charges of "politicizing" intelligence when those judgments turn out not to be true.

Messrs. Levin and Rockefeller may enjoy scoring partisan points. But their nasty obsession with Mr. Feith will have the effect of endorsing more group-think as the last, best word in intelligence -- and will lead to more Iraqs and more 9/11s.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2007, 01:42:09 AM
The Covert War and Elevated Risks
By Fred Burton

Amid a general atmosphere of saber rattling by the United States and Israel, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Feb. 8 that any aggression against his country would be met with reciprocal strikes by Iranian forces inside and outside the country. Khamenei's remarks were merely the latest installment in a drama of rhetoric, arms acquisitions, military exercises and missile launches designed to demonstrate to the United States and Israel that any potential strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities would come at a very high price.

The United States and Israel also have used overt pressure tactics in the hopes of forcing Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions and to help end the chaos in Iraq. Khamenei referred to these efforts as the "enemies' psychological operations" and said they are "an indication of weakness and a state of paralysis." Speaking to an audience of Iranian air force members in Tehran, the ayatollah railed against international sanctions and threats, saying, "Fear and surrender to enemies is a method used by those nations and officials who have not comprehended the power of national resolve, but the Iranian nation, relying on its successful experiences of the last 27 years, will stand up to any enemy and threat."

Clearly, there is a lot of rhetoric flying around. But despite the threats and bluster, it is not at all clear that the United States has either the capacity or the will to launch an actual attack against Iran -- nor is it clear that Israel has the ability to attack Iran's nuclear infrastructure on its own. For its part, Iran -- in spite of its recent weapons purchases and highly publicized missile tests -- clearly is in no position to go toe-to-toe with the U.S. military.

With neither side willing or able to confront the other in the conventional military sense, both will be looking for alternative means of achieving its goals. For any nation-state, its intelligence services are an important weapon in the arsenal -- and it now appears that a covert intelligence war between the United States and Iran, first raised by Stratfor as a possibility in March 2006, is well under way. So far, the action in this intelligence war has been confined mainly to Iraq and Lebanon. However, recent events -- including the mysterious death in January of a top Iranian nuclear scientist, who was believed to have been a target of Mossad -- indicate that this quiet war is escalating, and soon could move to fronts beyond the Middle East.

Intelligence Wars

The covert intelligence war between the United States and Iran now appears to be well under way. As it has evolved against the backdrop of the war in Iraq and Tehran's nuclear ambitions, it has exhibited many characteristics that were notable in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. For example, irreconcilable geopolitical interests and conflicting ideologies prompted the present conflict. The United States appears to be following its tried-and-true Cold War doctrine of containment, and Iran has pursued the Cold War practice of equipping and training proxies to inflict pain on an adversary that is locked in a war -- following the examples set by the Soviet Union in Vietnam and the United States in the Afghan-Soviet conflict. Other similarities include the heavy use of disinformation, propaganda, agents of influence and covert action by both sides.

With its missile purchases, tests and nuclear program, Iran also has started an arms race of sorts in the region. This arms race, along with Iran's support for Hezbollah and controversial and provocative statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, inevitably has pulled Israel into the fray. Iran clearly regards Israel as a pressure point to be used against the Americans. The regime in Tehran also views rhetorical attacks against the Jewish state -- not to mention actual attacks waged by Iran's surrogate, Hezbollah -- as a way to curry favor or gain influence with the Muslim masses. This is, in effect, the same reason the Iraqis launched Scud missiles against Israel during the first Gulf War.

Israel is far from a passive victim of Iranian skullduggery, of course. It has been involved in these types of intelligence wars since the founding of the state -- and, if one counts the Jewish insurgent and terrorist attacks against British forces and Muslims in the 1930s and 1940s, even before. Out of geopolitical necessity, the Israelis cannot take the Iranian threats lightly; they are fully engaged in this current clandestine war.

Of course, Iran is not the first country in the region to have threatened Israel with harsh rhetoric while attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Iraq was in a similar position more than 20 years ago. Thus, beginning in 1980, Israel developed a program of assassinating and threatening scientists who were associated with Iraq's nuclear weapons program. This was followed by the bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in June 1981. As recently as the 1990 assassination of Canadian scientist and "supergun" creator Gerald Bull, Israel's clandestine hand appears to have been working to thwart Iraqi weapons programs.

A New Salvo?

There is reason to believe that Israel -- whose reputation for conventional military strength was dealt a considerable blow during last summer's conflict with Hezbollah -- now might be dusting off the strategy it successfully employed against Iraq. Specifically, Iranian news sources on Jan. 25 reported the death (a week previously) of Ardeshir Hassanpour, a high-level scientist who is believed to have played a key role in Iran's nuclear program. His death has not been officially explained, but Stratfor sources have indicated that Hassanpour was a target of Mossad. If he was indeed assassinated by agents of Israel, it would mean the Jewish state has raised the stakes in the covert war -- and reprisals could be coming down the pike.

However, the capabilities of Iran's intelligence services today are very different from those of 1980s Iraq. Though the Iraqi service was quite adept at operating domestically -- in torturing, murdering and instilling fear in its own population -- its efforts to strike U.S. targets in Asia and Africa in January 1991 (following the launch of Operation Desert Storm) demonstrated a much lower degree of tactical sophistication and aptitude in operations abroad. The Iraqi operatives blew themselves up, planted IEDs that did not detonate and made naive mistakes, such as dispatching operatives using consecutively numbered Iraqi passports. They were simply too clumsy to wage a nuanced and complex intelligence war.

Iran is a different story. Between the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), the special operations elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (also called the "Pasdaran" in Farsi) and Hezbollah, the Iranians have a well-developed clandestine infrastructure that has a history of effectively conducting assassinations and terrorist attacks abroad.

The Islamic Republic's covert capabilities were honed during the revolutionary struggle and became evident soon after the shah was toppled. The revolutionaries' first targets were Iranian monarchists in exile, who were trying to foment a counterrevolution in Iran. Later, after many of these opponents had been eliminated and the threat brought under control, MOIS shifted its focus to exiled dissidents and other opponents of the regime. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, influential leaders of these groups were targeted and killed in a sophisticated campaign that stretched from the Middle East to Europe to the suburbs of Washington.

Iranian agents and surrogates also engaged in overt attacks -- kidnappings, automatic weapons and grenade attacks in public places and bombings. Hezbollah in particular was quite active on this front; notable incidents included the abductions of CIA station chief William F. Buckley in 1984 and U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins in 1988 (both men died in captivity), as well as numerous hijackings and bombings.

Because Iran's conventional military forces -- though among the best in the region -- are clearly no match for those of the Americans or others, the sophisticated and highly disciplined intelligence service, and its ability to carry out covert campaigns, is a key component of national security. In the past, kidnappings and assassinations -- carried out with sufficient deniability -- have proved an effective way of eliminating enemies and leveraging the country's geopolitical position without incurring unacceptable risk.

Therefore, when Khamenei warned that attacking Iran would result in the attacker's interests around the world being targeted by Iranians, he was referring not only to Iran's conventional military strength but also to its well-developed clandestine capabilities.

Reciprocity

Reciprocity is one of the defining characteristics of an intelligence operation. For example, if a U.S. case officer were to be discovered by the Russians and PNG'd (declared "persona non grata"), it would be quite normal to see the Americans quickly detain and expel a Russian intelligence officer, known as a "Rezident." Similarly, if the FBI perceived that a Rezident was getting too provocative in his countersurveillance routine and decided to break the Rezident's car tail light or slash his tires, the bureau's Russian counterpart, the FSB, usually would respond in kind with an American case officer in Moscow. This principle extends to assassinations: If you kill one of ours, we will kill one of yours.

The concepts of reciprocity and vengeance are also deeply ingrained in the cultures and religions of the Middle East. In a conflict between the Iranians and Israelis, these concepts would figure prominently in any covert strikes -- as they frequently did in the past. To illustrate:


February 1992: Israeli agents assassinated Hezbollah leader Abbas Musawi. A month later, immediately after the 30-day mourning period for Musawi ended, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was bombed.


July 1994: Israel Defense Forces killed dozens of Hezbollah members in a strike at the group's Ein Dardara training camp. Hezbollah's response: the vehicle bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and attacks, eight days later, against the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish charity in London.


March 1995: MOIS carried out a well-planned strike against U.S. consulate employees in Karachi, Pakistan, killing two and wounding a third. It is believed that MOIS staged the attack in response to the killing of an Iranian intelligence officer, for which Tehran blamed the United States.

In short, Khamenei's recent threats of reciprocal attacks, in light of history, should not be taken lightly.

Emerging Risks

With this in mind, it is to be expected that the Iranians would retaliate against the party they believe to be responsible for the assassination of Hassanpour. Precisely which assets would be used in retaliation is an important question. If Hezbollah were activated, for example, one might expect a strike along the lines of the Buenos Aires or London attacks. But if MOIS operatives carried out the strike, it would have a completely different feel. MOIS frequently has employed stealth and deception to get the assassins within close range of their targets -- close enough to kill them with pistols or knives, often in the targets' homes.

If past cycles are any indication, the Iranians would take somewhere between four and six weeks to launch a reprisal -- or, in other words, a strike could come as early as the last week of February. According to source reports, MOIS and Hezbollah have been conducting pre-operational surveillance over the past year or so to collect targeting data in many different locations, so it is likely that a target already has been identified. This activity -- which began before the summer Israel/Hezbollah conflict and continued after its conclusion -- is a strong indication that the Iranians have been thinking about "off-the-shelf plans" that could be executed later as needed to protect their interests. Once plans were prepared, however, it still would be necessary to move operatives into place, acquire weapons and fine-tune details before an actual strike was carried out. This last step would require additional surveillance, so countersurveillance efforts will be crucial, especially for Israeli and Jewish targets, over the next few weeks.



(click to enlarge)

As a rule, the activities of Iranian diplomats in Western countries are watched closely in an effort to determine who among them are likely to be MOIS officers. With international tensions with Iran at their current levels, the activities of these officers will be scrutinized closely in coming weeks. American and Israeli intelligence officers also will be watching the Iranians closely in developing countries -- working with intelligence and security services of friendly countries and on a unilateral basis in locations where the host government is less cooperative -- or less competent. Meanwhile, counterintelligence agents will be taking a keen interest in anyone who meets with suspected MOIS officers -- especially Lebanese or Iranian visitors from out of town. That is because the Iranians have shown a tendency to use "out-of-town talent" to carry out attacks in the past, such as the strikes in Buenos Aires. Monitoring such activity could help to pre-empt any plans for a retaliatory strike by Iran. The Iranians know this well -- it is not a new concept -- and therefore likely would plan any retaliatory actions to take place in a country where, from their perspective, there is less risk of being detected or caught after the fact.

History and Khamenei's statement last week support the possibility that a reprisal attack very well could take place far beyond the Middle East. Countries in Asia, the Americas or Europe -- where MOIS and Hezbollah have conducted operations in the past -- are possibilities to consider. The risks to Israeli or Jewish targets are highest in areas where the Iranians have a diplomatic presence to support the mission, and where the host country's intelligence service and law enforcement officials are corrupt or otherwise ineffective.

If a strike against an Israeli or Jewish target in such a location should transpire, it would differ from a jihadist attack in that there would be no claims of credit by Iran. The attack itself would send all the message required.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2007, 05:26:25 PM
A Real Outing
The Los Angeles Times boasts that it has identified three CIA pilots who are facing kidnapping charges in Germany over a 2003 counterterrorism operation there:

The names they used were all aliases, but The Times confirmed their real identities from government databases and visited their homes this month after a German court in January ordered the arrest of the three "ghost pilots" and 10 other alleged members of the CIA's special renditions unit on charges of kidnapping and causing serious bodily harm to Khaled Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, three years ago.

None of the pilots responded to repeated requests for comment left with family members and on their home telephones. The Times is not publishing their real names because they have been charged only under their aliases.

But it does offer plenty of details about them:

In real life, the chief pilot is 52, drives a Toyota Previa minivan and keeps a collection of model trains in a glass display case near a large bubbling aquarium in his living room. Federal aviation records show he is rated to fly seven kinds of aircraft as long as he wears his glasses. . . .

His copilot, who used the alias Fain, is a bearded man of 35 who lives with his father and two dogs in a separate subdivision. . . .

The third pilot, who used the alias Bird, is 46, drives a Ford Explorer and has a 17-foot aluminum fishing boat. Certified as a flight instructor, he keeps plastic models of his favorite planes mounted by the fireplace in his living room in a house that backs onto a private golf course here [in a town of 13,000 the Times identifies in its dateline].

Remember all the outrage when Robert Novak "outed" Valerie Plame, who apparently worked a desk job at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.? Here the L.A. Times is publishing extensive personal details on three men who have actually done dangerous work defending the country. Where's the outrage?

WSJ
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2007, 09:36:28 AM
February 26, 2007 -- LAST week, American troops checking traffic from Iran detained Amar al-Hakim, a cleric and the son of the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) - the key Shia political organization we're counting on.


The bust was a mistake - although the soldiers followed their orders to the letter. Young Hakim's bodyguards got to kiss the dirt while the vehicles in the cleric's convoy were searched. The troops didn't know the mullah from a moonshine runner.

SCIRI certainly has some dark connections with Iran. The party's a dubious ally, at best. But jerking the boss' kid around was, in diplo-speak, "unhelpful." Even if Hakim Jr. was smuggling money, or worse.

I'd be shocked if he wasn't. It's the Middle East, folks. We're just betting we can handle the least poisonous local snakes.

As a former Military Intelligence officer, my first reaction to teaching Little Hakim the perp walk was: "Who's responsible for tracking this guy?"

A sound intel effort would monitor all of the male family members of Iraq's key leaders 24/7. How did Hakim Jr. slip off the reservation?

My second reaction was more indulgent. Even with a first-rate intel program, mistakes happen under combat conditions. No amount of training, information flow and technical support will ever achieve perfection.

The good news is that the Army's Military Intelligence branch has been learning fast in Iraq. Official and un-official reforms are underway, driven from below by the divisional, brigade and battalion-level "deuces" who've paid their combat-zone dues.

The Military Intelligence ancien regime badly needed a trip to the guillotine. The ethical corruption of MI branch over the last quarter-century was appalling. In peacetime, we wasted billions; in wartime, we wasted lives.

While a minority of us had argued since the mid-1980s that the human factor would be paramount in our future conflicts and that technology couldn't replace the human mind, the MI establishment just went on buying platinum-plated junk that never delivered a tenth of what the contractors and apostles of hi-tech promised.

Appropriate technologies can help us - but no database or collection system is a substitute for seasoned human judgment. The key task in intelligence is understanding the enemy. Machines do many things, but they still don't register flesh-and-blood relationships, self-sacrifice or fanaticism.

Forgetting that tech is supposed to support people, we wasted talented people supporting worthless technologies.

The cardinal example of this corrosive mentality was the purchase of a multibillion-dollar, Rube Goldberg contraption called the All Source Analysis System (ASAS). Under development for more than two decades, ASAS never worked. But a generation of senior MI leaders made rank pitching the system as the answer to every intelligence need.

ASAS was going to fuse the data from every classified intel source and give the commander instant, perfect answers. Early on - in 1984 - a self-assured technocrat in uniform told me that, within 10 years, human analysts would be irrelevant.

ASAS was disastrously flawed from the start, but impossible to kill once the funding got going. Not only were MI careers at stake, Congress preferred to buy gear built by home-district contractors, rather than "waste" money on soldiers. And those contractors ensured that key MI apparatchiks wouldn't flip burgers after they retired.

When ASAS consistently failed to work, the inevitable response from above was "Make it work!"

It never did, no matter how much money we squandered.

By the time ASAS deployed to Iraq, it was an obese behemoth requiring so much technical support to achieve minimal output that it became a liability, robbing our forces of human capital needed to deal with the real problems of insurgency, such as ethnic rivalries and religious hatred. To quote one disgusted officer, ASAS was, at best, "the world's most-expensive communications van."

ASAS was the monster that ate MI.

Now ASAS has been slain at last, the one good kill our enemies made. And a new generation of officers has earned its spurs. MI's combat veterans understand what intelligence must do, and they realize that satellites can't pierce the human soul. There's a powerful reform effort underway, from Iraq and Afghanistan back to the Army Intelligence Center and School.

Today's Military Intelligence personnel are a damned sight better than my inept, physically slovenly and intellectually lazy generation was.

On a recent visit to the Intel School at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., I found that the last ASAS nonsense had been swept away. Captains returning from Iraq and Afghanistan for the Advanced Course - a training staple - had no patience with yesteryear's bureaucratic approach to intel. They know that commanders need results, not just data dumps. The lives of our soldiers depend upon the quality of our intel.

There still isn't nearly enough money for language training (Congress would rather pay contractors, as usual), and there isn't sufficient classroom time to make up fully for the lost years. But it was reassuring to see commanders, students and faculty discarding the old faith in technology's divine powers and coming to grips with the rigors of real intel work.

Under wartime pressures, Military Intelligence is finally coming of age. We'll still get some things wrong. Now and then the wrong guy will be told to assume the position. Our struggle with Islamist terror is more than Andy and Barney keeping the peace in Mayberry. MI's maturation process will take years - and more wars. The profiteers and careerists will fight back. But the reformers have the upper hand at last.

That isn't just good news for our troops, but for our country.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Never Quit The Fight."

http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/...lph_peters.htm
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 04, 2007, 06:18:57 AM
Intelligence Specialist's Shooting Stirs Speculation
No Motive Known As Comments on Putin Are Debated


By Candace Rondeaux and Lori Aratani
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 4, 2007; C01

In some ways, the shooting of Paul Joyal last week in a quiet, middle-class enclave of Prince George's County would seem like nothing more than a random act of violence.
But for those who know the 53-year-old expert on Russian intelligence and former staff member of the U.S. Senate's intelligence committee, the shooting has raised suspicions that his background might be behind the incident.
Law enforcement sources have said it is unclear whether the gunmen were trying to rob Joyal. He was shot in the driveway of his home shortly after returning from a trip to the International Spy Museum in the District with a friend.
Two men shot Joyal about 7:35 p.m. Thursday, sources said. The shooting occurred four days after Joyal alleged in a television broadcast that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the fatal poisoning of a former KGB agent in London.
Prince George's police officers have released few details about the incident, and several calls requesting comment were not returned yesterday. Joyal remained hospitalized yesterday.
But an FBI official confirmed yesterday that the agency is looking into the shooting. Joseph Persichini Jr., the FBI's assistant director in charge of the Washington field office, said his office is assisting Prince George's and the Baltimore office of the FBI in the investigation.
"We're pursuing this as hard as possible. We're not at all sure of the motive," Persichini said.
Joyal, who has long been an outspoken critic of the Putin regime, appeared in a segment on "Dateline NBC" Feb. 25 about the Alexander Litvinenko case. Litvinenko's death in November from radiation poisoning has caused widespread speculation that Putin and the Russian government were involved, because Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, was looking into the killing of a Russian journalist. Putin and Kremlin officials have repeatedly denied involvement.
In the "Dateline" interview, Joyal pointedly accused the Putin regime of silencing its critics and poisoning Litvinenko with polonium-210, a rare radioactive substance.
"It's clear-cut. It has to be a state-run or a state-managed operation," Joyal said in the interview.
The circumstances of Joyal's shooting seem worthy of a spy novel.
"I would not rule out anything, but it's hard to believe that a few days [after the broadcast] that some guys would shoot him. It could be just a regular criminal assault," said longtime family friend and former business associate Oleg Kalugin.
Kalugin, a former KGB general and Putin's former boss in the agency, met with Joyal for drinks at a restaurant at the Spy Museum a few hours before the shooting. Kalugin, a member of the museum's board, said in a phone interview yesterday that Joyal seemed in good spirits before leaving for home.
Kalugin said he was shocked when he received a panicked phone call from Joyal's wife about an hour after the men had parted, saying that Joyal had been shot in front of his Adelphi area home.
"I could not believe my ears when she said he was shot. She said Paul drove up to the house, and as he opened the door and left [the car], there were two guys, and they shot him," Kalugin said.
A source close to Joyal, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the unidentified assailants shot Joyal in the groin and escaped.
Joyal's wife, who is a nurse, was at home at the time and ran to assist her husband as he lay bleeding in the driveway, the sources said.
Joyal was taken to a hospital, where he was initially in critical condition. A source said yesterday that Joyal had improved and that doctors were "cautiously optimistic" that he will recover.
Yesterday, four cars were parked in the driveway at Joyal's brick ranch on Lackawanna Road. A boy who answered the door declined to speak to a reporter.
Neighbors and friends said Joyal, who is a member of the Prince George's law enforcement task force, is the father of three and coaches youth basketball.
Prince George's State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey, who befriended Joyal through his work in local law enforcement, said he did not know details about the investigation.
"He's a wonderful man with a strong commitment to the community," Ivey said.
Staff writers Sari Horwitz, Eric Rich and Meg Smith contributed to this report.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 04, 2007, 10:09:49 PM
involved in Iranian general's disappearance?

Former Iranian deputy defense minister vanished about a month ago on his way from Damascus to Turkey. Iranian officials say Mossad, CIA may have been involved in his disappearance Dudi Cohen Published: 03.04.07, 22:24 / Israel News

A senior Iranian general, Ali-Raza Asgari, went missing nearly a month ago in Istanbul and Iranian officials claim that Israel and the United States may have had a hand in his disappearance.

Several days ago, Iranian website Baztab, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, reported that during the 1980s Asgari held a senior position in the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon , and that following his return to Iran he was appointed deputy defense minister.

No official source in Iran has commented on the report about the disappearance, but a top official told Baztab that "some of the claims in the report are unequivocally incorrect."

The general's disappearance was first reported at the end of February in the Saudi newspaper al-Watan. The paper said that at the beginning of February Asgari visited Damascus and later flew o Istanbul in Turkey, where he checked into a hotel.
"Several Turkish citizens reserved a room for Asgari at the Gilan Hotel in Istanbul and paid for it, but haven't heard from him since," the paper stated.

"In a meeting held by the Turkish security officials with an Iranian delegation, the possibility was raised that the Mossad and the CIA were involved in his disappearance," it added.

Security sources in Turkey told a local newspaper that so far, the searches for Asgari have yielded no results.  According to a Turkish official, "The records do not show that a person under this name left Turkey, but given his sensitive job and the important information he possesses regarding the Iranian nuclear program, the possibility that he left Turkey using a fake passport and an alias is being examined." Former Iranian deputy defense minister vanished about a month ago on his way from Damascus to Turkey. Iranian officials say Mossad, CIA may have been involved in his disappearance Dudi Cohen Published: 03.04.07, 22:24 / Israel News

A senior Iranian general, Ali-Raza Asgari, went missing nearly a month ago in Istanbul and Iranian officials claim that Israel and the United States may have had a hand in his disappearance.

Several days ago, Iranian website Baztab, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, reported that during the 1980s Asgari held a senior position in the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon , and that following his return to Iran he was appointed deputy defense minister.

No official source in Iran has commented on the report about the disappearance, but a top official told Baztab that "some of the claims in the report are unequivocally incorrect."

The general's disappearance was first reported at the end of February in the Saudi newspaper al-Watan. The paper said that at the beginning of February Asgari visited Damascus and later flew o Istanbul in Turkey, where he checked into a hotel.
"Several Turkish citizens reserved a room for Asgari at the Gilan Hotel in Istanbul and paid for it, but haven't heard from him since," the paper stated.

"In a meeting held by the Turkish security officials with an Iranian delegation, the possibility was raised that the Mossad and the CIA were involved in his disappearance," it added.

Security sources in Turkey told a local newspaper that so far, the searches for Asgari have yielded no results. According to a Turkish official, "The records do not show that a person under this name left Turkey, but given his sensitive job and the important information he possesses regarding the Iranian nuclear program, the possibility that he left Turkey using a fake passport and an alias is being examined."

This is the second Iranian high official to either have come up missing or dead in about the last months time. We can all only hope more will follow.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2007, 12:33:24 PM
Geopolitical Diary: Iranian Secrets on the Loose?

Ali Reza Askari, a former aide to the Iranian defense minister and a retired general with long service in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has been missing since Feb. 7. He reportedly was last seen in Istanbul. After his disappearance, Arab newspapers quickly fingered Mossad and the CIA for his assassination or kidnapping. Iranian officials made similar claims. On Tuesday, the independent Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat offered a different explanation: Askari had defected, turning himself over to U.S. agents in Turkey.

After visiting Damascus on official business, Askari reportedly flew to Istanbul on a personal trip. Menashe Amir, an Israeli analyst of Iranian affairs, has said that Askari's family left Iran ahead of him and met up with him in Istanbul. That his disappearance appears to have happened while he was traveling abroad with his family seems a remarkable coincidence. And Istanbul is a particularly convenient location for the U.S. intelligence community: Turkey's intelligence agencies are on good terms with their American counterparts, and U.S. military flights are quite common.

While Asharq Al-Awsat has occasionally been used by Riyadh for disinformation purposes -- and both the Saudis and the Israelis (and essentially everyone else discussing his disappearance) have cause to manipulate perceptions of Iran -- the fact remains that a covert war is raging, and has been. Mossad has likely taken out Ardeshir Hassanpour, a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist. In Iraq, the United States has raided an Iranian consulate and arrested Iranian citizens, including Mohsen Shirazi, a commander of the elite IRGC Quds Brigade.

One thing is clear: Askari is missing and Tehran is at least pretending to be worried. An Iranian delegation arrived in Istanbul last week to investigate, and has reportedly contacted Interpol. Some of the details of Askari's military career have been closely guarded by the Iranian government, but indications are that he has been heavily involved in strategic affairs as well as military purchases and production. Israeli sources claim that he was the commander of the IRGC in Lebanon in the late 1980s, where he served as a liaison with Hezbollah. He could even be privy to information on Tehran's nuclear program.

Iran appears to be operating on the assumption that Askari might have been compromised. While the true scope and pertinence of his knowledge is known only to Tehran (or was, prior to Feb. 7), the damage he could do to Iran is almost certainly significant. Reports that dozens of IRGC members working in cultural centers and embassies in the Arab world and Europe have been called back to Tehran, for fear that their identities will be disclosed, lend credence to the utility of the information Askari might offer. Some sources have characterized his possible defection as a "deathblow."

While a kidnapped Askari would be of deep concern, an Askari who defected willingly would be a nightmare for Tehran. And this situation could be even more dire than just Askari walking in out of the cold and asking for asylum. The U.S. intelligence community could already have been working him for months -- or years.

Brushing aside the loss of someone like Askari simply might not be possible for Tehran. A defense establishment that has gone out of its way to appear threatening and capable could be exposed as a fake. Or even if it truly is dangerous and capable, its best laid battle plans and contingencies might now be in the hands of the Pentagon. From Iranian lines of communication to Hezbollah, to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's evacuation plans in the event of a U.S. attack, the possible revelations are numerous and highly sensitive.

Of course, Askari could be a double agent and Iran's "concern" could be feigned. His high position would certainly suggest a strong loyalty to the clerical regime. But making a double agent out of someone with such a vast array of devastating information seems to place too much directly into the hands of the United States -- an awful gamble for Tehran.

Whatever the case, the stakes in the covert war have almost certainly been raised.

stratfor.com
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 10, 2007, 06:06:52 AM

http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/03092007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/iran__big_fish_gone_missing_opedcolumnists_amir_ta heri.htm
March 9, 2007 -- 'A VERY big fish" - so Tehran sources de scribe former Deputy Defense Minister Ali-Reza Askari (sometimes called "Asghari" in the West), who disappeared in Istanbul on Sunday.

Askari's disappearance fits an emerging pattern. Since December, the United States and its allies appear to have moved onto the offensive against the Islamic Republic's networks of influence in the Middle East:
* Jordan has seized 17 Iranian agents, accused of trying to smuggle arms to Hamas, and deported them quietly after routine debriefing.
* A number of Islamic Republic agents have been identified and deported in Pakistan and Tunisia.
* At least six other Iranian agents have been picked up in Gaza, where they were helping Hamas set up armament factories.
* In the past three months, some 30 senior Iranian officials, including at least two generals of Revolutionary Guards, have been captured in Iraq.
All but five of the Islamic Republic agents seized in Iraq appear to have been released. One of those released was Hassan Abbasi, nicknamed "the Kissinger of Islam," who is believed to be President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's strategic advisor.
Among those still held by the Americans is one Muhammad Jaafari Sahraroudi, a senior Revolutionary Guard commander wanted by the Austrian police in connection with the murder of three Iranian Kurdish leaders in Vienna in 1989.
All this looks like a message to Tehran that its opponents may be moving on to the offensive in what looks like a revival of tactics used in the Cold War.
But let us return to the "big fish."
A retired two-star general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Askari had just led a military mission to Damascus, the Syrian capital. He was making a private "shopping stopover" in Turkey on his way back to Tehran.
The Iranian mission's task was to lay the foundations for a Syrian armament industry, licensed to manufacture Iranian-designed weapons. The 30 or so experts that had accompanied Askari remained in Syria to work out the technical details.
According to some reports, Askari had stopped over in Istanbul to meet with an unidentified Syrian arms dealer who lives in Paris.
Having at first denied reports of the general's disappearance, Tehran authorities eventually came out with a confirmation. The Islamic Republic's police chief, Gen. Ismail Ahmadi-Muqaddam, issued a statement Tuesday claiming that the missing general had been abducted by a Western intelligence service and taken to "a country in northern Europe."
Foreign Ministry sources in Tehran, however, said that Askari might have defected, possibly to the United States, where he has relatives. Some reports in the Iranian and Arab media suggest that the Israeli secret service Mossad and the CIA are behind Askari's disappearance.
Israel has denied involvement in the general's disappearance, but The London Daily Telegraph speculated on Monday that Askari could have been abducted by Israel to shed light on the whereabouts of Israel Air Force Lt.-Col. Ron Arad, missing since 1986, who might have been held at one point by Iran. Askari was involved in a deal to transfer Arad to Tehran after his capture by the Lebanese Hezbollah.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted Monday as saying Iran was "taking necessary steps" to solve the case: "A director-general from the [foreign] ministry has traveled to Turkey . . . We have asked Turkey to investigate Askari's case."
According to Iranian sources, Askari, in his late 50s, joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRG) at its very start in 1979. He was an associate of Mostafa Chamran, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Iranian origin who returned to Iran when the mullahs seized power in 1979 and helped found the IRG. When Chamran was appointed defense minister two years later, Askari became one of his advisers.
Always in the shadows, Askari was in charge of a program to train foreign Islamist militants as part of Tehran's strategy of "exporting" the Khomeinist revolution.
In 1982-83, Askari (along with Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Mohatashami-Pour) founded the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah and helped set up its first military units. The two men supervised the 1983 suicide attacks on the U.S. Embassy and on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut - killing more than 300 Americans, including 241 Marines. Iranian sources say Askari was part of a triumvirate of Revolutionary Guard officers that controlled Hezbollah's armed units until the end of the '90s.
Askari led the 500-man Iranian military mission in Beirut from 1998 to 2000 before returning home to work for the Strategic Defense Procurement Committee. In that capacity, he often traveled abroad to negotiate arms deals.
Tehran sources claim that Askari was also involved in Iran's controversial nuclear program, which, although presented as a civilian project, is controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. They also say that last November he was appointed a member of the Strategic Defense Planning Commission set up by Ali Khamenei, the "Supreme Guide."
Indeed, Iran is rife with rumors about the case: Askari has been transferred to Romania, where he is being debriefed by the Americans; he had documents with him, mostly related to Iran's military purchases abroad; Israeli efforts to see him (in connection with his years of running Hezballah) have so far failed to meet with success . . .
Whether he defected or was abducted, Askari is a big catch with a mine of information about the activities of the Revolutionary Guard and its elite arm, the Quds Corps, which controls Arab and Turkish radical groups financed by Tehran. Last month, the United States accused the Quds Corps of supplying special projectiles to terrorists in Iraq to kill GIs.
Iranian-born journalist and author Amir Taheri is based in Europe.
Askari is a big catch, with a mine of information about the activities of the Revolutionary Guard.</B>
------------------------------------------
a different interpretation:

From: stevewessler
Date: 3/8/2007 6:53:43 PM
To: ArmySecurityAgency@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [ASA] Iranian General Reportedly Defects

Iranian General Reportedly Defects
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

A former high-ranking Iranian government official, Brig. Gen. Alireza
Asghari, 63, has defected to the United States, Iranian exiles and
other sources told Newsmax today.

Asghari had access to highly-classified intelligence information and
"defected to the Americans with lots of secrets," respected Iranian
journalist Alireza Nourizadeh told Newsmax from London.
The disappearance of the former Revolutionary Guards General has
created a panic in Tehran.

Gen. Asghari left Iran on an officially-sanctioned trip to Damascus,
Syria, then went missing during a stop-over in Istanbul, Turkey on
February 7, according to statements by Iranian government officials
in Tehran.

Nourizadeh believes he had been sent to Damascus to supervise an arms
deal between Iran and Syria that was signed last June during a trip
to Tehran by Syria's defense minister.

"It is possible that former deputy defense minister Asghari was
kidnapped by Western intelligence services because of his Defense
Ministry background," the head of Iran's national police, Gen. Ismail
Ahmadi-Moghaddam, said in Tehran yesterday.

But Newsmax has learned from Iranian sources that Gen. Asghari's
family also managed to leave Iran just before he went missing, and
that he sold his house in the Narmak area of Tehran in December.
Both are considered clear indications that he defected and had been
planning his departure for some time.

As a senior member of the general staff of the Revolutionary Guards
Corps, Gen. Asghari had access to highly-classified operational
information, as well as strategic planning documents, said Shahriar
Ahy, an Iranian political analyst based in Washington, D.C. "It will
take them months to know just what they've lost," Ahy told Newsmax
today.

The damage control investigation could reach the very summit of the
Iranian government because of Gen. Asghari's long-standing personal
relationship to former Defense minister Admiral Ali Shakhani, Any
said. "The loss of Gen. Asghari will severely hamper the regime's
operations outside the country, because he will pull back the cloth
on what he knows," Ahy said. "Intelligence agents will be called
back, and operations will be put into deep freeze" as the regime
tries to figure out what secrets Asghari compromised.

Gen. Asghari is believed to have detailed knowledge of the
Revolutionary Guards Qods Force units operating in Iraq. He is also
believed to have come out with extensive information on Iran's
clandestine nuclear weapons program, which will make it harder for
Russia and China to come to Iran's defense at the ongoing 6-power
talks on Iran's nuclear program.

From 1989-1993, Gen. Asghari was stationed in Lebanon as Iran's
liaison to Hezbollah. Israeli press accounts have identified him as
the Iranian official who "knows the most" about what happened to
Israeli navigator Ron Arad, who was reportedly "sold" to Iran after
his plane was shot down over southern Lebanon in 1986.


The Iranian regime requires top official such as Gen. Asghari to
obtain an authorization before they can travel abroad. Gen. Asghari's
10-day trip to Syria was approved by the military judicial
authorities, sources inside Iran told Newsmax. Two days after he
arrived in Damascus, his family managed to leave Iran, the sources
said. The main impediment to defections by high-ranking Iranian
officials is fear that any family members left behind will be
arrested, tortured, and possibly killed.

The Persian-language website Baztab.com claims that Gen. Asghari's
name was on a CIA "hit list" of twenty former Revolutionary Guards
officers. Baztab is owned by former Revolutionary Guards commander
Gen. Mohsen Rezai, now a top aide to former president Ali Akbar
Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Alireza Nourizadeh, the Iranian journalist based
in London, tells Newsmax that Gen. Asghari planned his defection
carefully. "While he was in Damascus, he sent a fax or an email to
Tehran saying that one of his contacts, who was an arms dealer, was
in Turkey and wanted to meet him," he told Newsmax. "So they gave him
permission to go to Turkey, where he defected."

The Iranian military attaché in Istanbul had reserved a room for Gen.
Asghari at the Continental hotel, Nourizadeh said, but Asghari
complained that it was not safe. Instead, he booked three rooms at
the Gilan Hotel, in the Tacsim district which is popular among
Iranians. "After calling a relative in Tehran, he left the hotel at
6:30 PM and disappeared," he said.

During the 1990s, Gen. Asghari was in charge of short and medium-
range missile projects at the Defense Industries Organization. "He
ran the Nazeat, Fajr, and Zelzal missile programs," Nourizadeh said.
From 1996-1997, he worked on secret nuclear procurement projects, and
traveled frequently to Russia, China, North Korea, and Southeast Asia
buying equipment and parts.

Nourizadeh believes Gen. Asghari defected because he had incurred the
wrath of his superiors in the Defense ministry during a stint as the
Defense Ministry's Inspector General. "He discovered two gangs of
corrupt officials who had embezzled the government for $90 million
and $150 million," Nourizadeh said. "After he exposed them, he was
arrested. He was Mr. Clean."
Eventually, Gen. Asghari was rehabilitated and put to work on the
Iran-Syria arms deals signed last year, but he never forgave his
superiors for orchestrating his fall from power.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 14, 2007, 05:36:21 PM
The Asghari Case: Defection and Damage Control
March 14, 2007 19 52  GMT



By Fred Burton

Ali Reza Asghari, a former Iranian deputy defense minister and Pasdaran commander, went missing from Istanbul several weeks ago. After his disappearance -- which Turkish authorities say could have been as long ago as December but was not reported to them by Iran until early February -- Arab newspapers began to insinuate that Mossad and the CIA were responsible for having had him abducted or killed. These claims were echoed by Iranian officials. Last week, however, the Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat independent newspaper reported that Asghari had defected to the U.S. government while traveling in Turkey. This report was confirmed by the Washington Post, which quoted a senior U.S. intelligence official March 8 as saying Asghari was cooperating voluntarily -- and fully -- with Western intelligence agencies.

The United States and Iran have been locked in a covert "intelligence war" that has been raging for some time now. And, as in the Cold War, this war likely will involve the use of tactics ranging from assassinations and clandestine operations to propaganda, disinformation and the use of military proxies. Defectors and agents of influence also have been a feature of such wars in the past -- which brings us back to the Asghari case.

The significance of Asghari's disappearance stems entirely from his background. Not only did he serve as Iran's deputy defense minister under former President Mohammed Khatami, but he also is a retired general who was a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, the Iranians clearly have worried that he might be providing Western intelligence agencies with a wealth of information on the capabilities of the Iranian armed forces, and possibly helping to improve their understanding of the relationship between the IRGC (or "Pasdaran," in Farsi) and Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iraqi Shiite groups such as the Mehdi Army and the Badr Brigade. Given his background, he also would be in a position to shed light on the Pasdaran's clandestine abilities abroad and perhaps identify other Iranian intelligence officers. In other words, Asghari could prove an important (and timely) catch for U.S. intelligence, especially if he had been working with the United States as an "agent in place" for a long period.

In an intelligence war -- or just at routine levels of good old-fashioned espionage -- the defection of a figure like Asghari can prove useful in more ways than one. To understand this case and its potential twists and turns a bit better, let's take a look at the definitions and specific stages of the intelligence process surrounding defections: vetting, extraction and debriefings.

Defectors

To begin at the beginning, a "defector" is a person who abandons allegiance to one country in order to serve another. Like other intelligence sources, there are two basic types of defectors: those who are sought, or recruited, and those who volunteer.

Sources who are recruited are approached by intelligence agencies because they are in a certain position in government or society and have access to what is deemed important information. They are people who can provide the information to satisfy key intelligence requirements. While some sources might leave their native countries soon after being recruited, there have been many cases when it was found, after defection, that the person had worked as either an agent in place or an "agent of influence" -- someone who can help to shape government policy, public opinion or even military decisions -- for the recruiting country. Such agents can stay in place for years before "coming in from the cold," or physically defecting, to the recruiting country.

Well-positioned agents in place provide unique insight into the thinking, mindset and planning of the leadership of the government on which they have been spying. They provide crucial insight that cannot be gathered through technical means. In other words, you can use technology to take a picture of a man or listen to his telephone conversations, but those things might not provide you with information or even very good clues about his thoughts and plans. That kind of information comes only from human sources with the right access.

The second type of defector, the one who volunteers, is called a "walk-in" -- because, frequently, they literally do walk into the embassy or consulate of a foreign country and volunteer their services. Walk-ins are problematic because they often appear when they are least expected; therefore, intelligence-gathering operations involving walk-ins are often hectic affairs that must be quickly conceived and implemented. Furthermore, if the person who walks in is not careful, their very presence at a foreign embassy can out them to the host country's counterintelligence forces (which can be expected to be monitoring the embassy). That makes it difficult to retain a walk-in as an agent in place, and adds to the challenges of getting him out of the country when needed for an in-depth debriefing. However, it can be done: CIA officer Aldrich Ames was a walk-in to the Soviet Embassy in Washington but the KGB (and its successor, the FSB) managed to work him as an agent in place for nearly 10 years before he was detected and arrested.

A highly placed source like Ames is a dream come true for an intelligence officer -- and the worst nightmare for a counterintelligence service.

Vetting the source -- to affirm whether he or she is genuine -- is an important part of all espionage recruitment operations, and defectors are not excepted from this rule. Many walk-ins turn out to be "fabricators," "dangles" (people sent into the embassy in an order to identify the nondeclared intelligence officers stationed there) or "double agents" (those who appear to be defectors but who actually are used to spread disinformation and to determine how the opponent's intelligence service functions). While there is not much danger of a source who is targeted for recruitment being a fabricator, there is a danger of that person being a dangle, or a double agent. Vetting of both the source and the information provided by the source is essentially a continuous process; the defector will be closely monitored (and subjected to polygraph exams) throughout his period of employment.

Extraction

Once a spy has been identified, recruited and initially vetted -- and found to be of value -- the intelligence service must determine the best way to use that person. As noted, the source might be left in place to collect additional information, or whisked out of the country for a debriefing. Either way, the source must eventually be extracted from the country in a clandestine fashion. This extraction process is sometimes called an "exfiltration" -- the opposite of an infiltration.

While some extractions can be dramatic, not all of them are Hollywood productions involving submarines and special operations forces. Because such operations are not only dangerous but also costly, they are carried out only under extreme circumstances. Most extractions are intended to be far more low-key: Quite often, the sneakiest way to commit an operational act is to do it in a mundane fashion, in plain sight. Therefore, it is far more common for defectors to leave their home countries under the ruse of taking a vacation or, as with Asghari, for business reasons. (That said, people are still occasionally smuggled out of embassy parking garages in the trunks of a cars.)

Time is an important consideration in extractions: Generally, the more time one has to plan and execute an extraction, the smoother and more low-key it will be. Location is also critical. Getting a person out of an open society is much easier than getting them out of a repressive society with strict travel regulations.

Once a defector gets to a third country for "vacation" or to "attend a conference," they can be picked up and spirited away. But again, time is a critical factor: If a person is watched closely by his government and cannot stray far from a security officer, or "minder," those planning the extraction will have significantly less time to operate than they otherwise would. Once the defector is in custody, he can be furnished with false documentation and secreted away in much the same way a subject is in an extraordinary rendition. In fact, much of the U.S. government's expertise in handling renditions was derived from its operations to extract defectors.

It is even easier if the third country is friendly to the extracting country. For instance, in the Asghari case, Turkey is known to cooperate with U.S. intelligence and the presence of (heavily trafficked) U.S. air bases in the country would make it quite simple to get a defector from a third country out of Turkey without being detected.

Debriefing

Debriefing a defector can be a lengthy process that often involves specialists from a number of government agencies. In the case of Asghari, the team likely would include members from the Defense Intelligence Agency and Special Operations Command (given Asghari's military background), and the FBI and State Department, since he might have historical information regarding Iranian-sponsored attacks by Hezbollah and other proxies, and perhaps even information pertaining to future attacks.

During the course of a debriefing, the defector would be given a complete medical and psychological exam. The psychological team often can provide important guidance on the defector's psyche and on the best approaches to use in debriefing that person -- and, just as important, subjects to raise and pitfalls to avoid.

Vetting is as important during the debriefing as in other stages of the process. This not only helps to determine if the defector is a double agent, but also can be useful in determining when the defector has run out of useful information. (At this stage, many sources will begin to fabricate information in an effort to make themselves appear to be of lasting value.) The defector likely will endure several polygraph examinations during this phase. The host country's reaction to the defection also will be factored in to the vetting equation, and other sources will be tasked to determine whether he was a double agent.

Once the defector has been completely debriefed, he probably will be resettled and employed by the government as a consultant -- someone authorities can turn to in the future with questions about personalities and events relevant to his background. He also might lead training classes and seminars to teach U.S. and allied personnel about the organization and operations of his former agency.

Of course, given the value of an asset like Asghari, the intelligence services of numerous U.S. allies undoubtedly are clamoring for information from him, and even seeking access in order to conduct their own debriefings.

Opportunities

With the United States and Iran already engaged in an intelligence war, the defection of a figure like Asghari doubtless has provided Washington with a windfall of information regarding the Iranian defense establishment and Pasdaran. However, the Iranian reaction to the defection also could provide an opportunity to gather even more intelligence -- especially if Washington had the time to pre-position additional surveillance assets.

This, by the way, is very likely the reason Iranian authorities did not report Asghari's disappearance to the Turkish government for several weeks. Regardless of whether the defector was thought to be already in enemy hands, Tehran would have wanted to keep its reaction as low-key as possible and information about Asghari's disappearance away from a "hostile" (meaning U.S.-allied) intelligence service until Iranian officials had a handle on the situation.

From the U.S. perspective, the immediate follow-on questions and responses would have followed a set pattern. For instance, Washington would be monitoring Iranian diplomatic and intelligence traffic carefully. How was Asghari's disappearance reported internally? Who did the Iranians contact in Istanbul and Ankara? Were messages sent out to other Iranian missions in Europe or in New York? Have diplomats received any sudden recall orders?

Physically, the United States would use surveillance teams against the Iranian diplomats in Turkey to determine such things as: Who went looking for Asghari? Who in the Turkish government did the Iranians meet with? Did they mobilize any Iranian businessmen or students to assist their search? Such things could provide valuable insight into the Iranian intelligence network in Turkey.

In the wake of the defection, the United States and others doubtless have been watching for other sudden and unexpected departures of personnel from Iranian diplomatic missions worldwide. Such departures could indicate that an officer is with the Pasdaran or another intelligence agency that the leadership in Tehran believes might have been compromised by Asghari.

The Iranians will have to do a thorough damage-control investigation to determine every secret to which Asghari had access. They most assuredly will downplay the significance of Washington's intelligence score by making public claims that Asghari was of minimal importance and had no access to current information. However, in the end, the most crucial question Tehran will need to answer is, "How long has Asghari been working for the Americans?"

If the answer is "a long time," the damage to Iran's national security could be enormous.

stratfor.com
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on March 17, 2007, 06:35:46 AM
A Real CIA Outing   
By Andrew Walden
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 16, 2007

Just two days after former vice presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted in the Valerie Plame CIA case, anti-American war activists attempted to expose the identity of a CIA “clandestine agent” at a University of Hawaii-Hilo event. Twenty-five students gathered at UH Hilo on Thursday March 8 for a briefing on career opportunities with the Central Intelligence Agency. Their right of free assembly was obstructed by ten protesters including faculty, an administrator, and local Democratic Party figures.
Complaining that they were unable to complete their mission, protest leader, convicted federal felon, and ex-con Jim Albertini, whose misnamed Malu-Aina Peace Center also leads weekly anti-American war protests at the Hilo Federal Building explained, “Global HOPE leader Justin Avery, was told he could not use his video camera. Malu Aina peace organization also intended to take still photos and video of the presentation.” Hawaii Tribune-Herald photographer William Ing was also present; all photographers were warned by campus center officials that they would be removed by campus security if they attempt to take photos.
 
According to Beau Butts, former President of the UH Hilo Student Association, “Avery was filming the inside of the room and who was there from the door. He continued filming, walked in and sat down in the very front with the camera pointed at the CIA gentleman. Only after the gentleman mandated no photos or film of any kind did Avery turn off his camera and put the lens cap on. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some footage of the agent but I couldn’t know for sure. Snickering and inappropriate muttering continued throughout the entire presentation and continued interjections and allusions of CIA conspiracies regarding 9/11 were brought up.”
 
The Global HOPE Club at UH Hilo has at various times suggested that “Israelis” carried out the 9/11 attacks. They have also suggested that the CIA carried them out and they showed twice the movie 9/11 in Plane Site, made by ultra-right-wing conspiracy nuts, which claims that the US Air Force carried out the 9/11 attacks.  9/11 in Plane Site was also shown in 2005 at SKEA by then-Hawaii Island Journal sales and marketing director Tammy Rouleau. Albertini is a regular contributor to Hawaii Island Journal. Avery has written several articles for Big Island Weekly.
 
According to the Hawaii County Democratic Party website, Albertini is the President of Precinct 3-9. Avery, listed as Democratic President of Precinct 3-6, was endorsed in his failed District 4 council campaign by the Hawaii County Sierra Club. The Sierra Club’s Legislative Director was involved in a high profile altercation with Avery’s opponent, Stacey Higa at a hospital fundraiser in Kona shortly before Election Day. The Sierra Club endorsed Avery over Wendell Kaehuaea, who outpolled Avery in 2006 and had been endorsed by the Sierra Club in 2004. Sierra-Club-endorsed candidates now control the Hawaii County Council.
Said Albertini, "If the CIA ‘spook’ doesn't want his photo taken then he shouldn't be giving a public recruiting lecture at a public university." Fortunately the Supreme Court has upheld the “Solomon Amendment,” which would cause complete loss of all federal funds to any school which does not allow military recruiters on campus. Leftist academics often lose interest in “sacred principles” when their paycheck is on the line. UHH Student Services Vice-Chancellor Keith Miser helpfully pointed out to the Star Bulletin March 10 that the university occasionally imposes bans on photography of individuals or of events such as performances.

Avery came to the event in a suit and with fake blood on his hands apparently trying to portray the CIA but looking more like a blood-stained Soviet Commissar. He and Albertini were joined by faculty members Noelie Rodriguez and Tim Freeman and International Student Services Director, Ruth Robinson and an unidentified activist who shed his civilian disguise to show his true appearance as the grim reaper waving large stacks of counterfeit money. Rodriguez is the spouse of Hawaii County Planning Director Chris Yuen.
 
Said Butts in a letter to Robinson, the protesters’ “behavior shows a lack of faith in student’s abilities to discern for themselves what is right and wrong and what they may or may not look into as a viable potential career opportunity.”
 
Norm Stahl, a retired Marine and director of the UHH Career Center explained, “the group …came into the room and interfered with our students right to get career information free of distraction.” Students interested in CIA careers were forced to move into Stahl’s office so they could have a discussion without disruption.
 
It is not clear whether any of the activists actually obtained photos of the CIA agent, who is identified in the Star Bulletin as, “Joe Dorsey, from the CIA West Coast Recruitment Office in Fountain Valley, Calif.” Dorsey was described as a “clandestine agent” by university officials. The anti-American activists are claiming that the identification of the agent gives them the right to expose his face. Apparently they have not noticed that all CIA representatives have conspicuously inconspicuous names like “Joe Dorsey.” Unlike Avery, who adopted a misspelled fake Hawaiian name for his failed council campaign, CIA agents are required to be able to both spell and pronounce their names.
 
What type of punishment is available for those who actually expose a clandestine agent of the CIA? Federal Law is clear on this issue; USC 50-421 section C reads:
 
Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States, discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual’s classified intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
 
Albertini should be familiar with this: he spent one year in a federal penitentiary after diving into Hilo Bay in a failed 1984 effort to prevent a US Navy ship from docking.
 
Left-wing website Daily Kos’ diarist “KStreetProjector” has a different idea about punishment, explaining February 15: “The act of outing Valerie Wilson nee Plame was an act of Treason….Those involved should be hung. They have violated their oath, attacked our nation, violated their duty and are, to any sane reading: Domestic Enemies.”
 
Of course Plame was not a clandestine operative but a desk-bound CIA analyst and Democrat political operative whose covert career had been ended long before. The CIA believed her identity had been exposed in the 90s by Soviet spy Aldrich Ames. Richard Armitage, a Colin Powell ally and opponent of President Bush’s Iraq strategy, identified her in 2003 to columnist Robert Novak after her husband Joe Wilson started his media campaign to spread the lie that Saddam Hussein had not been attempting to acquire uranium in Niger, Africa.
If “KStreetProjector” were not just a political hack, logically what punishment would he and all the other leftists who have been howling about the Plame case for the last three-and-a-half years deem appropriate for their allies’ own attempt to “out” a real clandestine operative?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2007, 08:06:31 AM
Richard Posner is a very bright and thoughtful man and anything he writes deserves serious consideration.

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Time to Rethink the FBI
By RICHARD A. POSNER
March 19, 2007; Page A13

The FBI came under heavy criticism last week when it was reported that the agency had failed properly to supervise the issuance of national security letters, a form of administrative subpoena used in terrorist investigations. The bureau, it turns out, was unable even to determine how many such subpoenas it has issued.

Just weeks earlier, it was discovered that the FBI had been misreporting the statistics that it uses to track its intelligence activities. The bureau attributed that lapse to its continued struggle -- five and a half years after the 9/11 attacks -- to master modern information technology. The FBI also inflates its counterterrorist statistics by defining terrorism to include the acts of obnoxious but minor political criminals, such as white supremacists, animal-rights extremists and makers of idle (but frightening) phone threats.

Is it the case that the FBI is "incapable of effective counterterrorism," as an editorial in this newspaper wondered? Does the country need "to debate again whether domestic antiterror functions should be taken from the FBI and given to a new agency modeled after Britain's MI5"?

The answer to both questions is yes.

It is more than a decade since the then director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, tried to make the bureau take the terrorist threat to the United States seriously. He failed. His successor, the current director, Robert Mueller, has tried harder than Mr. Freeh, and has made some progress, but not enough. The cause lies deep in the bureau's organizational culture. The FBI is a detective bureau. Its business is not to prevent crime but to catch criminals. The Justice Department, of which the FBI is a part, knows only one way of dealing with terrorism, and that is prosecution. (Mr. Mueller is a former prosecutor.)

For prosecutors and detectives, success is measured by arrests, convictions and sentences. That is fine when the object is merely to keep the crime rate within tolerable limits. But the object of counterterrorism is prevention. Terrorist attacks are too calamitous for the punishment of the terrorists who survive the attack to be an adequate substitute for prevention.

Detecting terrorist plots in advance so that they can be thwarted is the business of intelligence agencies. The FBI is not an intelligence agency, and has a truncated conception of intelligence: gathering information that can be used to obtain a conviction. A crime is committed, having a definite time and place and usually witnesses and often physical evidence and even suspects. This enables a criminal investigation to be tightly focused. Prevention, in contrast, requires casting a very wide investigative net, chasing down ambiguous clues, and assembling tiny bits of information (hence the importance of information technology, which plays a limited role in criminal investigations).

The bureau lacks the tradition, the skills, the patience, the incentive structures, the recruitment criteria, the training methods, the languages, the cultural sensitivities and the career paths that national-security intelligence requires. All the bureau's intelligence operations officers undergo the full special-agent training. That training emphasizes firearms skills, arrest techniques and self-defense, and the legal rules governing criminal investigations. None of these proficiencies are germane to national-security intelligence. What could be more perverse than to train new employees for one kind of work and assign them to another for which they have not been trained?

Every major nation (and many minor ones), except the United States, concluded long ago that domestic intelligence should be separated from its counterpart to the FBI. Britain's MI5 is merely the best-known example. These nations realize that if you bury a domestic intelligence service in an agency devoted to criminal law enforcement, you end up with "intelligence-led policing," which means orienting intelligence collection and analysis not to preventing terrorist attacks but to assisting in law enforcement.

MI5 and its counterparts in other nations are not law-enforcement agencies and do not have arrest powers. Their single-minded focus is on discovering plots against the nation. Knowing that arrest and prosecution should be postponed until a terrorist network has been fully traced and its methods, affiliates, financiers, suppliers and camp followers identified, they do not make the mistake that the FBI made last year in arresting seven Muslims in Miami on suspicion of plotting to blow up buildings there, along with the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The bureau had been able to plant an informant in the group. Yet as soon as it had enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy, it pounced. Because the group had no money or backers (except the FBI's informant!) and no skills or experience, and had been penetrated, it was not an imminent threat, so there was no urgency about arresting its members. The group had wanted to get in touch with foreign terrorists but had been unable to do so.

The informant might have helped them do so -- might even have helped them become part of a serious terrorist network, enabling the bureau to ascertain the network's scope and membership, methods and tradecraft, even goals and specific plans. The opportunity to exploit the penetration in this fashion was lost by the arrests -- about which the Attorney General boasted to an extent that, given the ineptness of the defendants, evoked ridicule.

A senior Justice Department official said: "We can't afford to wait . . . [The suspects in Miami] were of significant concern, and we're not going to allow them to run into somebody who has the means to carry out what they were talking about."

That is the wrong attitude. Finding a "somebody who has the means" to carry out a terrorist attack is more important than prosecuting plotters who pose no immediate threat to the nation's security. The undiscovered "somebody" is the real threat. Small fry are easily caught, but upon their arrest any big shots who might be linked to them scatter. The arrests and prosecutions serve mainly to alert terrorists to the bureau's methods and targets, as well as to bolster its arrest statistics and provide fodder for its public affairs office.

Experts on terrorism, noting the fortunately thwarted terrorist plots of British and Canadian citizens (thwarted in major part through the efforts of the British and Canadian domestic-intelligence services), warn of the homegrown terrorist threat against the U.S. Against that threat, most of our security apparatus is helpless. When a foreign terrorist wants to strike us here, our security forces have three bites at the apple: seize him abroad, seize him at the border, and if all else fails, seize him inside the U.S. In the case of U.S. citizen terrorists, there is only the one bite; and the FBI does not have the right set of teeth.

Improving domestic intelligence is not a partisan issue. The critics of the FBI's performance include former members (among them the co-chairmen) of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission; the advocates of creating a separate agency include Democratic Congressman Rahm Emmanuel.

Civil libertarians worry about abuses of domestic intelligence. But an agency that had no powers of arrest or prosecution, and that conceived its primary role to be to prevent the alienation of Americans who have religious or family ties to nations that harbor terrorists, rather than to run up arrest statistics, would be less likely than the FBI to engage in the promiscuous issuance of administrative subpoenas.

In 2004, Congress created the post of Director of National Intelligence, hoping to plug the gaps in our multi-agency intelligence system. The biggest gap is domestic intelligence, yet the FBI director and his staff have largely ignored it. They have no background in domestic intelligence. No senior official is assigned full time to it. So turf wars between the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have been allowed to rage, and the nation's hundreds of thousands of local police have not been knitted into a comprehensive national system of domestic intelligence collection.

We need an agency that will integrate local police and other information gatherers (such as border patrol police, customs officials and private security personnel) into a comprehensive national intelligence network, as MI5 has done in Britain -- and as the FBI has failed to do here, in part because of deeply rooted tensions that have long inhibited cooperation between the bureau and the rest of the law enforcement community. The bureau does not want the local police to steal its cases, and vice versa. Moreover, it is a self-consciously elite institution whose stars -- the special agents -- look down on local police and are reluctant to share information with them. Lacking police powers or a law enforcement function, a domestic intelligence agency separate from the FBI would be an honest broker among all the institutions that gather information of potential significance for national intelligence.

The Director of National Intelligence has not evaluated the FBI's performance. Nor has he explored the feasibility and desirability of creating a separate agency. The FBI staggers and stumbles; the managers of the intelligence community are content to avert their eyes from the unedifying spectacle.

Mr. Posner, a federal circuit judge and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, is the author of "Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

 
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 22, 2007, 07:34:15 AM
Written with shading typical of the NY Times, but the subject is important and some interesting data is covered:

Israeli Raid on Syria Fuels Debate on Weapons
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By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: September 22, 2007
WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 — American concerns about ties between Syria and North Korea have long focused on a partnership involving missiles and missile technology. Even many hawks within the Bush administration have expressed doubts that the Syrians have the money or technical depth to build a serious nuclear program like the one in Iran.

But the Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike inside Syria has reignited debate over whether the Syrians are trying to overcome past obstacles by starting their own small nuclear program, or by trying to buy nuclear components from an outside supplier. It is a particularly difficult question for American spy agencies, which are still smarting from the huge prewar misjudgments made about the status of Iraq’s weapons programs.

American officials are now sorting through what they say are Israel’s private claims that what their jets struck was tied to nuclear weapons development, not merely to missile production. So far, American officials have been extremely cautious about endorsing the Israeli conclusion.

Syria’s efforts to bolster its missile arsenal have been a source of worry for Israel for years, especially given Syria’s track record of arming Hezbollah fighters when they clash with Israeli troops. During the summer of 2006, Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group, fired hundreds of missiles at targets inside Israel from Lebanon, surprising Israeli officials with the sophistication of its arsenal.

And North Korean engineers are long believed to have helped Syria develop a sophisticated class of Scud missiles that have a longer range and are more accurate than earlier versions. According to GlobalSecurity.org, a defense research organization, North Korea has helped Syria develop the Scud-D missile, with a range of about 435 miles.

Whether Syria is actively pursuing a nuclear program has been the subject of fierce debate in Washington for several years. The dispute was at the center of the fight in 2005 over the nomination of John R. Bolton to become ambassador to the United Nations.

At the time, several intelligence officials said they had clashed in 2002 and 2003 with Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state, about the extent of Syria’s unconventional weapons programs. According to the officials, Mr. Bolton wanted to include information in a public speech about a Syrian nuclear program that could not be corroborated by intelligence agencies.

In recent interviews, Mr. Bolton has suggested that the Israeli strike may have partly vindicated his view.

Yet that is hard to assess, since whatever information a few senior officials in Washington and Jerusalem possess has been so restricted that two senior Asian diplomats, representing close American allies who are frequently updated on North Korea, said late this week that they had received no useful information from their American counterparts.

On Thursday, President Bush declined three times to shed any light on the Israeli strike, although he did repeat a warning to North Korea.

It is unclear to what extent the secrecy about the Israeli strike has been motivated by American doubts about the intelligence or by an effort to protect sources and classified information. But American officials are now looking at the possibility that the Syrians saw an opportunity to buy some of the basic components of a nuclear program on the cheap, perhaps because North Korea is trying to get elements of its nuclear program out of the country to meet deadlines in a precarious denuclearization agreement with Washington.

American officials are also studying at least two technology trade agreements between Syria and North Korea that were signed over the summer, trying to determine whether the arrangements may be designed for nascent nuclear cooperation between the two countries.

“One has to balance the skepticism that the Syrians can build an indigenous nuclear program with the very sobering assessment that North Korea is the world’s No. 1 proliferator and a country willing to sell whatever it possesses,” said a former senior Bush administration official who once had full access to the intelligence about both countries, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence assessments.

Though it has long sold its missile technology — to Syria, Iran, Pakistan and other customers — North Korea has never been known to export nuclear technology or material. Last Oct. 9, hours after the North tested its first nuclear device, Mr. Bush went in front of cameras in the White House to issue the North a specific warning that “the transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or nonstate entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action.”

His declaration that day had been urged for years by hard-liners in the administration who believed that the United States had never been explicit enough with North Korea. They saw their opportunity after the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, ignored pressure from China, South Korea, Russia and others and conducted its test.

Even though the Israelis are whispering that there was a nuclear connection to the Sept. 6 attack, so far there has been no hard evidence that the North has ever tried to sell elements of its two nuclear programs. One of those programs, involving plutonium, is quite advanced, enough to produce six to a dozen nuclear weapons. But selling that fuel would be enormously risky, and perhaps easily detectable.

The other program, based on uranium-enrichment equipment believed to have been bought from the network created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear engineer, is assessed to be in its very early stages, and some doubt the North Koreans ever made much progress on it at all. That program involves the construction of centrifuges to enrich uranium, the path that Iran is taking. But it is complex, expensive and hard to hide, and many experts believe it is beyond Syria’s capabilities or budget.

Syria does have one very small research reactor, which is Chinese built. But it was described in a 2004 Swedish defense research agency report as “the smallest on the world market and incapable of military applications.”

John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org said that, given its neighborhood, Syria might be interested in a nuclear deterrent, but that he was highly skeptical that Damascus could at this point have developed anything that would pose a significant risk to Israel.

“Any country in the region that was not at least learning what it would take to develop a nuclear program is asleep at the switch,” he said. “But the proposition that there is anything sufficiently mature to warrant bombing is difficult to believe.”
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on September 22, 2007, 10:09:24 AM
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the NorKs or the AQ Khan network hadn't seeded several countries with pre-fab nuke kits, including Syria and Iran.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on September 22, 2007, 05:11:39 PM
**File this under "G M not surprised".  8-) **

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2512380.ece

From The Sunday Times
September 23, 2007
Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian raid
Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter

Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.

The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.

They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

Israeli special forces had been gathering intelligence for several months in Syria, according to Israeli sources. They located the nuclear material at a compound near Dayr az-Zwar in the north.

Evidence that North Korean personnel were at the site is said to have been shared with President George W Bush over the summer. A senior American source said the administration sought proof of nuclear-related activities before giving the attack its blessing.

Diplomats in North Korea and China believe a number of North Koreans were killed in the strike, based on reports reaching Asian governments about conversations between Chinese and North Korean officials.

Syrian officials flew to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, last week, reinforcing the view that the two nations were coordinating their response.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on September 22, 2007, 05:33:30 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/09/22/good-news-north-korea-training-syrian-missile-engineers/

More on the Syrian-NorK alliance.
______________________________

N Korea trains Syrian missile engineers: report

Posted Fri Sep 21, 2007 10:32pm AEST

A report says North Korea has trained Syrian missile engineers and the Arab nation has bartered farm products and computers for missiles from the Stalinist state.

The two countries have recently strengthened missile cooperation, with Syrian engineers staying in Pyongyang to acquire technology, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.

The barter system began in 1995 due to Syria's worsening financial woes.

Syria has shipped cotton, food and computers to North Korea in return for buying short-range missiles, the report said.

The United States has accused North Korea of being a leading global proliferator of weapons of mass destruction, but the cash-strapped country has refused to stop missile exports, a major source of hard currency earnings.

North Korea has sold about 100 missiles to Syria, Iran and other countries each year, Yonhap said.

In July last year the North test-fired seven missiles, including the Taepodong-2, which in theory could reach the US west coast. This year it tested a series of short-range missiles.

- AFP
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on September 23, 2007, 09:24:04 AM
http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2512105.ece

From The Sunday Times
September 23, 2007

Snatched: Israeli commandos ‘nuclear’ raid
Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv, Sarah Baxter, Washington, and Michael Sheridan



ISRAELI commandos from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit – almost certainly dressed in Syrian uniforms – made their way stealthily towards a secret military compound near Dayr az-Zawr in northern Syria. They were looking for proof that Syria and North Korea were collaborating on a nuclear programme.

Israel had been surveying the site for months, according to Washington and Israeli sources. President George W Bush was told during the summer that Israeli intelligence suggested North Korean personnel and nuclear-related material were at the Syrian site.

Israel was determined not to take any chances with its neighbour. Following the example set by its raid on an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak 1981, it drew up plans to bomb the Syrian compound.

Related Links
Blast at secret missile site killed dozens
But Washington was not satisfied. It demanded clear evidence of nuclear-related activities before giving the operation its blessing. The task of the commandos was to provide it.

Today the site near Dayr az-Zawr lies in ruins after it was pounded by Israeli F15Is on September 6. Before the Israelis issued the order to strike, the commandos had secretly seized samples of nuclear material and taken them back into Israel for examination by scientists, the sources say. A laboratory confirmed that the unspecified material was North Korean in origin. America approved an attack.

News of the secret ground raid is the latest piece of the jigsaw to emerge about the mysterious Israeli airstrike. Israel has imposed a news blackout, but has not disguised its satisfaction with the mission. The incident also reveals the extent of the cooperation between America and Israel over nuclear-related security issues in the Middle East. The attack on what Israeli defence sources now call the “North Korean project” appears to be part of a wider, secret war against the nonconventional weapons ambitions of Syria and North Korea which, along with Iran, appears to have been forging a new “axis of evil”.

The operation was personally directed by Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, who is said to have been largely preoccupied with it since taking up his post on June 18.

It was the ideal mission for Barak, Israel’s most decorated soldier and legendary former commander of the Sayeret Matkal, which shares the motto “Who Dares Wins” with Britain’s SAS and specialises in intelligence-gathering deep behind enemy lines.

President Bush refused to comment on the air attack last week, but warned North Korea that “the exportation of information and/or materials” could jeopard-ise plans to give North Korea food aid, fuel and diplomatic recognition in exchange for ending its nuclear programmes.

Diplomats in North Korea and China said they believed a number of North Koreans were killed in the raid, noting that ballistic missile technicians and military scientists had been working for some time with the Syrians.

A senior Syrian official, Sayeed Elias Daoud, director of the Syrian Arab Ba’ath party, flew to North Korea via Beijing last Thursday, reinforcing the belief among foreign diplomats that the two nations are coordinating their response to the Israeli strike.

The growing assumption that North Korea suffered direct casualties in the raid appears to be based largely on the regime’s unusually strident propaganda on an issue far from home. But there were also indications of conversations between Chinese and North Korean officials and intelligence reports reaching Asian governments that supported the same conclusion, diplomats said.

Jane’s Defence Weekly reported last week that dozens of Iranian engineers and Syrians were killed in July attempting to load a chemical warhead containing mustard gas onto a Scud missile. The Scuds and warheads are of North Korean design and possibly manufacture, and there are recent reports that North Koreans were helping the Syrians to attach airburst chemical weapons to warheads.

Yesterday, while Israelis were observing Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the military was on high alert after Syria promised to retaliate for the September 6 raid. An Israeli intelligence expert said: “Syria has retaliated in the past for much smaller humiliations, but they will choose the place, the time and the target.”

Critics of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, believe he has shown poor judgment since succeeding his father Hafez, Syria’s long-time dictator, in 2000. According to David Schenker, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, he has provoked the enmity of almost all Syria’s neighbours and turned his country into a “client” of Iran.

Barak’s return to government after making a fortune in private business was critical to the Israeli operation. Military experts believe it could not have taken place under Amir Peretz, the defence minister who was forced from the post after last year’s ill-fated war in Lebanon. “Barak gave Olmert the confidence needed for such a dangerous operation,” said one insider.

The unusual silence about the airstrikes amazed Israelis, who are used to talkative politicians. But it did not surprise the defence community. “Most Israeli special operations remain unknown,” said a defence source.

When Menachem Begin, then Israeli prime minister, broke the news of the 1981 Osirak raid, he was accused of trying to help his Likud party’s prospects in forthcoming elections.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads Likud today, faced similar criticism last week when he ignored the news blackout, revealed that he had backed the decision to strike and said he had congratulated Olmert. “I was a partner from the start,” he claimed.

But details of the raid are still tantalisingly incomplete. Some analysts in America are perplexed by photographs of a fuel tank said to have been dropped from an Israeli jet on its return journey over Turkey. It appears to be relatively undamaged. Could it have been planted to sow confusion about the route taken by the Israeli F-15I pilots?

More importantly, questions remain about the precise nature of the material seized and about Syria’s intentions. Was Syria hiding North Korean nuclear equipment while Pyongyang prepared for six-party talks aimed at securing an end to its nuclear weapons programme in return for security guarantees and aid? Did Syria want to arm its own Scuds with a nuclear device?

Or could the material have been destined for Iran as John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, has suggested? And just how deep is Syrian and North Korean nuclear cooperation anyway?

China abruptly postponed a session of the nuclear disarmament talks last week because it feared America might confront the North Koreans over their weapons deals with Syria, according to sources close to the Chinese foreign ministry. Negotiations have been rescheduled for this Thursday in Beijing after assurances were given that all sides wished them to be “constructive”.

Christopher Hill, the US State Department negotiator, is said to have persuaded the White House that the talks offered a realistic chance to accomplish a peace treaty formally ending the 1950-1953 Korean war, in which more than 50,000 Americans died. A peace deal of that magnitude would be a coup for Bush – but only if the North Koreans genuinely abandon their nuclear programmes.

The outlines of a long-term arms relationship between the North Koreans and the Syrians are now being reexamined by intelligence experts in several capitals. Diplomats in Pyongyang have said they believe reports that about a dozen Syrian technicians were killed in a massive explosion and railway crash in North Korea on April 22, 2004.

Teams of military personnel wearing protective suits were seen removing debris from the section of the train in which the Syrians were travelling, according to a report quoting military sources that appeared in a Japanese newspaper. Their bodies were flown home by a Syrian military cargo plane that was spotted shortly after the explosion at Pyongyang airport.

In December last year, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Seyassah quoted European intelligence sources in Brussels as saying that Syria was engaged in an advanced nuclear programme in its northeastern province.

Most diplomats and experts dismiss the idea that Syria could master the technical and industrial knowhow to make its own nuclear devices. The vital question is whether North Korea could have transferred some of its estimated 55 kilos of weapons-grade plutonium to Syria. Six to eight kilos are enough for one rudimentary bomb.

“If it is proved that Kim Jong-il sold fissile material to Syria in breach of every red line the Americans have drawn for him, what does that mean?” asked one official. The results of tests on whatever the Israelis may have seized from the Syrian site could therefore be of enormous significance.

The Israeli army has so far declined to comment on the attack. However, several days afterwards, at a gathering marking the Jewish new year, the commander-in-chief of the Israeli military shook hands with and congratulated his generals. The scene was broadcast on Israeli television. After the fiasco in Lebanon last year, it was regarded as a sign that “we’re back in business, guys”.
Title: AQ goes dark
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 09, 2007, 05:58:12 AM
Enemy Vanishes From Its Web Sites

By ELI LAKE
Staff Reporter of the Sun

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden's first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda's internal security division that the organization's Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda's production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.

One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America's Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda's internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America's intelligence community saw. "We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak," the official said. "We lost an important keyhole into the enemy."

By Friday evening, one of the key sets of sites in the Obelisk network, the Ekhlaas forum, was back on line. The Ekhlaas forum is a password-protected message board used by Qaeda for recruitment, propaganda dissemination, and as one of the entrance ways into Obelisk for those operatives whose user names are granted permission. Many of the other Obelisk sites are now offline and presumably moved to new secret locations on the World Wide Web.

The founder of a Web site known as clandestineradio.com, Nick Grace, tracked the shutdown of Qaeda's Obelisk system in real time. "It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes," Mr. Grace said yesterday.

The head of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors Jihadi Web sites and provides information to subscribers, Rita Katz, said she personally provided the video on September 7 to the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter.

Ms. Katz yesterday said, "We shared a copy of the transcript and the video with the U.S. government, to Michael Leiter, with the request specifically that it was important to keep the subject secret. Then the video was leaked out. An investigation into who downloaded the video from our server indicated that several computers with IP addresses were registered to government agencies."

Yesterday a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, Carl Kropf, denied the accusation that it was responsible for the leak. "That's just absolutely wrong. The allegation and the accusation that we did that is unfounded," he said. The spokesman for the director of national intelligence, Ross Feinstein, yesterday also denied the leak allegation. "The intelligence community and the ODNI senior leadership did not leak this video to the media," he said.

Ms. Katz said, "The government leak damaged our investigation into Al Qaeda's network. Techniques and sources that took years to develop became ineffective. As a result of the leak Al Qaeda changed their methods." Ms. Katz said she also lost potential revenue.

A former counterterrorism official, Roger Cressey, said, "If any of this was leaked for any reasons, especially political, that is just unconscionable." Mr. Cressey added that the work that was lost by burrowing into Qaeda's Internet system was far more valuable than any benefit that was gained by short-circuiting Osama bin Laden's video to the public.

While Al Qaeda still uses human couriers to move its most important messages between senior leaders and what is known as a Hawala network of lenders throughout the world to move interest-free money, more and more of the organization's communication happens in cyber space.

"While the traditional courier based networks can offer security and anonymity, the same can be had on the Internet. It is clear in recent years if you look at their information operations and explosion of Al Qaeda related Web sites and Web activities, the Internet has taken a primary role in their communications both externally and internally," Mr. Grace said.

Source Drudge
=========
Firm Says Administration's Handling of Video Ruined Its Spying Efforts

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; A01

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.

Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.

SITE -- an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities -- was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company's Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest.

"We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda's hidden world," Katz said. Her company's income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.

Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.

She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.

Administration and intelligence officials would not comment on whether they had obtained the video separately. Katz said Fielding and Bagnal made it clear to her that the White House did not possess a copy at the time she offered hers.

Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. "Please understand the necessity for secrecy," Katz wrote in her e-mail. "We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations."

Fielding replied with an e-mail expressing gratitude to Katz. "It is you who deserves the thanks," he wrote, according to a copy of the message. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intelligence director's office.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz's e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE's server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.

By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

A small number of private intelligence companies compete with SITE in scouring terrorists' networks for information and messages, and some have questioned the company's motives and methods, including the claim that its access to al-Qaeda's network was unique. One competitor, Ben Venzke, founder of IntelCenter, said he questions SITE's decision -- as described by Katz -- to offer the video to White House policymakers rather than quietly share it with intelligence analysts.

"It is not just about getting the video first," Venzke said. "It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place to make sure that the appropriate intelligence gets to where it needs to go in the intelligence community and elsewhere in order to support ongoing counterterrorism operations."

Source Drudge
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on October 09, 2007, 09:24:29 AM
Coincidental to the timing of the story that US intel obtained bin Laden's tape before he posted it, that media outlets blew our cover and that AQ had to shut down their sites, I see there has been heavy fighting in Waziristan the last 3 days where that group is presumed to be residing. I'm guessing the new fighting is inspired by the latest intel. One of these days, one of these battles is going to bring us the head of AQ.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7034795.stm

Battles rage on Pakistan border
Pakistani troops in North Waziristan (file photo)
The army faces well-armed, well-trained militants in Waziristan
At least 45 Pakistani soldiers and 150 pro-Taleban militants have died in three days of fierce fighting in North Waziristan, the Pakistani army says.

Unconfirmed reports say 50 more rebels died in fresh air strikes on Tuesday.  It is the heaviest fighting in the Waziristan region, which borders Afghanistan, for many months. Locals are reported to be fleeing the clashes.

US and Nato have been pressing Pakistan to do more to stop militants crossing the border to attack their troops.

The fighting is centred around the town of Mir Ali. The bombing destroyed many shops and homes...
Latest reports say many of its residents are trying to escape, but it is unclear how many are going.

The BBC's Barbara Plett in Islamabad says that Mir Ali is known as a base for foreign militants with links to the Taleban and al-Qaeda.  The violence has been escalating since mid-July when a ceasefire between the army and the militants broke down.  Access for journalists to the tribal areas is restricted and it is impossible to independently verify the casualty figures.

Military aircraft struck "one or two places" near Mir Ali on Tuesday, army spokesman Maj Gen Waheed, the Associated Press news agency reports. There were unconfirmed reports that about 50 militants had been killed.

As well as soldiers confirmed killed, the army says up to 15 soldiers who went missing on Monday are still unaccounted for.

The army says it has rejected a ceasefire proposed by the militants and will "continue punitive action till complete peace is restored", AP said.

Our correspondent says that, by all accounts, the fighting in North Waziristan has been extraordinarily fierce.  The army has been bombing suspected militant positions in villages using helicopter gun ships and jet fighters.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 14, 2007, 07:13:04 AM
A Hizbollah Mole?
Case against CIA spy shocks counter-intelligence community

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 7:46 PM ET Nov 13, 2007

A former FBI agent who pleaded guilty Tuesday to fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship and then improperly accessing sensitive computer information about Hizbollah was working until about a year ago as a CIA spy assigned to Middle East operations, Newsweek has learned.

The stunning case of Nada Nadim Prouty, a 37-year-old Lebanese native who is related to a suspected Hizbollah money launderer, appears to raise a nightmarish question for U.S. intelligence agencies: Could one of the world's most notorious terrorist groups have infiltrated the U.S. government?

"I'm beginning to think it's possible that Hizbollah put a mole in our government," said Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism chief under Presidents Clinton and, until 2002, Bush. "It's mind-blowing."

A U.S. official familiar with the case said Tuesday that the government's investigation has uncovered no evidence so far that Prouty, who was employed by the CIA until last week, had compromised any undercover operations or passed along sensitive intelligence information to Hizbollah operatives. After joining the CIA in June 2003, Prouty was an undercover officer for the agency's National Clandestine Service, the espionage division, working on Middle East-related cases. She was reassigned to a less sensitive position about a year ago, after she first came under suspicion, officials said.

Prosecutors have not charged Prouty with espionage. Nonetheless, the case remains an "ongoing investigation" and "that is obviously something we're looking at," a senior law enforcement official said. Her lawyer declined comment today. Under the terms of her plea agreement, she faces six to twelve months behind bars, and could be stripped of her U.S. citizenship.

The case is clearly a major embarrassment for both the FBI and CIA and has already raised a host of questions. Chief among them: how did an illegal alien from Lebanon who was working as a waitress at a shish kabob restaurant in Detroit manage to slip through extensive security background checks, including polygraphs, to land highly sensitive positions with the nation's top law enforcement and intelligence agencies?

Indeed, the bizarre details of the Prouty investigation—which include connections to both Hizbollah and a multi-million dollar bribery ring involving a former senior U.S. Homeland Security official—could ultimately be cast as a war-on-terror version of the notorious spy cases of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, Soviet spies who worked for the CIA and FBI respectively.

"It's hard to imagine a greater threat than the situation where a foreign national uses fraud to attain citizenship and then, based on that fraud, insinuates herself into a sensitive position in the U.S. government," said Stephen J. Murphy, the U.S. attorney in Detroit.

According to court papers filed Tuesday, Prouty pleaded guilty to three charges in federal court in Detroit: naturalization fraud; unlawfully accessing a federal computer system to obtain information about her relatives as well as Hizbollah; and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Prouty, according to court documents, first entered the United States from Lebanon in 1989 on a one-year, non-immigrant student visa. After her visa expired, she illegally remained in the country, residing in Taylor, Michigan with her sister and another individual. In order to stay in the country and evade immigration laws, she offered money to an unemployed U.S. citizen to marry her in the summer of 1990. But, according to her indictment, Prouty "never lived as husband and wife with her fraudulent 'husband' and the marriage was never consummated sexually."
By 1992, the court papers say, Prouty landed a job as a waitress and hostess at La Shish, a popular chain of Middle Eastern shish kabob restaurants in the Detroit area owned by a Lebanese businessman, Talil Khalil Chahine, who later came under federal investigation for his suspected ties to Hizbollah.

At this point, Prouty's case seemed like a garden variety case of marriage and immigration fraud. But as laid out in the court papers, the story took a more ominous turn in April, 1999, when Prouty, using the alias of "Nada Nadim Alley" and her fraudulently-obtained U.S. citizenship, landed a job as an FBI special agent. Prouty got the job under a special FBI "language program" designed to recruit Arabic and other foreign-language speakers, a bureau official said today. Not only was she quickly granted a security clearance, she was then assigned to the bureau's Washington field office, where she worked on an extraterritorial squad investigating crimes against U.S. persons overseas. In that capacity, Prouty in September 2000 improperly tapped into bureau computers to access information about herself, her sister, and Chahine. Three years later, Prouty again tapped into bureau computers to obtain information about a case she was not assigned to: a national security investigation targeting Hizbollah being conducted by the Detroit field office.

Prouty, the court papers suggest, may have had a personal motive for seeking information about Chahine and Hizbollah. Her sister, Elfat El Aouar, had by then married Chahine and both of them in August 2002 had attended a "fundraising event in Lebanon." The keynote speakers at the event, according to the court papers, were Chahine and Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hizbollah, who has been designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist."

Chahine was subsequently charged in two federal indictments. One of them last year accused him of skimming $20 million from his chain of restaurants in Detroit and routing some of that cash to unnamed persons in Lebanon. (Prouty's sister was also charged in that case. She has since pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison last May.) In the second indictment last month, Chahine—now believed to be a fugitive in Lebanon—was charged with conspiring with a former senior official of the Homeland Security's office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Detroit to extort funds from former employees of Chahine's La Shish restaurant chain. (Although he has since left the country, his lawyer has denied that Chahine had any involvement in terrorism.) The ICE official, Roy Bailey, was accused of misusing his position to accept "large sums of currency and other property in return for granting immigration benefits," according to a Justice Department press release last month. (Bailey has entered a plea of not guilty.)

Officials emphasized that there is still there is much they don't know about Prouty's activities—most importantly, whether she was actively providing U.S. government intelligence to Hizbollah. But the FBI acknowledged Tuesday that they didn't discover Prouty's connections to Hizbollah until December 2005—apparently as a result of the ICE bribery probe--and more than two years after she left the bureau to go work for the CIA's Clandestine Service. Eventually, the bureau alerted the agency and the CIA later reassigned her into a less sensitive position, a U.S. official said. But while both agencies are still doing damage control assessments, the mere fact that Prouty got as far as she did has stunned the counter-intelligence community. "This is not good," said one chagrined senior official, who, like all officials quoted anonymously in this story, declined to speak on the record owing to the sensitivity of the subject.

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said: "The CIA, among other federal agencies, cooperated with the investigation. Ms. Prouty was a mid-level employee who came to us in 2003 from the FBI, where she had been a special agent. The naturalization issue occurred well before she was hired by the Bureau. She formally resigned from the federal service as part of her plea agreement."



URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/70309
Title: More on Nada Prouty scandal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 21, 2007, 05:02:28 PM
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/

It Only Gets Worse

Kudos to Debbie Schlussel, Michelle Malkin and the New York Post, who are still digging into on the Nada Prouty scandal, while the MSM takes the a pass.

Readers will recall that Ms. Prouty is the former FBI Special Agent and CIA Operative who pleaded guilty last week to charges of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship, unlawfully obtaining information from a government computer system, and defrauding the United States.

The charges stemmed from Prouty's use of a sham marriage to attain citizenship, a prerequisite for federal employment. Once on the FBI payroll, she attempted to gain information on the bureau's efforts to investigate Hizballah activities in the U.S. and abroad. Prouty's brother-in-law, who provided employment during the 1990s, is a reported Hizballah fund-raiser, accused of funneling more than $20 million to the terrorist group before fleeing the United States.

Now, it seems that Prouty has a former sister-in-law who pulled a similar scam, to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. Reporter Jeane MacIntosh of the Post has discovered that Samar Khalil Nabbou Spinelli married the brother of the man that Prouty wed to obtain U.S. citizenship. Both marriages took place in 1990; neither woman ever lived with their "husbands," and once the naturalization process was complete, they filed for divorce. Sources tell the Post that the Michigan men involved in the scheme, Christopher and Jean Paul Deladurantaye, agreed to the deal.

With her citizenship in hand, Samar Khalil Nabbou enlisted in the Marine Corps and eventually became a commissioned officer; her rank has not been disclosed. However, depending on when she earned her commission, Nabbou is at least a Captain (O-3), a Major (O-4). After entering the Corps--and divorcing her sham husband--Nabbou married a fellow Marine, giving her yet another last name.

So far, the Marine Corps has said little about Samar Khalil Nabbou Spinelli, reporting only that she is currently stationed in Japan. The Corps has not provided information on her military specialty or past duty assignments. However, with her background and language skills, it would not be surprising to learn that Spinelli is an intelligence officer.

This much we know: as a commissioned officer in the Marine Corps, Spinelli held a "Secret" security clearance at a minimum. If she held a Top Secret/SCI security clearance, Spinelli had access to Intelink, the secure "intranet" which allows the FBI, intelligence agencies and military intelligence to access and share information, including some of the nation's most sensitive secrets. As an FBI agent, Prouty may have had access to the same system, and she certainly used Intelink during her subsequent employment as a CIA operative.

What remains unclear is the relationship between Prouty and Spinelli once their sham marriages ended. The Post reports that both women lived together--with Prouty's sister--during their marriages to the Deladurantayes. However, Spinelli enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1990, while Prouty remained in the Detroit area until 1997, when she applied for a position with the FBI. Prouty used Spinelli as a reference on her employment application, suggesting there was some contact after her former "sister-in-law" began her military career.

At this point, the Marine Corps won't say what punishment (if any) Spinelli might face. For starters, there's the issue of Fraudulent Enlistment, which is a crime under Article 83 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). To become a Marine officer, Spinelli had to be a U.S. citizen, and she obtained her citizenship through fraud.

Spinelli was also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal case against Prouty, along with the former CIA operative's sister, and her Hizballah-connected husband, Talil Kahil Chahine. We're guessing that Spintelli's status as a co-conspirator was based on more than merely providing a reference for Prouty's FBI application. Needless to say, the Marines will frown on Spinelli's role in the Prouty case, and her own, fraudulent enlistment into the Corps.

Beyond Spinelli's potential problems with the military justice system, there are other, equally pressing issues that require immediate resolution. The emergence of the Marine officer as an un-indicted co-conspirator raises new questions about her own access to classified information, contact with Nada Prouty after 1997, and how Spinelli's entrance into the Marine Corps (and subsequent commissioning) were vetted by authorities.

***

Complete background on the Prouty case from the experts at the Counter-Intelligence Centre.
Labels: Hizballah, Nada Prouty, Samar Nabbou Spinelli

Title: NIE Curveball
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2007, 08:55:46 AM
Iran Curveball
This latest intelligence fiasco is Mr. Bush's fault.
WSJ
Saturday, December 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

President Bush has been scrambling to rescue his Iran policy after this week's intelligence switcheroo, but the fact that the White House has had to spin so furiously is a sign of how badly it has bungled this episode. In sum, Mr. Bush and his staff have allowed the intelligence bureaucracy to frame a new judgment in a way that has undermined four years of U.S. effort to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions.

This kind of national security mismanagement has bedeviled the Bush Presidency. Recall the internal disputes over post-invasion Iraq, the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi by the State Department and CIA, hanging Scooter Libby out to dry after bungling the response to Joseph Wilson's bogus accusations, and so on. Mr. Bush has too often failed to settle internal disputes and enforce the results.

What's amazing in this case is how the White House has allowed intelligence analysts to drive policy. The very first sentence of this week's national intelligence estimate (NIE) is written in a way that damages U.S. diplomacy: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." Only in a footnote below does the NIE say that this definition of "nuclear weapons program" does "not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."

In fact, the main reason to be concerned about Iran is that we can't trust this distinction between civilian and military. That distinction is real in a country like Japan. But we know Iran lied about its secret military efforts until it was discovered in 2003, and Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, with 3,000 centrifuges, in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. There is no civilian purpose for such enrichment. Iran has access to all the fuel it needs for civilian nuclear power from Russia at the plant in Bushehr. The NIE buries the potential danger from this enrichment, even though this enrichment has been the main focus of U.S. diplomacy against Iran.





In this regard, it's hilarious to see the left and some in the media accuse Mr. Bush once again of distorting intelligence. The truth is the opposite. The White House was presented with this new estimate only weeks ago, and no doubt concluded it had little choice but to accept and release it however much its policy makers disagreed. Had it done otherwise, the finding would have been leaked and the Administration would have been assailed for "politicizing" intelligence.
The result is that we now have NIE judgments substituting for policy in a dangerous way. For one thing, these judgments are never certain, and policy in a dangerous world has to account for those uncertainties. We know from our own sources that not everyone in American intelligence agrees with this NIE "consensus," and the Israelis have already made clear they don't either. The Jerusalem Post reported this week that Israeli defense officials are exercised enough that they will present their Iran evidence to Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he visits that country tomorrow.

For that matter, not even the diplomats at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency agree with the NIE. "To be frank, we are more skeptical," a senior official close to the agency told the New York Times this week. "We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." Senator John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, is also skeptical enough that he wants Congress to establish a bipartisan panel to explore the NIE's evidence. We hope he keeps at it.

All the more so because the NIE heard 'round the world is already harming U.S. policy. The Chinese are backing away from whatever support they might have provided for tougher sanctions against Iran, while Russia has used the NIE as another reason to oppose them. Most delighted are the Iranians, who called the NIE a "victory" and reasserted their intention to proceed full-speed ahead with uranium enrichment. Behind the scenes, we can expect Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to expand their nuclear efforts as they conclude that the U.S. will now be unable to stop Iran from getting the bomb.





We reported earlier this week that the authors of this Iran NIE include former State Department officials who have a history of hostility to Mr. Bush's foreign policy. But the ultimate responsibility for this fiasco lies with Mr. Bush. Too often he has appointed, or tolerated, officials who oppose his agenda, and failed to discipline them even when they have worked against his policies. Instead of being candid this week about the problems with the NIE, Mr. Bush and his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, tried to spin it as a victory for their policy. They simply weren't believable.
It's a sign of the Bush Administration's flagging authority that even many of its natural allies wondered this week if the NIE was really an attempt to back down from its own Iran policy. We only wish it were that competent.

WSJ
Title: My congresswoman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2007, 12:44:20 PM
Trivia:  Jane Harman was my opponent the last time I ran for Congress.

WSJ

The Limits of Intelligence
By PETER HOEKSTRA and JANE HARMAN
December 10, 2007; Page A18

On one of our several trips together to Iraq, a senior intelligence official told us how she wrote her assessments -- on one page, with three sections: what we know, what we don't know, and what we think it means.

Sound simple? Actually, it's very hard.

The limitations of the intelligence community are unfortunately well known to us. As past leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, we both saw the intelligence on Iraq's WMD in the run-up to the war, as well as the failure to detect the 9/11 plot or predict India's rise to the ranks of nuclear-armed nations. As a result, we coauthored, along with Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, the 2004 Intelligence Reform & Terrorism Prevention Act.

Since then, we have monitored the intelligence community as it tries to reinvent itself and become a strong, world-class organization. And we have worked, on a bipartisan basis, to strengthen the capability of the intelligence community to penetrate targets. Those efforts are moving forward, but we still have work to do. We are not convinced we have the necessary access to form definitive conclusions on Iran's future plans, or the plans and intentions of other hard targets. As lawmakers on homeland security and intelligence, we want hard information on what is actually happening on the ground.

Moreover, the only way Congress can have faith in the intelligence we receive is for the administration and intelligence community to follow the law by keeping the congressional intelligence committees "fully and currently" informed on intelligence matters. The controversy over the recording and destruction of interrogation tapes by the Central Intelligence Agency underscores this point, and the negative consequences when they don't.

Still, intelligence is in many ways an art, not an exact science. The complete reversal from the 2005 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear-weapons program to the latest NIE serves as its own caution in this regard. The information we receive from the intelligence community is but one piece of the puzzle in a rapidly changing world. It is not a substitute for policy, and the challenge for policy makers is to use good intelligence wisely to fashion good policy.

In fact, the new NIE on Iran comes closest to the three-part model our intelligence community strives for: It carefully describes sources and the analysts' assessment of their reliability, what gaps remain in their understanding of Iran's intentions and capabilities, and how confident they are of their conclusions. Yet it ignores some key questions. Most importantly, it does not explain why the 2005 NIE came to the opposite conclusion, or what factors could drive Iran to "restart" its nuclear-weapons program.

We were among the loudest voices in 2006 demanding more intelligence on the status of Iran's program and its intent to construct nuclear weapons. In a joint television interview, we raised serious concerns about the quality and extent of our intelligence community's penetration of Iran. We were concerned that some of the conclusions being reached were based on scant reporting. Our view is that there were more gaps in our coverage of Iran than many were willing to admit at the time.

Intelligence is essential in countering proliferation challenges from state and nonstate actors. And national-security issues should be bipartisan and debated in a constructive manner, recognizing that sometimes, based on the information available, what we believe in good faith to be true may turn out to be wrong.

Lawmakers have a constitutional obligation to understand and investigate these issues. This is why we have traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan to assess the situation firsthand, and why we both recently signed a letter responding to a request from Iranian parliamentarians to meet with them. The purpose of the meeting would not be foreign policy, but to learn and hopefully fill in some of the gaps in information we receive from the intelligence community.

Though the new NIE may be taken as positive news, Iran clearly remains dangerous. The combination of international pressure, economic sanctions and the presence of U.S. troops on Iran's borders may have indeed convinced Tehran to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, as the NIE states with "high confidence." Nevertheless, Congress must engage in vigorous oversight -- to challenge those who do intelligence work, and to make site visits to see for ourselves.

Intelligence is an investment -- in people and technology. It requires sustained focus, funding and leadership. It also requires agency heads that prioritize their constitutional duty to keep the intelligence committees informed. Good intelligence will not guarantee good policy, but it can spare us some huge policy mistakes.

Mr. Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2004-2006. Ms. Harman, a California Democrat, was on the Intelligence Committee for eight years ending in 2006, the final four as ranking member
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2007, 09:28:45 AM
WSJ

The NIE Fantasy
The intelligence community failed to anticipate the Cuban Missile Crisis.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, December 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

"The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it."


--Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, Sept. 19, 1962
Twenty-five days after this NIE was published, a U-2 spy plane photographed a Soviet ballistic missile site in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. It's possible the latest NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program will not prove as misjudged or as damaging as the 1962 estimate. But don't bet on it.

At the heart of last week's NIE is the "high confidence" judgment that Tehran "halted its nuclear weapons program" in the fall of 2003, "primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work." Prior to that, however, the NIE states, also with "high confidence," that "Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons." Left to a footnote is the explanation that "by 'nuclear weapons program' we mean Iran's nuclear weapon design and weaponization work. . . . we do not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."

Let's unpack this.

In August 2002, an Iranian opposition group revealed that Iran had an undeclared uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and an undeclared heavy water facility at Arak--both previously unknown to the pros of the U.S. intelligence community. Since then, the administration has labored to persuade the international community that all these facilities have no conceivable purpose other than a military one. Those efforts paid off in three successive U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding Iran suspend enrichment because it was "concerned by the proliferation risks" it posed.

Along comes the NIE to instantly undo four years of diplomacy, using a semantic sleight-of-hand to suggest some kind of distinction can be drawn between Iran's bid to master the nuclear fuel cycle and its efforts to build nuclear weapons. How credible is this distinction?

In "Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy" (1996), MIT's Owen Cote notes that "The recipe [for designing a weapon] is very simple. . . . Nor are the ingredients, other than plutonium or HEU [highly enriched uranium], hard to obtain. For a gun weapon, the gun barrel could be ordered from any machine shop, as could a tungsten tamper machined to any specifications the customer desired. The high-explosive charge for firing the bullet could also be fashioned by anyone with access to and some experience handling TNT, or other conventional, chemical explosives" (my emphasis).
In other words, Iran didn't abandon its nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, it went public with it. It's certainly plausible Tehran may have suspended one aspect of the program--the aspect that is the least technically challenging and that, if exposed, would offer smoking-gun proof of ill intent. Then again, why does the NIE have next to nothing to say about Iran's efforts to produce plutonium at the Arak facility, which is of the same weapons-producing type as Israel's Dimona and North Korea's Yongbyon reactors? And why the silence on Iran's ongoing and acknowledged testing of ballistic missiles of ever-longer range, the development of which only makes sense as a vehicle to deliver a weapon of mass destruction?

Equally disingenuous is the NIE's assessment that Iran's purported decision to halt its weapons program is an indication that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach"--an interesting statement, given that Iran's quest for "peaceful" nuclear energy makes no economic sense. But the NIE's real purpose becomes clear in the next sentence, when it states that Iran's behavior "suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige and goals for regional influence in other ways, might--if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible--prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program."

This is a policy prescription, not an intelligence assessment. Nonetheless, it is worth recalling that if Iran did have an active weaponization program prior to 2003, as the NIE claims, it means that former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami was lying when he said that "weapons of mass destruction have never been our objective." Mr. Khatami is just the kind of "moderate" that advocates of engagement with Iran see as a credible negotiating partner. If he's not to be trusted, is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Then again, when it comes to the issue of trust, it isn't just Mr. Ahmadinejad we need to worry about. It has been widely pointed out that the conclusions of this NIE flatly contradict those of a 2005 NIE on the same subject, calling the entire process into question. Less discussed is why the administration chose to release a shoddy document that does maximum political damage to it and to key U.S. allies, particularly France, the U.K. and Israel.

The likely answer is that the administration calculated that any effort by them to suppress or tweak the NIE would surely leak, leading to accusations of "politicizing intelligence." But that only means that we now have an "intelligence community" that acts as an authority unto itself, and cannot be trusted to obey its political masters, much less keep a secret. The administration's tacit acquiescence in this state of affairs may prove even more damaging than its wishful thinking on Iran.
For years it has been a staple of fever swamp politics to believe the U.S. government is in the grip of shadowy powers using "intelligence" as a tool of control. With the publication of this NIE, that is no longer a fantasy.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

Title: AQ on the Dark Web
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2007, 11:35:47 AM
Second post of the AM

U.S.: The Role and Limitations of the 'Dark Web' In Jihadist Training
Summary

Security experts have warned in recent weeks that Western governments have yielded control of the Internet to jihadists by failing to understand the efficacy of pro-al Qaeda Web sites to recruit and train new operatives. Although the Internet has been a great enabler for grassroots cells to spread their ideology and recruit new acolytes, some things are incredibly difficult to accomplish online -- namely, absorbing the technical information and tradecraft of terrorism and applying it to a real-world situation, particularly in a hostile environment.

Analysis

Security experts have warned in recent weeks that Western governments have ceded control of the Internet to jihadists, the World Tribune reported Dec. 10. In a conference on Internet security at Germany's Federal Police Office headquarters Nov. 21, Western experts argued that the United States and a number of EU countries have failed to understand the efficacy of pro-al Qaeda Web sites -- or the "Dark Web" -- to recruit and train new operatives, and have written off such Web sites as propaganda.

According to these Western experts, al Qaeda has been so successful in its exploitation of the Internet that it has closed training camps in Afghanistan, though this somewhat understates the role of the U.S. military in closing the camps. Gabriel Weimann, a professor in Israel and Germany, told the conference that al Qaeda has made a shift and is now able to indoctrinate, train and mobilize new recruits and turn them into jihadist militants via practical Web sites that illustrate how to handle weapons, carry out kidnappings and make bombs. The Internet -- specifically Google Earth -- has also reduced jihadists' need for target reconnaissance. Although the Internet has been a boon for grassroots cells in spreading their ideology and recruiting new acolytes, the Web has some serious limitations as a terrorism enabler. Some things are very difficult to accomplish online -- namely, absorbing technical information and the tradecraft of terrorism and applying it to a real-world situation, particularly in a dangerous environment.

Since 9/11, blogs, chat rooms and Web sites have experienced an increase in popularity among jihadists. Often, these jihadist "cyberwarriors" -- usually in their late teens or early 20s -- join or form grassroots cells and become "al Qaeda 3.0 or 4.0" operatives.

However, the application of technical skills (bomb-making, targeting, and deployment) often requires subtle and complex abilities that one cannot perfect simply by reading about them. It is quite difficult to follow written instructions and build a perfectly functioning improvised explosive device from scratch; as with any scientific endeavor, trial and error and testing in the real world usually are required. Bomb-making is a talent best learned from an experienced teacher (and many potential teachers have blown themselves up in pursuit of expert-level skills). Without such a teacher and hands-on experience, there is a steep learning curve, and much trial and error is required.

Additionally, tradecraft -- those intuitive skills needed to sustain secrecy and operations in a hostile environment -- are essential to both the individual jihadist and his network. History has shown repeatedly that -- even when preoperational planning and other activities have begun in cyberspace -- as a matter of routine, jihadists conduct target surveillance in the physical world and carry out dry runs when possible. While Google Earth might be an efficient tool for mapping and coordinating an attack, it does not negate the need for preoperational surveillance. Jihadists recognize, as do law enforcement agents, that however detailed a picture of a target might appear on a Web site, it is an incomplete snapshot of reality that has been frozen in time. Successful attacks depend on knowledge of large swathes of terrain, security routines and other details that cannot be obtained from videos or photographs.

Although these Web sites are not going to produce super-jihadists, the challenge remains for law enforcement agencies to identify and remove dangerous sites quickly and to develop Web monitoring programs in an attempt to track those using them as part of counterterrorism efforts. As these sites proliferate, so does the attention devoted to them. It is important to note that visiting such Web sites is an operational security hazard that can allow counterterrorism forces to identify potential militants and close in on them, as they did in Canada in the summer of 2006 and in Atlanta before that.

stratfor
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2007, 02:47:10 PM
American Intelligence
By CLAUDE MONIQUET
December 13, 2007

The citizens of the free world have nothing to worry any more -- America's spy masters have recovered their missing crystal ball. No fewer than 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have just told us that the Iranian nuclear program really is not so dangerous. According to the National Intelligence Estimate, Tehran has, for reasons yet to be explained, supposedly stopped the military plank of its atomic research.

Before rolling out the peace banners, though, it's worth looking at the agencies' track record in getting these sorts of "estimates" right. As a matter of fact, U.S. intelligence services have so far failed to predict the nuclearization of a single foreign nation. They failed to do so with regard to the Soviet Union in 1949, China in 1964, India and Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2002. They also got Saddam's weapons program wrong -- twice. First by underestimating it in the 1980s and then by overplaying its progress before the 2003 invasion. But on the possible nuclearization of a regime that sounds fanatic enough to use this doomsday weapon, the NIE, contradicting everything we have heard so far about the issue, including from a previous NIE report, is suddenly to be trusted?

It's not just on the nuclear front where American intelligence services have failed their country. They foresaw neither the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 nor the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. In Afghanistan, during the 1980s, while other friendly services, among them the French, urged the CIA to support more "moderate" tribal chiefs in the fight against the Red Army, the agency relied on the enlightened advice of its Saudi friends and supported the most extreme Islamists. U.S. troops are fighting and dying today for that blunder.

More recently, the CIA conducted those "extraordinary renditions" of terrorist suspects in such an amateurish manner that several American intelligence officers were exposed and are now being tried in absentia in Italy. Allied services in other countries were also compromised, souring future cooperation between the agencies.

I do not rehash this history with any kind of schadenfreude but to urge policy makers in the U.S. and here in Europe to read this report with more than just a grain of salt. Many Democrats in Washington and the international media welcomed the agencies' "independence" from the political leadership. But one must wonder whether, in a democracy, intelligence services are supposed to cultivate their "independence" to the point of opposing the elected political leadership.

And make no mistake, the NIE has little in common with intelligence as it is understood by professionals. Instead, Langley & Co. seem to have decided to carry out their own foreign policy. The report's most controversial conclusion -- that Iran ceased its covert nuclear program -- is based on the absurd distinction between military and civilian. Iran itself admits -- no, boasts -- that it continues enriching uranium as part of its "civilian" program. But such enrichment can have only a military purpose.

With this sleight of hand, though, the intelligence services effectively sabotaged the Bush administration's efforts to steer its allies toward a tougher position on Iran. Paris in particular won't be amused about what appears almost like a betrayal. President Nicolas Sarkozy took a great political risk when he turned around French foreign policy and became Europe's leading opponent of a nuclear Iran. He even warned of a possible armed conflict with Iran -- not the most popular thing to do in France.

The agencies say in the report that they don't "know" whether Tehran is considering equipping itself with nuclear arms. These super-spies in the suburbs of Washington do not seem to be the least embarrassed by this admission of incompetence. With their multibillion-dollar budget, one might certainly expect the agencies to "know" these sorts of things.

This admission also betrays a rather naive view of the nature of the Iranian regime. Are the mullahs' intentions really so hard to discern? What everybody "knows" -- and not only those in the intelligence community -- is that Tehran has made it pretty clear that it wants nuclear arms and that it has very concrete plans for their deployment: to erase Israel from the map. Everybody also "knows" that nuclear arms would make the Islamic Republic almost untouchable, turning it into a regional superpower that could dictate its will on the Gulf states -- the world's suppliers of oil and gas. And everybody "knows" that this is an unacceptable prospect for the Gulf countries, practically forcing them to get the bomb as well. Over time the Middle East, not a very stable region, would become completely nuclearized.

The CIA and its covert colleagues could have thought about these realities a bit longer before publishing a document that can only add confusion to an already complex crisis. But to do so would have meant concentrating on intelligence analysis rather than politics. This whole affair would be almost laughable if it weren't so disturbing and dangerous.

Mr. Moniquet, a former field operative for the French foreign intelligence service, heads the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center.
WSJ
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 15, 2007, 11:17:04 AM
Israel: US report on Iran may spark war


By LAURIE COPANS, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 27 minutes ago


JERUSALEM - Israel's public security minister warned Saturday that a U.S. intelligence report that said Iran is no longer developing nuclear arms could lead to a regional war that would threaten the Jewish state.

In his remarks — Israel's harshest criticism yet of the U.S. report — Avi Dichter said the assessment also cast doubt on American intelligence in general, including information about Palestinian security forces' crackdown on militant groups. The Palestinian action is required as part of a U.S.-backed renewal of peace talks with Israel this month.

Dichter cautioned that a refusal to recognize Iran's intentions to build weapons of mass destruction could lead to armed conflict in the Middle East.

He compared the possibility of such fighting to a surprise attack on Israel in 1973 by its Arab neighbors, which came to be known in Israel for the Yom Kippur Jewish holy day on which it began.

"The American misconception concerning Iran's nuclear weapons is liable to lead to a regional Yom Kippur where Israel will be among the countries that are threatened," Dichter said in a speech in a suburb south of Tel Aviv, according to his spokesman, Mati Gil. "Something went wrong in the American blueprint for analyzing the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat."

Dichter didn't elaborate on the potential scenario but seemed to imply that a world that let its guard down regarding Iran would be more vulnerable to attack by the Islamic regime.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had disputed the U.S. intelligence assessment this month, saying that Iran continues its efforts to obtain components necessary to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran still poses a major threat to the West and the world must stop it, Olmert said.

Israel has for years been warning that Iran is working on nuclear weapons and backed the United States in its international efforts to exert pressure on Iran to stop the program. Israel considers Iran a significant threat because of its nuclear ambitions, its long-range missile program and repeated calls by its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for the disappearance of Israel.

Iran says its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes.

Israel will work to change the American intelligence agencies' view of Iran, said Dichter, a former chief of Israel's Shin Bet secret service agency.

"A misconception by the world's leading superpower is not just an internal American occurrence," Dichter said.

Any future faulty U.S. intelligence on the actions of Palestinian security forces could damage peace efforts, Dichter said.

"Those same (intelligence) arms in the U.S. are apt to make a mistake and declare that the Palestinians have fulfilled their commitments, which would carry with it very serious consequences from Israel's vantage point," Dichter said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071215/...israel_us_iran
Title: Uh oh , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2007, 12:41:24 PM
stratfor

LEBANON: A senior Iranian intelligence officer arrived in Lebanon the week of Dec. 9, and Imad Mughniyye, Hezbollah official in charge of foreign operations, is accompanying the officer to his meetings there, Stratfor sources said Dec. 16. The two have held continuous talks with Hezbollah foreign operations officers in meetings attended by Hezbollah security chief Wafiq Safa. They later traveled to the town of Nabi Sheit in the northern Biqaa, then met with Syrian intelligence officers led by Brig. Gen. Ali Diab in Hezbollah training grounds in Shara near the border village of Janta.
Title: AG Mukasey on Protecting Telcoms from lawsuits for helping track I-fascists
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 04, 2008, 05:51:40 AM
Notable & Quotable
January 4, 2008; Page A11
WSJ
Attorney General Michael Mukasey at the American Bar Association, December 19:

I also want to address the issue of protecting telecom companies from lawsuits. It's critical that Congress provide retroactive liability protection for telecommunications companies, as a bipartisan bill from the Senate Intelligence Committee does. Let me explain why this is important.

Over 40 lawsuits have been filed against telecommunication companies simply because these companies are believed to have assisted our intelligence agencies after the attacks of September 11th. The amounts of these claims -- which run into the hundreds of billions of dollars; that's billions with a B -- are enough to send any company into bankruptcy. These companies face lawsuits, they face bankruptcy, they face loss of reputation, they face millions of dollars in legal fees, all because they are alleged to have helped the government in obtaining intelligence information after 9/11.

Even if you believe the lawsuits will ultimately be dismissed, as we do, the prospect of having to defend against these massive claims is an enormous burden for the companies to bear.

Not only is the litigation itself costly, but the companies also may suffer significant business and reputational harm as the result of the allegations against them -- allegations which may or may not be true, but to which they cannot publicly respond, because they're not allowed to confirm or deny whether, and to what extent, they provide classified assistance to the Government. . . .

As you might imagine, these companies and others may decide that it's too risky to help the Intelligence Community in the future, no matter how great our need for their assistance may be.

Title: phone data - secure? - nah.
Post by: ccp on January 04, 2008, 06:49:37 PM
"these companies are believed to have assisted our intelligence agencies"

And how did these companies assist law enforcement?

Who is monitoring what these companies do with their databases of personal phone call information?  Who monitors who they track with cell tower info?

The answer:  nobody knows but them.

Don't think for a minute they (mis)use information only for "law enforcement purposes".
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on January 04, 2008, 09:40:37 PM
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2006-02-02hm.html

Heather Mac Donald
Talking Sense on “Spying”
Requiring warrants for computerized surveillance is absurd and dangerous to national security.
2 January 2006


It’s time to get real: Computers can’t spy. They can’t violate your privacy, because they don’t know that you exist. Computers are the solution to Americans’ hyperactive privacy paranoia, not its nightmare confirmation. Next Monday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the National Security Agency’s Al Qaeda phone-tracking program should focus on the promise of computer technology in fighting terrorism, and on overcoming the impediments to using it.

The furor over the National Security Agency program has been inflamed by conflating computer scanning with human spying. Administration opponents and the media have thrown around the phrases “domestic surveillance” and “warrantless eavesdropping” to refer to what appears to be computer analysis of vast amounts of communications traffic. In only the most minute fraction of cases has a human mind attended to the results—at which point, the term “eavesdropping” may become appropriate. Most of the time, however, the communications data passed through NSA’s supercomputers without any further consequences and without any sentient being learning what the data were. Anyone who feels violated by the possibility that his international phone calls or emails joined the flood of zeros and ones that feed the NSA’s machines only to be passed by undeciphered, must believe that his wonderful individuality can spark interest even in silicon chips.

But although the NSA’s Al Qaeda communications analysis program did not in the vast majority of cases violate privacy, it probably did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And that fact should serve as a warning that national security law needs reform if we want to deploy one of our greatest defensive assets—computer technology—against Islamic terrorists.

The facts about the NSA tracking program remain unknown: administration accounts and media reports are conflicting and incomplete. Assuming some truth in what has come out to date, it seems that when American soldiers and intelligence agents abroad seize phones and computers from Al Qaeda suspects, NSA computers start tracking communications to and from the phone numbers and email addresses contained in those devices, including communications between Al Qaeda suspects abroad and people here in the U.S.

Some of that mechanized tracking, it appears, simply follows calling or emailing patterns to and from the intercepted numbers and internet addresses—looking solely at phone numbers and email addresses without analyzing content. Other aspects of the program may search for certain key phrases within phone and electronic messages. And perhaps in a small percentage of cases, an NSA agent may monitor the content of highly suspicious communications between Al Qaeda operatives and U.S. residents.

Under the law, all of those methods require a court order if any of the numbers or addresses belong to U.S. citizens or legal residents, even though only a live agent poses any privacy problems. Using a computer to track phone numbers called and email addresses contacted, or to search for key words in conversations—assuming no follow-up action by the government—is a privacy-protecting measure. A computer is no more sensitive to the meaning of the millions of conversations it may be scanning for Jihadist code words than a calculator that you use to figure out your taxes is privy to your income and debt levels.

But the legal hurdles to such automated-scanning programs become significant if there’s any possibility that data on American residents are in play. To track just the phone numbers dialed out of and received by numbers contained in Khalid Sheik Mohammad’s cell phone, without any interception of content, for example, requires a court order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, if some of those numbers belong to U.S. residents or are found in the U.S. This requirement is particularly perverse, because the Supreme Court has held that there is no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in the numbers you dial from or receive into your phone. Phone companies already possess that information, which they use (among other things) to pitch new calling plans to subscribers. Dialing patterns, therefore, have no claim to constitutionally protected privacy.

The barriers to using our computer capacity grow even more daunting when the government wants to use computers to find Jihadist language in communications. Remember: a computer cannot eavesdrop on a conversation, because it does not “know” what anyone is saying, and a key-word detection program would exclude from computer analysis all conversations and all parts of conversations that don’t use suspicious language. Nevertheless, such an insensate tracking device becomes “surveillance” for FISA purposes. Thus, in order to put a computer to work sifting through thousands of phone conversations or email messages a day, the NSA must convince the FISA court that there is probable cause to believe that every U.S. resident whose conversations will be dumbly scanned is an agent of a foreign power knowingly and illegally gathering intelligence or planning terrorism. FISA’s 72-hour emergency exception rule, which allows the government to begin monitoring a conversation and seek a warrant within 72 hours, is no help. The government will still need to prove that the thousands of electronically scanned and ignored conversations emanate from American agents of foreign governments or terrorist organizations.

Obviously, such a requirement is both unworkable and unnecessary. It is wrong to consider computer analysis a constitutional “search” of data that haven’t been selected for further inspection. Only when authorities order a follow-up investigation on selected results should a probable-cause standard come into play.

That FISA employs probable-cause standards at all is a belated encroachment on national defense that contravened centuries of constitutional thinking. The Fourth Amendment’s probable-cause requirement governs criminal prosecution. It requires public authorities to prove to a judge issuing a search or arrest warrant that there is sufficient reason to believe that the wanted individual has committed a crime or that the criminal evidence sought is likely to be in the alleged location. The purpose of probable-cause rules is to ensure that the government’s police powers are correctly targeted and do not unreasonably invade privacy. But federal judges and criminal evidentiary standards should be irrelevant when the government is gathering intelligence to prevent an attack on the country. A federal judge has no expertise in evaluating the need for and significance of foreign intelligence information. And the standard for gathering intelligence on our enemies should be lower than that for bringing the government’s penal powers to bear on citizens.

FISA’s incongruous probable-cause standards, passed in a fit of civil-libertarian zeal after the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s, however, are likely here to stay. At the very least, we should not make matters worse by equating computer interception of large-scale data with “surveillance” under FISA. Requiring probable cause for computer analysis of intelligence data would knock out our technological capacity in the war on Islamic terrorists almost as effectively as a Jihadist strike against NSA’s computers.
Title: Bolton: Our politicized intel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2008, 06:37:46 AM
Our Politicized Intelligence Services
By JOHN R. BOLTON
February 5, 2008; Page A17

Today, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee (and Thursday on the House side) to give the intelligence community's annual global threat analysis. These hearings are always significant, but the stakes are especially high now because of the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

Criticism of the NIE's politicized, policy-oriented "key judgments" has spanned the political spectrum and caused considerable turmoil in Congress. Few seriously doubt that the NIE gravely damaged the Bush administration's diplomatic strategy. With the intelligence community's credibility and impartiality on the line, Mr. McConnell has an excellent opportunity to correct the NIE's manifold flaws, and repair some of the damage done to international efforts to stop Iran from obtaining deliverable nuclear weapons.

 
There are (at least) three things he should do:

- Explain how the NIE was distorted, and rewrite it objectively to reflect the status of Iran's nuclear programs. The NIE's first key judgment is "we judge with high confidence that in fall, 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." Most of the world, predictably, never got beyond that opinion. Only inveterate footnote hunters noticed the extraordinary accompanying footnote which redefined Iran's "nuclear weapons program" to mean only its "nuclear weapon design and weaponization work," and undeclared uranium conversion and enrichment activities. Card sharks -- not intelligence professionals -- could be proud of this sleight of hand, which grossly mischaracterizes what Iran actually needs for a weapons program.

The NIE later makes clear that Iran's nuclear efforts and capabilities are continuing and growing, that many activities are "dual use" (i.e., for either civil or military purposes), and that Iran's real intentions are unknown. Substantively, therefore, the NIE is not far different from the 2005 NIE, but its first sentence gives a radically different impression.

Here is the first question for Congress: Was the NIE's opening salvo intended to produce policy consequences congenial to Mr. McConnell's own sentiments? If not, how did he miss the obvious consequences that flowed from the NIE within minutes of its public release?

This was a sin of either commission or omission. If the intelligence community intended the NIE's first judgment to have policy ramifications -- in particular to dissuade the Bush administration from a more forceful policy against Iran -- then it was out of line, a sin of commission.

If, on the other hand, Mr. McConnell and others missed the NIE's explosive nature, then this is at best a sin of omission, and perhaps far worse. Will Mr. McConnell say he saw nothing significant in how the NIE was written? Does he believe in fact that the first sentence is the NIE's single most important point? If not, why was it the first sentence?

Why not start by using the NIE's very last key judgment, "we assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so." Who decided which sentence should be first and which last? This is not an exercise in style, but a matter of critical importance for American national security.

- Commit that NIEs will abjure policy bias. Policy makers and intelligence community analysts agree that assessing hard capabilities is typically easier than judging the murkier world of intentions. The NIE's judgments on Iran's intentions and sensitivities, however, often sound as though they were written by Supreme Leader Khamenei's psychologist, albeit with precious little factual basis.

While acknowledging that the 2003 halt was due to "pressure," the NIE opines that a combination of pressures and "opportunities for Iran" might cause the halt to be extended, but only if those worthy mullahs in Tehran find the "opportunities" to be "credible." One can only guess where that conclusion comes from, but the NIE's next sentence says "it is difficult to specify what such a combination might be," thus rendering the earlier conclusions not only unsupported, but incomprehensible.

One key proof of the NIE's policy-driven nature is the number of dogs that don't bark. The 2003 halt could have been triggered by the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, acts which certainly awakened Moammar Gadhafi and led to Libya renouncing its nuclear-weapons program. But somehow the Iraq war never makes it into the NIE. The 2003 halt is attributed merely to the "exposure of Iran's previously undeclared work." Moreover, the NIE says nothing about Iran's aggressive ballistic missile development program, which bears directly on Iran's intentions: Was it expending large sums only to deliver conventional weapons?

Mr. McConnell should commit the intelligence community to stick to its knitting -- intelligence -- and return its policy enthusiasts to agencies where policy is made.

- Reaffirm the existing policy that NIE key judgments should not be made public. Then, stick to it and enforce discipline against leaks. Press reports say that the White House agreed to make the key judgments public, contrary to a policy adopted only weeks earlier, because the intelligence community warned that the document would otherwise surely leak. Some might see this as blackmail, but at best it represents a failure of both the intelligence community's leadership and rank and file. The only clear victor was Tehran, which might as well have received the NIE via e-mail directly from Mr. McConnell's office.

The intelligence community is not a think tank. It is a clandestine service to advise U.S. decision makers, proud and honorable work that its members once uniformly understood was to remain behind the scenes. This is where it should return.

Whatever the intentions of the drafters of the NIE, it mortally wounded the administration's diplomatic strategy, which was ineffective to begin with. Many applauded the outcome of this internecine bureaucratic warfare, but it is highly risky to allow such outcome-determinative opinions to prevail.

Iran is a critical challenge for the U.S. -- which Mr. McConnell should begin his testimony by stressing -- but the implications of how this NIE was written are also serious. Several members of Congress have suggested an independent analysis of the data underlying the NIE. Mr. McConnell should agree to this, to resolve the disagreements and restore the intelligence community's damaged credibility.

Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster/Threshold Editions, 2007).

WSJ
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 05, 2008, 05:10:07 PM
We'll ignore Bolton's advice, until after it's too late....
Title: Restatement of NIE assessment ignored by NY Times; AQ stronger than ever
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2008, 06:04:46 AM
NY Times

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda is gaining in strength from its refuge in Pakistan and is steadily improving its ability to recruit, train and position operatives capable of carrying out attacks inside the United States, the director of national intelligence told a Senate panel on Tuesday.

Al QaedaThe director, Mike McConnell, told lawmakers that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, remained in control of the terrorist group and had promoted a new generation of lieutenants. He said Al Qaeda was also improving what he called “the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S.” — producing militants, including new Western recruits, capable of blending into American society and attacking domestic targets.

A senior intelligence official said Tuesday evening that the testimony was based in part on new evidence that Qaeda operatives in Pakistan were training Westerners, most likely including American citizens, to carry out attacks. The official said there was no indication as yet that Al Qaeda had succeeded in getting operatives into the United States.

The testimony, in an annual assessment of the threats facing the United States, was the latest indication that Al Qaeda appears to have significantly rebuilt a network battered by the American invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It follows a National Intelligence Estimate last summer that described a resurgent Al Qaeda, and could add fuel to criticisms from Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates that the White House focus on Iraq since 2002 has diverted attention and resources from the battle against the Qaeda organization’s core.

In recent weeks, fresh concerns about the threat posed by Al Qaeda have prompted senior Bush administration officials to travel to Pakistan to seek approval for more aggressive American military action against militants based in the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan.

As part of his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, also offered the government’s most extensive public defense for the use of waterboarding, saying that the C.I.A. had used the harsh interrogation technique against three Qaeda operatives in 2002 and 2003 in a belief that another terrorist attack on the United States was imminent. He identified the three as Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

General Hayden said the technique, which induces a feeling of drowning, had not been used since 2003. Mr. McConnell said that a future C.I.A. request to use waterboarding on a detainee would need to be approved both by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and by President Bush.

The C.I.A. is the only agency permitted under law to use interrogation methods more aggressive than those used by the American military. Senate Democrats sought to use the hearing to exploit divisions about those techniques.

Both Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers that their agencies had successfully obtained valuable intelligence from terrorism suspects without using what Mr. Mueller called the “coercive” methods of the C.I.A.

But General Hayden bristled when asked about Congressional attempts to mandate that C.I.A. interrogators be required to use the more limited set of interrogation methods contained in the Army Field Manual, which is used by military interrogators.

“It would make no more sense to apply the Army’s field manual to C.I.A.,” General Hayden said, “than it would to take the Army Field Manual on grooming and apply it to my agency, or the Army Field Manual on recruiting and apply it to my agency. Or, for that matter, the Army Field Manual on sexual orientation and apply it to my agency.”

During the testimony, Mr. McConnell tried to recalibrate somewhat the intelligence agencies’ view of Iran’s nuclear program, telling senators that the public portion of a National Intelligence Estimate released in December placed too much significance on the fact that Iran had halted secret work on nuclear weapons design in 2003.

Mr. McConnell said that weapons design was “probably the least significant part of the program” and that Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment meant that it still posed a potential nuclear threat.

The fact that Iran was continuing its enrichment efforts was mentioned in that intelligence assessment, but Republican lawmakers and many conservative commentators have criticized the report as misleading.

Intelligence officials have defended the assessment on Iran as an example of the more rigorous analysis that American spy agencies have adopted in response to the prewar intelligence failures on Iraq. But while Mr. McConnell praised the assessment, he said his office had not been clear enough about its conclusions as it hurried to make it public.

“In retrospect, as I mentioned, I would do some things differently,” he said.

Among his litany of worldwide threats, Mr. McConnell also warned the Senate panel about the growing threat of “cyberattacks” by terror groups or homegrown militants. He said President Bush signed a classified directive in January outlining steps to protect American computer networks.

In his testimony on Al Qaeda, Mr. McConnell said Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri were precluded by “security concerns” from the day-to-day running of the organization. But he said both men “regularly pass inspirational messages and specific operational guidance to their followers through public statements.”

Mr. McConnell said the flow of foreign militants into Iraq slowed somewhat during the final months of 2007. At the same time, however, he warned that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the largely homegrown Sunni insurgent group in Iraq that American officials say is led by foreigners, could shift its focus to carrying out attacks outside Iraq.

Based on captured documents, Mr. McConnell said, fewer than 100 militants from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia to date have left Iraq to establish cells in other countries.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, blamed the Iraq war for undermining the campaign against Al Qaeda.

“The focus of America’s military forces and intelligence resources were mistakenly shifted,” he said, “from delivering a decisive blow against Al Qaeda, which is the enemy.”

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2008, 09:06:55 AM
 
 
     
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Iranian Nuclear Rewrite
February 8, 2008; Page A16
Give Admiral Michael McConnell credit for trying to walk back the cat. Questioned this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Director of National Intelligence defended the "integrity and the professionalism" of the process that produced last December's stunning National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear program. Yet his testimony amounts to a reversal of the previous judgment.

The December NIE made headlines the world over for its "key judgment" that in 2003 "Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programs" -- programs that previously had been conducted in secret and in violation of Iran's Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations.

 
This was a "high confidence" judgment, though the intelligence community had only "moderate confidence" that the program hasn't since been restarted. The NIE also waded into speculative political and policy judgments, such as that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs."

So it was little wonder that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quickly called the NIE a "declaration of victory" for Iran's nuclear programs. Diplomatic efforts to pass a third round of U.N. economic sanctions ground to a crawl, though another weak draft resolution is currently making the rounds. Russia decided to ship nuclear fuel to the reactor it has built for Iran at Bushehr, a move it had previously postponed for months and which has worrisome proliferation risks.

Elsewhere, the NIE complicated U.S. efforts to deploy an antiballistic-missile shield in Central Europe. The Israelis worried that the report signaled the death of American seriousness on Iran, possibly requiring them to act alone. At home, Democrats used the NIE to accuse the Administration of hyping intelligence. "It's absolutely clear and eerily similar to what we saw with Iraq," said John Edwards.

Now Admiral McConnell is clearly trying to repair the damage, even if he can't say so directly. "I think I would change the way that we described [the] nuclear program," he admitted to Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) during the hearing, adding that weapon design and weaponization were "the least significant portion" of a nuclear weapons program.

He expressed some regret that the authors of the NIE had left it to a footnote to explain that the NIE's definition of "nuclear weapons program" meant only its design and weaponization and excluded its uranium enrichment. And he agreed with Mr. Bayh's statement that it would be "very difficult" for the U.S. to know if Iran had recommenced weaponization work, and that "given their industrial and technological capabilities, they are likely to be successful" in building a bomb.

The Admiral went even further in his written statement. Gone is the NIE's palaver about the cost-benefit approach or the sticks-and-carrots by which the mullahs may be induced to behave. Instead, the new assessment stresses that Iran continues to press ahead on enrichment, "the most difficult challenge in nuclear production." It notes that "Iran's efforts to perfect ballistic missiles that can reach North Africa and Europe also continue" -- a key component of a nuclear weapons capability.

Then there is the other side of WMD: "We assess that Tehran maintains dual-use facilities intended to produce CW [Chemical Warfare] agent in times of need and conducts research that may have offensive applications." Ditto for biological weapons, where "Iran has previously conducted offensive BW agent research and development," and "continues to seek dual-use technologies that could be used for biological warfare."

All this merely confirms what has long been obvious about Iran's intentions. No less importantly, his testimony underscores the extent to which the first NIE was at best a PR fiasco, at worst a revolt by intelligence analysts seeking to undermine current U.S. policy. As we reported at the time, the NIE was largely the work of State Department alumni with track records as "hyperpartisan anti-Bush officials," according to an intelligence source. They did their job too well. As Senator Bayh pointed out at the hearing, the NIE "had unintended consequences that, in my own view, are damaging to the national security interests of our country." Mr. Bayh is not a neocon.

Admiral McConnell's belated damage repair ought to refocus world attention on Iran's very real nuclear threat. Too bad his NIE rewrite won't get anywhere near the media attention that the first draft did.

WSJ
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2008, 12:56:53 PM
Dongfan Chung, an engineer, was arrested in Los Angeles on Monday for economic espionage and serving as an unregistered foreign agent. According to the charges filed against him, Chung had been engaged in espionage since 1979, when he worked for Rockwell International, providing the Chinese with technical intelligence on the B-1 bomber. Rockwell later was taken over by Boeing, and Chung then began providing China with intelligence on the space shuttle, the C-17 transport aircraft and rocket engines. Chung, a naturalized American citizen, held security clearances and traveled to China several times between 1985 and 2003 to meet with his handlers and deliver information in person.

Although it is not clear when he joined the B-1 project, he is thought to have started providing the Chinese with intelligence in 1979. A heavy strategic bomber, the B-1 was optimized for low-altitude penetration and remains one of the most advanced designs in the world — short of the B-2 stealth in key technology, but still not trivial.

Clearly, the charges against Chung are only allegations at this point, but if we assume for now that the government’s evidence is rock solid, the case merits examination. We would be looking at Chung’s ability to infiltrate a highly classified program and provide information to his handlers — and then to shift to other classified programs. His ability to do this for 30 years without being detected, in spite of an apparent flow of information and several trips to China, seems even more interesting. Most important, it is not clear what he would have passed to the Chinese. It can’t be assumed that it was simply material to which he had access. A skilled agent would — over time — be able to access information throughout a facility or a program. Chung was an engineer operating near many classified projects; what else did he access?

The allegations raise an important question about Chung. Was he a trained Chinese intelligence officer assigned to penetrate the B-1 program, or was he simply recruited by Chinese intelligence after he went to work there? The difference is crucial. A trained intelligence officer dedicated enough to operate under deep cover for that long is going to be a tough nut to crack. Someone recruited for love or money is more likely to be prepared to talk in exchange for leniency.

Who Chung is matters. That he allegedly was able to operate in sensitive facilities for almost three decades matters just as much. It raises questions about exactly how the United States works to detect espionage. Obviously, background checks are done. But background checks are not particularly effective at screening out threats. The famous cases of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hannsen, both of whom were recruited by the Soviets from deep in the CIA and FBI, show the weakness not only of the background check but also of the polygraph, with which the intelligence community is so enamored.

Chung was born in China. But if the United States ruled out foreign-born engineers, it would not have enough engineers. And most foreign-born engineers have nothing to do with espionage. The issue is not what someone was — which is frequently unknowable — or what one’s blood flow is during a polygraph. Security is constant monitoring and testing of all personnel. That is costly, time consuming and difficult. It is easier to ask neighbors if he ever used drugs and do a polygraph.

Chinese intelligence did exactly what it was supposed to do — and did it well. If Chung was a Chinese intelligence officer, he served his country well. If he simply was bought, the agent who bought Chung did his job. One would hope that U.S. intelligence is returning the favor as we speak. But the Chung case raises two questions: First, how compromised was the B-1 project, and how do we know? Second, how many agents do the Chinese currently have deployed in sensitive positions, and how do we intend to find out?

Chung supposedly operated for almost 30 years. If true, either he was very good or U.S. counterintelligence was very bad — or both. In any case, this is a cautionary tale. How many out there are feeding information to China on projects so black that U.S. citizens may never hear of them?

stratfor
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 13, 2008, 01:41:57 PM
**Another reason to buy an Izzy a beer!**

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/02/13/score-imad-mughniyeh-killed-by-car-bomb/
 :-D  :-D  :-D  :-D  :-D



Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 16, 2008, 11:29:09 AM
**When the next 9/11 comes, thank a democrat.**

February 15, 2008, 5:30 p.m.

When the Clock Strikes Midnight, We Will Be Significantly Less Safe
The Democrats’ FISA talking points are nonsense.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

According to top Democrats, the expiration of the Protect America Act (PAA) when the clock strikes midnight Sunday is no big deal. Our ability to monitor foreign threats to national security, they assure us, will be completely unaffected.

This is about as dumb a talking point as one can imagine. And it is just as demonstrably false.

Think for a moment about Tuesday’s crucial Senate bill overhauling our intelligence law that Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to allow the House to consider before recessing Friday — for a vacation. (Democrats evidently had no time for national security, having exhausted themselves on such cosmic matters as a baseball pitcher’s alleged steroid use and unenforceable, unconstitutional contempt citations in a stale investigation into something that wasn’t a crime and that no one but MoveOn.org cares about any longer).

In a Senate controlled by the Democrats, the bill passed by an overwhelming 2-to-1 margin. To attract such numbers, the Bush administration (as I detailed yesterday) gave ground on critically important issues of executive power and expansion of the FISA court’s role.

Democrats surely did not want to give President Bush this legislative victory, and President Bush certainly did not want to cave on these issues. But both sides compromised precisely because they understood that failing to do so, failing to preserve current surveillance authority, would endanger the United States.

Now, maybe they did it because they didn’t want to be blamed if something catastrophic happened; I prefer to think it was because they felt it their obligation to prevent something catastrophic from happening. But either way, the certainty that a failure to act would mean an exorbitant increase in the odds of catastrophe clearly weighed on both sides.

That is why so many Senate Democrats went along. That is why Democrats in both houses agreed to the PAA in the first place. That is why 34 House Democrats defied their leadership on Wednesday, voting against another temporary extension of the PAA in an effort to force a vote on the Senate bill — which, had Pelosi allowed it to come to the floor, would have become law by a healthy bipartisan margin.

If the expiration of the PAA made no difference, as top Democrats are speciously claiming now, there is not the remotest chance any of those things would have happened.

So how can they make such an argument? Here is the sleight of hand.

The PAA permitted, without court authorization for up to one year, surveillance of foreign targets outside the U.S. who were communicating with other foreigners outside the U.S. The PAA was passed in August 2007 with a six-month sunset provision (which expires at midnight). But the end of the PAA does not mean the immediate end of all surveillance authorized by the PAA.

Let’s say we started surveillance on Pakistani Suspected Terrorist A on December 1, 2007. The PAA provides that even if the PAA sunsets, any surveillance authorized under it may continue for the full year from the start date of the surveillance. Thus, to the extent Democrats are saying the PAA’s expiration would not affect the monitoring of Pakistani Suspected Terrorist A, they are correct — that surveillance may continue through November 30, 2008.

But here’s the problem: What if, tomorrow, for the first time, Pakistani Suspected Terrorist B comes on our radar screen — to say nothing Pakistani Suspected Terrorists C though ZZZ? Let’s say, as is entirely possible (if not likely), that B & Co. are not necessarily affiliated with al-Qaeda or any currently known terrorist group. Starting tomorrow, there will be no PAA authority to begin monitoring those suspected terrorists.

To that rather obvious point, leading Democrats counter, “Wait just a second — you can still go to the FISA court.”

Right.

Can you see what’s happening here? The whole reason Congress enacted the PAA in the first place is because FISA was never meant to apply to foreigners outside the U.S. communicating with other foreigners outside the U.S. We are not supposed to need court authorization for that. We are not supposed to have to write affidavits, approved by the attorney general and others, demonstrating probable cause that such people are agents of foreign powers — as well as demonstrating that other alternative investigative techniques would not yield the same intelligence.

Those are protections afforded by the FISA statute. Foreigners outside the U.S. are supposed to be outside the protection of the FISA statute, just as they are outside the protection of the Constitution. Saying the government can go to the FISA court is no answer: Government is not supposed to have to go to the FISA court. These people are not supposed to have FISA rights. They are not supposed to have Fourth Amendment rights.

We are talking about thousands upon thousands of communications, totally outside the U.S. (in the sense that no person inside our country is a participant) which the intelligence community used to be able to intercept and sift through without any burdensome judicial procedures whatsoever. That is how FISA was written, and that is how FISA was understood for almost 30 years. Then last year, a secret FISA-court ruling attempted to bring all those communications under FISA-court control — apparently on the theory that, because some digital bits of these conversations may zoom through U.S. hubs in global telecommunications networks, somehow a conversation between a guy in Pakistan and a guy in Afghanistan should now be considered a U.S. wire communication.

But FISA was not intended to protect Pakistanis and Afghans. It was intended to protect people inside the U.S. from being subjected to national-security surveillance absent probable cause that they were acting as foreign agents.

Requiring FISA compliance for foreign-to-foreign communications does not protect anyone inside the U.S. It protects non-Americans, some of whom will be terrorists and none of whom is entitled to any protection under American law. It makes it impossible for the intelligence community to monitor all the foreign-to-foreign communications that we used to monitor because we will never be able to show, for every target, probable cause that he is an agent of a foreign power — as FISA requires. The PAA did not call for that; it simply required a certification that we were monitoring people believed to be outside the United States.

The claim that the expiration of the PAA will not open a huge gap in surveillance coverage is laughable. Right now, we are permitted to collect foreign-to-foreign communications absent probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power. As of 12:00 A.M., we will no longer be permitted to do that. It is absurd to suggest that this huge drop-off in collection will have no impact on our security.

The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate stated:
globalization trends and recent technological advances will continue to enable even small numbers of alienated people to find and connect with one another, justify and intensify their anger, and mobilize resources to attack — all without requiring a centralized terrorist organization, training camp, or leader.

Translation: There are ever larger numbers of potentially hostile operatives who are galvanized by jihadist ideology without necessarily being connected to a known terrorist organization. Casting a broad surveillance net to collect intelligence overseas is how we detect and thwart any threat they may pose. It’s how we protect Americans in the homeland and on the battlefield.

As of midnight, that net is gone.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, an NRO contributing editor, directs the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWU3NmEwNzhmYjVkZDdlNzVmZDhhODVmMmViZTRlODM=
Title: Wasn't quite sure where to put this one
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2008, 09:03:57 AM
Summary
In the wake of the Feb. 12 assassination of top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyah, the organization has instructed its operatives to exercise caution when using cell phones to avoid becoming targets of Israeli attacks. Due to advancements in electronic surveillance, however, Hezbollah will have to do a lot more to evade the deadly cell phone ping.

Analysis
Hezbollah has plenty of reasons to be paranoid in the wake of the Feb. 12 assassination of top commander Imad Mughniyah. Not only does Israel possibly have more targeted assassinations in store, but Hezbollah cannot be sure of the origin of the leak that sacrificed its most seasoned and innovative operative.

There are indications that Hezbollah suspects the leak came from Syrian intelligence. When Hezbollah officials like Mughniyah travel to Damascus, they inform the Syrian authorities just before they cross the border into Syria. Once they are inside the country, Syrian intelligence vehicles escort them to their destination. This is not to say that the Syrian regime necessarily was complicit in the attack –- Hezbollah remains a key asset for Damascus — but there is a possibility that a foreign intelligence agency such as the Israeli Mossad recruited an asset within the Syrian intelligence network. This could explain why Syria has maintained a highly defensive posture following the assassination, making almost daily announcements about the progress of the bombing investigation and indirectly blaming Israel and Western-backed Arab governments in the region.

Following the assassination, Hezbollah has severely tightened security in Lebanon and temporarily curtailed the travel of any key officials to Syria. Stratfor has learned that the Hezbollah leadership also has instructed its cadres to be extremely vigilant in their movements and use of mobile phones. Hezbollah operatives are under strict orders not to answer phone calls from unknown callers. Instead, the operatives must first change locations and then return the calls if necessary.

The reason for these instructions is the relative ease with which a hostile intelligence agency can triangulate a target’s location by exploiting the structure of GSM networks. Using either mobile identification or multilaterization, the location of the target phone can be determined within the network. Of these two methods, multilaterization (more commonly known as phone pinging) is more precise, yielding accuracies within five meters of the location of the phone. Hezbollah is operating on the logic that when a call is received, a hard connection is made with the tower and the target’s location immediately can be pinpointed. However, if the target first moves to a different location before returning the call (preferably in an area with fewer network contact points, towers and receivers to enlarge the target scope), the mobile user likely will be harder to locate and will be exposed to less risk.

Mobile phone networks are not particularly useful for tracking moving targets on the street, unless the phones being used have GPS modules. However, this tactic still can help pinpoint facilities or verify that a target is at a particular location (such as the building where Mughniyah allegedly held a meeting with Hamas and Syrian intelligence officials) prior to the launch of a planned attack.

This exploitation of phones also can be applied to those that rely on satellite networks. A case in point is the April 1996 assassination of Dzhokhar Musayevich Dudayev, the first president of Chechnya, in the heyday of the first Chechen war. Rumor has it that Dudayev was compromised by then-colleague Vladislav Surkov (who now is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deputy chief of staff) before the latter switched sides and allied with the Kremlin. Through Surkov, the Russian security establishment obtained Dudayev’s personal phone numbers and triangulated his precise location while he was using his satellite phone in southern Chechnya; Russian forces later dropped a 500-pound bomb on the safe house where he was hiding.

Given that the instructions for cell phone use were given to Hezbollah operatives in the immediate aftermath of the Mughniyah assassination, there is a distinct possibility that a simple cell phone ping is what gave away Mughniyah’s location. That said, Mughniyah was obsessed with operational security and likely was well aware of the risks involved in using a cell phone. Nicknamed “the Fox,” Mughniyah probably was not one to fall for such a trap.

High-value targets like Mughniyah usually carry multiple cell phones and change the SIM cards frequently to avoid being traced. There is always the possibility that a compromised Syrian intelligence offer fitted Mughniyah’s phone with a SIM card for the attackers to trace, but it would have been far easier for the source simply to inform the perpetrators of the time and location of Mughniyah’s meeting. There is also the distinct possibility that software was installed on his cell phone to facilitate targeting his location. This could have been done by someone with access to his phone or, given the right resources, it could have been installed on the phone remotely from another phone or a computer without his knowledge. Once the software is installed, it can calculate the user’s location within the network and send this information to a preset place, either via e-mail or using SMS. However, this is dependent on the surveillant knowing the phone number for the SIM card, as well as the phone or SIM card having enough memory available to copy the program.

Moreover, seasoned operatives like Mughniyah often are familiar with the U.S. government’s cell phone tracking abilities, in addition to the practice of using multilaterization and network exploitation to pinpoint a target’s location. These methods utilize the signals used by networks and phones to communicate and exchange data when they are connected. Phones often receive redundant signals while connected, which ensures that continuous communication can occur even while the user is moving considerable distances. The strength of the signals varies with the distance between the device and the tower or communication point, allowing a phone to be located within a particular network. By calculating either the strength of the tower signals being received by the phone or the time it takes them to reach the device, the phone’s location can be triangulated. The owner of the phone does not even need to be using it for this to take place, but it must be connected to the network. The most effective way to beat this system, therefore, is to remove either the battery or the SIM card — or both — from the phone when it is not in use.

The FBI also has earned the U.S. government several lawsuits by turning criminals’ cell phones into microphones and transmitters for eavesdropping. This process, known as using a roving bug, can be carried out by getting the mobile provider to remotely install a piece of software on a handset without the owner’s knowledge that activates the microphone — even if the target is not on a call.

The instructions given to Hezbollah operatives on cell phone use thus reflect a high degree of naiveté on the part of Hezbollah’s leadership. Even the Hamas leaders, who also have gone underground for fear of Israeli reprisal attacks, have taken far more logical measures to avoid detection. According to a Feb. 12 Al Hayat report, high-value Hamas targets are prohibited from using cell phones. A center in Gaza has also been created to filter landline calls for these leaders, and callers must enter a pass code before their calls will go through.

Despite the security risks associated with cell phone use, the devices have become as much of a necessity for militant organizations like Hezbollah as they have for businessmen. Counterterrorism operations can continue to benefit from this and further advances in electronic surveillance technology. Hezbollah operatives, meanwhile, will have to take more extraordinary measures to avoid having their phone conversations end with a boom.

stratfor

Title: Hezbollah in context
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2008, 07:13:31 AM
Canada: Hezbollah Activity in Context
Stratfor Today » June 20, 2008 | 1534 GMT

Photo by Donald Weber/Getty Images
A Jewish rally in TorontoSummary
Hezbollah operatives reportedly have been spotted surveilling Jewish targets in Canada. The reports come as Hezbollah finds itself at risk of losing its Syrian sponsor, making it all the more important for the militant group to prove its value to its Iranian sponsor. They also come amid continued tensions between an internally divided Iran and a United States facing a presidential election in November.

Analysis
Related Special Topic Page
Hezbollah
Reports from Canada say Hezbollah operatives have been detected conducting surveillance on Jewish targets in Toronto, including schools and synagogues. U.S. sources have confirmed increased Hezbollah activity as well. Intriguingly, the reports specifically said the men conducting the surveillance were Hezbollah members, not just men of Middle Eastern appearance. That either indicates a deep penetration of Hezbollah in Canada — the Canadians knew the political affiliation of the men — or psychological warfare against Hezbollah, an attempt to let the group know the Canadians are on to them. If this is a Hezbollah operation, the Canadians just told them they were busted.

There is a complex situation developing around Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is in deep trouble. Syria has shifted its position by entering into serious negotiations with Israel. Syria wants to come out of those negotiations with Lebanon in its sphere of influence. The Israeli price for that would be Syria curtailing Hezbollah activities. The Syrians, more interested in Lebanese wealth than in the interests of a Shiite religious movement — Syria is neither Shiite nor particularly religious — might well make the deal.

This puts Hezbollah in a very difficult position. They have operated in the past with the sponsorship of Iran and Syria. Syria is closer. If the Syrians were to shift their policy, Hezbollah would be isolated and in jeopardy. Indeed, there is a debate in Stratfor as to who actually killed Imad Mugniyah, the death of whom Hezbollah swore to avenge. Some take the conventional line that it was Israel. Others believe the killing was a Syrian down payment to Israel on the Israeli-Syrian negotiations and a signal to Hezbollah not to do anything to upset the negotiations unless and until the Syrians gave the word.

At this moment, Hezbollah’s only ally is Iran. It needs to make itself valuable to Iran. The United States and Israel are constantly signaling they might attack Iran in the next few months. The very fact that these signals come and are taken seriously reduces the likelihood of such an attack. If either country really wanted to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, they would want to take out all the facilities’ equipment and the personnel. Expertise is everything, and they would want to eliminate it. Signaling the possibility of an attack increases the likelihood that Iran would disperse all of the expertise and some of the equipment. That would decrease the effectiveness of the attacks dramatically. You do not signal an attack on facilities to give the other side a chance to shift things around and undermine your intelligence.

Thus, there is a great deal of psychological warfare involved in these threats. The United States and Israel want Iran to feel insecure. This has resulted in increased tensions within the Iranian government, namely, between factions around Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who believe the United States is bluffing and factions around Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and others who might also believe the United States is bluffing, but are using the bluff to undermine Ahmadinejad’s position by portraying him as reckless — and a poor custodian of the economy to boot.

It is in Ahmadinejad’s interest to attempt to counter American and Israeli pressure by demonstrating Iran’s strategic options. Tehran does not have many, but it does have one: Hezbollah. U.S. President George W. Bush’s nightmare is that his presidency will end as it began, with terrorist attacks. His one claim to success — and it is an important one — is that regardless of what might have happened in Iraq, the United States itself has not been attacked since 9/11, and that this was the result of his global actions. To the extent he will have a positive legacy, it will be built on that claim.

But if Hezbollah were to carry out strikes in the United States as Bush exits, his legacy would be further tarnished. The question of whether the Republican strategy is really effective against terrorism would be raised in the middle of a campaign for president, and the campaign would turn around this question. The Republicans will want to show that the Democrats do not take terrorism seriously enough and have no plan to deal with it. The Democrats would claim that it is the Republicans who seven years after 9/11 still do not have an effective counterstrategy.

Hezbollah needs to do a service for Iran. They need Iran. The Iranians need to signal Washington that their psywar — or even real plans to attack — would have a swift and devastating counter, a counter Bush really does not want to see. Therefore, it was in Iran’s interest to have Hezbollah surveillance noticed. It sends the message that Ahmadinejad wants to send to the United States and Israelis. It also increases the strategic value of Hezbollah to Iran, which in turn can pressure Syria on the future of Hezbollah.

Thus, there are two reasons why the Canadians could know what group these operatives were members of. One is that they and the Americans have penetrated Hezbollah and are letting them know that their cover is blown. The other is that Hezbollah wanted to telegraph its punch to signal the U.S. administration to move very carefully in pressuring Iran. This message would be that if you strike Iran, we will strike at you, and if you keep threatening us we will threaten you. Without doubt the Iranians are split politically. But they are signaling the United States that as much as Iran is split, they are not as politically split as the United States is at the moment.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2008, 12:41:36 PM
Government Intelligence
Is Way Behind
September 15, 2008; Page A21
As we mark the anniversary of 9/11, it's worth reviewing how quickly the U.S. has closed intelligence gaps in the past and how far we have to go today. In a similar period after the Nazis started World War II, the U.S. broke the German communications code, invented radar, and developed and dropped the nuclear bomb. The war to gain the information upper hand over terrorists is taking longer -- perhaps too long.

Ironically, the government's last great innovation in information technology was the network that became the Internet. The Web has revolutionized civilian life, but not so for the intelligence agencies. Still plagued by old-fashioned giant IT projects, government intelligence agencies stockpile silos of unshared data in a large bureaucratic structure more suited to a predigital era.

National security should benefit more than it does from the country's technological genius, but Silicon Valley and Washington are opposite cultures. In one, the creative destruction of competition is the norm. In 2001, for example, digital leaders included Netscape, Excite and AltaVista where now Google and others dominate. In Washington, permanent bureaucracies are the rule, with new layers added in the name of reform. Venture capitalists back innovations through small technology teams. Washington has built a massive, unwieldy intelligence structure.

This is dangerous because successful intelligence requires great craft in gathering accurate information, then smartly connecting the dots. Recall that law-enforcement authorities had information that would have stopped most of the 9/11 hijackers if only known information about them -- their flight schools, travel documents and dubious wire payments from the Mideast -- had been shared and analyzed. Imagination needed to be applied to these facts, including that civilian airplanes could be turned into weapons.

We do know that many plots have been uncovered and stopped. What we don't know remains a huge risk. London and Madrid have had their versions of 9/11, and other plots have come close. Britain stopped a plot to blow up passenger airplanes flying to the U.S.; the FBI arrested al Qaeda supporters planning to attack soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J.; and German authorities arrested suspected Islamic Jihad Union members planning to attack U.S. military facilities in Germany.

The New York City Police Department alone cites a dozen serious plots against the city since 9/11. Publicized ones include a planned cyanide attack on the subway by al Qaeda operatives; a separate al Qaeda plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge; a plan to blow up the midtown subway station at Herald Square; and a plot to bomb underwater train tunnels to flood lower Manhattan.

The good news is that dots are being identified better than before 9/11. Attorney General Michael Mukasey plans to issue new guidelines next month so FBI agents can use the same investigative tools to stop terror plots that they use for criminal probes. A $90 million project is under way for massive surveillance of New York City's financial district, with closed-circuit cameras throughout the area and license-plate monitors to tag suspicious vehicles.

How well these dots are being connected is less clear. Post-9/11 legal reforms now permit FBI agents to search Google and other commercial sites. Yet less than one-third of the FBI's national security branch agents and analysts have Internet access at their desks. A $500 million technology project to update the software to access the terrorist watch list of some one million names doesn't reliably track Arabic names when translated into English. It also doesn't allow basic search terms such as "and" and "or."

Government intelligence has been reorganized into the massive bureaucracy at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In contrast, countries such as Britain and Israel have structures that encourage information sharing while also ensuring competitive analysis of what the gathered intelligence really means.

Given how commercial innovation is outpacing government, it's likelier that you'll see a targeted, online advertisement for a flight to Orlando just when you're ready to go, long before smart algorithms mining classified data will alert intelligence authorities to connections among suspicious characters. The intelligence community should be challenged at least to become a fast follower of innovation.

Remembering 9/11 means remembering the losses of that day, but it also means remembering what went wrong to allow it to happen. No intelligence system can work all the time, but the government still has a lot to learn from Silicon Valley about how information flows best and how technology can help turn facts into knowledge. A war based on information should be a war fought on our terms, if we can become more intelligent about intelligence.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2008, 10:37:06 AM
Counterintelligence Implications of Foreign Service National Employees
October 29, 2008 | 1836 GMT


Graphic for Terrorism Intelligence Report

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Related Special Topic Page

    * Tracking Mexico’s Drug Cartels

Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said Oct. 27 that five officials from the anti-organized crime unit (SIEDO) of the Office of the Mexican Attorney General (PGR) have been arrested for allegedly providing intelligence to the Beltrán Leyva drug trafficking organization for money. Two of the recently arrested officials were senior SIEDO officers. One of those was Fernando Rivera Hernández, SIEDO’s director of intelligence; the other was Miguel Colorado González, SIEDO’s technical coordinator.

This episode follows earlier announcements of the arrests in August of SIEDO officials on corruption charges. Medina Mora said that since July, more than 35 PGR agents have been arrested for accepting bribes from cartel members — bribes that, according to Medina Mora, can range from $150,000 to $450,000 a month depending on the quality of information provided.

Mexican newspapers including La Jornada are reporting that information has been uncovered in the current investigation indicating the Beltrán Leyva organization had developed paid sources inside Interpol and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, and that the source in the embassy has provided intelligence on Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigations. The source at the U.S. Embassy was reportedly a foreign service national investigator, or FSNI. The newspaper El Universal has reported that the U.S. Marshals Service employed the FSNI in question.

This situation provides us with a good opportunity to examine the role of foreign service national employees at U.S. missions abroad and why they are important to embassy functions, and to discuss the counterintelligence liability they present.
Foreign Service Nationals

U.S. embassies and consulates can be large and complicated entities. They can house dozens of U.S. government agencies and employ hundreds, or even thousands, of employees. Americans like their creature comforts, and keeping a large number of employees comfortable (and productive) requires a lot of administrative and logistical support, everything from motor pool vehicles to commissaries. Creature comforts aside, merely keeping all of the security equipment functioning in a big mission — things like gates, vehicle barriers, video cameras, metal detectors, magnetic locks and residential alarms — can be a daunting task.

In most places, the cost of bringing Americans to the host country to do all of the little jobs required to run an embassy or consulate is prohibitive. Because of this, the U.S. government often hires a large group of local people (called foreign service nationals, or FSNs) to perform non-sensitive administrative functions. FSN jobs can range from low-level menial positions, such as driving the embassy shuttle bus, answering the switchboard or cooking in the embassy cafeteria, to more important jobs such as helping the embassy contract with local companies for goods and services, helping to screen potential visa applicants or translating diplomatic notes into the local language. Most U.S diplomatic posts employ dozens of FSNs, and large embassies can employ hundreds of them.

The embassy will also hire FSNIs to assist various sections of the embassy such as the DEA Attaché, the regional security office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the anti-fraud unit of the consular section. FSNIs are the embassy’s subject-matter experts on crime in the host country and are responsible for maintaining liaison between the embassy and the host country’s security and law enforcement organizations. In a system where most diplomats and attachés are assigned to a post only for two or three years, the FSNs become the institutional memory of the embassy. They are the long-term keepers of the contacts with the host country government and will always be expected to introduce their new American bosses to the people they need to know in the government to get their jobs done.

Because FSNIs are expected to have good contacts and to be able to reach their contacts at any time of the day or night in case of emergency, the people hired for these FSNI positions are normally former senior law enforcement officers from the host country. The senior police officials are often close friends and former classmates of the current host country officials. This means that they can call the chief of police of the capital city at home on a Saturday or the assistant minister of government at 3 a.m. if the need arises.

To help make sure this assistance flows, the FSNI will do little things like deliver bottles of Johnny Walker Black during the Christmas holidays or bigger things like help the chief of police obtain visas so his family can vacation at Disney World. Visas, in fact, are a very good tool for fostering liaison. Not only can they allow the vice minister to do his holiday shopping in Houston, they can also be used to do things like bring vehicles or consumer goods from the United States back to the host country for sale at a profit.

As FSNs tend to work for embassies for long periods of time, while the Americans rotate through, there is a tendency for FSNs to learn the system and to find ways to profit from it. It is not uncommon for FSNs to be fired or even prosecuted in local court systems for theft and embezzlement. FSNs have done things like take kick-backs on embassy contracts for arranging to direct the contract to a specific vendor; pay inflated prices for goods bought with petty cash and then split the difference with the vendor who provided the false receipt; and steal gasoline, furniture items, computers and nearly anything else that can be found in an embassy.

While this kind of fraud is more commonplace in third-world nations where corruption is endemic, it is certainly not confined there; it can even occur in European capitals. Again, visas are a critical piece of the puzzle. Genuine U.S. visas are worth a great deal of money, and it is not uncommon to find FSNs involved in various visa fraud schemes. FSN employees have gone as far as accepting money to provide visas to members of terrorist groups like Hezbollah. In countries involved in human trafficking, visas have been traded for sexual favors in addition to money. In fairness, the amount that can be made from visa fraud means it is not surprising to find U.S. foreign service officers participating in visa fraud as well.
Liabilities

While it saves money, employing FSNs does present a very real counterintelligence risk. In essence, it is an invitation to a local intelligence service to send people inside U.S. buildings to collect information. In most countries, the U.S. Embassy cannot do a complete background investigation on an FSN candidate without the assistance of the host country government. This means the chances of catching a plant are slim unless the Americans have their own source in the local intelligence service that will out the operation.

In many countries, foreigners cannot apply for a job with the U.S. Embassy without their government’s permission. Obviously, this means local governments can approve only those applicants who agree to provide the government with information. In other countries, embassy employment is not that obviously controlled, but there still is a strong possibility of the host country sending agents to apply for jobs along with the other applicants.

It may be just coincidence, but in many countries the percentage of very attractive young women filling clerical roles at the U.S. Embassy appears many times higher than the number of attractive young women in the general population. This raises the specter of “honey traps,” or sexual entrapment schemes aimed at U.S. employees. Such schemes have involved female FSNs in the past. In one well known example, the KGB employed attractive female operatives against the Marine Security Guards in Moscow, an operation that led to an extremely grave compromise of the U.S. Embassy there.

Because of these risk factors, FSNs are not allowed access to classified information and are kept out of sections of the embassy where classified information is discussed and stored. It is assumed that any classified information FSNs can access will be compromised.

Of course, not all FSNs report to host country intelligence services, and many of them are loyal employees of the U.S. government. In many countries, however, the extensive power host country intelligence services can wield over the lives of its citizens means that even otherwise loyal FSNs can be compelled to report to the host country service against their wills. Whereas an American diplomat will go home after two or three years, FSNs must spend their lives in the host country and are not protected by diplomatic status or international conventions. This makes them very vulnerable to pressure. Additionally, the aforementioned criminal activity by FSNs is not just significant from a fiscal standpoint; Such activity also leaves those participating in it open to blackmail by the host government if the activity is discovered.

When one considers the long history of official corruption in Mexico and the enormous amounts of cash available to the Mexican drug cartels, it is no surprise that members of the SIEDO, much less an FNSI at the U.S. Embassy, should be implicated in such a case. The allegedly corrupt FNSI most likely was recruited into the scheme by a close friend or former associate who may have been working for the government and who was helping the Beltrán Leyva organization develop its intelligence network.
Limits

It appears that the FSNI working for the Beltrán Leyva organization at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City worked for the U.S. Marshals Service, not the DEA. This means that he would not have had access to much DEA operational information. An FSNI working for the U.S. Marshals Service would be working on fugitive cases and would be tasked with liaison with various Mexican law enforcement jurisdictions. Information regarding fugitive operations would be somewhat useful to the cartels, since many cartel members have been indicted in U.S. courts and the U.S. government would like to extradite them.

Even if the FSNI involved had been working for the DEA, however, there are limits to how much information he would have been able to provide. First of all, DEA special agents are well aware of the degree of corruption in Mexico, and they are therefore concerned that information passed on to the Mexican government can be passed to the cartels. The special agents also would assume that their FSN employees may be reporting to the Mexican government, and would therefore take care to not tell the FSN anything they wouldn’t want the Mexican government — or the cartels — to know.

The type of FSNI employee in question would be tasked with conducting administrative duties such as helping the DEA attaché with liaison and passing name checks and other queries to various jurisdictions in Mexico. The FSN would not be privy to classified DEA cable traffic, and would not sit in on sensitive operational meetings.

In the intelligence world, however, there are unclassified things that can be valuable intelligence. These include the names and home addresses of all the DEA employees in the country, for example, or the types of cars the special agents drive and the confidential license plates they have for them.

Other examples could be the FSNI being sent to the airport to pick up a group of TDY DEA agents and bringing them to the embassy. Were the agents out-of-shape headquarters-types wearing suits and doing an inspection, or fit field agents from a special operations group coming to town to help take down a high-value target? Even knowing that the DEA attaché has suddenly changed his schedule and is now working more overtime can indicate that something is up. Information that the attaché has asked the FSNI about the police chief in a specific jurisdiction, for example, could also be valuable to a drug trafficking organization expecting a shipment to arrive at that jurisdiction.

In the end, it is unlikely that this current case resulted in grave damage to DEA operations in Mexico. Indeed, the FSNI probably did far less damage to counternarcotics operations than the 35 PGR employees who have been arrested since July. But the vulnerabilities of FSN employees are great, and there are likely other FSNs on the payroll of the various Mexican cartels.

As long as the U.S. government employs FSNs it will face the security liability that comes with them. In general, however, this liability is offset by the utility they provide and the systems put in place to limit the counterintelligence damage they can cause.

Tell Stratfor What You Think
Title: WSJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2008, 03:12:48 AM
WASHINGTON -- Overhauling the extraordinary legal framework established under President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks may prove among the most difficult -- and urgent -- tasks on President-elect Barack Obama's agenda.

While the nation's economic crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be higher priorities for most Americans, Mr. Obama will have to decide quickly whether to permit the military-commission trials under way at Guantanamo Bay to proceed. He also must weigh the fates of hundreds of detainees held there in legal limbo.

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Associated Press
President-elect Barack Obama will need to decide quickly whether to allow military-commission trials under way in Guantanamo Bay to proceed.
As a senator and candidate, Mr. Obama voted and campaigned against some of the Bush administration's most aggressive surveillance, detention and interrogation policies, including the secret prison network run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Obama administration will "take an immediate interest in what's actually going on there," said Prof. Laurence Tribe, who once taught Mr. Obama at Harvard Law School and now is among his legal advisers. "I'm certain that a rather bright light would be turned to Guantanamo right away."

Still, closing the offshore prison -- as Mr. Obama pledged to do -- will require a series of decisions on vexing issues such as the prisoners who have been approved for release, but whom no other country is willing to accept.

More than a dozen Uighurs, Chinese Muslims captured near the Afghan border, have been cleared of terrorism charges but remain locked up at Guantanamo because they face persecution in China and no country will accept them. A federal judge's order to free them in the U.S. is on hold while the Bush administration appeals.

Even Democrats critical of the Bush policy see no easy resolution. "Can you imagine the political fallout if one of the first things Obama does is bring the Uighurs to the U.S.?" says a Democratic congressional aide familiar with detainee affairs.

Polls, Maps, Graphics
Electoral Calculator & MapComplete Coverage: Campaign 2008Washington Wire
Wash Wire: Reports on the election winners and losersSo-called high-value detainees, such as accused Sept. 11, 2001, attack organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, present another set of problems. Mr. Mohammed and other such prisoners were subjected to waterboarding, which simulates drowning, and they were secretly held under grueling conditions. Statements taken through coercion are difficult if not impossible to introduce in court. Already, several terrorism prosecutions have been scuttled because of abusive treatment by interrogators.

"There are people there like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who can't be let out, no matter how badly the previous administration [bungled] the process," the Democratic aide says. "You have to get those folks tried."

The Bush administration has begun military-commission proceedings against Mr. Mohammed and four co-defendants. Prosecutors have said higher-ups pushed to get the long-delayed trials under way before Mr. Bush leaves office, hoping to lock the Obama administration into seeing them through.

Mr. Obama has also supported increased oversight of the secret CIA detention program and efforts to restrict the CIA to interrogation techniques used by the military, which would prohibit waterboarding.

When it comes to domestic security, Mr. Obama has said he would end the Bush administration's preference for conducting surveillance outside of court oversight. He said he would ask his attorney general to conduct a comprehensive review of domestic surveillance and would appoint a senior adviser for domestic intelligence.

The national-security transition team, which is still taking shape, will learn gradually about the full extent of the Bush administration's surveillance apparatus. Mr. Obama's team will receive more detailed intelligence briefings in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the transition.

"There will be a review of the state of the intelligence community, so that they are comfortable when they assume power that these are things that they feel are appropriate to continue and that will be able to address what our pressing national security issues will be," said John Brennan, a former chief of the National Counterterrorism Center and adviser to the Obama campaign on intelligence issues, in an interview shortly before Election Day.

The transition team will evaluate intelligence activities based on whether there are adequate protections for civil liberties, as well as adherence to laws and executive orders, Mr. Brennan said.

Aides are likely to draw up a list of some actions the new president can take quickly after he assumes office, but full solutions to many of the large legal issues will take much longer. Human-rights advocates and civil-liberties groups -- which, after being shut out of Bush administration policy debates, won major victories on detainee issues in the courts -- expect Mr. Obama to take their views seriously.

The American Civil Liberties Union has already assembled a proposal urging Mr. Obama to issue three executive orders on his first day on the job. The orders would close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, "cease and prohibit the use of torture and abuse" in CIA interrogations, and end the practice of sending detainees to countries that conduct harsher interrogations than are allowable under U.S. law.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 06, 2008, 06:49:05 AM
This is the bright spot in this whole mess. Let's just see what Barry-O does as commander in chief now that the weight of protecting this country is on his shoulders. Barry can release every detainee and shut down every federal agency from using the PATRIOT act. I know he voted to reauthorize it. So, where are all the leftist screamers now?
Title: CIA chief, convert to Islam, allegedly raped drugged women
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 28, 2009, 12:16:46 PM
Exclusive: CIA Station Chief in Algeria Accused of Rapes

"Ugly American"? Spy Boss Allegedly Drugged Muslim Women, Made Secret Sex Videos

By BRIAN ROSS, KATE McCARTHY, and ANGELA M. HILL
January 28, 2009—


The CIA's station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

Officials say the 41-year old CIA officer, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.



The discovery of more than a dozen videotapes showing the CIA officer engaged in sex acts with other women has led the Justice Department to broaden its investigation to include at least one other Arab country, Egypt, where the CIA officer had been posted earlier in his career, according to law enforcement officials.

The U.S. State Department referred questions to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment.

"It has the potential to be quite explosive if it's not handled well by the United States government," said Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in women's issues in the Middle East.

"This isn't the type of thing that's going to be easily pushed under the carpet," she said.

The CIA refused to acknowledge the investigation or provide the name of the Algiers station chief, but the CIA Director of Public Affairs, Mark Mansfield, said, "I can assure you that the Agency would take seriously, and follow up on, any allegations of impropriety."

It can be a crime for government officials to reveal the identity of a current covert intelligence officer, and CIA officials would not comment the status of the person under investigation.

One of the alleged victims reportedly said she met the CIA officer at a bar in the U.S. embassy and then was taken to his official station chief residence where she said the sexual assault took place.

The second alleged victim reportedly told U.S. prosecutors that, in a separate incident, she also was drugged at the American's official residence before being sexually assaulted.

Both women have reportedly given sworn statements to federal prosecutors sent from Washington to prepare a possible criminal case against the CIA officer.

Following the initial complaints, U.S. officials say they obtained a warrant from a federal judge in Washington, D.C. in October to search the station chief's CIA-provided residence in Algiers and turned up the videos that appear to have been secretly recorded and show, they say, the CIA officer engaged in sexual acts.

Officials say one of the alleged victims is seen on tape, in a "semi-conscious state."

The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when CIA officer was in Cairo, officials said.

Pills found in the CIA residence were sent to the FBI crime laboratory for testing, according to officials involved in the case.

"Drugs commonly referred to as date rape drugs are difficult to detect because the body rapidly metabolizes them," said former FBI agent Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant. "Many times women are not aware they were even assaulted until the next day," he said.

A third woman, a friend of one of the alleged victims, reportedly provided a cell phone video that showed her friend having a drink and dancing inside the CIA station chief's residence in Algiers, which officials told ABC News provided corroboration the CIA officer had indeed brought the woman to his residence.

The officer in charge of the CIA station in Algiers plays an important role in working with the Algerian intelligence services to combat an active al Qaeda wing responsible for a wave of bombings in Algeria.

In the most serious incident, 48 people were killed in a bombing in August, 2008 in Algiers, blamed on the al Qaeda group.

The Algerian ambassador to the United Nations, Mourad Benmehid, said his government had not been notified by the U.S. of the rape allegations or the criminal investigation.

Repeated messages left for the CIA officer with his parents and his sister were not returned.

No charges have been filed but officials said a grand jury was likely to consider an indictment on sexual assault charges as early as next month.

"This will be seen as the typical ugly American," said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. "My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas," Baer said.

"From a national security standpoint," said Baer, the alleged rapes would be "not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that's something the CIA should have picked up on," said Baer. "This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency," he said.

"Rape is ugly in any context," said Coleman who praised the bravery of the alleged Algerian victims in going to authorities. "Rape is viewed as very shameful to women, and I think this is an opportunity for the US to show how seriously it takes the issue of rape," she said.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=6750266&page=1
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on January 28, 2009, 12:34:00 PM
Fraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack! What a great day for the global jihad.  :oops:
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 28, 2009, 12:52:09 PM
Oh my gawd. This pinhead should be taken out back and shot.
Title: AQ in the Arabian Peninsula
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 28, 2009, 01:13:16 PM
In the meantime would it make sense to remind folks he was Muslim?

Anyway, not to push this discussion off the radar screen, but adding this just in from Stratfor:

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula: Desperation or New Life?
January 28, 2009




By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

Related Links
The Devolution of Al Qaeda
The media wing of one of al Qaeda’s Yemeni franchises, al Qaeda in Yemen, released a statement on online jihadist forums Jan. 20 from the group’s leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi, announcing the formation of a single al Qaeda group for the Arabian Peninsula under his command. According to al-Wuhayshi, the new group, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, would consist of his former group (al Qaeda in Yemen) as well as members of the now-defunct Saudi al Qaeda franchise.

The press release noted that the Saudi militants have pledged allegiance to al-Wuhayshi, an indication that the reorganization was not a merger of equals. This is understandable, given that the jihadists in Yemen have been active recently while their Saudi counterparts have not conducted a meaningful attack in years. The announcement also related that a Saudi national (and former Guantanamo detainee) identified as Abu-Sayyaf al-Shihri has been appointed as al-Wuhayshi’s deputy. In some ways, this is similar to the way Ayman al-Zawahiri and his faction of Egyptian Islamic Jihad swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and were integrated in to al Qaeda prime.

While not specifically mentioned, the announcement of a single al Qaeda entity for the entire Arabian Peninsula and the unanimous support by jihadist militants on the Arabian Peninsula for al-Wuhayshi suggests the new organization will incorporate elements of the other al Qaeda franchise in Yemen, the Yemen Soldiers Brigade.

The announcement also provided links to downloadable versions of the latest issue of the group’s online magazine, Sada al-Malahim, (Arabic for “The Echo of Battle”). The Web page links provided to download the magazine also featured trailers advertising the pending release of a new video from the group, now referred to by its new name, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The translated name of this new organization sounds very similar to the old Saudi al Qaeda franchise, the al Qaeda Organization in the Arabian Peninsula (in Arabic, “Tandheem al Qaeda fi Jazeerat al-Arabiyah”). But the new group’s new Arabic name, Tanzim Qa’idat al-Jihad fi Jazirat al-Arab, is slightly different. The addition of “al-Jihad” seems to have been influenced by the Iraqi al Qaeda franchise, Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn. The flag of the Islamic State of Iraq also appears in the Jan. 24 video, further illustrating the deep ties between the newly announced organization and al Qaeda in Iraq. Indeed, a number of Yemeni militants traveled to Iraq to fight, and these returning al Qaeda veterans have played a large part in the increased sophistication of militant attacks in Yemen over the past year.

Four days after the Jan. 20 announcement, links for a 19-minute video from the new group titled “We Start from Here and We Will Meet at al-Aqsa” began to appear in jihadist corners of cyberspace. Al-Aqsa refers to the al-Aqsa Mosque on what Jews know as Temple Mount and Muslims refer to as Al Haram Al Sharif. The video threatens Muslim leaders in the region (whom it refers to as criminal tyrants), including Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Saudi royal family, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. It also threatens so-called “crusader forces” supporting the regional Muslim leaders, and promises to carry the jihad from the Arabian Peninsula to Israel so as to liberate Muslim holy sites and brethren in Gaza.

An interview with al-Wuhayshi aired Jan. 27 on Al Jazeera echoed these sentiments. During the interview, al-Wuhayshi noted that the “crusades” against “Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia” have been launched from bases in the Arabian Peninsula, and that because of this, “all crusader interests” in the peninsula “should be struck.”

A Different Take on Events
Most of the analysis in Western media regarding the preceding developments has focused on how two former detainees at the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear in the Jan. 24 video — one of whom was al-Shihri — and that both were graduates of Saudi Arabia’s ideological rehabilitation program, a government deprogramming course for jihadists. In addition to al-Shihri who, according to the video was Guantanamo detainee 372, the video also contains a statement from Abu-al-Harith Muhammad al-Awfi. Al-Awfi, who was identified as a field commander in the video, was allegedly former Guantanamo detainee 333. Prisoner lists from Guantanamo obtained by Stratfor appear to confirm that al-Shihri was in fact Guantanamo detainee No. 372. We did not find al-Awfi’s name on the list, however, another name appears as detainee No. 333. Given the proclivity of jihadists to use fraudulent identities, it is entirely possible that al-Awfi is an alias, or that he was held at Guantanamo under an assumed name. At any rate, we doubt al-Awfi would fabricate this claim and then broadcast it in such a public manner.

The media focus on the Guantanamo aspect is understandable in the wake of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Jan. 22 executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and all the complexities surrounding that decision. Clearly, some men released from Guantanamo, and even those graduated from the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program, can and have returned to the jihadist fold. Ideology is hard to extinguish, especially an ideology that teaches adherents that there is a war against Islam and that the “true believers” will be persecuted for their beliefs. Al Qaeda has even taken this one step further and has worked to prepare its members not only to face death, but also to endure imprisonment and harsh interrogation. A substantial number of al Qaeda cadres, such as al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya al-Libi, have endured both, and have been instrumental in helping members withstand captivity and interrogation.

This physical and ideological preparation means that efforts to induce captured militants to abandon their ideology can wind up reinforcing that ideology when those efforts appear to prove important tenets of the ideology, such as that adherents will be persecuted and that the Muslim rulers are aligned with the West. It is also important to realize that radical Islamist extremists, ultraconservatives and traditionalists tend to have a far better grasp of Islamic religious texts than their moderate, liberal and modernist counterparts. Hence, they have an edge over them on the ideological battlefield. Those opposing radicals and extremists have a long way to go before they can produce a coherent legitimate, authoritative and authentic alternative Islamic discourse.

In any event, in practical terms there is no system of “re-education” that is 100 percent effective in eradicating an ideology in humans except execution. There will always be people who will figure out how to game the system and regurgitate whatever is necessary to placate their jailers so as to win release. Because of this, it is not surprising to see people like al-Shihri and al-Awfi released only to re-emerge in their former molds.

Another remarkable feature of the Jan. 27 video is that it showcased four different leaders of the regional group, something rarely seen. In addition to al-Wuhayshi, al-Shihri and al-Awfi, the video also included a statement from Qasim al-Rami, who is suspected of having been involved with the operational planning of the suicide attack on a group of Spanish tourists in Marib, Yemen, in July 2007.

In our estimation, however, perhaps the most remarkable feature about these recent statements from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is not the appearance of these two former Guantanamo detainees in the video, or the appearance of four distinct leaders of the group in a single video, but rather what the statements tell us about the state of the al Qaeda franchises in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Signposts
That the remnants of the Saudi al Qaeda franchise have been forced to flee their country and join up with the Yemeni group demonstrates that the Saudi government’s campaign to eradicate the jihadist organization has been very successful. The Saudi franchise was very active in 2003 and 2004, but has not attempted a significant attack since the February 2006 attack against the oil facility in Abqaiq. In spite of the large number of Saudi fighters who have traveled to militant training camps, and to fight in places such as Iraq, the Saudi franchise has had significant problems organizing operational cells inside the kingdom. Additionally, since the death of Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, the Saudi franchise has struggled to find a charismatic and savvy leader. (The Saudis have killed several leaders who succeeded al-Muqrin.) In a militant organization conducting an insurgency or terrorist operations, leadership is critical not only to the operational success of the group but also to its ability to recruit new members, raise funding and acquire resources such as weapons.

Like the Saudi node, the fortunes of other al Qaeda regional franchises have risen or fallen based upon ability of the franchise’s leadership. For example, in August 2006 al Qaeda announced with great fanfare that the Egyptian militant group Gamaah al-Islamiyah (GAI) had joined forces with al Qaeda. Likewise, in November 2007 al Qaeda announced that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) had formally joined the al Qaeda network. But neither of these groups really ever got off the ground. While a large portion of the responsibility for the groups’ lack of success may be due to the oppressive natures of the Egyptian and Libyan governments and the aggressive efforts those governments undertook to control the new al Qaeda franchises, we believe the lack of success also stems from poor leadership. (There are certainly other significant factors contributing to the failure of al Qaeda nodes in various places, such as the alienation of the local population.)

Conversely, we believe that an important reason for the resurgence of the al Qaeda franchise in Yemen has been the leadership of al-Wuhayshi. As we have noted in the past, Yemen is a much easier environment for militants to operate in than either Egypt or Libya. There are many Salafists employed in the Yemeni security and intelligence apparatus who at the very least are sympathetic to the jihadist cause. These men are holdovers from the Yemeni civil war, when Saleh formed an alliance with Salafists and recruited jihadists to fight Marxist forces in South Yemen. This alliance continues today, with Saleh deriving significant political support from radical Islamists. Many of the state’s key institutions (including the military) employ Salafists, making any major crackdown on militant Islamists in the country politically difficult. This sentiment among the security forces also helps explain the many jihadists who have escaped from Yemeni prisons — such as al-Wuhayshi.

Yemen has also long been at the crossroads of a number of jihadist theaters, including Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Levant, Egypt and Somalia. Yemen also is a country with a thriving arms market, a desert warrior tradition and a tribal culture that often bridles against government authority and that makes it difficult for the government to assert control over large swaths of the country. Yemeni tribesmen also tend to be religiously conservative and susceptible to the influence of jihadist theology.

In spite of this favorable environment, the Yemeni al Qaeda franchise has largely floundered since 9/11. Much of this is due to U.S. and Yemeni efforts to decapitate the group, such as the strike by a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle on then-leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Ali al-Harithi, in late 2002 and the subsequent arrest of his replacement, Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, in late 2003. The combination of these operations in such a short period helped cripple al Qaeda in Yemen’s operational capability.

As Stratfor noted in spring 2008, however, al Qaeda militants in Yemen have become more active and more effective under the leadership of al-Wuhayshi, an ethnic Yemeni who spent time in Afghanistan as a lieutenant under bin Laden. After his time with bin Laden, Iranian authorities arrested al-Wuhayshi, later returning him to Yemen in 2003 via an Iranian-Yemeni extradition deal. He subsequently escaped from a high-security prison outside the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, in February 2006 along with Jamal al-Badawi (the leader of the cell that carried out the suicide bombing of the USS Cole).

Al-Wuhayshi’s established ties with al Qaeda prime and bin Laden in particular not only provide him legitimacy in the eyes of other jihadists, in more practical terms, they may have provided him the opportunity to learn the tradecraft necessary to successfully lead a militant group and conduct operations. His close ties to influential veterans of al Qaeda in Yemen like al-Badawi also may have helped him infuse new energy into the struggle in Yemen in 2008.

While the group had been on a rising trajectory in 2008, things had been eerily quiet in Yemen since the Sept. 17, 2008, attack against the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa and the resulting campaign against the group. The recent flurry of statements has broken the quiet, followed by a Warden Message on Jan. 26 warning of a possible threat against the compound of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and a firefight at a security checkpoint near the embassy hours later.

At this point, it appears the shooting incident may not be related to the threat warning and may instead have been the result of jumpy nerves. Reports suggest the police may have fired at a speeding car before the occupants, who were armed tribesmen, fired back. Although there have been efforts to crack down on the carrying of weapons in Sanaa, virtually every Yemeni male owns an AK-variant assault rifle of some sort; like the ceremonial jambiya dagger, such a rifle is considered a must-have accessory in most parts of the country. Not surprisingly, incidents involving gunfire are not uncommon in Yemen.

Either way, we will continue to keep a close eye on Yemen and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As we have seen in the past, press statements are not necessarily indicative of future jihadist performance. It will be important to watch developments in Yemen for signs that will help determine whether this recent merger and announcement is a sign of desperation by a declining group, or whether the addition of fresh blood from Saudi Arabia will help breathe new life into al-Wuhayshi’s operations and provide his group the means to make good on its threats.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 28, 2009, 04:22:56 PM
More on the CIA rape charge:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6750266&page=1

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,484487,00.html

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/01/28/cia.rape.allegations/



Exclusive: CIA Station Chief in Algeria Accused of Rapes
"Ugly American"? Spy Boss Allegedly Drugged Muslim Women, Made Secret Sex Videos

By BRIAN ROSS, KATE McCARTHY, and ANGELA M. HILL
January 28, 2009—

The CIA's station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

The suspect in the case is identified as Andrew Warren in an affidavit for a search warrant filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. by an investigator for the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service.

Click here to read the affidavit.

Watch "World News with Charles Gibson" TONIGHT at 6:30 p.m. ET for the full report.

Officials say the 41-year old Warren, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.

According to the affidavit, the two women "reported the allegations in this affidavit independently of each other."

The affidavit says the first victim says she was raped by Warren in Sept. 2007 after being invited to a party at Warren's residence by U.S. embassy employees.

She told a State Department investigator that after Warren prepared a mixed drink of cola and whiskey, she felt a "violent onset of nausea" and Warren said she should spend the night at his home.

When she woke up the next morning, according to the affidavit, "she was lying on a bed, completely nude, with no memory of how she had been undressed." She said she realized "she recently had engaged in sexual intercourse, though she had no memory of having intercourse."

According to the affidavit, a second alleged victim told a similar story, saying Warren met her at the U.S. embassy and invited her for a "tour of his home" where she said he prepared an apple martini for her "out of her sight."

The second victim said she suddenly felt faint and went to the bathroom where "V2 [victim 2] could see and hear, but she could not move," the affidavit says.

She told investigators Warren "was attempting to remove V2's her pants." The affidavit states, "Warren continued to undress V2, and told her she would feel better after a bath."

Alleged Rape Victims Tell Their Stories to Investigators

The alleged victim said she remembers being in Warren's bed and asking him to stop, but that "Warren made a statement to the effect of 'nobody stays in my expensive sheets with clothes on.'" She told investigators "as she slipped in and out of consciousness she had conscious images of Warren penetrating her vagina repeatedly with his penis."

The second victim told investigators she sent Warren a text message accusing him of abusing her and he replied, "I am sorry," the affidavit says.

According to the affidavit, when Warren was interviewed by Diplomatic Security investigators, he claimed he had "engaged in consensual sexual intercourse" and admitted there were photographs of the two women on his personal laptop. He would not consent to a search or seizure of the computer, leading investigators to seek the warrant.

According to the affidavit, a search of Warren's residence in Algiers turned up Valium and Xanax and a handbook on the investigation of sexual assaults.

The affidavit says toxicologists at the FBI laboratory say Xanax and Valium are among the drugs "commonly used to facilitate sexual assault."

"Drugs commonly referred to as date rape drugs are difficult to detect because the body rapidly metabolizes them," said former FBI agent Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant. "Many times women are not aware they were even assaulted until the next day," he said.

The CIA refused to acknowledge the investigation or provide the name of the Algiers station chief, but the CIA Director of Public Affairs, Mark Mansfield, said, "I can assure you that the Agency would take seriously, and follow up on, any allegations of impropriety."

State Departmentt Acting Spokesman Robert Wood issued a statement saying, "The U.S. takes very seriously any accusations of misconduct involving any U.S. personnel abroad. The individual is question has returned to Washington and the U.S. Government is looking into the matter."

U.S. officials were bracing for public reaction in the Muslim world, following the report of the allegation.

"It has the potential to be quite explosive if it's not handled well by the United States government," said Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in women's issues in the Middle East.

"This isn't the type of thing that's going to be easily pushed under the carpet," she said.

U.S. Officials Say They Found Video Tapes

Both women have reportedly since given sworn statements to federal prosecutors sent from Washington to prepare a possible criminal case against the CIA officer.

Following the initial complaints, U.S. officials say they did obtain a warrant from a federal judge in Washington, D.C. in October to search the station chief's CIA-provided residence in Algiers and turned up the videos that appear to have been secretly recorded and show, they say, Warren engaged in sexual acts.

Officials say one of the alleged victims is seen on tape, in a "semi-conscious state."

The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when Warren was in Cairo, officials said.

As the station chief in Algiers, Warren played an important role in working with the Algerian intelligence services to combat an active al Qaeda wing responsible for a wave of bombings in Algeria.

In the most serious incident, 48 people were killed in a bombing in Aug. 2008 in Algiers, blamed on the al Qaeda group.

The Algerian ambassador to the United Nations, Mourad Benmehid, said his government had not been notified by the U.S. of the rape allegations or the criminal investigation.

Repeated messages left for the Warren with his parents and his sister were not returned.

No charges have been filed, but officials said a grand jury was likely to consider an indictment on sexual assault charges as early as next month.

"This will be seen as the typical ugly American," said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. "My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas," Baer said.

"From a national security standpoint," said Baer, the alleged rapes would be "not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that's something the CIA should have picked up on," said Baer. "This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency," he said.

"Rape is ugly in any context," said Coleman, who praised the bravery of the alleged Algerian victims in going to authorities. "Rape is viewed as very shameful to women, and I think this is an opportunity for the U.S. to show how seriously it takes the issue of rape," she said.

Click Here for the Investigative Homepage.

Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2009, 06:33:57 AM
U.S. Says Ex-Agent Passed Secrets to Russia From Jail
By EVAN PEREZ

WASHINGTON -- A former Central Intelligence Agency official imprisoned for spying for Russia continued to pass information and collect money from his old handlers while behind bars, according to U.S. prosecutors.

Harold James Nicholson, 58 years old, used his 24-year-old son, Nathaniel, to restart contacts with Russian spies in Mexico, Peru and Cyprus, according to an indictment against father and son filed in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore. Both father and son were arraigned Thursday on charges of money laundering and acting as agents of a foreign government.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation agent's affidavit filed in court provides a spy-novel narrative from 2006 to 2008. U.S. officials claim Harold Nicholson tutored his son in spy tradecraft and Nathaniel Nicholson tried to hide his activities as he reached out to Russian contacts on trips abroad, buying his plane tickets with cash.

Prosecutors allege the elder Mr. Nicholson, who was serving a 23-year sentence, was seeking to recover money, and perhaps a "pension," that his Russian contacts owed him for past work, in order to help his financially struggling family. Even behind bars, Mr. Nicholson still held value to the Russians, who wanted to figure out how he was caught and how much U.S. investigators knew of Russian spying in the U.S., prosecutors say.

Harold Nicholson was a former CIA station chief in Malaysia and later worked as an instructor for trainees at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters. He was convicted of espionage conspiracy under a plea agreement in 1997. Prosecutors say he gave Russian spies the identity of the CIA's Moscow station chief as well as information on new CIA trainees. Federal agents stopped him as he attempted to fly to Switzerland to hand over classified documents to agents for the SVR, the successor agency to the Soviet Union's KGB. He is the most senior CIA official ever convicted of spying for a foreign government.

Matthew G. Olsen, acting assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement that "these charges underscore the continuing threat posed by foreign intelligence services."

An attorney for the father and son couldn't be reached for a comment.

FBI agents monitored the father and son, using email and telephone wiretaps and tracking devices on the son's car to keep tabs on the 24-year-old's alleged spy activities, according to documents filed by prosecutors.

Along the way, the father offered proud words of encouragement to his son. A birthday card the father sent the son last year, according to prosecutors, read: "You have been brave enough to step into this new unseen world that is sometimes dangerous but always fascinating. God leads us on our greatest adventures. Keep looking through your new eyes. I understand you and me."

Federal agents stopped Nathaniel Nicholson as he returned from meeting contacts in Lima, Peru, in December 2007. Without telling him, the agents photocopied a notebook he carried that agents say contained coded notes about his alleged meetings with Russian spies. The notebook also contained instructions for a meeting he later had at a TGI Friday's restaurant in Nicosia, Cyprus, with a Russian contact, according to the FBI affidavit.

FBI agents monitoring an email account attributed to Nathaniel Nicholson said that in October 2008, he sent a coded email as instructed by his Russian contact, confirming an upcoming meeting in Cyprus.

The email, according to the FBI affidavit, read: "Hola Nancy! It is great to receive your message! I love you too. I hope to see you soon! The best regards from my brother Eugene! - Love Dick"

Prosecutors claim the son collected nearly $36,000 in trips overseas intended to help family members pay off debts. The father expressed hopes of relocating to Russia when he left prison, prosecutors say.

In one letter, the father sent physical data such as his height and weight to his son, and prosecutors think the information was to be used by the Russians to provide him travel documents upon his release.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123326691076330523.html
Title: WSJ: BO's pick for NIE
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 25, 2009, 12:45:54 PM
It keeps getting worse and worse , , ,

GABRIEL SCHOENFELD
During the presidential campaign, a constant refrain of Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates was that the Bush administration had severely politicized intelligence, resulting in such disasters as the war in Iraq.

 
AP
Chinese President Hu Jintao, left, greets Chas Freeman Jr., right, at a reception prior to a dinner in his honor in Washington, April 2006.
The irony of course is that, if anything, President Bush badly failed at depoliticizing a CIA that was often hostile to his agenda. Witness the repeated leaks of classified information that undercut his policies. It now appears Mr. Obama has appointed a highly controversial figure to head the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for producing National Intelligence Estimates. The news Web site Politico.com yesterday reported that it could confirm rumors that a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles "Chas" Freeman Jr., has been appointed chairman. (My calls to the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence produced neither confirmation nor denial.)

Without question, Mr. Freeman has a distinguished résumé, having served in a long list of State and Defense Department slots. But also without question, he has distinctive political views and affiliations, some of which are more than eyebrow-raising.

In 1997, Mr. Freeman succeeded George McGovern to become the president of the Middle East Policy Council. The MEPC purports to be a nonpartisan, public-affairs group that "strives to ensure that a full range of U.S. interests and views are considered by policy makers" dealing with the Middle East. In fact, its original name until 1991 was the American-Arab Affairs Council, and it is an influential Washington mouthpiece for Saudi Arabia.

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As Mr. Freeman acknowledged in a 2006 interview with an outfit called the Saudi-US Relations Information Service, MEPC owes its endowment to the "generosity" of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia. Asked in the same interview about his organization's current mission, Mr. Freeman responded, in a revealing non sequitur, that he was "delighted that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has, after a long delay, begun to make serious public relations efforts."

Among MEPC's recent activities in the public relations realm, it has published what it calls an "unabridged" version of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. This controversial 2006 essay argued that American Jews have a "stranglehold" on the U.S. Congress, which they employ to tilt the U.S. toward Israel at the expense of broader American interests. Mr. Freeman has both endorsed the paper's thesis and boasted of MEPC's intrepid stance: "No one else in the United States has dared to publish this article, given the political penalties that the Lobby imposes on those who criticize it."

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Freeman has views about Middle East policy that differ rather sharply from those held by supporters of the state of Israel. More surprisingly, they also differ rather sharply from the views -- or at least the views stated during the campaign -- of the president who has invited him to serve.

While President Obama speaks of helping the people of Israel "search for credible partners with whom they can make peace," Mr. Freeman believes, as he said in a 2007 address to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, that "Israel no longer even pretends to seek peace with the Palestinians; it strives instead to pacify them." The primary reason America confronts a terrorism problem today, he continued, is "the brutal oppression of the Palestinians by an Israeli occupation that is about to mark its fortieth anniversary and shows no sign of ending."

Although initial reaction to Mr. Freeman's selection has focused on his views of the Middle East, that region is by no means Mr. Freeman's only area of interest. He has pronounced on a wide variety of other subjects, including China, where he has attempted to explain away the scale and scope of the starkly intensive buildup of the People's Liberation Army. The specter of a Chinese threat, he remarked during a China forum at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in October 2006, is nothing more than "a great fund-raiser for the hyper-expensive advanced weaponry our military-industrial complex prefers to make and our armed forces love to employ."

On the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Mr. Freeman unabashedly sides with the Chinese government, a remarkable position for an appointee of an administration that has pledged to advance the cause of human rights. Mr. Freeman has been a participant in ChinaSec, a confidential Internet discussion group of China specialists. A copy of one of his postings was provided to me by a former member. "The truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities," he wrote there in 2006, "was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud." Moreover, "the Politburo's response to the mob scene at 'Tiananmen' stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action." Indeed, continued Mr. Freeman, "I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be."

We have already seen a string of poorly vetted appointments from the Obama White House, like those of Tom Daschle and Bill Richardson, that after public scrutiny were tossed under the bus. The chairmanship of the National Intelligence Council differs from those cases, for it does not require Senate confirmation. If someone with such extreme views has been appointed to such a sensitive position, is this a reflection of Mr. Obama's true predilections, or is it proof positive that the Obama White House has never gotten around to vetting its own vetters?

Either way, if those complaining loudest about politicized intelligence have indeed placed a China-coddling Israel basher in charge of drafting the most important analyses prepared by the U.S. government, it is quite a spectacle. The problem is not that Mr. Freeman will shade National Intelligence Estimates to suit the administration's political views. The far more serious danger is that he will steer them to reflect his own outlandish perspectives and prejudices.

Mr. Schoenfeld, a resident scholar at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., is writing a book about secrecy and national security.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on February 26, 2009, 01:50:01 PM
****More surprisingly, they also differ rather sharply from the views -- or at least the views stated during the campaign -- of the president who has invited him to serve.****

More evidence of the real intent and devious nature of BO.
Remember Alinsky - pretend you are one of them and then you can change them - or in this case screw them.
This is BO's true intent.

This is in perfect sync with the 900 million BO is giving to Hamas/Gaza for humanitarian aid.

I don't believe this will end well.

When I meant that republicans need to alter their thinking I menat to do more to reach out to Blakcs and Latinos who are becoming an increasing proportion of the population.

I didn't mean we should roll over and become liberals and fools.  Or that Rep should simply agree with the Dems. 
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 26, 2009, 05:43:36 PM
Two nations that may not survive Barry-O's presidency:

1. Israel

2. Taiwan
Title: IBD
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 03, 2009, 09:40:05 AM
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN on Sunday that Iran has enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

"We think they do, quite frankly," Mullen said.

Tehran retorted that the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency monitors Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz. But the IAEA was shocked last month to find 209 kilograms more low-enriched uranium at Natanz than expected, enough for up to 25 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium — or one Hiroshima-sized device.

Speaking of incompetence, the U.S. intelligence community in October 2007 asserted "with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

That National Intelligence Estimate said: "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005."

That hasn't seemed to have quelled Admiral Mullen's worries.

Consider, after all, the long list of examples proving the cloudiness of our spy agencies' crystal ball. Two days before Saddam Hussein's march into Kuwait in 1990, for instance, the CIA was telling President George H.W. Bush that an invasion was unlikely.

Less than a week before Moscow's Christmas 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the agency's top Soviet analysts claimed, "The pace of Soviet deployments does not suggest . . . urgent contingency."

And back in 1950, two days before 300,000 Red Chinese troops assaulted American forces in Korea, the CIA repeated to President Eisenhower that the Chinese would not invade.

How many times must Inspector Clouseau bumble before we stop taking him seriously?

Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman's new history of nuclear proliferation, "The Nuclear Express," recounts Israel's successful — and fairly speedy — quest for the bomb. By the spring of 1963, President John F. Kennedy knew Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was lying about Israel's Dimona "civilian" reactor.

JFK "sent harsh messages to Ben-Gurion, but to no avail; delay and obfuscation were Ben-Gurion's stock and trade."

By the end of 1963 the Dimona plant was producing plutonium. By 1966, Israel apparently conducted "a hydronuclear or near-zero yield test" of a prototype bomb beneath the Negev desert.

Four decades later, delay and obfuscation are now Tehran's stock and trade. But unlike Tel Aviv, their nuclear intentions are not defensive but jihadist. And they are a clear and present danger to us.
Title: WSJ: Espionage Act
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2009, 10:04:26 PM
There was good news for the First Amendment late last month, when a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee can use evidence from classified documents in their defense at trial on espionage charges. The ruling provides a golden opportunity for President Obama's Justice Department to drop this misbegotten case.

The prosecution should never have been brought in the first place, for reasons of law and damage to free speech. In 2005, American Israel Public Affairs Committee staffers Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman were accused of divulging information they learned from Administration officials to journalists as well as officials in the Israeli government.

The Espionage Act of 1917 was intended to apply to government leakers, but in this case Justice (and original Bush-era prosecutor Paul McNulty) has been attempting to apply it to two men who merely heard such information and passed it on. This is of course precisely what journalists often do, albeit to larger audiences than Messrs. Rosen and Weissman reached. A success in this case would make any journalist who reports classified information, no matter how benign, a potential target of government prosecution.

The U.S. doesn't have a United Kingdom-style Official Secrets Act, and Justice shouldn't be allowed to impose one via the backdoor by reinterpreting an old and rarely invoked statute. The good news is that the ruling will make it difficult to marshal enough evidence to convict Messrs. Rosen and Weissman. The case is one of the Bush Justice Department's misfires, and Attorney General Eric Holder can do the country a favor by dropping it.
Title: Freeman at NIC is profoundly scary. WHY THE SILENCE?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2009, 11:30:50 PM
WSJ

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal published a letter from 17 U.S. ambassadors defending the appointment of Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council. The same day, the leaders of the 1989 protests that led to the massacre at Beijing's Tiananmen Square wrote Barack Obama "to convey our intense dismay at your selection" of Mr. Freeman.

If moral weight could be measured on a zero to 100 scale, the signatories of the latter letter, some of whom spent years in Chinese jails, would probably find themselves in the upper 90s. Where Mr. Freeman and his defenders stand on this scale is something readers can decide for themselves.

So what do Chinese democracy activists have against Mr. Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia? As it turns out, they are all, apparently, part-and-parcel of the Israel Lobby.

In a recent article about Mr. Freeman's nomination in the Huffington Post, M.J. Rosenberg of the left-wing Israel Policy Forum writes that "Everyone involved in the anti-Freeman effort are staunch allies of the lobby." Of course: Only the most fervid Likudnik mandarins could object to Mr. Freeman's 2006 characterization of Mao Zedong as a man who, for all his flaws, had a "brilliance of . . . personality [that] illuminated the farthest corners of his country and inspired many would-be revolutionaries and romantics beyond it." It also takes a Shanghai Zionist to demur from Mr. Freeman's characterization of the Chinese leadership's response to the "mob scene" at Tiananmen as "a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership."

Mr. Freeman knows China well: He served as a translator during Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to Beijing. More recently, Mr. Freeman served on the advisory board of CNOOC, the Chinese state-owned oil giant. Is this also a qualification to lead the NIC?

But the Far East is by no means Mr. Freeman's only area of expertise. For many years he has led the Middle East Policy Council, generously funded by Saudi money. It's a generosity Mr. Freeman has amply repaid.

Thus, recalling Mr. Freeman's special pleading on behalf of Riyadh during his stint as ambassador in the early '90s, former Secretary of State James Baker called it "a classic case of clientitis from one of our best diplomats." Mr. Freeman has also been quoted as saying "It is widely charged in the United States that Saudi Arabian education teaches hateful and evil things. I do not think this is the case." Yet according to a 2006 report in the Washington Post, an eighth grade Saudi textbook contains the line, "They are the Jews, whom God has cursed and with whom He is so angry that He will never again be satisfied." Maybe Mr. Freeman was unaware of this. Or maybe he doesn't consider it particularly evil and hateful.

Whatever the case, Mr. Freeman has been among the Kingdom's most devoted fans, going so far as to suggest that King Abdullah "is very rapidly becoming Abdullah the Great." No sycophancy there.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Freeman was a ferocious critic of the war on terror. Not surprising, either, was his opinion about what started it: "We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs," he said in 2006. "Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home."

This is not a particularly original argument, although in Mr. Freeman's case it becomes a kind of monomania, in which Israel is always the warmonger, always slapping away Arab hands extended in peace. Say what you will about this depiction of reality, there's also a peculiar psychology at work.

Then again, as Middle East scholar Martin Kramer points out, Mr. Freeman's recent views on the causes of 9/11 contradict his view from 1998, when he insisted that al Qaeda's "campaign of violence against the United States has nothing to do with Israel." What changed? Mr. Kramer thinks Mr. Freeman was merely following the lead of his benefactor, Citibank shareholder Prince Al-Waleed, who opined that 9/11 was all about U.S. support for Israel, not what the Kingdom teaches about the infidels.

Is Mr. Freeman merely a shill? That seems unfair, even if it's hard to square his remorseless "realism" in matters Chinese with the touching solicitude he feels for Israel's victims (who, by his count, must be numbered in the tens of millions). James Fallows of the Atlantic has argued that Mr. Freeman's "contrarian inclination" would serve him well in the NIC post. But the line between contrarian and crackpot is a thin one, and knowing the difference between the two is a main task of intelligence.

Adm. Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence who asked Mr. Freeman to serve, is testifying today in Congress. Somebody should ask him if any of Mr. Freeman's views quoted above meet the definition of "crackpot," and, if not, why?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 11, 2009, 08:04:29 AM
He has withdrawn his nomination;

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...RFXf8&refer=us
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on March 14, 2009, 08:13:36 PM
Probably to be replaced by someone just as bad, but less visible....   :roll:
Title: Declassified Secrets
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 28, 2009, 09:18:39 AM
I haven't given this site a careful look yet, so caveat lector:

http://www.declassifiedsecrets.blogspot.com/
Title: NYT: Chinese internet computer spying operation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 29, 2009, 05:33:14 AM
TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.


In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.

The newly reported spying operation is by far the largest to come to light in terms of countries affected.

This is also believed to be the first time researchers have been able to expose the workings of a computer system used in an intrusion of this magnitude.

Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.

The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.

The Toronto researchers said they had notified international law enforcement agencies of the spying operation, which in their view exposed basic shortcomings in the legal structure of cyberspace. The F.B.I. declined to comment on the operation.

Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”

“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a member of the research group and an associate professor of political science at Munk. “This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, said. “The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”

The Toronto researchers, who allowed a reporter for The New York Times to review the spies’ digital tracks, are publishing their findings in Information Warfare Monitor, an online publication associated with the Munk Center.

At the same time, two computer researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans, are releasing an independent report. They do fault China, and they warned that other hackers could adopt the tactics used in the malware operation.

============

Page 2 of 2)



“What Chinese spooks did in 2008, Russian crooks will do in 2010 and even low-budget criminals from less developed countries will follow in due course,” the Cambridge researchers, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson, wrote in their report, “The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement.”


In any case, it was suspicions of Chinese interference that led to the discovery of the spy operation. Last summer, the office of the Dalai Lama invited two specialists to India to audit computers used by the Dalai Lama’s organization. The specialists, Greg Walton, the editor of Information Warfare Monitor, and Mr. Nagaraja, a network security expert, found that the computers had indeed been infected and that intruders had stolen files from personal computers serving several Tibetan exile groups.

Back in Toronto, Mr. Walton shared data with colleagues at the Munk Center’s computer lab.

One of them was Nart Villeneuve, 34, a graduate student and self-taught “white hat” hacker with dazzling technical skills. Last year, Mr. Villeneuve linked the Chinese version of the Skype communications service to a Chinese government operation that was systematically eavesdropping on users’ instant-messaging sessions.

Early this month, Mr. Villeneuve noticed an odd string of 22 characters embedded in files created by the malicious software and searched for it with Google. It led him to a group of computers on Hainan Island, off China, and to a Web site that would prove to be critically important.

In a puzzling security lapse, the Web page that Mr. Villeneuve found was not protected by a password, while much of the rest of the system uses encryption.

Mr. Villeneuve and his colleagues figured out how the operation worked by commanding it to infect a system in their computer lab in Toronto. On March 12, the spies took their own bait. Mr. Villeneuve watched a brief series of commands flicker on his computer screen as someone — presumably in China — rummaged through the files. Finding nothing of interest, the intruder soon disappeared.

Through trial and error, the researchers learned to use the system’s Chinese-language “dashboard” — a control panel reachable with a standard Web browser — by which one could manipulate the more than 1,200 computers worldwide that had by then been infected.

Infection happens two ways. In one method, a user’s clicking on a document attached to an e-mail message lets the system covertly install software deep in the target operating system. Alternatively, a user clicks on a Web link in an e-mail message and is taken directly to a “poisoned” Web site.

The researchers said they avoided breaking any laws during three weeks of monitoring and extensively experimenting with the system’s unprotected software control panel. They provided, among other information, a log of compromised computers dating to May 22, 2007.

They found that three of the four control servers were in different provinces in China — Hainan, Guangdong and Sichuan — while the fourth was discovered to be at a Web-hosting company based in Southern California.

Beyond that, said Rafal A. Rohozinski, one of the investigators, “attribution is difficult because there is no agreed upon international legal framework for being able to pursue investigations down to their logical conclusion, which is highly local.”
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2009, 09:33:09 AM
A Chilling Effect on U.S. Counterterrorism
April 29, 2009
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

Over the past couple of weeks, we have been carefully watching the fallout from the Obama administration’s decision to release four classified memos from former President George W. Bush’s administration that authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In a visit to CIA headquarters last week, President Barack Obama promised not to prosecute agency personnel who carried out such interrogations, since they were following lawful orders. Critics of the techniques, such as Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have called for the formation of a “truth commission” to investigate the matter, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to launch a criminal inquiry into the matter.

Realistically, those most likely to face investigation and prosecution are those who wrote the memos, rather than the low-level field personnel who acted in good faith based upon the guidance the memos provided. Despite this fact and Obama’s reassurances, our contacts in the intelligence community report that the release of the memos has had a discernible “chilling effect” on those in the clandestine service who work on counterterrorism issues.

In some ways, the debate over the morality of such interrogation techniques — something we do not take a position on and will not be discussing here — has distracted many observers from examining the impact that the release of these memos is having on the ability of the U.S. government to fulfill its counterterrorism mission. And this impact has little to do with the ability to use torture to interrogate terrorist suspects.

Politics and moral arguments aside, the end effect of the memos’ release is that people who have put their lives on the line in U.S. counterterrorism efforts are now uncertain of whether they should be making that sacrifice. Many of these people are now questioning whether the administration that happens to be in power at any given time will recognize the fact that they were carrying out lawful orders under a previous administration. It is hard to retain officers and attract quality recruits in this kind of environment. It has become safer to work in programs other than counterterrorism.

The memos’ release will not have a catastrophic effect on U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Indeed, most of the information in the memos was leaked to the press years ago and has long been public knowledge. However, when the release of the memos is examined in a wider context, and combined with a few other dynamics, it appears that the U.S. counterterrorism community is quietly slipping back into an atmosphere of risk-aversion and malaise — an atmosphere not dissimilar to that described by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) as a contributing factor to the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks.

Cycles Within Cycles
In March we wrote about the cycle of counterterrorism funding and discussed indications that the United States is entering a period of reduced counterterrorism funding. This decrease in funding not only will affect defensive counterterrorism initiatives like embassy security and countersurveillance programs, but also will impact offensive programs such as the number of CIA personnel dedicated to the counterterrorism role.

Beyond funding, however, there is another historical cycle of booms and busts that can be seen in the conduct of American clandestine intelligence activities. There are clearly discernible periods when clandestine activities are deemed very important and are widely employed. These periods are inevitably followed by a time of investigations, reductions in clandestine activities and a tightening of control and oversight over such activities.

After the widespread employment of clandestine activities in the Vietnam War era, the Church Committee was convened in 1975 to review (and ultimately restrict) such operations. Former President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Bill Casey as director of the CIA ushered in a new era of growth as the United States became heavily engaged in clandestine activities in Afghanistan and Central America. Then, the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair in 1986 led to a period of hearings and controls.

There was a slight uptick in clandestine activities under the presidency of George H.W. Bush, but the fall of the Soviet Union led to another bust cycle for the intelligence community. By the mid-1990s, the number of CIA stations and bases was dramatically reduced (and virtually eliminated in much of Africa) for budgetary considerations. Then there was the case of Jennifer Harbury, a Harvard-educated lawyer who used little-known provisions in Texas common law to marry a dead Guatemalan guerrilla commander and gain legal standing as his widow. After it was uncovered that a CIA source was involved in the guerrilla commander’s execution, CIA stations in Latin America were gutted for political reasons. The Harbury case also led to the Torricelli Amendment, a law that made recruiting unsavory people, such as those with ties to death squads and terrorist groups, illegal without special approval. This bust cycle was well documented by both the Crowe Commission, which investigated the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, and the 9/11 Commission.

After the 9/11 attacks, the pendulum swung radically to the permissive side and clandestine activity was rapidly and dramatically increased as the U.S. sought to close the intelligence gap and quickly develop intelligence on al Qaeda’s capability and plans. Developments over the past two years clearly indicate that the United States is once again entering an intelligence bust cycle, a period that will be marked by hearings, increased controls and a general decrease in clandestine activity.

Institutional Culture

It is also very important to realize that the counterterrorism community is just one small part of the larger intelligence community that is affected by this ebb and flow of covert activity. In fact, as noted above, the counterterrorism component of intelligence efforts has its own boom-and-bust cycle that is based on major attacks. Soon after a major attack, interest in counterterrorism spikes dramatically, but as time passes without a major attack, interest lags. Other than during the peak times of this cycle, counterterrorism is considered an ancillary program that is sometimes seen as an interesting side tour of duty, but more widely seen as being outside the mainstream career path — risky and not particularly career-enhancing. This assessment is reinforced by such events as the recent release of the memos.

At the CIA, being a counterterrorism specialist in the clandestine service means that you will most likely spend much of your life in places line Sanaa, Islamabad and Kabul instead of Vienna, Paris or London. This means that, in addition to hurting your chances for career advancement, your job also is quite dangerous, provides relatively poor living conditions for your family and offers the possibility of contracting serious diseases.

While being declared persona non grata and getting kicked out of a country as part of an intelligence spat is considered almost a badge of honor at the CIA, the threat of being arrested and indicted for participating in the rendition of a terrorist suspect from an allied country like Italy is not. Equally unappealing is being sued in civil court by a terrorist suspect or facing the possibility of prosecution after a change of government in the United States. Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of CIA case officers who are choosing to carry personal liability insurance because they do not trust the agency and the U.S. government to look out for their best interests.

Now, there are officers who are willing to endure hardship and who do not really care much about career advancement, but for those officers there is another hazard — frustration. Aggressive officers dedicated to the counterterrorism mission quickly learn that many of the people in the food chain above them are concerned about their careers, and these superiors often take measures to rein in their less-mainstream subordinates. Additionally, due to the restrictions brought about by laws and regulations like the Torricelli Amendment, case officers working counterterrorism are often tightly bound by myriad legal restrictions.

Unlike in television shows like “24,” it is not uncommon in the real world for a meeting called to plan a counterterrorism operation to feature more CIA lawyers than case officers or analysts. These staff lawyers are intricately involved in the operational decisions made at headquarters, and legal issues often trump operational considerations. The need to obtain legal approval often delays decisions long enough for a critical window of operational opportunity to be slammed shut. This restrictive legal environment goes back many years in the CIA and is not a new fixture brought in by the Obama administration. There was a sense of urgency that served to trump the lawyers to some extent after 9/11, but the lawyers never went away and have reasserted themselves firmly over the past several years.

Of course, the CIA is not the only agency with a culture that is less than supportive of the counterterrorism mission. Although the prevention of terrorist attacks in the United States is currently the FBI’s No. 1 priority on paper, the counterterrorism mission remains the bureau�s redheaded stepchild. The FBI is struggling to find agents willing to serve in the counterterrorism sections of field offices, resident agencies (smaller offices that report to a field office) and joint terrorism task forces.

While the CIA was very much built on the legacy of Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, the FBI was founded by J. Edgar Hoover, a conservative and risk-averse administrator who served as FBI director from 1935-1972. Even today, Hoover’s influence is clearly evident in the FBI’s bureaucratic nature. FBI special agents are unable to do much at all, such as open an investigation, without a supervisor’s approval, and supervisors are reluctant to approve anything too adventurous because of the impact it might have on their chance for promotion. Unlike many other law enforcement agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI rarely uses its own special agents in an undercover capacity to penetrate criminal organizations. That practice is seen as being too risky; they prefer to use confidential informants rather than undercover operatives.

The FBI is also strongly tied to its roots in law enforcement and criminal investigation, and special agents who work major theft, public corruption or white-collar crime cases tend to receive more recognition — and advance more quickly — than their counterterrorism counterparts.

FBI special agents also see a considerable downside to working counterterrorism cases because of the potential for such cases to blow up in their faces if they make a mistake — such as in the New York field office’s highly publicized mishandling of the informant whom they had inserted into the group that later conducted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It is much safer, and far more rewarding from a career perspective, to work bank robberies or serve in the FBI’s Inspection Division.

After the 9/11 attacks — and the corresponding spike in the importance of counterterrorism operations — many of the resources of the CIA and FBI were focused on al Qaeda and terrorism, to the detriment of programs such as foreign counterintelligence. However, the more time that has passed since 9/11 without another major attack, the more the organizational culture of the U.S government has returned to normal. Once again, counterterrorism efforts are seen as being ancillary duties rather than the organizations’ driving mission. (The clash between organizational culture and the counterterrorism mission is by no means confined to the CIA and FBI. Fred’s book “Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent” provides a detailed examination of some of the bureaucratic and cultural challenges we faced while serving in the Counterterrorism Investigations Division of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service.)

Liaison Services

One of the least well known, and perhaps most important, sources of intelligence in the counterterrorism field is the information that is obtained as a result of close relationships with allied intelligence agencies — often referred to as information obtained through “liaison channels.”

Like FBI agents, most CIA officers are well-educated, middle-aged white guys. This means they are better suited to use the cover of an American businessmen or diplomat than to pretend to be a young Muslim trying to join al Qaeda or Hezbollah. Like their counterparts in the FBI, CIA officers have far more success using informants than they do working undercover inside terrorist groups.

Services like the Jordanian General Intelligence Department, the Saudi Mabahith or the Yemeni National Security Agency not only can recruit sources, but also are far more successful in using young Muslim officers to penetrate terrorist groups. In addition to their source networks and penetration operations, many of these liaison services are not at all squeamish about using extremely enhanced interrogation techniques — this is the reason many of the terrorism suspects who were the subject of rendition operations ended up in such locations. Obviously, whenever the CIA is dealing with a liaison service, the political interests and objectives of the service must be considered — as should the possibility that the liaison service is fabricating the intelligence in question for whatever reason. Still, in the end, the CIA historically has received a significant amount of important intelligence (perhaps even most of its intelligence) via liaison channels.

Another concern that arises from the call for a truth commission is the impact a commission investigation could have on the liaison services that have helped the United States in its counterterrorism efforts since 9/11. Countries that hosted CIA detention facilities or were involved in the rendition or interrogation of terrorist suspects may find themselves exposed publicly or even held up for some sort of sanction by the U.S. Congress. Such activities could have a real impact on the amount of cooperation and information the CIA receives from these intelligence services.

Conclusion

As we’ve previously noted, it was a lack of intelligence that helped fuel the fear that led the Bush administration to authorize enhanced interrogation techniques. Ironically, the current investigation into those techniques and other practices (such as renditions) may very well lead to significant gaps in terrorism-related intelligence from both internal and liaison sources — again, not primarily because of the prohibition of torture, but because of larger implications.

When these implications are combined with the long-standing institutional aversion of U.S. government agencies toward counterterrorism, and with the difficulty of finding and retaining good people willing to serve in counterterrorism roles, the U.S. counterterrorism community may soon be facing challenges even more daunting than those posed by its already difficult mission.
Title: Check Sandy Berger's Pants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 20, 2009, 07:49:29 AM
Ah whups, found this category. Not sure this fits here, but it's the closest match:

Sensitive data missing from National Archives
Breach included personal data of Clinton-era White House staff and visitors

By Larry Margasak

updated 46 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - The National Archives lost a computer hard drive containing massive amounts of sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including Social Security numbers, addresses, and Secret Service and White House operating procedures, congressional officials said Tuesday.

One of former Vice President Al Gore's three daughters is among those whose Social Security numbers were on the drive, but it was not clear which one. Other information includes logs of events, social gatherings and political records.

Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said in a written statement that the agency was preparing to notify affected individuals of the breach. The representative of former President Bill Clinton has been notified, but Cooper gave no indication whether the former president's personal information was on the hard drive.

"The drive contains an as yet unknown amount of personally identifiable information of White House staff and visitors," the statement added.

The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation of the matter, according to Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Towns and the committee's senior Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, said they would continue to seek more information.

The lawmakers said they learned of the loss from committee aides after the staff was briefed by the inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration. There was no indication that anyone has been victimized, aides said.

The drive is missing from the Archives facility in College Park, Md., a Washington suburb. The drive was lost between October 2008 and March 2009 and contained 1 terabyte of data — enough material to fill millions of books.

A Republican committee aide who was at the inspector general's briefing said the Archives had been converting the Clinton administration information to a digital records system when the hard drive went missing.

The aide, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said the hard drive was left on a shelf and unused for an uncertain period of time. When the employee tried to resume work, the hard drive was missing.

Committee staff members were told there is a copy of the massive amount of information, but Archives officials have only just begun to learn what was on the drive.

Towns said he would have the FBI and inspector general brief committee members so they can "begin to understand the magnitude of the security breach and all of the steps being taken to recover the lost information.

"The committee will do everything possible to prevent compromising the integrity of the FBI's criminal investigation while we fulfill our constitutional duty to investigate the compromised security protocols," he said.

Issa called for the Archives acting director, Adrienne Thomas, to appear before a committee panel Thursday to "explain how such an outrageous breach of security happened."

"This egregious breach raises significant questions regarding the effectiveness of the security protocols that are in place at the National Archives and Records Administration," he said.

Issa said the hard drive was moved from a "secure" storage area to a workspace while it was in use. The inspector general explained that at least 100 badge-holders had access to the area where the hard drive was left unsecured.

"The IG is investigating the situation as a crime with the assistance of the Department of Justice and the Secret Service but they have not yet determined if the loss was the result of theft or accidental loss," Issa said.
Title: Empty-suit, meet the NGA
Post by: G M on June 02, 2009, 01:17:15 AM
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2009/05/five-guys-three-letter-agency.html

SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2009

Five Guys, Three-Letter Agency
It probably won't make the President's "public" calendar, but Navy Vice Admiral Robert Murrett will soon pay a visit to the White House.

Murrett's job? Get Barack Obama up-to-speed on the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), the organization Murrett has led since 2006. As you probably know, the agency came up in conversation as Mr. Obama stood in line at a D.C. hamburger stand on Friday. Engaging a fellow patron named Walter in casual conversation, the President appeared clueless when the man identified himself as an NGA employee.

A transcript of their chat, courtesy of C-SPAN and Ben Smith at the Politico:

Obama: What do you do Walter?

Walter: I work at, uh, NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Obama: Outstanding, how long you been doing that?

Walter: About six years

Obama: Yea?

Walter: Yes.

Obama: You like it?

Walter: I do, keeps me...

Obama: So explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial...uh...

Walter: Uh, we work with, uh, satellite imagery..

Obama: Right

Walter: [unintelligible] ...support systems, so...

Obama: Sounds like good work.

Walter: Enjoy the weekend.

Obama: Appreciate it.


Mr. Smith speculates that NGA "isn't getting much time in the President's daily brief," which (supposedly) explains why Obama hasn't heard of the agency. Never mind that NGA has over 9,000 employees around the world, making it fourth-largest among the three-letter spy agencies. Or that NGA, as its name implies, provides most of the nation's satellite imagery and other forms of geo-spatial intelligence.

It's not a matter of face time. Traditionally, the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) has included a healthy dose of satellite imagery, which accompanies the various articles found in the update. Images provided by NGA are emblazoned with that organization's logo, but (apparently) it didn't make much of an impression on the intel consumer-in-chief.

And, Mr. Obama's introduction to NGA and its capabilities came long before he entered the Oval Office. As a Senator, one of Obama's "signature" legislative accomplishments was passage of a bill (co-sponsored by Indiana Republican Richard Lugar) which provides funding for the destruction of conventional weapons stockpiles, and the intercept of WMD materials. As you might expect, NGA plays a key role in supporting that effort, furnishing imagery and other products that track conventional weaponry and WMD sites.

NGA analysts routinely provide briefings for members of Congress and their staffers. Given his "interest" in the non-proliferation issue, there's a good bet that Senator Obama sat through a presentation from NGA, or a joint intelligence team that included experts from the agency. But again, the organization's unique capabilities and products failed to register on Mr. Obama, resulting in that stilted exchange with Walter, waiting for a burger at Five Guys.

As Commander-in-Chief, there is no requirement for Mr. Obama to know the intricate details of how the government's 16 intelligence agencies operate. But as the ultimate customer for intelligence, you'd think he'd have a little more interest in an organization that employs thousands of Americans, spends billions of dollars every year, and provides critical intel that helps him formulate policy decisions.

That's why Admiral Murrett will soon come calling at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Mr. Obama is not a student of the U.S. intelligence community, but he is a master of the art of politics. Friday's exchange at the burger joint was clearly a major gaffe, although it's received little attention outside of the Politico or conservative blogs.

If we've learned anything about President Obama during his time in office, it's this: he appears to have a thin skin, and doesn't take kindly to personal embarrassments. So, it's time for a little sit-down with Admiral Murrett on the finer points of NGA, just in case the president finds himself in another line, and wondering aloud about this "National Geospatial" organization that supports him on a daily basis.

NGA doesn't need more face time, Mr. Smith. What they need is a commander-in-chief who's a bit more engaged on the intelligence system, its agencies and their capabilities.

***

ADDENDUM: Can you imagine how the press would have reacted if George W. Bush had uttered similar comments about one of "his" intelligence organizations?
Title: Whoops, the "accidental" release of classified material
Post by: G M on June 03, 2009, 07:49:23 PM
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2009/06/no-accident.html

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 03, 2009

No Accident

If you believe the so-called "experts," the recent, on-line publication of a detailed report on U.S. nuclear facilities was nothing more than an "accident."

The 266-page summary, which provided detailed information on civilian nuclear sites and programs, was posted at a Government Printing Office website until Tuesday night, when it was suddenly removed. That action followed disclosure of the document's existence--and its accessibility--at a web site devoted to government secrecy.

According to The New York Times, the report was marked "Highly Confidential" and listed hundreds of civilian reactors and research facilities linked to government nuclear programs. In some cases, the document provided maps that showed the precise location of fuel stockpiles used for nuclear weapons.

While analysts debate the damage caused by the disclosure, the Times managed to find an expert who dismissed the report's publication as little more than a clerical error:

“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former director of central intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”

Of course, there is no small irony in Mr. Deutch's comments. As you'll recall, he was dismissed as CIA Director during the Clinton Administration for a colossal security blunder. Investigators discovered the Mr. Deutch not only took home highly classified intelligence files, he uploaded them on a personal computer that was linked to the internet. The CIA has never disclosed if foreign intelligence agencies were able to access Mr. Deutch's computer, and download secret files stored on his personal computers--machines that were never cleared for classified use.

Apologist for Mr. Deutch tried to depict him as a computer neophyte--a latecomer to the world of laptops--but that defense only goes so far. A CIA investigation into Deutch's computer files revealed that the CIA Director first tried to retain his machines, which had been purchased by the agency. When that request was rejected, Mr. Deutch apparently tried to reformat his computer, in an attempt to erase the classified files. He even sought help from technical experts at CIA HQ in an effort to reformat computer memory cards, a request that first raised questions about the director and his security habits.

In other words, Mr. Deutch willfully broke the rules, although he was never prosecuted and received a pardon from President Clinton. The "willful intent," so apparent in the Deutch case, is also evident in the "accidental" publication of that nuclear report. In other words, someone made a conscious decision to put the document on that unclassified government web site.

How can we be so sure? Government policy mandates the creation, editing and publication of classified reports on systems cleared for that type of information. Typically, a "confidential" report would be produced on a SECRET-level system, and published on an intranet cleared for that level of data. In the Department of Defense, the intranet for SECRET information is called SIPRNET. Other government agencies also have access to SIPRNET, or utilize their own SECRET-level intranets.

Getting that report on that unclassified web site, took several deliberate steps (or mistakes, depending on your perspective). First, the document had to be downloaded from a classified system and then copied or uploaded onto the unclassified site. Quite a series of missteps, wouldn't you say?

However, tracking down the guilty party should be relatively easy--assuming that the Obama Administration is interested in sealing the security breach. Government computer systems (at all levels) are extensively monitored, and employees must log on/log off using a personalized access card. Consequently, it shouldn't be too hard to find out who download the report, then uploaded it on the unclassified system.

One final note: many of the government's classified systems won't accept "outside" media, meaning you can't stick an unclassified flash card, floppy disk, CD-ROM or DVD into the appropriate drive and download information. Obviously, the feds haven't released details on the system(s) involved in this compromise, so we can't be completely sure how the information was transferred.

But one thing is clear: given the steps required, the posting of that report on an unclassified government web site was anything but an accident or a simple "screw-up."
Title: BO-Panetta castrate US in yet another way
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2009, 12:42:38 PM
U.S.: Reaction to the CIA Assassination Program
July 15, 2009




By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton

On June 23, 2009, Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta learned of a highly compartmentalized program to assassinate al Qaeda operatives that was launched by the CIA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. When Panetta found out that the covert program had not been disclosed to Congress, he canceled it and then called an emergency meeting June 24 to brief congressional oversight committees on the program. Over the past week, many details of the program have been leaked to the press and the issue has received extensive media coverage.

That a program existed to assassinate al Qaeda leaders should certainly come as no surprise to anyone. It has been well-publicized that the Clinton administration had launched military operations and attempted to use covert programs to strike the al Qaeda leadership in the wake of the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. In fact, the Clinton administration has come under strong criticism for not doing more to decapitate al Qaeda prior to 2001. Furthermore, since 2002, the CIA has conducted scores of strikes against al Qaeda targets in Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) like the MQ-1 Predator and the larger MQ-9 Reaper.

These strikes have dramatically increased over the past two years and the pace did not slacken when the Obama administration came to power in January. So far in 2009 there have been more than two dozen UAV strikes in Pakistan alone. In November 2002, the CIA also employed a UAV to kill Abu Ali al-Harithi, a senior al Qaeda leader suspected of planning the October 2000 attack against the USS Cole. The U.S. government has also attacked al Qaeda leaders at other times and in other places, such as the May 1, 2008, attack against al Qaeda-linked figures in Somalia using an AC-130 gunship.

As early as Oct. 28, 2001, The Washington Post ran a story discussing the Clinton-era presidential finding authorizing operations to capture or kill al Qaeda targets. The Oct. 28 Washington Post story also provided details of a finding signed by President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks that reportedly provided authorization to strike a larger cross section of al Qaeda targets, including those who are not in the Afghan theater of operations. Such presidential findings are used to authorize covert actions, but in this case the finding would also provide permission to contravene Executive Order 12333, which prohibits assassinations.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Bush and the members of his administration were very clear that they sought to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and the members of the al Qaeda organization. During the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in the United States, every major candidate, including Barack Obama, stated that they would seek to kill bin Laden and destroy al Qaeda. Indeed, on the campaign trail, Obama was quite vocal in his criticism of the Bush administration for not doing more to go after al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan. This means that, regardless of who is in the White House, it is U.S. policy to go after individual al Qaeda members as well as the al Qaeda organization.

In light of these facts, it would appear that there was nothing particularly controversial about the covert assassination program itself, and the controversy that has arisen over it has more to do with the failure to report covert activities to Congress. The political uproar and the manner in which the program was canceled, however, will likely have a negative impact on CIA morale and U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

Program Details
As noted above, that the U.S. government has attempted to locate and kill al Qaeda members is not shocking. Bush’s signing of a classified finding authorizing the assassination of al Qaeda members has been a poorly kept secret for many years now, and the U.S. government has succeeded in killing al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

While Hellfire missiles are quite effective at hitting trucks in Yemen and AC-130 gunships are great for striking walled compounds in the Somali badlands, there are many places in the world where it is simply not possible to use such tools against militants. One cannot launch a hellfire from a UAV at a target in Milan or use an AC-130 to attack a target in Doha. Furthermore, there are certain parts of the world — including some countries considered to be U.S. allies — where it is very difficult for the United States to conduct counterterrorism operations at all. These difficulties have been seen in past cases where the governments have refused U.S. requests to detain terrorist suspects or have alerted the suspects to the U.S. interest in them, compromising U.S. intelligence efforts and allowing the suspects to flee.

A prime example of this occurred in 1996, when the United States asked the government of Qatar for assistance in capturing al Qaeda operational mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was living openly in Qatar and even working for the Qatari government as a project engineer. Mohammed was tipped off to American intentions by the Qatari authorities and fled to Pakistan. According to the 9/11 commission report, Mohammed was closely associated with Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, who was then the Qatari minister of religious affairs. After fleeing Doha, Mohammed went on to plan several al Qaeda attacks against the United States, including the 9/11 operation.

Given these realities, it appears that the recently disclosed assassination program was intended to provide the United States with a far more subtle and surgical tool to use in attacks against al Qaeda leaders in locations where Hellfire missiles are not appropriate and where host government assistance is unlikely to be provided. Some media reports indicate that the program was never fully developed and deployed; others indicate that it may have conducted a limited number of operations.

Unlike UAV strikes, where pilots fly the vehicles by satellite link and can actually be located a half a world away, or the very tough and resilient airframe of an AC-130, which can fly thousands of feet above a target, a surgical assassination capability means that the CIA would have to put boots on the ground in hostile territory where operatives, by their very presence, would be violating the laws of the sovereign country in which they were operating. Such operatives, under nonofficial cover by necessity, would be at risk of arrest if they were detected.

Also, because of the nature of such a program, a higher level of operational security is required than in the program to strike al Qaeda targets using UAVs. It is far more complex to move officers and weapons into hostile territory in a stealthy manner to strike a target without warning and with plausible deniability. Once a target is struck with a barrage of Hellfire missiles, it is fairly hard to deny what happened. There is ample physical evidence tying the attack to American UAVs. When a person is struck by a sniper’s bullet or a small IED, the perpetrator and sponsor have far more deniability. By its very nature, and by operational necessity, such a program must be extremely covert.

Even with the cooperation of the host government, conducting an extraordinary rendition in a friendly country like Italy has proved to be politically controversial and personally risky for CIA officers, who can be threatened with arrest and trial. Conducting assassination operations in a country that is not so friendly is a far riskier undertaking. As seen by the Russian officers arrested in Doha after the February 2004 assassination of former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, such operations can generate blowback. The Russian officers responsible for the Yandarbiyev hit were arrested, tortured, tried and sentenced to life in prison (though after several months they were released into Russian custody to serve the remainder of their sentences).

Because of the physical risk to the officers involved in such operations, and the political blowback such operations can cause, it is not surprising that the details of such a program would be strictly compartmentalized inside the CIA and not widely disseminated beyond the gates of Langley. In fact, it is highly doubtful that the details of such a program were even widely known inside the CIA’s counterterrorism center (CTC) — though almost certainly some of the CTC staff suspected that such a covert program existed somewhere. The details regarding such a program were undoubtedly guarded carefully within the clandestine service, with the officer in charge most likely reporting directly to the deputy director of operations, who reports personally to the director of the CIA.

Loose Lips Sink Ships
As trite as this old saying may sound, it is painfully true. In the counterterrorism realm, leaks destroy counterterrorism cases and often allow terrorist suspects to escape and kill again. There have been several leaks of “sources and methods” by congressional sources over the past decade that have disclosed details of sensitive U.S. government programs designed to do things such as intercept al Qaeda satellite phone signals and track al Qaeda financing. A classified appendix to the report of the 2005 Robb-Silberman Commission on Intelligence Capabilities (which incidentally was leaked to the press) discussed several such leaks, noted the costs they impose on the American taxpayers and highlighted the damage they do to intelligence programs.

The fear that details of a sensitive program designed to assassinate al Qaeda operatives in foreign countries could be leaked was probably the reason for the Bush administration’s decision to withhold knowledge of the program from the U.S. Congress, even though amendments to the National Security Act of 1947 mandate the reporting of most covert intelligence programs to Congress. Given the imaginative legal guidance provided by Bush administration lawyers regarding subjects such as enhanced interrogation, it would not be surprising to find that White House lawyers focused on loopholes in the National Security Act reporting requirements.

The validity of such legal opinions may soon be tested. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, recently said he was considering an investigation into the failure to report the program to Congress, and House Democrats have announced that they want to change the reporting requirements to make them even more inclusive.

Under the current version of the National Security Act, with very few exceptions, the administration is required to report the most sensitive covert activities to, at the very least, the so-called “gang of eight” that includes the chairmen and ranking minority members of the congressional intelligence committees, the speaker and minority leader of the House of Representatives and the majority and minority leaders of the Senate. In the wake of the program’s disclosure, some Democrats would like to expand this minimum reporting requirement to include the entire membership of the congressional intelligence committees, which would increase the absolute minimum number of people to be briefed from eight to 40. Some congressmen argue that presidents, prompted by the CIA, are too loose in their invocation of the “extraordinary circumstances” that allow them to report only to the gang of eight and not the full committees. Yet ironically, the existence of the covert CIA program stayed secret for over seven and a half years, and yet here we are writing about it less than a month after the congressional committees were briefed.

The addition of that many additional lips to briefings pertaining to covert actions is not the only thing that will cause great consternation at the CIA. While legally mandated, disclosing covert programs to Congress has been very problematic. The angst felt at Langley over potential increases in the number of people to be briefed will be compounded by the recent reports that Attorney General Eric Holder may appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogations and ethics reporting.

In April we discussed how some of the early actions of the Obama administration were having a chilling effect on U.S. counterterrorism programs and personnel. Expanding the minimum reporting requirements under the National Security Act will serve to turn the thermostat down several additional notches, as did Panetta’s overt killing of the covert program. It is one thing to quietly kill a controversial program; it is quite another to repudiate the CIA in public. In addition to damaging the already low morale at the agency, Panetta has announced in a very public manner that the United States has taken one important tool entirely out of the counterterrorism toolbox: Al Qaeda no longer has to fear the possibility of clandestine American assassination teams.
Title: Hyperbole & Secrets
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 21, 2009, 04:00:17 PM
Spy Agency Fiasco

Ethel C. Fenig

OK, granted that President Barack  Obama's (D) choice of former California representative Leon Panetta (D) to head the CIA was unusual because, unlike many other Obama appointees, he wasn't a tax scofflaw. However Panetta, inexperienced about the realities of spying, speaking before a closed door briefing to Congress, charged the agency he now headed formerly ran a secret--and illegal--assassination program after September 11. Panetta provided juicy, substantial meat to the starving Democratic dogs eager to rip apart President George W. Bush (R) and the CIA. Except, except...the charges weren't true.


Joseph Finder of the Daily Beast has the exclusive details.

• The secret assassination ‘program' wasn't much more than a PowerPoint presentation, a task force and a collection of schemes-it never got off the ground

• Panetta's three immediate predecessors-George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden-have spoken to him, and that he now sees that no laws were broken.

• Panetta has frantically tried to rectify his gaffe, but now faces increased Congressional oversight.

Oh well. Not quite.

But according to a half-dozen sources, including several very senior, recently retired CIA officials, clandestine-service officers, and Cabinet-level officials from the Bush administration, the real story is at once more innocent-Panetta was mistaken; no law was broken-and far more troubling: an inexperienced CIA director, unfamiliar with how his vast, complicated agency works, unable to trust senior officials within his own agency, and desperate to keep his hands clean, screwed up. (snip)

An innocent mistake, but the consequences of his gaffe, which he's unable to admit without damaging his own reputation further, will likely subject U.S. intelligence capabilities to unnecessary and intrusive oversight for years to come.

Meanwhile the real enemies of the U.S. rejoice while plotting more horror; the ability of spy agencies to discover them is further restricted. But maybe Hollywood can make a movie out of it. And Panetta paid his taxes.

hat tip: Lucianne.com

 



Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/08/spy_agency_fiasco.html at August 21, 2009 - 06:57:59 PM EDT
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 25, 2009, 10:06:39 AM


Leon Panetta’s Agony
In the antwar Left's blinkered hindsight, the CIA director has become a shill for torturers.

By Rich Lowry


Pity Leon Panetta. The CIA director counseled the Obama administration against releasing classified interrogation memos from the Bush years. And got ignored. Then, Nancy Pelosi said his agency lied to her about post-9/11 interrogations, and Democrats rushed to try to back her up. Now, Attorney General Eric Holder has tasked a prosecutor with looking into reopening criminal cases against CIA employees and contractors.

Such is life at Langley under an administration exhibiting liberalism’s typical contempt for covert action and its inevitable moral complications. No wonder ABC News is reporting that Panetta recently uncorked a profanity-laced tirade about the Justice Department at the White House and is contemplating quitting (the CIA denies it). If Panetta were shrewd, he’d make a play for a position that would command more respect — say, assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Panetta has had to write another letter to CIA employees meant to keep their morale up. For those keeping count, it’s his sixth. No matter how many missives he writes earnestly committing himself and his agency to looking ahead, the rest of his administration and party drags him back into the past. As far as they are concerned, he’s merely a frontman for Bush-era criminality.

In response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, a judge ordered the administration to release a 2004 CIA inspector general report about interrogation practices. Although often uncomfortable reading (one incident involved a power drill), the report also outlines the CIA’s nearly obsessive quest for legal guidance and its intolerance for unauthorized methods as piddling as blowing cigar smoke at detainees.

Consider the fate of the CIA officer who used a gun to frighten Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. He did it in 2002. The agency immediately called him back to headquarters. He faced an internal accountability board, suffered a reprimand, and eventually resigned. The Justice Department looked into the case because threatening a detainee with “imminent death” is torture, but declined to prosecute. Proving torture in a court of law, where seemingly mincing legal distinctions matter, is much harder than braying about it on op-ed pages.

The CIA certainly didn’t act like an agency with a guilty conscience. It didn’t try to cover up any abuses, but undertook the inspector general investigation and forwarded the report on to Congress and the Justice Department. In one case, Justice got a conviction against a contractor who — in an obvious crime — beat a detainee to death. But what possible public interest can be served in reopening murkier cases years after the fact, when the CIA already took internal action and career prosecutors already examined them?

The next time CIA officers are told that they have to be more aggressive in protecting their country, they could be forgiven for saying, “No thanks.” One prescient officer quoted in the report said he knew interrogators would be hounded for their work, but unfortunately, it had to be done. Indeed, human-rights activists have tracked down and taken secret photographs of interrogators, some of which the lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees may have shown to their clients in violation of the law.

Of course, no one wants to hear the words “power drill” and “interrogation” in the same sentence, except perhaps in a review of a Quentin Tarantino movie. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we struggled to get the balance right between our safety and our values as an open, liberal society. It’d be nice to pretend otherwise, but there is indeed such a balance. As the IG report makes clear, the interrogations rendered important intelligence about other terrorists and other plots. “Whether this was the only way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute,” Panetta writes in his latest letter.

That dispute rightly belongs in the political arena, not the courts. But who wants to listen to the CIA director, a shill for torturers almost by definition?

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDQ4ZTM5M2Y5MDk4YmVkZmNmNTU1ZDcyYjAxZDY3Zjk=
Title: Re: Intel Matters: What made Detainees Talk?
Post by: DougMacG on August 27, 2009, 08:19:43 AM
The Inspector General forgot to mention the lives that were saved, that the operatives that were captured from the intel were already in the US studying landmark targets, and that the info was not forthcoming until after the enhanced techniques.

I look forward to some liberal explaining to me 'what it is says about me' and my moral defect that I would favor water tricks before execution on the person who planned the bombing of the USS Cole and the planner of the 9/11/01 attacks that killed more Americans than Pearl Harbor.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/08/what_made_ksm_talk.asp#more

What Made KSM Talk?

Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball says the Inspector General’s report and other recently-released documents pertaining to Bush-era interrogations of top al Qaeda operatives do not show that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) “actually worked.” Hosenball concedes that the detainees gave up a treasure trove of valuable intelligence, but the documents do not “convincingly demonstrate” that the EITs “produced this useful information.”

This is likely to be the new conventional wisdom on the documents. It’s wrong, so let’s take it apart.

First, here are the four key paragraphs from the Inspector General’s Report that deal specifically with waterboarding – the harshest of the enhanced interrogation techniques – and its effect on intelligence production. They are reproduced below, with redactions noted, because you have to read them together to understand as much of the story as possible. The paragraphs can all be found on pages 90 and 91 of the Inspector General’s Report.

    The waterboard has been used on three detainees: Abu Zubaydah, Al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad. [REDACTED]…with the belief that each of the three detainees possessed perishable information about imminent threats against the United States.

    Prior to the use of EITs, Abu Zubaydah provided information for [REDACTED] intelligence reports. Interrogators applied the waterboard to Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times during August 2002. During the period between the end of the use of the waterboard and 30 April 2003, he provided information for approximately [REDACTED] additional reports. It is not possible to say definitively that the waterboard is the reason for Abu Zubaydah’s increased production, or if another factor, such as the length of detention, was the catalyst. Since the use of the waterboard, however, Abu Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative, [REDACTED]

    With respect to Al-Nashiri, [REDACTED] reported two waterboard sessions in November 2002, after which the psychologist/interrogators determined that Al-Nashiri was compliant. However, after being moved [REDACTED] Al-Nashiri was thought to be withholding information. Al-Nashiri subsequently received additional EITs, [REDACTED] but not the waterboard. The Agency then determined Al-Nashiri to be “compliant.” Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify exactly why Al-Nashiri became more willing to provide information. However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [REDACTED] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.

    On the other hand, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete. As a means of less active resistance, at the beginning of their interrogation, detainees routinely provide information that they know is already known. Khalid Shakyh Muhammad received 183 applications of the waterboard in March 2003 [REDACTED]

Admittedly, the redactions make it difficult to get the whole story. But here is what we can tell.

The IG says he couldn’t tell whether it was the waterboard or some other factor that led to the increase in intelligence production coming out of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations. It seems highly unlikely on its face that Zubaydah’s time in custody alone (the only other possible explanation specifically offered by the IG) could have led to this increase in output. The waterboarding began in August 2002, and the increase in Zubaydah’s intelligence reporting that is cited ended in April of 2003. That’s a period of just nine months, which is hardly a prolonged period of time for a master terrorist such as a Zubaydah.

Moreover, even the IG concedes that since Zubaydah was waterboarded he “has appeared to be cooperative.”

Next came Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. Nashiri was waterboarded twice before the Agency determined he had become compliant. Nashiri was then apparently moved and stopped giving up intelligence, so the Agency employed a variety of EITs, but not the waterboard, in a short period of time. After the EITs were employed, Nashiri became compliant once again. Nashiri now “provided information about his most current operational planning…as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.”

So, the use of EITs on Nashiri led him to give up actionable intelligence on his operations. Previously, he was giving up “historical information,” which had presumably significantly less value.

Finally, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal planner of the September 11 attacks, was taken into custody and interrogated. Note that the final paragraph of the block quote reproduced above begins with “On the other hand…” The author appears to be drawing a comparison to the previous paragraph, which dealt with Nashiri’s interrogations. One possible reading is that while EITs other than waterboarding worked on Nashiri, they didn’t work on KSM, who was an “accomplished resistor.”

The IG found that before KSM was waterboarded he gave up only a few intelligence reports and “much” of that scant intelligence was bogus. However, we know from other declassified reports released on Monday that KSM became a font of intelligence on al Qaeda, giving up his fellow terrorists and specific plots. That’s why the CIA’s June 3, 2005, report calls KSM the Agency’s “preeminent source” on al Qaeda in the title.

What made KSM talk? Taken at face value, the IG’s report suggests that it was the waterboard, and the waterboard alone, that led to this gusher of intelligence. The un-redacted portions of the IG’s report do not mention any other possible reason for KSM’s change of heart when it came to dealing with his debriefers. And he wasn’t in custody very long before KSM started naming names – some of the terrorists he gave up were captured within a matter of weeks.

So, there you have it. Zubaydah gave up more intelligence after being waterboarded. The waterboard made Nashiri compliant. When Nashiri stopped cooperating, other EITs were used to make him talk. And talk he did, giving up the “operational” details of his plotting. And, finally, KSM gave up little of value prior to being waterboarded. Afterwards, he became the CIA’s most important source on al Qaeda.

Despite all of this, Hosenball concludes that the IG’s report does not “convincingly demonstrate” that the implementation of the EITs produced “useful information.” This is nonsense. How could Nashiri’s information about “current operational planning,” which he only gave up after the EITs were employed, not be useful? Nashiri was plotting multiple attacks prior to his capture.

And Hosenball pretends that KSM may have given up a significant amount of intelligence prior to waterboarding. The IG’s report plainly contradicts this assessment, saying that KSM gave up little prior to being waterboarded. Some of the pre-waterboarding intelligence may very well have been valuable, but much of it, according to the IG’s own report, was bunk. KSM would go on to become the CIA’s “pre-eminent source” on al Qaeda.

When Hosenball isn’t mischaracterizing the report, he is selectively citing it. The IG report notes that the detainees gave up vital information about al Qaeda’s plotting. But Hosenball selectively quotes the inspector general as saying that his investigation failed to "uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent."

Here is the full quote from the IG’s report:

    This Review did not uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent. Agency senior managers believe that lives have been saved as a result of the capture and interrogation of terrorists who were planning attacks, in particular Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Hambali, and Al-Nashiri.

Hosenball simply left out the part about saving lives.

It should be noted, too, that some of the intelligence given up by the detainees related to al Qaeda operatives who were already on American soil and plotting attacks. KSM, for example, gave up intelligence on Uzair Paracha and Iyman Faris, both of whom were plotting attacks on New York City. Faris had already cased the Brooklyn Bridge, and was exploring ways to attack landmarks in and around New York City. Uzair Paracha worked in an office in the Garment District of Manhattan. From that office, Uzair plotted attacks with his father, Saifullah. Among other nefarious plotting, the Parachas intended to help al Qaeda smuggle explosives into New York using their export/import company as a cover.

Both Uzair Paracha and Iyman Faris were arrested in March 2003, just weeks after KSM was detained. Both of them have subsequently been convicted and sentenced to prison. Saifullah Paracha is currently detained at Gitmo.

The IG may believe that their plotting did not pose an “imminent” threat, but there are plenty of good reasons to disagree with that assessment. There are other examples of what can be reasonably called “imminent” plots that were stopped as well.

Some, like Hosenball, may want to pretend that the implementation of controversial techniques did not lead to valuable intelligence and save American lives. A careful reading of the IG’s report and other documents says otherwise.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on August 27, 2009, 02:41:27 PM
- Pajamas Media - http://pajamasmedia.com -

Morale at CIA Plummets as Panetta Makes a Bad Situation Worse

Posted By Nate Hale On August 25, 2009 @ 10:28 am In . Column1 07, Crime, History, Homeland Security, Media, Politics, US News | 113 Comments

When Leon Panetta took over the CIA earlier this year, he was described (in some circles) as the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time.

Seven months later, that assessment is proving eerily prescient. As the agency prepares for a politically-charged investigation of its interrogation practices, Mr. Panetta’s leadership is noticeably lacking. Indeed, there is growing evidence that the director’s recent actions have made a bad situation worse.

We refer to the manufactured “scandal” surrounding the agency’s plans to enlist contractors in the hunt for high-value terror targets. That proposal — which involved the controversial security firm Blackwater — was discussed on several occasions, but never reached the operational stage. Three previous CIA directors declined to brief the proposal to Congress, largely because there was nothing to it.

But that didn’t stop Mr. Panetta from rushing to Capitol Hill when he learned of the project, offering an emergency briefing to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Congressional Democrats immediately pounced on Panetta’s admission, saying it supported claims (by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the spy agency had repeatedly lied to lawmakers.

Sources now suggest that Mr. Panetta regrets his actions.  Columnist Joseph Finder, who writes for the Daily Beast [1], reported last week that the CIA director spoke with his predecessors after he reported the program’s existence to members of Congress.  George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden were all aware of the program, but they elected not to inform Congress because it never evolved past the “PowerPoint” stage.

My own contacts within the intelligence community paint a similar picture. There were a few meetings (along with that slide presentation), but the CIA made no effort to make the program operational. Indeed, the planned involvement of contractor personnel made agency personnel nervous, one reason the project never moved past the discussion stage.

In other words, Leon Panetta created an unnecessary scandal at the very moment his agency is facing increased scrutiny.  According to the Washington Post [2], Attorney General Eric Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to examine allegations that CIA officers and contractors violated anti-torture laws during interrogations of terror suspects.

Mr. Holder’s reported decision is anything but a surprise. Literally from the day they took office, members of the Obama administration have been weighing a probe into CIA practices under President George W. Bush. The recent leaks about the agency’s potential partnership with Blackwater — and claims of interrogation abuse — were little more than groundwork for Eric Holder’s pending announcement.

To counter the gathering tempest, the CIA needs its own advocate, someone who can factually counter allegations of widespread misconduct. The fact is, Mr. Holder’s special counsel will investigate only a dozen cases of reported abuse out of literally thousands of interrogations conducted by CIA specialists and contract personnel. Has anyone at Langley asked if such an inquiry represents a legitimate use of government resources? Or is it simply a taxpayer-funded witch hunt, aimed at placating the ultra-liberal wing of President Obama’s party?

True, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency can’t exactly say that sort of thing in public, but you’d think that Mr. Panetta — the ultimate Washington insider — knows how the game is played. Leaks can be countered with more leaks, providing the agency’s own version of events. Better yet, the DCI could call the bluff of his opponents at the ACLU and the White House by demanding the release of documents which affirm the effectiveness of CIA interrogations — and the limited use of so-called “torture techniques.” (Note: the CIA Inspector General’s report was released after this was written and can be found here [3].)

Instead, Leon Panetta became obsessed with a non-scandal, losing valuable opportunities to defend his agency and its personnel. One retired CIA official I spoke with referred to him as “another Colby,” — a reference to William Colby, the DCI who cooperated with the Church and Pike Committees that probed agency abuses in the 1970s. To this day, many CIA employees feel that Colby went too far in his cooperation, opening the door for increased congressional oversight that gutted the agency’s covert operations directorate.

The bitter “Colby” reference is a sure sign that morale at Langley is plummeting. And with good reason. The looming special counsel inquiry will make a skittish organization even more risk averse. Talented personnel will continue to leave the agency, believing (correctly) that the CIA will leave them twisting in the wind when the going gets tough.

It’s a trend that is sadly familiar. Following previous scandals in the 70s and 80s, thousands of skilled analysts and operations specialists left Langley for greener pastures, leaving behind the hacks and politicians who presided over such intelligence debacles as 9-11.

Strong leadership could go a long way in taking on the agency’s critics and preventing another mass exodus from the agency.  But sadly, Mr. Panetta is not that type of leader. Without any meaningful intelligence experience (except as a consumer) the former Democratic congressman and White House chief of staff was asked to lead the CIA during a time of difficult transition under the new director of national intelligence construct.

To his credit, Panetta has fought some battles for his agency. ABC News [4] reports the DCI erupted into a tirade during a White House meeting that apparently laid out plans for Holder’s investigation. Sources tell ABC that Panetta also threatened to resign, although a CIA spokesman denies those claims.

Meanwhile, the White House is said to be screening possible replacements, suggesting that Panetta’s departure is all but inevitable. Under normal circumstances, the removal of an ineffectual CIA director would be welcome news. But these are extraordinary times; American troops are fighting two wars and the threat from global terrorists remains critical. At a time when the agency needs an exceptional hand on the tiller, Mr. Panetta has only one thing going for him: his potential replacement are likely to be even worse, setting the stage for more bloodletting — and diminished capabilities — at Langley.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/morale-at-cia-plummets-as-panetta-makes-a-bad-situation-worse/

URLs in this post:

[1] the Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-18/spy-agency-fiasco/

[2] Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/24/AR2009082401743.html

[3] here: http://washingtonindependent.com/56175/the-2004-cia-inspector-generals-report-on-torture

[4] ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8398902
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on August 28, 2009, 08:33:20 PM

 
August 28, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

Eric Holder’s Hidden Agenda
The investigation isn’t about torture, but about transnationalism.

By Andrew C. McCarthy


‘This is an administration that is determined to conduct itself by the rule of law. And to the extent that we receive lawful requests from an appropriately created court, we would obviously respond to it.”

It was springtime in Berlin and Eric Holder, a well-known “rule of law” devotee, was speaking to the German press. He’d been asked if his Justice Department would cooperate with efforts by foreign or international tribunals to prosecute U.S. government officials who carried out the Bush administration’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policies. The attorney general assured listeners that he was certainly open to being helpful. “Obviously,” he said, “we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it.”

As the Associated Press reported at the time, Holder was “pressed on whether that meant the United States would cooperate with a foreign court prosecuting Bush administration officials.” He skirted the question in a way Americans ought to find alarming. The attorney general indicated that he was speaking only about “evidentiary requests.” Translation: The Obama administration will not make arrests and hand current or former American government officials over for foreign trials, but if the Europeans or U.N. functionaries (at the nudging of, say, the Organization of the Islamic Conference) want Justice’s help gathering evidence in order to build triable cases — count us in.

Hue and cry followed Holder’s decision this week to have a prosecutor investigate CIA interrogators and contractors. The probe is a nakedly political, banana republic-style criminalizing of policy differences and political rivalry. The abuse allegations said to have stunned the attorney general into acting are outlined in a stale CIA inspector general’s report. Though only released this week — a disclosure timed to divert attention from reports that showed the CIA’s efforts yielded life-saving intelligence — the IG report is actually five years old. Its allegations not only have been long known to the leaders of both parties in Congress, they were thoroughly investigated by professional prosecutors — not political appointees. Those prosecutors decided not to file charges, except in one case that ended in an acquittal. As I outline here, the abuse in question falls woefully short of torture crimes under federal law.

Americans are scratching their heads: Why would Holder retrace this well-worn ground when intimidating our intelligence-gatherers so obviously damages national security? The political fallout, too, is palpable. Leon Panetta, the outraged CIA director, is reportedly pondering resignation. President Obama, laying low in the tall grass on his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, is having staffers try to put distance between himself and his attorney general. It is unlikely that many will be fooled: Both Obama and Holder promised their antiwar base just this sort of “reckoning” during the 2008 campaign. But the question remains, Why is Holder (or, rather, why are Holder and the White House) instigating this controversy?

I believe the explanation lies in the Obama administration’s fondness for transnationalism, a doctrine of post-sovereign globalism in which America is seen as owing its principal allegiance to the international legal order rather than to our own Constitution and national interests.

Recall that the president chose to install former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as his State Department’s legal adviser. Koh is the country’s leading proponent of transnationalism. He is now a major player in the administration’s deliberations over international law and cooperation. Naturally, membership in the International Criminal Court, which the United States has resisted joining, is high on Koh’s agenda. The ICC claims worldwide jurisdiction, even over nations that do not ratify its enabling treaty, notwithstanding that sovereign consent to jurisdiction is a bedrock principle of international law.

As a result, there have always been serious concerns that the ICC could investigate and try to indict American political, military, and intelligence officials for actions taken in defense of our country. Here it’s crucial to bear in mind that the United States (or at least the pre-Obama United States) has not seen eye-to-eye with Europe on significant national-security matters. European nations, for example, have accepted the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, while the United States has rejected it. Protocol I extends protections to terrorists and imposes an exacting legal regime on combat operations, relying on such concepts as “proportional” use of force and rigorous distinction between military and civilian targets. That is, Protocol I potentially converts traditional combat operations into war crimes. Similarly, though the U.S. accepted the torture provisions of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), our nation rejected the UNCAT’s placing of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” on a par with torture. By contrast, Europe generally accepts the UNCAT in toto.

#pageAs long as we haven’t ratified a couple of bad human-rights treaties, why should we care that Europe considers them binding? Because of the monstrosity known as “customary international law,” of which Koh is a major proponent. This theory holds that once new legal principles gain broad acceptance among nations and international organizations, they somehow transmogrify into binding law, even for nations that haven’t agreed to them. That is, the judgment of the “international community” (meaning, the judgment of left-wing academics and human-rights activists who hold sway at the U.N. and the European Union) supersedes the standards our citizens have adopted democratically. It is standard fare among transnational progressives to claim that Protocol I is now binding on the United States and that what they define as cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment is “tantamount to torture.”

And the transnational Left has still another treat in store: its notion of “universal jurisdiction.” This theory holds that individual nations have the power to prosecute actions that occur in other countries, even when they have no impact on the prosecuting nation. The idea is that some offenses — such as torture and war crimes — so offend the purported consensus of humanity (i.e., so offend left-wing sensibilities) that they may be prosecuted by any country that cares to take the initiative. In fact, many countries (the United States included) open their justice systems to civil suits against government officials — again, even if the country where the suit is filed has nothing to do with the alleged offenses.

So we come back to Holder in Berlin. Two months before the attorney general’s visit, the U.N.’s “special rapporteur on torture” told German television that the Obama administration had “a clear obligation” under the UNCAT to file torture charges against former president George W. Bush and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The rapporteur was relying on documents produced because of American investigations — including a nakedly partisan report by the Democrat-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee.

Meanwhile, as I detailed here in March, Spain’s universal-justice crusader Baltasar Garzón is pursuing his own torture case against Bush administration lawyers who weighed in on interrogation policy. Garzón is the Spanish investigating magistrate who, with the help of a terrorist turned human-rights lawyer, had Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet arrested in England for crimes against humanity. The same terrorist-lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, is helping Garzón on the Bush case. The Brits, by the way, eventually decided not to send Pinochet to Spain, but not before the law lords ruled that they could, a decision enthusiastically hailed at the time by U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. That would be the same Mary Robinson of Durban infamy — the one President Obama just honored with the Medal of Freedom.

And then there is the Center for Constitutional Rights, a Marxist organization that for years has coordinated legal representation for terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay. The CCR has been attempting to convince Germany, France, Spain, and other countries to file war-crime indictments against former Bush administration officials, including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary Rumsfeld. In representing America’s enemies, CCR has collaborated with many private lawyers, who also volunteered their services — several of whom are now working in the Obama Justice Department. Indeed, Holder’s former firm boasts that it still represents 16 Gitmo detainees (the number was previously higher). And, for help shaping detainee policy, Holder recently hired Jennifer Daskal for DOJ’s National Security Division — a lawyer from Human Rights Watch with no prior prosecutorial experience, whose main qualification seems to be the startling advocacy she has done for enemy combatants.

Put it all together and it’s really not that hard to figure out what is going on here.

Transnationalists from outside and, now, inside our government have been ardent supporters of prosecutions against American officials who designed and carried out the Bush counterterrorism policies that kept this country safe after 9/11. The U.N.’s top torture monitor is demanding legal action, almost certainly as a prelude to calling for action by an international tribunal — such as the ICC — if the Justice Department fails to indict. Meantime, law-enforcement authorities in Spain and elsewhere are weighing charges against the same U.S. officials, spurred on by the CCR and human-rights groups that now have friends in high American places. In foreign and international courts, the terrorist-friendly legal standards preferred by Europe and the U.N. would make convictions easier to obtain and civil suits easier to win.

Obama and Holder were principal advocates for a “reckoning” against Bush officials during the 2008 campaign. They realize, though, that their administration would be mortally wounded if Justice were actually to file formal charges — this week’s announcement of an investigation against the CIA provoked howls, but that’s nothing compared to the public reaction indictments would cause. Nevertheless, Obama and Holder are under intense pressure from the hard Left, to which they made reckless promises, and from the international community they embrace.

The way out of this dilemma is clear. Though it won’t file indictments against the CIA agents and Bush officials it is probing, the Justice Department will continue conducting investigations and releasing reports containing new disclosures of information. The churn of new disclosures will be used by lawyers for the detainees to continue pressing the U.N. and the Europeans to file charges. The European nations and/or international tribunals will make formal requests to the Obama administration to have the Justice Department assist them in securing evidence. Holder will piously announce that the “rule of law” requires him to cooperate with these “lawful requests” from “appropriately created courts.” Finally, the international and/or foreign courts will file criminal charges against American officials.

Foreign charges would result in the issuance of international arrest warrants. They won’t be executed in the United States — even this administration is probably not brazen enough to try that. But the warrants will go out to police agencies all over the world. If the indicted American officials want to travel outside the U.S., they will need to worry about the possibility of arrest, detention, and transfer to third countries for prosecution. Have a look at this 2007 interview of CCR president Michael Ratner. See how he brags that his European gambit is “making the world smaller” for Rumsfeld — creating a hostile legal climate in which a former U.S. defense secretary may have to avoid, for instance, attending conferences in NATO countries.

The Left will get its reckoning. Obama and Holder will be able to take credit with their supporters for making it happen. But because the administration’s allies in the antiwar bar and the international Left will do the dirty work of getting charges filed, the American media will help Obama avoid domestic political accountability. Meanwhile, Americans who sought to protect our nation from barbarians will be harassed and framed as war criminals. And protecting the United States will have become an actionable violation of international law.

I’m betting that’s the plan.

 


— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).
 
 

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National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGMyYTQ1ZTM5YTQ5NjJjNzJmNGUxZDIyOTFjYzIyM2Y=
Title: Subversion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 28, 2009, 11:01:48 PM
This matter of "subversion of sovereignty through internationalism" is one of the subtlest and most perverse of all the subversions of America by the O-droids.   

I'd like to suggest that future posts on this point appear in the American Creed threads.
Title: Stratfor: Libya: A hero's welcome
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 29, 2009, 06:46:58 AM
Libya: A Hero's Welcome
August 26, 2009
By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton

On Aug. 24, Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill addressed a special session of the Scottish Parliament. The session was called so that MacAskill could explain why he had decided to release Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of terrorism charges in connection with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and who had been expected to spend the rest of his life in prison. MacAskill said he granted al-Megrahi a compassionate release because al-Megrahi suffers from terminal prostate cancer and is expected to live only a few months.

The Aug. 20 release of al-Megrahi ignited a firestorm of outrage in both the United Kingdom and the United States. FBI Director Robert Mueller released to the press contents of an uncharacteristically blunt and critical letter he had written to MacAskill in which Mueller characterized al-Megrahi’s release as inexplicable and “detrimental to the cause of justice.” Mueller told MacAskill in the letter that the release “makes a mockery of the rule of law.”

The flames of outrage over the release of al-Megrahi were further fanned when al-Megrahi received a hero’s welcome upon his arrival in Tripoli — video of him being welcomed and embraced by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was broadcast all over the world.

For his part, Gadhafi has long lobbied for al-Megrahi’s release, even while taking steps to end Libya’s status as an international pariah. Gadhafi first renounced terrorism and his nuclear ambitions in 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In October 2008 he completed the compensation agreement with the families of the U.S. victims of the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 and of an April 1986 Libyan attack against the La Belle disco in Berlin.

Yet despite the conviction of al-Megrahi, the 2003 official admission of Libyan responsibility for the Pan Am bombing in a letter to the United Nations, and the agreement to pay compensation to the families of the Pan Am victims, Gadhafi has always maintained in public statements that al-Megrahi and Libya were not responsible for the bombing. The official admission of responsibility for the Pan Am bombing, coupled with the public denials, has resulted in a great deal of ambiguity and confusion over the authorship of the attack — which, in all likelihood, is precisely what the denials were intended to do.

The Pan Am 103 Investigation
At 7:03 p.m. on Dec. 21, 1988, an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated in one of Pan Am Flight 103’s cargo containers, causing the plane to break apart and fall from the sky. The 259 passengers and crew members aboard the flight died, as did 11 residents of Lockerbie, Scotland, the town where the remnants of the jumbo jet fell.

Immediately following the bombing, there was suspicion that the Iranians or Syrians had commissioned the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) to conduct the bombing. This belief was based on the fact that German authorities had taken down a large PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt in October 1988 and that one member of the cell had in his possession an IED concealed inside a Toshiba radio. Frankfurt is the city where Pan Am 103 departed before stopping in London. Indeed, even today, there are still some people who believe that the PFLP-GC was commissioned by either the Iranian or the Syrian government to conduct the Pan Am bombing.

The PFLP-GC theory might eventually have become the officially accepted theory had the bomb on Pan Am 103 detonated (as planned) while the aircraft was over the North Atlantic Ocean. However, a delay in the plane’s departure from London resulted in the timed device detonating while the aircraft was still over land, and this allowed authorities to collect a great deal of evidence that had been scattered across a wide swath of the Scottish countryside. The search effort was one of the most complex crime-scene investigations ever conducted.

Through months of painstakingly detailed effort, investigators were able to determine that the aircraft was brought down by an IED containing a main charge of Semtex, that the IED had been placed inside a Toshiba radio cassette player (in a macabre coincidence, that particular model of Toshiba, the RT-SF 16, is called the “BomBeat radio cassette player”), and that the radio had been located inside a brown Samsonite hard-side suitcase located inside the cargo container.

Investigators were also able to trace the clothing inside the suitcase containing the IED to a specific shop, Mary’s House, in Sliema, Malta. While examining one of the pieces of Maltese clothing in May 1989, investigators found a fragment of a circuit board that did not match anything found in the Toshiba radio. It is important to remember that in a bombing, the pieces of the IED do not entirely disappear. They may be shattered and scattered, but they are not usually completely vaporized. Although some pieces may be damaged beyond recognition, others are not, and this often allows investigators to reconstruct the device

In mid-1990, after an exhaustive effort to identify the circuit-board fragment, the FBI laboratory in Washington was able to determine that the circuit board was very similar to one that came from a timer that a special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service had recovered from an arms cache while investigating a Libyan-sponsored coup attempt in Lome, Togo, in 1986. Further investigation determined that the company that produced the timers, the Swiss company MEBO, had sold as many as 20 of the devices to the Libyan government, and that the Libyan government was the company’s primary customer. Interestingly, in 1988, MEBO rented one of its offices in Zurich to a firm called ABH, which was run by two Libyan intelligence officers: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Badri Hassan.

The MEBO timer, model MST-13, is very different from the ice-cube timer in the PFLP-GC device found in Frankfurt in October 1988. Additionally, the ice-cube timer in the PFLP-GC device was used in conjunction with a barometric pressure switch, and the IED used a different main charge, TNT, instead of the Semtex used in the Pan Am 103 device.

Perhaps the fact that does the most damage to the PFLP-GC conspiracy theory is that the principal bombmaker for the PFLP-GC Frankfurt cell (and the man who made the PFLP-GC Toshiba device), Marwan Khreesat, was actually an infiltrator sent into the organization by the Jordanian intelligence service. Kreesat not only assisted in providing the information that allowed the Germans to take down the cell, but he was under strict orders by his Jordanian handlers to ensure that every IED he constructed was not capable of detonating. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that one of the IEDs he created was used to destroy Pan Am 103.

One of the Libyans connected to MEBO, al-Megrahi, is an interesting figure. Not only was he an officer with Libyan intelligence, the External Security Organization, or ESO, but he also served as the chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA) and had visited Malta many times. The owner of the Mary’s House clothing shop in Sliema identified al-Megrahi as the man who purchased the clothing found in the suitcase, and Maltese immigration records indicated that al-Megrahi was in Malta on Dec. 7, 1988, the time that the clothing was purchased. Al-Megrahi left Malta on Dec. 9, 1988, but returned to the country using a false identity on Dec. 20, using a passport issued by the ESO in the name of Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad. Al-Megrahi left Malta using the Abdusamad passport on Dec. 21, 1988, the day the suitcase was apparently sent from Malta aboard Air Malta Flight KM180 to Frankfurt and then transferred to Pan Am 103.

On Nov. 13, 1991, the British government charged al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, the LAA station manager at Luqa Airport in Malta, with the bombing. One day later, a federal grand jury in the United States returned an indictment against the same two men for the crime. In March 1995, the FBI added the two men to its most wanted list and the Diplomatic Security Service’s Rewards for Justice Program offered a $4 million reward for their capture. Al-Megrahi and Fhimah were placed under house arrest in Libya — a comfortable existence that, more than actually confining them, served to protect them from being kidnapped and spirited out of Libya to face trial.

After many years of boycotts, embargos, U.N. resolutions and diplomatic wrangling — including extensive efforts by South African President Nelson Mandela and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan — a compromise was reached and all parties agreed to a trial in a neutral country — the Netherlands — conducted under Scottish law. On April 5, 1999, al-Megrahi and Fhimah were transferred to Camp Zeist in the Netherlands to stand trial before a special panel of Scottish judges.

On Jan. 31, 2001, after a very long trial that involved an incredible amount of technical and detailed testimony, the judges reached their decision. The Scottish judges acquitted Fhimah, finding that there was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was involved in the plot (the British government had charged that he had been the person who stole the luggage tags and placed the suitcase on the Air Malta flight), but they did find al-Megrahi guilty of 270 counts of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum sentence of 27 years.

Although the case against al-Megrahi was entirely circumstantial — there was no direct evidence he or Fhimah had placed the device aboard the aircraft — the Scottish judges wrote in their decision that they believed the preponderance of the evidence, including al-Megrahi’s knowledge of airline security measures and procedures, his connection to MEBO, his purchase of the clothing in the suitcase that had contained the IED and his clandestine travel to Malta on Dec. 20 to 21, 1988, convinced them beyond a reasonable doubt that al-Megrahi was guilty as charged.

In a December 2003 letter to the United Nations, Libya accepted responsibility for the Pan Am 103 bombing. (In the same letter, Libya also took responsibility for the September 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772, a French airliner destroyed by an IED after leaving Brazzaville, Congo, and making a stop in N’Djamena, Chad. All 170 people aboard the aircraft died when it broke up over the Sahara in Niger.) Nevertheless, the Libyan government continued to maintain al-Megrahi’s innocence in the Pan Am bombing, just as al-Megrahi had done throughout the trial, insisting that he had not been involved in the bombing.

Al-Megrahi’s reluctance to admit responsibility for the bombing or to show any contrition for the attack is one of the factors singled out by those who opposed his release from prison. It is also one of the hallmarks of a professional intelligence officer. In many ways, al-Megrahi’s public stance regarding the bombing can be summed up by the unofficial motto of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services — “Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.”

Shadows
In the shadow world of covert action it is not uncommon for the governments behind such actions to deny (or at least not claim) responsibility for them. These governments also often attempt to plan such attacks in a way that will lead to a certain level of ambiguity — and thereby provide plausible deniability. This was a characteristic seen in many Libyan attacks against U.S. interests, such as the 1986 La Belle Disco bombing in Berlin. It was only an intercept of Libyan communications that provided proof of Libyan responsibility for that attack.

Many attacks that the Libyans sponsored or subcontracted out, such as the string of attacks carried out against U.S. interests by members of the Japanese Red Army and claimed in the name of the Anti-Imperialist International Brigade, were likewise meant to provide Libya with plausible deniability. Gadhafi did not relish the possibility of another American airstrike on his home in Tripoli, like the one that occurred after the La Belle attack in April 1986. (A number of Libyan military targets also were hit in the broader U.S. military action, known as Operation El Dorado Canyon.) Pan Am 103 is considered by many to be Gadhafi’s retribution for those American airstrikes, one of which killed his adopted baby daughter. Gadhafi, who had reportedly been warned of the strike by the Italian government, was not injured in the attack.

During the 1980s, the Libyan government was locked in a heated tit-for-tat battle with the United States. One source of this friction were U.S. claims that the Libyan government supported terrorist groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), which conducted several brutal, high-profile attacks in the 1980s, including the December 1985 Rome and Vienna airport assaults. There was also military tension between the two countries as Libya declared a “line of death” across the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra. The U.S. Navy shot down several Libyan fighter aircraft that had attempted to enforce the edict. But these two threads of tension were closely intertwined; the U.S. Navy purposefully challenged the line of death in the spring of 1986 in response to the Rome and Vienna attacks, and it is believed that the La Belle attack was retribution for the U.S. military action in the Gulf of Sidra. The Libyan ESO was also directly implicated in attacks against U.S. diplomats in Sanaa, Yemen, and Khartoum, Sudan, in 1986.

Because of the need for plausible deniability, covert operatives are instructed to stick to their cover story and maintain their innocence if they are caught. Al-Megrahi’s consistent denials and his many appeals, which often cite the PFLP-GC case in Frankfurt, have done a great deal to sow doubt and provide Libya with some deniability.

Like Osama bin Laden’s initial denial of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, al-Megrahi’s claims of innocence have served as ready fuel for conspiracy theorists, who claim he was framed by the U.S. and British governments. However, any conspiracy to frame al-Megrahi and his Libyan masters would have to be very wide ranging and, by necessity, reach much further than just London and Washington. For example, anyone considering such a conspiracy must also account for the fact that in 1999 a French court convicted six Libyans in absentia for the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772. The six included Abdullah al-Sanussi, Gadhafi’s brother-in-law and head of the ESO.

Getting two or more governments to cooperate on some sort of grand conspiracy to frame the Libyans and exonerate the Iranians and Syrians is hard to fathom. Such cooperation would have to involve enough people that, sooner or later, someone would spill the beans — especially considering that the Pan Am 103 saga played out over multiple U.S. administrations. As seen by the current stir over CIA interrogation programs, administrations love to make political hay by revealing the cover-ups of previous administrations. Surely, if there had been a secret ploy by the Reagan or Bush administrations to frame the Libyans, the Clinton or Obama administration would have outed it. The same principle applies to the United Kingdom, where Margaret Thatcher’s government oversaw the beginning of the Pan Am 103 investigation and Labour governments after 1997 would have had the incentive to reveal information to the contrary.

While the U.S. and British governments work closely together on a number of intelligence projects, they are frequently at odds on counterterrorism policy and foreign relations. From our personal experience, we believe that it would be very difficult to get multiple U.S. and British administrations from different political parties to work in perfect harmony to further this sort of conspiracy. Due to the UTA investigation and trial, the conspiracy would have to somehow involve the French government. While the Americans working with the British is one thing, the very idea of the Americans, British and French working in perfect harmony on any sort of project — much less a grand secret conspiracy to frame the Libyans — is simply unimaginable. It is much easier to believe that the Libyans were guilty, especially in light of the litany of other terror attacks they committed or sponsored during that era.

Had the IED in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103 exploded over the open ocean, it is very unlikely that the clothing from Malta and the fragment of the MEBO timer would have ever been recovered — think of the difficulty the French have had in locating the black box from Air France 447 in June of this year. In such a scenario, the evidence linking al-Megrahi and the Libyan government to the Pan Am bombing might never have been discovered and plausible deniability could have been maintained indefinitely.

The evidence recovered in Scotland and al-Megrahi’s eventual conviction put a dent in that deniability, but the true authors of the attack — al-Megrahi’s superiors — were never formally charged. Without al-Megrahi’s cooperation, there was no evidence to prove who ordered him to undertake the attack, though it is logical to conclude that the ESO would never undertake such a significant attack without Gadhafi’s approval.

Now that al-Megrahi has returned to Libya and is in Libyan safekeeping, there is no chance that any death-bed confession he may give will ever make it to the West. His denials will be his final words and the ambiguity and doubt those denials cast will be his legacy. In the shadowy world of clandestine operations, this is the ideal behavior for someone caught committing an operational act. He has shielded his superiors and his government to the end. From the perspective of the ESO, and Moammar Gadhafi, al-Megrahi is indeed a hero.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on September 29, 2009, 08:29:51 AM
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/07/20/germans-of-course-iran-kept-working-on-nuclear-weapons/

Germans: Of course Iran kept working on nuclear weapons
posted at 1:36 pm on July 20, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

When the American intelligence community reversed itself in 2007 and announced that Iran had quit working on nuclear weapons in 2003, jaws dropped around the world.  George Bush’s political opponents at home and enemies around the world used it to buffalo the administration into reducing its effort to corner Tehran, but European intelligence agencies did not fall for the political kneecapping performed on Bush.  At the time, British intel rejected that conclusion, and now the Wall Street Journal reports that the Germans have thoroughly debunked it:

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany’s highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency “showed comprehensively” that “development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003.”
According to the judges, the BND supplemented its findings on August 28, 2008, showing “the development of a new missile launcher and the similarities between Iran’s acquisition efforts and those of countries with already known nuclear weapons programs, such as Pakistan and North Korea.”
It’s important to point out that this was no ordinary agency report, the kind that often consists just of open source material, hearsay and speculation. Rather, the BND submitted an “office testimony,” which consists of factual statements about the Iranian program that can be proved in a court of law. This is why, in their March 26 opinion, the judges wrote that “a preliminary assessment of the available evidence suggests that at the time of the crime [April to November 2007] nuclear weapons were being developed in Iran.” In their May press release, the judges come out even more clear, stating unequivocally that “Iran in 2007 worked on the development of nuclear weapons.”

This rises far above the level of evidence provided in the 2007 NIE.  The court had to determine whether evidence presented by the German government could convict a defendant in an espionage trial, and the case rested in large part on whether the Iranians had continued to develop nuclear weapons.  A lower-court ruling had tossed out the indictment, ruling that the US NIE showed that Iran had not done work on its nuclear-weapons programs during the time that the defendant had allegedly traded illegally and conducted espionage on behalf of their program.  In response, the BND showed the court their evidence of continued work on the weapons program — which the court ruled sufficient to use at trial.
As the authors note, this decision calls into question yet again how the US intelligence service could have concluded otherwise.  Did they not coordinate with the Germans, who have much better access to Iran than either the US or even the British?  The BND says they shared these findings with the Americans prior to the publication of the NIE, but that they were ignored.  Why?
It’s really not difficult to conclude that the higher echelons of American intelligence had gone to war with the Bush administration early in his presidency.  The 2007 NIE was their coup de grace, making Bush impotent and giving them control over American foreign policy.  It also let vital time slip past while Iran continued to develop nuclear weapons, although in the event, Europe simply rejected the NIE as faulty and proceeded along the same path that Bush had demanded.  The NIE gave Russia and China political cover to block the West’s attempts to rein in the Iranians, although that would have happened anyway with other rationalizations.
Democrats are demanding a reckoning with the CIA over a program that never proceeded past the spitball stage.  Republicans ought to demand a reckoning, too — over the NIE and the wool that got pulled over the eyes of Congress.
Title: WSJ: Mukasey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2009, 06:23:17 AM
By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY
One would think that the arrests last week of Najibullah Zazi, charged with plotting to bomb New York City subways—and of two others charged with planning to blow up buildings in Dallas, Texas, and Springfield, Ill.—would generate support for the intelligence-gathering tools that protect this country from Muslim fanatics. In Mr. Zazi's case, the government has already confirmed the value of these tools: It has filed a notice of its intent to use information gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was specifically written to help combat terrorists and spies.

Nevertheless, there is a rear-guard action in Congress to make it more difficult to gather, use and protect intelligence—the only weapon that can prevent an attack rather than simply punish one after the fact. The USA Patriot Act, enacted in the aftermath of 9/11, is a case in point.

This law has a series of provisions that will expire unless Congress renews them. Up for renewal this year is a provision that permits investigators to maintain surveillance of sophisticated terrorists who change cell phones frequently to evade detection. This kind of surveillance is known as "roving wiretaps." Also up for renewal are authorizations to seek court orders to examine business records in national security investigations, and to conduct national security investigations even when investigators cannot prove a particular target is connected to a particular terrorist organization or foreign power—known as "lone wolf" authority.

View Full Image

AP Photo/New York City Police Department
 
Najibullah Zazi, center, faces charges in a plot to blow up commuter trains.
.Roving wiretaps have been used for decades by law enforcement in routine narcotics cases. They reportedly were used to help thwart a plot earlier this year to blow up synagogues in Riverdale, N.Y. Business records, including bank and telephone records, can provide important leads early in a national security investigation, and they have been used to obtain evidence in numerous cases.

The value of lone wolf authority is best demonstrated by its absence in the summer of 2001. That's when FBI agents might have obtained a warrant to search the computer of Zacharias Moussaoui, often referred to as the "20th hijacker," before the 9/11 attacks—although there was no proof at the time of his arrest on an immigration violation that he was acting for a terrorist organization. But a later search of his computer revealed just that.

Rather than simply renew these vital provisions, which expire at the end of this year, some congressional Democrats want to impose requirements that would diminish their effectiveness, or add burdens to existing authorizations that would retard rather than advance our ability to gather intelligence.

One bill would require the government to prove that the business records it seeks by court order pertain to an agent of a foreign power before investigators have seen those records. The current standard requires only that the records in question do not involve a person in the United States, or that they do relate to an investigation undertaken to protect the country against international terrorism or spying.

The section of the Patriot Act that confers the authority on investigators to seek these records was amended in 2006 to add civil liberties protections when sensitive personal information about a person in the U.S. is gathered. It passed the Senate overwhelmingly with support that included then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

The same proposed legislation would make it harder to obtain a real-time record of incoming and outgoing calls—known as a pen register—in national security cases. It does so by requiring that the government prove that the information sought in this record relates to a foreign power. Currently, the government can obtain a court order by certifying that the information sought either is foreign-intelligence information or relates to an investigation to protect against foreign terrorism or spying.

While the changes may sound benign, they turn the concept of an investigation on its head, requiring the government to submit proof at the outset of an investigation while facts are still being sought. In any event, a pen register shows only who called whom and nothing about the content of the call, and thus raises none of the privacy concerns that are at stake when a full-fledged wiretap is at issue. Moreover, the underlying information in a pen register is not private because telephone companies routinely have it.

Other proposals target national security letters, known as NSLs, which are administrative subpoenas like those issued routinely by the FBI and agencies as diverse as the Agriculture Department and the IRS to get information they need in order to enforce the statutes they administer. One Democratic bill would impose a four-year sunset on the FBI's authority to issue such letters where none exists now. Another, the "Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts Act of 2009," would bar their use entirely to get information about local or long-distance calls, financial transactions, or information from credit reports.

But this is precisely the kind of information that would be useful to an investigator trying to find out who a terrorist is calling or how much money he is receiving from overseas. The FBI already has the authority to obtain this kind of information in cases involving crimes against children. The Drug Enforcement Administration has it in drug cases. There is no sense in giving investigators in national security cases less authority than investigators in criminal cases, and in criticizing them for failing to connect the dots while denying them the authority to discover the dots.

Mr. Zazi's arrest is only the most recent case in which intelligence apparently has averted disaster. Cells have been broken up and individual defendants convicted in New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas and Ohio.

But a disaster once averted is not permanently averted, as the writer Jonah Goldberg has noted. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing killed six people and injured hundreds, Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind, was caught, convicted and put in the maximum security prison at Florence, Colo. Nonetheless, the World Trade Center towers are gone along with thousands of people.

Those who indulge paranoid fantasies of government investigators snooping on the books they take out of the library, and who would roll back current authorities in the name of protecting civil liberties, should consider what legislation will be proposed and passed if the next Najibullah Zazi is not detected.

Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.
Title: Re: Intel Matters, Iran ended nuclear weapons program in 2003?
Post by: DougMacG on October 06, 2009, 08:42:39 AM
While we are investigating the questioning methods of terrorists that saved thousands of innocent lives, why is there no push for a congressional investigation and prosecution of the lying, backstabbing, partisan traitors in the intelligence agencies that brought us the known-FALSE report in 2007 that Iran had ended its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003?  Just curious.

I would hope that these negligent contributors to future genocides would receive fair trials with plenty of lengthy and expensive appeals, and then be executed for treason.
Title: John Yoo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2009, 06:02:25 PM
The author of this piece was an attorney for Bush and is held many to have written some really shoddy briefs in favor of harsh interrogation.

That said, this piece seems to make a lot of sense to me.
=========================
By JOHN YOO
'This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision," President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.

No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.

Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.

Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.

KSM is the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and a "terrorist entrepreneur," according to the 9/11 Commission report. He was the brains behind a succession of operations against the U.S., including the 1996 "Bojinka plot" to crash jetliners into American cities. Together with Osama bin Laden, he selected the 9/11 terrorists, arranged their financing and training, and ran the whole operation from abroad.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan KSM eventually became bin Laden's operations chief. American and Pakistani intelligence forces captured him on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Now, however, KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.

Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the "blind Sheikh"), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.

In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.

Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be.

Even more harmful to our national security will be the effect a civilian trial of KSM will have on the future conduct of intelligence officers and military personnel. Will they have to read al Qaeda terrorists their Miranda rights? Will they have to secure the "crime scene" under battlefield conditions? Will they have to take statements from nearby "witnesses"? Will they have to gather evidence and secure its chain of custody for transport all the way back to New York? All of this while intelligence officers and soldiers operate in a war zone, trying to stay alive, and working to complete their mission and get out without casualties.

The Obama administration has rejected the tool designed to solve this tension between civilian trials and the demands of intelligence and military operations. In 2001, President George W. Bush established military commissions, which have a long history that includes World War II, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. The lawyers in the Bush administration—I was one—understood that military commissions could guarantee a fair trial while protecting national security secrets from excessive exposure.

The Supreme Court has upheld the use of commissions for war crimes. The procedures for these commissions received the approval of Congress in 2006 and 2009.

Stranger yet, the Obama administration declared last week that it would use these military commissions to try five other al Qaeda operatives held at Guantanamo Bay, including Abu Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged planner of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It should make no difference that this second group attacked a military target overseas. If anything, the deliberate attack on purely civilian targets in New York City represents the greater war crime.

For a preview of the KSM trial, look at what happened in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker who was arrested in the U.S. just before 9/11. His trial never made it to a jury. Moussaoui's lawyers tied the court up in knots.

All they had to do was demand that the government hand over all its intelligence on him. The case became a four-year circus, giving Moussaoui a platform to air his anti-American tirades. The only reason the trial ended was because, at the last minute, Moussaoui decided to plead guilty. That plea relieved the government of the choice between allowing a fishing expedition into its intelligence files or dismissing the charges.

KSM's lawyers will not save the government from itself. Instead they will press hard to reveal intelligence secrets in open court. Our intelligence agents and soldiers will be the ones to suffer.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03 and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 16, 2009, 12:11:48 AM
Crafty,

What do you think was shoddy about Yoo's briefs?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2009, 03:23:28 PM
Oil drilling equipment. From North Korea? Pull the other one, Sergei.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/world/asia/14thai.html?hp
December 14, 2009

Crew of Detained Plane Denies Knowledge of Arms

By THOMAS FULLER and NICE POJANAMESBAANSTIT

BANGKOK — In their first interview since being detained by Thai authorities, the crew of a cargo aircraft traveling from North Korea said Sunday that they did not know they had been transporting an arsenal of rockets, grenade launchers and other unidentified weapons weighing at least 30 tons.

“They said it was oil drilling equipment,” said Viktor Abdullayev, the plane’s co-pilot. “That’s what the manager told us,” he said referring to his employer, a civilian cargo company from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Officials in Thailand did little over the weekend to shed light on the perplexing seizure of the aircraft, offering only rudimentary details about the plane, its crew and its cargo.

The five-man crew is to be charged in court Monday with possession of weapons of war, in a case that may shed light on the shadowy business of global arms trafficking — and in North Korea’s role, in particular.

Thai authorities said the weapons were seized after a tip from American officials, and said the shipment appeared to violate a United Nations arms embargo but did not provide a detailed accounting of the armaments, which will undergo a more thorough inspection Tuesday.

Thailand was acting, it said, under United Nations Resolution 1874, which was passed in June in response to nuclear tests in North Korea. The resolution is effectively an arms embargo covering the transport of heavy weaponry to and from North Korea. Such weapons sales are one of the few ways the country has been able to earn foreign currency.

The resolution, which builds on a previous resolution from 2006, calls on countries to “inspect and destroy” certain categories of weapons bound to or from North Korea, including large-caliber artillery, missiles and missile spare parts.

No major seizures of weapons have been made public since the passage of the resolution. This summer, the United States Navy tracked a North Korean freighter suspected of carrying banned cargo for about three weeks, and the ship eventually turned back to its home port without incident.

Speaking in rudimentary English, Mr. Abdullayev and his colleagues said they started their current mission in Ukraine, picked up cargo in North Korea and were traveling back to Ukraine via Thailand, Sri Lanka and the United Arab Emirates. They declined to say in which of those locations the cargo was meant to be delivered.

Mr. Abdullayev, who said he was from Kazakhstan, said it never occurred to him to inquire about the cargo. “I have no interest in what I carry,” he said. “Like a truck driver: just keep driving.”

Panitan Wattanayagorn, the Thai government spokesman, said in an interview that the aircraft, a Russian-made Ilyushin 76, which is registered in Georgia, had come through Bangkok twice — both on the way and during the return trip from North Korea. The aircraft was searched on the return journey after Thai authorities were tipped off by American officials that the aircraft might be carrying weapons. The crew was detained and the cargo confiscated but not immediately. The crew had enough time to buy six large bottles of beer at a duty-free shop, which were confiscated from them in the detention center where they are now being kept.

Mr. Panitan denied reports that the Friday stopover in Bangkok was an emergency landing.

“It was a scheduled landing to refuel the plane,” Mr. Panitan said.

Analysts have questioned why an aircraft carrying an illicit payload would land and refuel at an airfield in Bangkok — Don Muang airport — that is also used by the Thai military. The choice of Thailand as a refueling station is also peculiar considering the country’s close military ties with the United States.

“There’s much more to this story than what has been made public so far,” said Bertil Lintner, an author who has written extensively on North Korea. “Why would you refuel in Thailand?” If the aircraft had landed in neighboring Myanmar, which is ruled by generals friendly to the North Korean regime, “there would have been no problem,” Mr. Lintner said.

Among the many theories discussed on Thai Web sites and in the media here is that the Ilyushin was forced to land by the Thai air force as it crossed Thai airspace. In the interview the crew said they had landed in Bangkok to refuel.

Further details may emerge in the coming days as the cargo is examined and the crew members appear in court. The weapons have been transported to an air force base in central Thailand and will be more closely analyzed by experts on Tuesday, Mr. Panitan said.

Four of the crew members were from Kazakhstan, including the captain, Ilyas Issakov, Mr. Abdullayev, Alexandr Zrybney and Vtaliy Shurmnov, all co-pilots. Mikhail Prtkhou, a fourth co-pilot is from Belarus.

Mr. Issakov, the captain, said he had traveled to Thailand before for both business and pleasure.

All five men have been barred from making phone calls or reading newspapers. During the interview in a detention center late Sunday, Mr. Abdullayev requested help from a reporter to obtain a clothes iron because he said he wanted to appear presentable in court.
Title: OBL almost assassinated Pres. Clinton
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 24, 2009, 11:14:08 AM
Osama bin Laden came within minutes of killing Bill Clinton

Former President Bill Clinton came within minutes of being assassinated in the Philippines by terrorists controlled by Osama bin Laden, a new book has revealed.

By Tom Leonard in New York
Published: 7:00PM GMT 22 Dec 2009



The US leader was saved shortly before his car was due to drive over a bridge in Manila where a bomb had been planted.

The foiled attack came during Mr Clinton's visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the city in 1996.

At one point during his stay, he was scheduled to visit a local politician, his route taking him across a bridge in central Manila.

But as the presidential motorcade was about to set off, secret service officers received a "crackly message in one earpiece" saying intelligence agents had picked up a message suggesting an attack was imminent.

The transmission used the words "bridge" and "wedding" – a terrorists code word for assassination.

The motorcade was quickly re-routed and American agents later discovered a bomb had been planted under the bridge.

The subsequent US investigation into the plot "revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan – a man named Osama bin Laden".

Although al Qaeda members have admitted targeting Mr Clinton in the 1990s, no evidence has previously emerged suggesting the group's leader was involved or that the terrorists came close to succeeding.

Ken Gormley, an American law professor, said he was told by Louis Merletti, the former director of the Secret Service, of the bomb plot.

In The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs Starr, Prof Gormley wrote: "The thwarted assassination attempt was never made public.

"It remained top secret except to select members of the US intelligence community."

At the time, there were media reports about the discovery of two bombs, one at Manila airport and another at the venue for the leaders' meeting.

However, they were linked to a communist insurgency in the Philippines rather than as an external attempt to kill the US president.

A spokesman for the Secret Service refused to comment on Prof Gorman's allegations.

Commentators in the US questioned why the Clinton administration would keep quiet about the assassination attempt when it later needed to justify missile attacks on al-Qaeda training bases.

It could also have ramifications for the widely-held assumption that the Bush regime could not have anticipated the September 11 terror attacks.

Ramzi Yousef, the al-Qaeda member who used a truck bomb to attack the World Trade Centre in 1993, has admitted he plotted to assassinate Mr Clinton after fleeing to Manila, but was dissuaded by his high level of security.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described 9/11 mastermind, also lived in the Philippines in the mid-1990s and has admitted he considered trying to kill Mr Clinton.

The president and his national security team have been accused of passing up several opportunities to capture bin Laden and his associates in the 1990s when they were living in Sudan.

Mr Clinton has rejected such claims, insisting he was "obsessed" with the al-Qaeda leader during his time in office.

In the years leading up to the September 11 attacks, al Qaeda was blamed for bombing two US embassies in Africa and attacked the destroyer, the USS Cole.

However, Marisa Porges, a former government counter-terrorism advisor and an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, said the assassination plot, if true,would suggest al Qaeda was more developed than some thought it was prior to 9/11”.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said earlier this month that it was important to capture bin Laden, a goal that some believe has slipped down America's list of priorities in the years since the September 11 attacks.

Prof Gormley’s book, for which he interviewed Mr Clinton three times, focuses mainly on the former president’s pursuit by Ken Starr, the independent counsel.

Mr Starr’s conclusion that Mr Clinton lied during a sworn deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky led to the president’s impeachment.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...l-Clinton.html
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 24, 2009, 04:08:27 PM
Very interesting.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 25, 2009, 08:13:05 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/23/dennis-montgomery-cia-al-jazeera
The Nevada gambler, al-Qaida, the CIA and the mother of all cons
Chris McGreal in Washington guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 December 2009 21.47 GMT

The intelligence reports fitted the suspicions of the time: al-Qaida sleeper agents were scattered across the US awaiting orders that were broadcast in secret codes over the al-Jazeera television network.

Flights from Britain and France were cancelled. Officials warned of a looming "spectacular attack" to rival 9/11. In 2003 President Bush's homeland security tsar, Tom Ridge, spoke of a "credible source" whose information had US military bracing for a new terrorist onslaught.

Then suddenly no more was said.

Six years later, Playboy magazine has revealed that the CIA fell victim to an elaborate con by a compulsive gambler who claimed to have developed software that discovered al-Jazeera broadcasts were being used to transmit messages to terrorists buried deep in America.

Dennis Montgomery, 56, the co-owner of a software gaming company in Nevada, who has since been arrested for bouncing $1m worth of cheques, claims his program read messages hidden in barcodes listing international flights to the US, their positions and airports to be targeted.

The CIA took the information seriously, working with Montgomery at his offices and paying him an undisclosed amount of money. The "intelligence" Montgomery claimed to have found was passed on to the White House and homeland security where it kickstarted an alert that bordered on panic.

According to Playboy, Montgomery's claims caused the cancellation of British Airways and other flights supposedly mentioned in the codes.

Some officials were not at all surprised to hear the allegation that al-Jazeera was involved. The then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, later vilified the station for "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable" reporting of the US invasion of Iraq.

For months, the source of the information was kept under wraps within the CIA but once it became more widely known in the agency it immediately came under question. Playboy quotes one former counterterrorism official who attended a briefing on the source as being furious. He said: "I was saying: 'This is crazy. This is embarrassing.' They claimed they were breaking the code, getting latitude and longitude, and al-Qaida operatives were decoding it. They were coming up with airports and everything, and we were just saying: 'You know, this is horseshit!' "

Frances Townsend, a homeland security adviser to Bush, defended the decision to work with Montgomery. "It didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. We were relying on technical people to tell us whether or not it was feasible. I don't regret having acted on it," she told Playboy.

But the doubts began to prevail as Montgomery refused to reveal how he was finding the barcodes, when no one else could, and he demanded $100m for the software. The CIA also began to wonder why al-Qaida didn't use emails and web pages to communicate with its agents.
Title: Stratfor: Disinfo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2009, 10:43:33 AM
Deciphering Disinformation
AN INTER PRESS SERVICE (IPS) REPORT emerged Monday in which a former CIA official claims that a widely circulated document describing Iran’s nuclear weapons plans was fabricated. The document in question appeared in the Times of London on Dec. 14 and cited an “Asian intelligence source” who allegedly provided the newspaper with “confidential intelligence documents” on how Iran was preparing to run tests on a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion.

Former CIA counterterrorism official Philip Giraldi, however, claims in the IPS interview that the Rupert Murdoch publishing empire — which includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post in addition to the Times of London — has been used frequently by the Israelis and occasionally by the British government to plant false stories to exaggerate the Iranian nuclear threat. Giraldi has been credited in the past with exposing disinformation campaigns by the previous U.S. administration that were designed to bolster claims that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy uranium from Niger.

Disinformation campaigns are common practice in the world of intelligence. Diplomatic negotiations, economic sanctions and military strikes are all tools of statecraft that require a considerable amount of political energy. In the grey areas of intelligence, however, policymakers have a relatively low-cost option of directly shaping the perceptions of their target audience through carefully calibrated disinformation campaigns. U.S. administrations, for example, often use The New York Times and The Washington Post for leaks while Israel tends to rely on British media outlets like the Times of London to plant stories that support their policy objectives.

“It takes a jolt like this to get Washington to go back to the drawing board and re-examine its assessments on Iran.”
We don’t know if the document on the neutron initiator was completely fabricated, but we do know that these leaks serve a very deliberate political purpose. Israel clearly has an interest in building up the Iranian nuclear threat. The United States has pledged to do its part to neutralize the Iranian nuclear program, and Israel has every incentive to drive the United States toward action. Although they share an interest in eliminating the Iranian nuclear program, each side has very different perceptions of the urgency of the threat and the timetable upon which it must be addressed.

Giraldi’s counter-leak, on the other hand, plays into the interests of the Obama administration. President Obama has no interest in getting pushed into a military conflict with Iran and wants to buy time to deal with the issue. By discrediting intelligence that has influenced the U.S. net assessment on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Giraldi could quite effectively send the U.S. intelligence community into a tailspin. Obama can then raise the issue of faulty intelligence to gain more time and room to maneuver with Israel. After all, Israel would have a much more difficult time making the case to Washington that Iran is approaching the point of no return in its nuclear weapons program if the United States can argue that the intelligence supporting that assumption is resting on fabricated evidence.

It takes a jolt like this to get various policymakers and intelligence officials in Washington to go back to the drawing board and re-examine their assessments on Iran. And Iran’s nuclear progress is not the only issue in question. Western media outlets and certain U.S. non-governmental institutions are spreading the perception that the opposition movement in Iran has gained considerable momentum and that the Iranian regime is on the ropes. Again, we have to take into account the use of disinformation campaigns. There are a lot of people around the world and in Washington that have an interest in painting the perception of an Iranian regime teetering on the edge of collapse. Twitter, YouTube and a handful of mostly U.S.- and Europe-based reformist Web sites, backed by upper-class Iranian expatriates no less, are a useful way to spread this perception.

But the facts on the ground appear to suggest otherwise. The Dec. 27 Ashura protests, described by many (including our own Iranian sources) as the big showdown between the regime and the opposition, were far more revealing of the marginalization of the opposition and the endurance of the Iranian regime than what many Western media outlets have led their viewers to believe. The protests have failed to break the regime’s tolerance level and have in fact empowered the regime, however fragmented, to crack down with greater force. This is broadly the view we have held since the June protests, but we, like many other intelligence organizations, are also in the process of reviewing our net assessment on Iran. The process is a painfully meticulous one, but one that requires great discipline and, of course, an ability to recognize multiple disinformation campaigns at work.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 31, 2009, 11:05:17 AM
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2009/12/stating-and-fixing-obvious.html

Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Stating--and Fixing--the Obvious

We've been critical of President Obama on numerous occasions, but today, we'll give him credit for describing last week's breach of airline security as a "systemic failure."

While Mr. Obama's comment might be described as stating the obvious, it was refreshing (if overdue) for someone in the administration to admit that we came periously close to catastrophe in the skies over Michigan on Christmas Day. The President's remarks also made a mockery of earlier statements by other officials, particularly Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano, who initially claimed that the "system worked."

Of course, the President's admission creates a few problems for his national security team. Ms. Napolitano's original assertion was remarkably similar to that of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, who also made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows. So, claims about the system "working" were clearly based on administration talking points. The White House apparently believed the public would accept that explanation until it became a national joke, forcing other officials--and finally, the President--to offer more realistic assessments. It would be an understatement to say Team Obama has suffered another serious blow to its credibility.

Then, there's the little matter of fixing that gaping security breach. The President, in best bureaucratic fashion, has ordered a "top-level review" of the intelligence failures that caused the near-disaster. A preliminary report is due on his desk on New Year's Eve; a more detailed assessment will follow in 2010. Mr. Obama is also promising accountability in the matter. Presumably, that means that someone will lose his (or her) job because of the screw-up, which nearly resulted in hundreds of fatalities.

Unfortunately, the government's track record in accountability is hardly promising. George Tenet, then-Director of Central Intelligence, kept his job after the debacles that led to 9-11. Ditto for other, senior intelligence officials. There's not much motive for senior bureaucrats to improve their job performance--or that of their subordinates--if everyone keeps their jobs, even after the most glaring intelligence failures.

The guarantee of lifetime employment is also a powerful disincentive to end the turf battles that still beset our intelligence community. Consider the "data trail" that preceded Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to bring down Flight 253. Abdulmutallab's father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former government economics minister, personally warned the U.S. Embassy in Lagos last month.

Given the elder Abdulmutallab's stature, it's clear he wasn't passed off to some minor consular official who passed the information along in a routine diplomatic cable. Reading between the lines of this AFP report, it seems clear that the CIA station in Lagos was notified immediately, and it's quite likely that agency personnel were involved in conversations with Abdulmutallab's father.

The CIA also insists that it passed the information to the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), and ensured that Farouk Abdulmutallab's name was entered into a government database. What happened after that is a bit fuzzy; despite the initial report (and later information that highlighted Abdulmutallab's ties to terrorists in Yemen), the "underwear bomber" never made it onto a no-fly list. The failure was compounded by other red flags, also missed by security personnel. He had no checked luggage for his "trip" to Detroit; Adbulmutallab paid for his one-way ticket in cash and was allowed to board the Northwest flight without a passport.

We suspect that the intelligence problems resulted, in part, from differing security classifications for the various databases. The initial report from Abdulmutallab's father was likely classified at the "Secret" level and disseminated via SIPRNET, the government intranet cleared for material up to that level. Meanwhile, reporting that linked the Nigerian to radicals in Yemen might have been based on SIGINT reporting; information of that type is normally held at the "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI), and disseminated via another network, known as JWICS.

Put another way, it's quite likely that those vital bits of intelligence data were never fused together. That would have given the feds ample reason to bar Abdulmutallab from the flight, although his actions in Amsterdam were more than sufficient for a secondary screening which might have revealed his hidden bomb.

Of course, the intelligence community has an organization that's supposed to "fuse" terrorist-related intel information--the NCTC. But the center is hardly immue from the long-running turf battles between the CIA and the FBI. The two agencies have sparred for years over the counter-terrorism mission and that war has only intensified since 9-11. With billions of budget dollars on the line (and dominance in the counter-terror mission at stake), it's little wonder that the NCTC has become yet another battleground for the FBI and CIA. True, the center actually falls under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), but with the CIA and FBI providing most of the personnel, conflicts over intel sources, methods and information reliability are inevitable.

And the list of problems doesn't end there. Beyond database issues and turf wars, there's the "mindset" that dominates our battles against terrorists. With the arrival of the Obama Team, the U.S. government has returned to a "law enforcement" approach in dealing with terror groups. Closing Gitmo, shipping Khalid Sheik Mohammed to Manhattan for a civilian trial and even the handling of Farouk Abdulmutallab are evidence of a changing mindset, one that will make it more difficult to prosecute terrorists--and implement solutions to deter future attacks.

You see, there's already a successful system for dealing with the types of threats posed by radicals like Abdulmutallab and his handlers in Yemen. It's the Israeli model, based heavily on advanced passenger screening and profiling. Israel's state airline (El Al) and other carriers have used this approach for years, supplemented with additional layers of physical security at the airport and on individual aircraft. Additionally, Israel is the only nation to take the extra measure of installing missile defense systems on passenger jets, protecting them against yet another potential threat.

But enhanced screening and passenger profiling have become dirty words in the United States. Concerns about civil liberties (and the initial cost for such measures) have prevented profiling on U.S. carriers. And, sadly enough, neither the Bush or Obama Administrations have shown any leadership in these areas. Indeed, it will be an uphill battle to install advanced, "full-body" scanners in American airports.

It's easy enough to spot the holes in our existing security system. But mustering the political courage to implement the required fixes is another matter entirely. We're guessing that enhanced passenger screening and profiling measures won't be implemented until an Al Qaida bomber actually succeeds, and brings down a passenger jet, killing hundreds of innocent civilians.

Then--and only then--will our political leaders summon the courage to do the right thing.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 31, 2009, 05:22:26 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/31/911-commission-chair-i-cant-believe-were-still-having-these-intel-problems/

Back at 9/10.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Rarick on January 01, 2010, 03:30:12 AM
It is a mind-set problem.  Get some fresh from the battle zone special forces intel trained types checking thru that stuff, and you will see a change.  Send these office weenies to a couple of the more dangerous field offices, or the combat zone for a tour.  Then they will learn the sense of what to be watching for.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on January 01, 2010, 07:21:32 AM
Agreed.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: michael on January 01, 2010, 09:06:43 AM
Absolutely! You do not learn how to "do" intelligence by sitting behind a desk and analyzing things you know nothing about.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: prentice crawford on January 04, 2010, 09:41:31 AM
Woof,
 NBC News is reporting that a Jordanian doctor who was trained and sent to Afghanistan to infiltrate al Qaida was a double agent and was responsible for the attack that killed seven CIA operatives last week in Afghanistan.
 Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi had been arrested by the Jordanians in 2008 for being linked to al-Qaida. While in custody al-Balawi agreed to help the U.S. by joining up with al Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan and make contact with al Qaida's Ayman al Zawahiri, which he did. Last week he claimed he had urgent information about Zawahiri and requested a meeting with the CIA team stationed in Khost and when he arrived blew himself up.
 Well, at least our enemy knows there's a war going on. :-P
                 P.C.
Title: WSJ: AQ's double agent
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2010, 10:29:44 AM
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
The recent death in Afghanistan of seven American counterterrorist officers, one Jordanian intelligence operative, and one exploding al Qaeda double agent ought to give us cause to reflect on the real capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency and al Qaeda.

The report card isn't good. America's systemic intelligence problems were partially on display in the bombing at the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province. Worse, al Qaeda showed skill that had been lacking in many of its operations. In response, President Barack Obama will likely be obliged to adopt counterterrorist methods that could make his administration as tough as his predecessor's.

Professionally, one has to admire the skill of suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi's handlers. This operation could well have been months—if not longer—in the making, and neither the Jordanian intelligence service (GID), which supplied the double agent to the CIA, nor Langley apparently had any serious suspicion that al-Balawi still had the soul and will of a jihadist.

That is an impressive feat. The Hashemite monarchy imprisons lots of Islamic militants, and the GID has the responsibility to interrogate them. The dead Jordanian official, Sharif Ali bin Zeid, reportedly a member of the royal family, may not have been a down-and-dirty case officer with considerable hands-on contact with militants, but al-Balawi surely passed through some kind of intensive screening process with the GID. Yet the GID and the CIA got played, and al Qaeda has revealed that it is capable of running sophisticated clandestine operations with sustained deception.

 
Martin Kozlowski
 .Indeed, al Qaeda did to us exactly what we intended to do to them: use a mole for a lethal strike against high-value targets. In the case of al-Balawi, it appears the target was Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Ladin's top deputy. During the Cold War, the CIA completely dropped its guard in the pursuit of much-desired Cuban and East German agents. The result? Most of our assets were plants given to us by Cuban and East German intelligence. With al-Balawi supposedly providing "good" information about al Zawahiri and al Qaeda's terrorist planning, a salivating CIA and the GID proved inattentive to counterintelligence concerns.

Whereas al Qaeda is showing increasing proficiency, the same cannot be said for the CIA. Competent case officers can get duped by a good double. And the GID, whose skill has been exaggerated in fiction and film and by Hashemite-stroked American case officers, isn't a global service. Take it far from its tribal society, where it operates with admirable efficiency, and it is nothing to write home about.

The CIA uses the GID so often not because the Jordanians are brilliant but because the Americans are so often, at best, mediocre. The GID's large cadre of English-speaking officers makes liaison work easy with Langley, which has never been blessed with a large number of Arabic-speaking officers, particularly within the senior ranks.

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.Language issues aside, the now-deceased chief of Base Chapman should have kept most of her personnel away from al-Balawi, and should never have allowed seven officers to get that close to him at one time. Traditional operational compartmentation clearly broke down.

It is also highly likely that all of the CIA officers at Chapman—and especially the chief of base, who was a mother of three—were on short-term assignments. According to active-duty CIA officers, the vast majority of Langley's officers are on temporary-duty assignments in Afghanistan, which usually means they depart in under one year. (The same is true for the State Department.) Many CIA officers are married with children and they do not care for long tours of duty in unpleasant spots—the type of service that would give officers a chance of gaining some country expertise, if not linguistic accomplishment.

Moreover, security concerns usually trap these officers into a limited range of contacts. Truth be told, even the most elemental CIA activity—meeting recruited agents or "developmentals" outside of well-guarded compounds—often cannot be done without contractor-supplied security. Without Blackwater, now renamed Xe, which handles security for Langley in Afghanistan, CIA case officers would likely be paralyzed.

The officers at Chapman were probably young. This isn't necessarily bad. As a general rule, younger case officers do better intelligence-collection work than older colleagues, whose zeal for Third World field work declines precipitously as their knowledge and expertise in CIA bureaucratic politics increases. But experience does breed cynicism, which doesn't appear to have been in abundance at the CIA base.

All of this reinforces the common U.S. military criticism of the Agency in Afghanistan and Iraq: It does not often supply the hard tactical and intimate personal and tribal portraits that military officers need to do their work. Army officers are generally among the natives vastly more than their CIA counterparts.

What does this all mean for President Obama? He did not come into office pledging to reform the CIA, only restrain it from aggressively interrogating al Qaeda terrorists. There is near zero chance that the president will attempt to improve the Agency operationally in the field. His counterterrorist adviser, John Brennan, is as institutional a case officer as Langley has ever produced. If Attorney General Eric Holder is so unwise as to bring any charges against a CIA officer for the rough interrogation of an al Qaeda detainee during the Bush administration, the president will likely find himself deluged with damaging CIA-authored leaks. Mr. Obama would be a fool to confront the CIA on two fronts.

But the president is likely to compensate for systemic weakness in American intelligence in substantial, effective ways. Mr. Obama has been much more aggressive than President George W. Bush was in the use of drone attacks and risky paramilitary operations. One can easily envision him expanding such attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Visa issuances, airport security, and perhaps even FBI surveillance of American Muslim militants are likely to become much tougher under Mr. Obama than under Mr. Bush. President Obama will, no doubt, continue to say empirically bizarre things about Guantanamo's imprisonment system creating jihadists, but his administration will now likely find another location to jail militants indefinitely. Too many of President Bush's released detainees have returned to terrorism.

National Security Adviser James Jones has already described the 21st century as the liaison century, where intelligence and security services cooperate energetically. The CIA has often compensated for its internal weaknesses through liaising with foreigners. President Bush and then Central Intelligence Director George Tenet kicked these relationships into hyper-drive after 9/11; President Obama is likely to kick them even further. Mr. Obama may have foreclosed the possibility of the CIA again aggressively questioning jihadists, but he's kept the door wide open for the rendition of terrorists to countries like Jordan, where the GID does not abide by the Marquess of Queensbury rules in its interrogations.

The deadly attack in Fort Hood, Texas, by Maj. Malik Hassan in November, the close call in the air above Detroit on Christmas Day, and now the double-agent suicide bombing in Khost have shocked America's counterterrorist system. Mr. Obama surely knows that one large-scale terrorist strike inside the U.S. could effectively end his presidency. He may at some level still believe that his let's-just-all-be-friends speech in Cairo last June made a big dent in the hatred that many faithful Muslims have for the U.S., but his practices on the ground are likely to be a lot less touchy-feely. This is all for the good. These three jihadist incidents ought to tell us that America's war with Islamic militancy is far—far—from being over.

Mr. Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on January 09, 2010, 08:10:06 PM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6956806/Could-the-CIA-have-achieved-what-al-Qaeda-did.html

Could the CIA have achieved what al-Qaeda did?
The audacious al-Qaeda attack in Khost, Afghanistan and the failures to detect the Detroit bomb plot are indications of a broken CIA, writes Toby Harnden in Washington
Title: WSJ: BStephens: Can Intelligence by intelligent?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 11, 2010, 05:07:42 PM
'Intelligence," Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, "is not to be confused with intelligence." To read two recent analyses of U.S. intelligence failures is to be reminded of the truth of that statement, albeit in very different ways.

Exhibit A is last week's unclassified White House memo on the attempted bombing of Flight 253 over the skies of Detroit. Though billed by National Security Adviser Jim Jones as a bombshell in its own right, the memo reads more like the bureaucratic equivalent of the old doctor joke about the operation succeeding and the patient dying. The counterterrorism system, it tells us, works extremely well and the people who staff it are top-notch. No doubt. It just happens that in this one case, this same terrific system failed comprehensively at the most elementary levels.

For contrast—and intellectual relief—turn to an unsparing new report on the U.S. military's intelligence operations in Afghanistan. "Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy," it begins. "U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage successful counterinsurgency."

View Full Image

Associated Press
 
Afghan security forces stand next to a vehicle destroyed in a roadside bomb on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Jan. 9, 2010.
.That's not happy talk, particularly given that it comes from the man who now runs the Army's intelligence efforts in the country, Major General Michael T. Flynn. But Gen. Flynn, along with co-authors Paul Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Marine Captain (and former Journal reporter) Matt Pottinger, are just getting warmed up. Current intel products, they write, "tell ground units little they do not already know." The intelligence community is "strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders." There is little by way of personal accountability: "Except in rare cases, ineffective intel officers are allowed to stick around."

All this is told in prose that is crisp, engaging and almost miraculously free of bureaucratic gobbledygook. The report illuminates the distinction between the kind of intel needed for anti-insurgency—information about the bad guys—as opposed to that needed for counterinsurgency: That is, the kind that tells you something about the people you are fighting for (and who you eventually want to get to do the fighting for you), and what they actually need and want.

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.Case study in point: As recently as last June, the Nawa district in Afghanistan's embattled Helmand Province was largely under the Taliban's control. "American and British troops could not venture a kilometer from their base without confronting machine gun and rocket fire from insurgents. Local farmers, wary of reprisals by the Taliban, refused to make eye contact with foreign soldiers, much less speak with them or offer valuable battlefield and other demographic information."

But that began to change in July with the arrival of 800 Marines, who fanned out through the district with the goal of discovering its so-called anchor points: "local personalities and local grievances that, if skillfully exploited, could drive a wedge between insurgents and the greater population."

In Nawa, the anchor point turned out to be the resentment of local elders to the Taliban's usurpation of their traditional authority. As in Anbar province in Iraq, winning the trust of those elders turned out to be more important for Nawa's rapid transformation into a relatively thriving, peaceful place than simply killing Talibs.

This is the sort of story that we'd all like to see replicated throughout Afghanistan. Yet the success in Nawa was never communicated through official channels, and became known mainly through the media. When it comes to bureaucracies, including the military's, information always seeks a cubby hole. That's also where it tends to stay.

The report's solution, in part, is the creation of new information centers that can synthesize intelligence as it works its way from the bottom up. But the more important recommendation concerns the type of officer who would staff these centers: "Analysts must absorb information with the thoroughness of historians, organize it with the skill of librarians, and disseminate it with the zeal of a journalist," the authors write. "Sufficient knowledge will not come from slides with little more text than a comic strip."

Uh oh: A military analyst without his PowerPoint? Terrifying as the thought may be to many of its current practitioners, the true art of intelligence requires, well, intelligence. That is a function neither of technology nor of "systems," which begin as efforts to supplement and enhance the work of intelligence and typically wind up as substitutes for it. It is, instead, a matter of experience, intellect, initiative and judgment, nurtured within institutions that welcome gadflies in their midst.

It remains to be seen whether the report's ideas will be put fully into practice, or whether the administration will fight the war long enough for them to make a difference. But there's no doubting that the Pentagon got lucky when Gen. Flynn, Capt. Pottinger and Mr. Batchelor managed to find one another and allowed them to have their say. Judging from recent performances, you've got to wonder how often that happens at other institutions of state that too often mistake intelligence for intelligence.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Rarick on January 12, 2010, 02:28:18 AM
In other words the intelligence community is lacking, and desperately needs, some serious tinfoil hat conspiracy theory gadflys. :evil:  Who know how to look for the weak points in a "situational structure" and therfore where to break in.  It sounds like the marines in the article merely used a variant of the inkblot strategy that was getting used, and working, in Vietnam until politics and body count started driving things.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 12, 2010, 08:11:19 AM
Summary
According to widespread rumors in the United States, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence had a hand in the Dec. 30, 2009, attack in Khost, Afghanistan, which killed several CIA agents. While luck played a definite role in the attack, the skill in preparing the double agent who detonated the suicide bomb used in the attack has lead some to see a state role. Such a role is unlikely, however, as Pakistan has little to gain by enraging the United States. Even so, the rumors alone will harm U.S.-Pakistani relations, perhaps giving the Taliban some breathing room.

Analysis
Speculation is rife in the United States about the possible role played by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, Pakistan’s foreign intelligence service, in the Dec. 30, 2009, suicide attack on Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan that killed multiple CIA agents. Much of this discussion traces back to a report citing unnamed U.S. and Afghan government sources as saying a chemical analysis of explosive residue suggesting the use of military-grade equipment points to ISI involvement in the incident.

This is a faulty basis to establish an ISI link, as the Pakistani Taliban have used military-grade explosives in numerous attacks against the Pakistani security establishment since late 2006. Still, rumors alone of ISI involvement will suffice to harm U.S.-Pakistani relations, which will serve the jihadists’ ends quite nicely.

To a large extent, chance aided the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in carrying out the attack. Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi’s arrival gave the group the opportunity to carry out an attack at a heavily fortified facility belonging to the world’s most powerful intelligence organization. That said, the preparation of the double agent for the attack showed definite skill. While it has shown a great degree of skill in pulling off attacks against major army, intelligence and other security installations in Pakistan, the TTP previously has not been seen as being capable of handling a foreign double agent for a complex operation outside Pakistan.

In this incident, the TTP managed to conceal al-Balawi’s true activities while in Pakistan. Admittedly, keeping close track of al-Balawi in Pakistan would have been a challenge to the CIA due to the agency’s fairly weak humint capabilities there, and because his jihadist hosts would have been extremely cautious about using communications devices that would show up on sigint monitoring. And while remaining below the radar while in jihadist country in the Pakistani northwest is one thing, circumventing all CIA countermeasures is quite another — and is something previously thought beyond the TTP’s known capabilities. Such sophistication rises to the level of the skills held by a national-level intelligence organization with tremendous resources and experience at this kind of tradecraft.

However, even this does not mean the ISI was involved in the attack.

The ISI falls under the control of the Pakistani army and the government, and the Pakistani state has no interest in carrying out actions against the United States, as this could seriously threaten Pakistani national interests. Also, it is clear that the ISI is at war with the TTP. For its part, the main Pakistani Taliban rebel group has specifically declared war on the ISI, leveling three key ISI facilities in the last eight months. It is therefore most unlikely this could have been an officially sanctioned Pakistani operation.

The possibility that jihadist sympathizers in the lower ranks of the Pakistani intelligence complex may have offered their services to the TTP cannot be ruled out, however. Given its history of dealing with Islamist nonstate proxies, the Pakistani intelligence apparatus is penetrated by the jihadists, which partially explains the ability of the TTP to mount a ferocious insurgency against the state.

Even though there is no clear smoking gun pointing at the ISI, rumors of its involvement alone will harm the already-fragile U.S.-Pakistani relationship. Concerns similar to those in the aftermath of the November 2008 Mumbai attack — that the situation in Pakistan has reached a point where the state no longer has control over its own security apparatus and now represents an intolerable threat to U.S. national security — will emerge again.

While the situation in Islamabad might not be dire, a U.S.-Pakistani and Indian-Pakistani breakdown is exactly what that the jihadists want so they can survive the U.S. and Pakistani offensives they currently face.
Title: Stratfor: The Khost Attack and the Intel War Challenge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 13, 2010, 06:08:41 AM
The Khost Attack and the Intelligence War Challenge
January 11, 2010
By George Friedman and Scott Stewart

As Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi exited the vehicle that brought him onto Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, on Dec. 30, 2009, security guards noticed he was behaving strangely. They moved toward al-Balawi and screamed demands that he take his hand out of his pocket, but instead of complying with the officers’ commands, al-Balawi detonated the suicide device he was wearing. The explosion killed al-Balawi, three security contractors, four CIA officers and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID) officer who was al-Balawi’s handler. The vehicle shielded several other CIA officers at the scene from the blast. The CIA officers killed included the chief of the base at Khost and an analyst from headquarters who reportedly was the agency’s foremost expert on al Qaeda. The agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan was allegedly among the officers who survived.

Al-Balawi was a Jordanian doctor from Zarqa (the hometown of deceased al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). Under the alias Abu Dujanah al-Khurasani, he served as an administrator for Al-Hesbah, a popular Internet discussion forum for jihadists. Jordanian officers arrested him in 2007 because of his involvement with radical online forums, which is illegal in Jordan. The GID subsequently approached al-Balawi while he was in a Jordanian prison and recruited him to work as an intelligence asset.

Al-Balawi was sent to Pakistan less than a year ago as part of a joint GID/CIA mission. Under the cover of going to school to receive advanced medical training, al-Balawi established himself in Pakistan and began to reach out to jihadists in the region. Under his al-Khurasani pseudonym, al-Balawai announced in September 2009 in an interview on a jihadist Internet forum that he had officially joined the Afghan Taliban.

A Lucky Break for the TTP
It is unclear if al-Balawi was ever truly repentant. Perhaps he cooperated with the GID at first, but had a change of heart sometime after arriving in Pakistan. Either way, at some point al-Balawi approached the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the main Pakistani Taliban group, and offered to work with it against the CIA and GID. Al-Balawi confirmed this in a video statement recorded with TTP leader Hakeemullah Mehsud and released Jan. 9. This is significant because it means that al-Balawi’s appearance was a lucky break for the TTP, and not part of some larger, intentional intelligence operation orchestrated by the TTP or another jihadist entity like al Qaeda.

The TTP’s luck held when a group of 13 people gathered to meet al-Balawi upon his arrival at FOB Chapman. This allowed him to detonate his suicide device amid the crowd and create maximum carnage before he was able to be searched for weapons.

In the world of espionage, source meetings are almost always a dangerous activity for both the intelligence officer and the source. There are fears the source could be surveilled and followed to the meeting site, or that the meeting could be raided by host country authorities and the parties arrested. In the case of a terrorist source, the meeting site could be attacked and those involved in the meeting killed. Because of this, the CIA and other intelligence agencies exercise great care while conducting source meetings. Normally they will not bring the source into a CIA station or base. Instead, they will conduct the meeting at a secure, low-profile offsite location.

Operating in the wilds of Afghanistan is far different from operating out of an embassy in Vienna or Moscow, however. Khost province is Taliban territory, and it offers no refuge from the watching eyes and gunmen of the Taliban and their jihadist allies. Indeed, the province has few places safe enough even for a CIA base. And this is why the CIA base in Khost is located on a military base, FOB Chapman, named for the first American killed in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion. Normally, an outer ring of Afghan security around the base searches persons entering FOB Chapman, who the U.S. military then searches again at the outer perimeter of the U.S. portion of the base. Al-Balawi, a high-value CIA asset, was allowed to skip these external layers of security to avoid exposing his identity to Afghan troops and U.S. military personnel. Instead, the team of Xe (the company formerly known as Blackwater) security contractors were to search al-Balawi as he arrived at the CIA’s facility.

A Failure to Follow Security Procedures
Had proper security procedures been followed, the attack should only have killed the security contractors, the vehicle driver and perhaps the Jordanian GID officer. But proper security measures were not followed, and several CIA officers rushed out to greet the unscreened Jordanian source. Reports indicate that the source had alerted his Jordanian handler that he had intelligence pertaining to the location of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. (There are also reports that al-Balawi had given his handlers highly accurate battle damage assessments on drone strikes in Pakistan, indicating that he had access to high-level jihadist sources.) The prospect of finally receiving such crucial and long-sought information likely explains the presence of the high-profile visitors from CIA headquarters in Langley and the station in Kabul — and their exuberance over receiving such coveted intelligence probably explains their eager rush to meet the source before he had been properly screened.

The attack, the most deadly against CIA personnel since the 1983 Beirut bombing, was clearly avoidable, or at least mitigable. But human intelligence is a risky business, and collecting human intelligence against jihadist groups can be flat-out deadly. The CIA officers in Khost the day of the bombing had grown complacent, and violated a number of security procedures. The attack thus serves as a stark reminder to the rest of the clandestine service of the dangers they face and of the need to adhere to time-tested security procedures.

A better process might have prevented some of the deaths, but it would not have solved the fundamental problem: The CIA had an asset who turned out to be a double agent. When he turned is less important than that he was turned into — assuming he had not always been — a double agent. His mission was to gain the confidence of the CIA as to his bona fides, and then create an event in which large numbers of CIA agents were present, especially the top al Qaeda analyst at the CIA. He knew that high-value targets would be present because he had set the stage for the meeting by dangling vital information before the agency. He went to the meeting to carry out his true mission, which was to deliver a blow against the CIA. He succeeded.

The Obama Strategy’s Weakness
In discussing the core weakness in the Afghan strategy U.S. President Barack Obama has chosen, we identified the basic problem as the intelligence war. We argued that establishing an effective Afghan army would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, because the Americans and their NATO allies lacked knowledge and sophistication in distinguishing friend from foe among those being recruited into the army. This problem is compounded by the fact that there are very few written documents in a country like Afghanistan that could corroborate identities. The Taliban would seed the Afghan army with its own operatives and supporters, potentially exposing the army’s operations to al Qaeda.

This case takes the problem a step further. The United States relied on Jordanian intelligence to turn a jihadist operative into a double agent. They were dependent on the Jordanian handler’s skills at debriefing, vetting and testing the now-double agent. It is now reasonable to assume the agent allowed himself to be doubled in an attempt to gain the trust of the handler. The Jordanians offered the source to the Americans, who obviously grabbed him, and the source passed all the tests to which he was undoubtedly subjected. Yet in the end, his contacts with the Taliban were not designed to provide intelligence to the Americans. The intelligence provided to the Americans was designed to win their trust and set up the suicide bombing. It is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that al-Balawi was playing the GID all along and that his willingness to reject his jihadist beliefs was simply an opportunistic strategy for surviving and striking.

Even though encountering al-Balawi was a stroke of luck for the TTP, the group’s exploitation of this lucky break was a very sophisticated operation. The TTP had to provide valuable intelligence to allow al-Balawi to build his credibility. It had to create the clustering of CIA agents by promising extraordinarily valuable intelligence. It then had to provide al-Balawi with an effective suicide device needed for the strike. And it had to do this without being detected by the CIA. Al-Balawi had a credible cover for meeting TTP agents; that was his job. But what al-Balawi told his handlers about his meetings with the TTP, and where he went between meetings, clearly did not indicate to the handlers that he was providing fabricated information or posed a threat.

In handling a double agent, it is necessary to track every step he takes. He cannot be trusted because of his history; the suspicion that he is still loyal to his original cause must always be assumed. Therefore, the most valuable moments in evaluating a double agent are provided by intense scrutiny of his patterns and conduct away from his handlers and new friends. Obviously, if this scrutiny was applied, al-Balawi and his TTP handlers were still able to confuse their observers. If it was not applied, then the CIA was setting itself up for disappointment. Again, such scrutiny is far more difficult to conduct in the Pakistani badlands, where resources to surveil a source are very scarce. In such a case, the intuition and judgment of the agent’s handler are critical, and al-Balawi was obviously able to fool his Jordanian handler.

Given his enthusiastic welcome at FOB Chapman, it would seem al-Balawi was regarded not only as extremely valuable but also as extremely reliable. Whatever process might have been used at the meeting, the central problem was that he was regarded as a highly trusted source when he shouldn’t have been. Whether this happened because the CIA relied entirely on the Jordanian GID for evaluation or because American interrogators and counterintelligence specialists did not have the skills needed to pick up the cues can’t be known. What is known is that the TTP ran circles around the CIA in converting al-Balawi to its uses.

The United States cannot hope to reach any satisfactory solution in Afghanistan unless it can win the intelligence war. But the damage done to the CIA in this attack cannot be underestimated. At least one of the agency’s top analysts on al Qaeda was killed. In an intelligence war, this is the equivalent of sinking an aircraft carrier in a naval war. The United States can’t afford this kind of loss. There will now be endless reviews, shifts in personnel and re-evaluations. In the meantime, the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan will be attempting to exploit the opportunity presented by this disruption.

Casualties happen in war, and casualties are not an argument against war. However, when the center of gravity in a war is intelligence, and an episode like this occurs, the ability to prevail becomes a serious question. We have argued that in any insurgency, the insurgents have a built-in advantage. It is their country and their culture, and they are indistinguishable from everyone else. Keeping them from infiltrating is difficult.

This was a different matter. Al-Balawi was Jordanian; his penetration of the CIA was less like the product of an insurgency than an operation carried out by a national intelligence service. And this is the most troubling aspect of this incident for the United States. The operation was by all accounts a masterful piece of tradecraft beyond the known abilities of a group like the TTP. Even though al-Balawi’s appearance was a lucky break for the TTP, not the result of an intentional, long-term operation, the execution of the operation that arose as a result of that lucky break was skillfully done — and it was good enough to deliver a body blow to the CIA. The Pakistani Taliban would thus appear far more skilled than we would have thought, which is the most important takeaway from this incident, and something to ponder.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on January 13, 2010, 06:51:57 AM
In other words, the ISI, or a jihadist element within.
Title: WaPo: CIA got dangled
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2010, 10:31:12 AM
While we were dangling, al-Qa'ida was roping:


In Afghanistan attack, CIA fell victim to series of miscalculations about informant
By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 16, 2010; A01



AMMAN, JORDAN -- He was an ambitious young doctor from a large family who had a foreign wife and two children -- details that officers of Jordan's intelligence service viewed as exploitable vulnerabilities, not biography.
Early last year, the General Intelligence Department picked up Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi after his pseudonymous postings on extremist Web sites had become increasingly strident. During three days of questioning, GID officers threatened to have Balawi jailed and end his medical career, and they hinted they could cause problems for his family, according to a former U.S. official and a Jordanian official, both of whom have knowledge of Balawi's detention.

Balawi was told that if he traveled to Pakistan and infiltrated radical groups there, his slate would be wiped clean and his family left alone, said the former U.S. official, whose more detailed account of the GID's handling of Balawi was generally corroborated by the Jordanian official, as well as by two former Jordanian intelligence officers.

Balawi agreed, and as the relationship developed, GID officers began to think that he was indeed willing to work against al-Qaeda.

This belief was the first in a series of miscalculations that culminated Dec. 30 when Balawi stepped out of a car at a CIA facility in Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. CIA officers allowed Balawi, who was wearing a vest packed with explosives and metal, to enter the base without a search. Then he detonated his load, killing seven CIA officers and contractors, a Jordanian intelligence officer and a driver.

Jordanian and U.S. officials have since concluded that Balawi was a committed extremist whose beliefs had deep intellectual and religious roots and who had never intended to cooperate with them. In hindsight, they said, the excitement generated by his ability to produce verifiable intelligence should have been tempered by the recognition that his penetration of al-Qaeda's top echelon was too rapid to be true.

Senior CIA and GID officials were so beguiled by the prospect of a strike against al-Qaeda's inner sanctum that they discounted concerns raised by case officers in both services that Balawi might be a fraud, according to the former U.S. official and the Jordanian government official, who has an intelligence background.

The Americans took over the management of Balawi from the Jordanians sometime in the second half of 2009, dictating how and when the informant would meet his handlers, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officers. Agency field officers faced unusual pressures from top CIA and administration officials in Washington keyed up by Balawi's promise to deliver al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current and former officers said.

But a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity, rejected assertions that the CIA had abandoned caution. "No one -- not in Washington, not in the field -- let excitement or anticipation run the show," the official said. The GID's approach was more subtle than simple blackmail, the official added. "Persuasion works better than coercion, and that's something the Jordanians understand completely," the official said. "The caricatures of clumsy, heavy-handed approaches just don't fit."

'A Salafi jihadi since birth'

Balawi, 32, trained as a physician at Istanbul University in Turkey and worked at a clinic in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. He was married to a Turkish journalist, who has written admiringly of al-Qaeda's leader in a book titled "Osama bin Laden: Che Guevara of the East."
In the past four years, using the pseudonym Abu Dujana al-Khorasani, Balawi wrote on extremist Web sites and gained renown. He trumpeted calls for martyrdom.

"My words will drink of my blood," he wrote, one of a number of statements suggesting an ambition to move beyond rhetoric.
"If you read his articles, you understand he is a Salafi jihadi since birth," said Hasan Hanieh, an author and former Islamic radical, referring to a purist strain of Islam known as Salafism. "They go to the core of his beliefs. Over years, I could see this type of person moderate, but such a person does not become an agent. Never."

The Jordanian official with an intelligence background, who has studied Balawi's writings since the attack, reached the same conclusion.
"If you read him in Arabic, there is a texture and a spirit that says he is a true believer," the official said. "I would have tested this man 20 times to believe him once."

After his arrest and interrogation last January, family members said, Balawi appeared sullen and preoccupied. He stopped using the computer -- to which he had seemed so tied.

"He came out a changed person," his father said in an interview. "They should have left him alone. They should not have played with his mind." He said his son would never have moved beyond rhetoric had he not been forced to leave Jordan.

Balawi left Jordan soon after his release, telling his family that he wanted to pursue further medical studies in Pakistan.

He began to produce credible and compelling information about extremists, and the GID turned over the operation's management and the resulting intelligence to the CIA while allowing its officer, Capt. Sharif Ali bin Zeid, to remain as a conduit to Balawi, officials said.

As the information continued to flow, the agency was able to exploit it for operations in Pakistan, officials said. Belief in Balawi grew.

"First, the guy had extremist credentials, including proven access to senior figures," the U.S. intelligence official said. "Second, you had a sound liaison service that believed they'd turned him and that had been working with him since. And third, the asset supplied intelligence that was independently verified. You don't ignore those kinds of things, but you don't trust the guy, either."

In September, six months after Balawi's arrival in Pakistan, U.S. and international intelligence officials described what they said was their growing success in penetrating al-Qaeda's senior ranks, which allowed improved targeting of insurgent locations in Pakistan.

"Human sources have begun to produce results," said Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations' al-Qaeda and Taliban monitoring group and the former chief of Britain's overseas counterterrorism operations. At the time, a senior Obama administration official with firsthand knowledge of the U.S. operations attributed the killings of more than a dozen senior al-Qaeda officials to the CIA's increasing ability "to locate and identify individuals."
Asked last week whether his reference to greater intelligence penetration included reports from Balawi, the official said he was "not referring to any one individual," but he declined to clarify whether he knew about Balawi's reports. "Maybe. Maybe not," he said.

Balawi appears to have been what in espionage terms is called a "dangle" held out by al-Qaeda.

"This is a very well-thought-out al-Qaeda operation," said a former senior U.S. intelligence officer. "Every dangle operation is a judgment call. It has to be significant enough so that the Jordanians and, in this case, the CIA knows it's real. . . . That's always the key in running a dangle operation: How much do you give to establish bona fides without giving up the family jewels?"

Indeed, tactical successes made possible by Balawi's information appear in retrospect to have been sacrifices by al-Qaeda to get closer to its ultimate target: the CIA.

"They would give up a lot to get at the CIA," said a former Jordanian intelligence officer.

After the attack, the Pakistani Taliban released a video of Balawi accompanied by its leader, but officials suspect al-Qaeda directed the bombing.

Case officers' qualms

Both American and Jordanian case officers raised questions last year about the speed with which Balawi appeared to have inserted himself into a position where he could obtain such intelligence, according to the former U.S. official familiar with Balawi's detention.

Al-Qaeda is deeply suspicious of new volunteers, and especially so of Jordanians because of repeated attempts by GID to penetrate the organization, according to former Jordanian intelligence officials. There are no Jordanians in bin Laden's inner circle, and some who have risen to prominence, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the slain leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, were given assignments far from the leadership.

Al-Qaeda security and intelligence officers rigorously vet new arrivals and subject them to a host of tests before they reach "even the third circle around the leadership," as a former Jordanian intelligence official put it.
"Their first instinct is to suspect," this former official said. "They check and double-check his background. They watch him eat and sleep and pray, for signs. They analyze everything. That's how they have survived since 9/11. And after all that, if they believe him, he won't get near the inner circle."

Balawi, however, appeared to have done just that, offering information on Zawahiri. The Jordanian provided "irrefutable proof," including "photograph-type evidence," that he had been in the presence of al-Qaeda's leaders, according to a senior intelligence official. Some Jordanian and U.S. officials now question whether such an encounter ever occurred. But they say that if it did, it was an elaborate piece of staging by Balawi's true handler.
"It was briefed to the White House and to Centcom," a U.S. official said, referring to U.S. Central Command. "This was a high profile. The Bush and Obama White Houses had vowed to kill him [bin Laden]. What a political victory it would be."

The U.S. intelligence official said the case was handled methodically: "This case didn't grow up overnight. None of them do. It developed step by step. And, at some point, especially if you're going to send somebody against one of the toughest targets in the world, you have to meet them face to face."

After several years of internal purges in which senior officers were pushed out, the GID had lost some of its "wisdom and caution," according to a Jordanian government official. A new leadership, installed slightly more than a year ago, relished the prospect of participating in such an extraordinary coup.

"There was desperation to get the fruit," the official said.

A former senior Jordanian intelligence official said he rues any possibility of mistrust between the two intelligence agencies in the wake of the Afghanistan bombing, asserting that the CIA-GID partnership has "saved hundreds of lives, including American lives" over the years.

"This relationship is in the interests of the United States," he said.

Warrick reported from Washington. Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Ellen Nakashima in Washington and special correspondent Ranya Kadri in Amman contributed to this report.
Title: Former NSA/CIA Director Says BHO Wrong on Intel
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 31, 2010, 04:34:31 PM
Obama admnistration takes several wrong paths in dealing with terrorism
By Michael V. Hayden
Sunday, January 31, 2010; A21

In the war on terrorism, this country faces an enemy whose theory of warfare ends the hard-won distinction in modern thought between combatant and noncombatant. In doing that for which we have created government -- ensuring life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- how can we be adequately aggressive to ensure the first value, without unduly threatening the other two? This is hard. And people don't have to be lazy or stupid to get it wrong.

We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is not "an isolated extremist." He is the tip of the spear of a complex al-Qaeda plot to kill Americans in our homeland.

In the 50 minutes the FBI had to question him, agents reportedly got actionable intelligence. Good. But were there any experts on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the room (other than Abdulmutallab)? Was there anyone intimately familiar with any National Security Agency raw traffic to, from or about the captured terrorist? Did they have a list or photos of suspected recruits?

When questioning its detainees, the CIA routinely turns the information provided over to its experts for verification and recommendations for follow-up. The responses of these experts -- "Press him more on this, he knows the details" or "First time we've heard that" -- helps set up more detailed questioning.

None of that happened in Detroit. In fact, we ensured that it wouldn't. After the first session, the FBI Mirandized Abdulmutallab and -- to preserve a potential prosecution -- sent in a "clean team" of agents who could have no knowledge of what Abdulmutallab had provided before he was given his constitutional warnings. As has been widely reported, Abdulmutallab then exercised his right to remain silent.

In retrospect, the inadvisability of this approach seems self-evident. Perhaps it didn't appear that way on Dec. 25 because we have, over the past year, become acclimated to certain patterns of thought.

Two days after his inauguration, President Obama issued an executive order that limited all interrogations by the U.S. government to the techniques authorized in the Army Field Manual. The CIA had not seen the final draft of the order, let alone been allowed to comment, before it was issued. I thought that odd since the order was less a legal document -- there was no claim that the manual exhausted the universe of lawful techniques -- than a policy one: These particular lawful techniques would be all that the country would need, at least for now.

A similar drama unfolded in April over the release of Justice Department memos that had authorized the CIA interrogation program. CIA Director Leon Panetta and several of his predecessors opposed public release of the memos in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on the only legitimate grounds for such a stand: that the documents were legitimately still classified and their release would gravely harm national security. On this policy -- not legal -- question, the president sided with his attorney general rather than his CIA chief.

In August, seemingly again in contradiction to the president's policy of not looking backward and over the objections of the CIA, Justice pushed to release the CIA inspector general's report on the interrogation program. Then Justice decided to reopen investigations of CIA officers that had been concluded by career prosecutors years ago, even though Panetta and seven of his predecessors said that doing so would be unfair, unwarranted and harmful to the agency's current mission.

In November, Justice announced that it intended to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several others in civilian courts for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The White House made clear that this was a Justice Department decision, which is odd because the decision was not legally compelled (other detainees are to be tried by military commissions) and the reasons given for making it (military trials could serve as a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda, harm relations with allies, etc.) were not legal but political.

Even tough government organizations, such as those in the intelligence community, figure out pretty quickly what their political masters think is not acceptable behavior. The executive order that confined interrogations to the Army Field Manual also launched a task force to investigate whether those techniques were sufficient for national needs. Few observers believed that the group would recommend changes, and to date, no techniques have been added to the manual.

Intelligence officers need to know that someone has their back. After the Justice memos were released in April, CIA officers began to ask whether the people doing things that were currently authorized would be dragged through this kind of public knothole in five years. No one could guarantee that they would not.

Some may celebrate that the current Justice Department's perspective on the war on terrorism has become markedly more dominant in the past year. We should probably understand the implications of that before we break out the champagne. That apparently no one recommended on Christmas Day that Abdulmutallab be handled, at least for a time, as an enemy combatant should be concerning. That our director of national intelligence, Denny Blair, bravely said as much during congressional testimony this month is cause for hope.

Actually, Blair suggested that the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), announced by the administration in August, should have been called in. A government spokesman later pointed out that the group does not yet exist.

There's a final oddity. In August, the government unveiled the HIG for questioning al-Qaeda and announced that the FBI would begin questioning CIA officers about the alleged abuses in the 2004 inspector general's report. They are apparently still getting organized for the al-Qaeda interrogations. But the interrogations of CIA personnel are well underway.

The writer was director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012903954.html
Title: Hayden: Thiessen's book a must-read
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2010, 07:01:10 PM
Former CIA Director Hayden: Thiessen’s ‘Courting Disaster’ a must-read
By Michael Hayden   02/15/10 at 12:00 am
 
  Marc Thiessen begins his new book, “Courting Disaster,” with something of a disclaimer: For reasons of security and classification, he says, he should not have been able to write it. He’s right. He shouldn’t have been able to write it. But I’m glad he did.

Thiessen jumps into the once murky (and once highly classified) world of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program with zeal and energy. And he puts fresh light on a story that up until now seems to have been taken to the darkest corner of the room at every opportunity.

I opposed the release of the Office of Legal Council memos on the CIA interrogation program last April. I opposed the release of additional memos and the report of the CIA inspector general on the interrogation program last August. But whatever their release did to reveal American secrets to our enemies, it did inject something into the public debate on this program that had been sorely missing—facts.

Thiessen has taken these documents, as well as his own extensive interviews and research, and created for the first time a public account of a program previously hidden from public view. Prior to this, some opponents of the program could create whatever image they wanted to create to support the argument of the moment. And those who were in government at the time were near powerless to correct the record. No longer.

There will still be those who remain adamantly opposed to the interrogation effort, but now they must be opposed to the program as it was, not as they imagined or feared or—dare I say, for some—expected it to be.

Thiessen lays out the facts without much varnish. Here are the techniques, here’s what was learned, here’s why it was thought lawful. And make no mistake, he lays out the facts with a point of view. He stops just a little short of being argumentative, but this is meant to be persuasive as well as expository prose.

He doesn’t use much varnish in his treatment of opponents, either. While not quite condemning them outright, he does take a variety of players to task. He chronicles, for example, the current attorney general’s journey from counter-terrorism hawk in 2002 (“They are not prisoners of war…they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.”) to this in 2008 (“Our government…denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution….We owe the American people a reckoning.”) Thiessen is also not particularly kind to civil liberties lobbies who have seemed to push their agendas without regard for any security consequences and he saves a special brand of disdain for the pro bono work of law firms who seem bent on discovering new “rights” for enemy combatants.

And the book’s subtitle—How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack—should suggest that Thiessen does not think even the president immune from criticism.

As someone who lived and worked them from the inside, I can tell you that these are tough issues and honest men can and do differ on them. Thiessen has been giving as good as he is getting in the numerous interviews he has been giving since the book came out. And I admire his range, from the Catholic Eternal Word Network to Christiane Amanpour on CNN. That people are willing to consider his message is borne out by the book’s popularity to date, No. 9 on the New York Times best-seller list and No. 6 for The Washington Post as of this writing.

Thiessen’s instincts for the broader audience seem to be on the mark. Acceptance and even support of the interrogation regime is higher among the general populace that it is among some political elites and that support has seemed to grow as more details of the program have become public.

All of this is good. These issues need to be joined and we need the wisdom of an informed public to help us.

But there’s something even better about this book. In the overheated rhetoric of today’s Washington, we have lost sight of the fact that this program was carried out by real people, acting out of duty, not enthusiasm.

In preparing President Bush’s September 2006 speech on the interrogation program, Thiessen got a chance to meet real CIA interrogators. These decent people told him candidly what they had done, why, how they felt about it and how they felt about the fellow human beings they interrogated. Thiessen recounts how one of the interrogators that I sent down to talk to him was dubbed Emir Harry (not his real name) by KSM.

Thiessen’s book has put a human face on Emir Harry and his associates. That’s a good thing. These people deserve better than to be stalked by the ACLU’s John Adams project or to be subject to a re-investigation of their past activities. For doing what they were asked to do, these quiet professionals are bearing the nation’s burdens still today and Thiessen has given them their due. And that alone would make “Courting Disaster” worth a read.

Michael Hayden is a retired U.S. Air Force four-star general and former director of the National Security Agency and director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2010, 03:41:14 PM
"Our man formerly in Iraq" forwarded the following to me:

=======
The below excerpt came from a Washington Post article the other day. 
 
This basically mirrors my experience in obtaining info for my Colombia and Iraq missions.  That the best info I came across came was from the foreign news bureau correspondents of Washington Post, New York Times, and NPR:
 
 
Military launches Afghanistan intelligence-gathering mission

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 20, 2010; A12


KABUL -- On their first day of class in Afghanistan, the new U.S. intelligence analysts were given a homework assignment.
First read a six-page classified military intelligence report about the situation in Spin Boldak, a key border town and smuggling route in southern Afghanistan. Then read a 7,500-word article in Harper's magazine, also about Spin Boldak and the exploits of its powerful Afghan border police commander.
 
The conclusion they were expected to draw: The important information would be found in the magazine story. The scores of spies and analysts producing reams of secret documents were not cutting it.
 
"They need help," Capt. Matt Pottinger, a military intelligence officer, told the class. "And that's what you're going to be doing."
 
The class that began Friday in plywood hut B-8 on a military base in Kabul marked a first step in what U.S. commanders envision as a major transformation in how intelligence is gathered and used in the war against the Taliban.
 
Last month, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, published a scathing critique of the quality of information at his disposal. Instead of understanding the nuances of local politics, economics, religion and culture that drive the insurgency, he said, the multibillion-dollar industry devoted nearly all its effort to digging up dirt on insurgent groups.
 
"Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy," he wrote in a paper co-authored by Pottinger and another official and published by the Center for a New American Security.

Title: Son of Hamas founder worked for Israelis for more than a decade
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2010, 06:24:14 AM

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article7039011.ece
Son of Hamas founder spied for Israel for more than a decade
James Hider in Jerusalem

Mosab Hassan Yousef, a 32-year-old convert to Christianity, now lives in California

 
The son of one of Hamas’s founding members was a spy in the service of Israel for more than a decade, helping prevent dozens of Islamist suicide bombers from finding their targets, it emerged today.

Codenamed the Green Prince by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, supplied key intelligence on an almost daily basis from 1996 onwards and tracked down suicide bombers and their handlers from his father’s organization, the daily Haaretz said.

Information he supplied led to the arrests of some of the most wanted men by Israeli forces, including Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader often tipped as a potential president who was convicted of masterminding terrorist attacks, and one of Hamas’ top bomb-makers Abdullah Barghouti, who is no relation of the jailed Fatah chief.

Mr Yousef, a 32-year-old convert to Christianity who now lives in California, has revealed the intrigues of his years as a spy in a new book called Son of Hamas, much to the concern of Shin Bet, whose operations will be revealed in detail. While the revelations may give a boost to Israel’s intelligence service, whose external counterpart Mossad is still grappling with the diplomatic fall-out of last month’s Hamas assassination in Dubai, there will be concern that the account may give too many insights into the murky world of espionage.


However, Mr Yousef’s work will be far more damaging to Hamas, whose brutality he denounced. Dubai police have suggested that Mahmoud al-Mabhuh, the top Hamas militant found dead in a hotel room in the emirate on January 20, may have been betrayed by an insider from the Islamist movement itself.

And Mr Yousef had harsh words for the movement that his father helped form, and which now rules the Gaza Strip after a bloody takeover in summer 2007. “Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis,” he told the daily. “That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels, only a cease-fire, and no one knows that better than I. The Hamas leadership is responsible for the killing of Palestinians, not Israelis."

Mr Yousef’s former Israeli handler, identified only as Captain Loai, praised the resolve of his agent, whose codename derived from the colour of Islam – and Hamas’ – banner and from his exalted position within an organization that regularly kills those suspected of collaborating with the Jewish state.

"So many people owe him their life and don't even know it," he said. "The amazing thing is that none of his actions were done for money. He did things he believed in. He wanted to save lives. His grasp of intelligence matters was just as good as ours — the ideas, the insights. One insight of his was worth 1,000 hours of thought by top experts."

Mr Yousef, whose father is still in an Israeli jail cell, from where he was elected as an MP in 2006, went as far as tracking down would-be kamikazes himself in the streets of the West bank during the Second Intifada which erupted a decade ago and left thousands of Palestinians and Israelis dead. On one occasion he followed a bomber from Manara Square in the centre of Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem.

“We didn't know his name or what he looked like — only that he was in his 20s and would be wearing a red shirt," said the former handler. "We sent the Green Prince to the square and with his acute sense, he located the target within minutes. He saw who picked him up, followed the car and made it possible for us to arrest the suicide bomber and the man who was supposed to give him the belt. So another attack was thwarted, though no one knows about it. No one opens Champagne bottles or bursts into song and dance. This was an almost daily thing for the Prince. He displayed courage, had sharp antennae and an ability to cope with danger."

Mr Yousef, who converted from Islam to Christianity a decade ago – in itself, a dangerous act – was arrested by the Israelis in 1996 and within a year had been recruited by Shin Bet, then released to begin working as an informant.

Speaking by telephone from California, Mr Yousef told Haaretz he worried that the Israeli Government might release some of the prisoners he helped put behind bars in exchange for Gilad Schalit, a young Israeli soldier abducted by Hamas from the Gaza border more than three years ago.

“I wish I were in Gaza now," he said. "I would put on an army uniform and join Israel's special forces in order to liberate Gilad Schalit. If I were there, I could help. We wasted so many years with investigations and arrests to capture the very terrorists that they now want to release in return for Schalit. That must not be done."
Title: Infiltration
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2010, 12:53:38 PM
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=521871

Infiltration: What a tangled web Islamist appointees weave. When his pro-terrorist quotes surfaced, a new White House envoy dismissed them as someone else's. A recording says otherwise.

Now Rashad Hussain, President Obama's pick as special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has changed his story. He admits he did indeed call the indictment of a now-convicted terrorist a "travesty of justice."

Politico.com has provided the quotes from a recording of the 2004 event attended by Hussain to the White House for review. In it, Hussain defended confessed terrorist Sami Al-Arian, suggesting the government had railroaded him. A Florida professor, Al-Arian was running a U.S. beachhead for Palestinian terrorists. In a plea deal, he copped to a reduced charge of conspiracy to provide material support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a federally designated terror group. In a speech at a Cleveland mosque, Al-Arian once thundered: "Let's damn America, let's damn Israel, let's damn their allies until death."

When the controversy first broke, the White House deferred to the spin of Hussain and the Mideast outfit that scrubbed the offending statements from its Web site. Turns out the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs, a Saudi-tied, anti-Israel journal that sells Intifada trinkets, deleted his remarks after receiving a phone call from Hussain. WRMEA once employed Al-Arian's daughter as a staffer. Thanks to the recording, there's now no denying what Hussain said. After this deception, Obama should change his pick for envoy, who would join the OIC, a 57-government Islamic bloc, the largest voting bloc in the U.N.

The OIC is waging an international campaign against "Islamophobia," calling it the real "terrorism." The bloc's assault on free speech includes pressuring the West into passing laws criminalizing criticism of Islam, including motives of jihadists like Al-Arian.

It's plain that Hussain, who also has bashed the Patriot Act and other key anti-terror tools, cannot be trusted to represent U.S. interests vis-a-vis the OIC.

What's more, there are reports linking him to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, of which Al-Arian is a senior member. The Brotherhood has hatched a secret plot to infiltrate the U.S. government and "destroy" it "from within," and has erected an impressive infrastructure supporting terrorism inside America.

In a raid of Al-Arian's home, federal agents seized a document in Arabic revealing a Brotherhood plan for "spying" on U.S. agencies.

"Members of the group should be able to infiltrate the sensitive intelligence agencies or the embassies in order to collect information and build close relationships with the people in charge in these establishments," the paper advises Brotherhood leaders in America.

So far with this White House, the bad guys are finding it shockingly easy to put their agents in place.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 13, 2010, 10:21:33 AM
Power Line Blog
http://www.powerlineblog.com
CIA spies and Dartmouth deans
   Share Post   Print
April 9, 2010 Posted by Scott at 5:24 AM

Ishmael Jones is the pseudonymous former Central Intelligence Agency case officer who focused on human sources with access to intelligence on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. His assignments included more than 15 years of continuous overseas service under deep cover. He is the author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published by Encounter Books and just out in paperback.

We invited Mr. Jones to write something for us on a theme related to his book. He has followed up with the following post on a subject close to our heart:

A challenge to free societies today is the growth in size, power, and cost of highly paid, non-producing administrators and bureaucrats. These Soviet-style nomenklatura classes can stifle the fundamental missions of organizations. As a former CIA officer involved in intelligence reform, much of the work I do is aimed at the systemic control of bureaucracy.

In the CIA, bureaucracy weakens intelligence collection and makes Americans vulnerable to attack. At a college such as Dartmouth, which Power Line editors have followed closely, bureaucracy must be carefully monitored or it will hinder undergraduate education.
Study of the CIA's clandestine service is helpful in the analysis of other organizations because its use of secrecy, essential for conducting espionage operations, also allows it to avoid accountability. It is a Petri dish that shows how bureaucracy can grow if unimpeded.
Bureaucracy perverts human nature. The CIA is filled with brave, talented, patriotic, and energetic people, but the system does not encourage clandestine work. Clandestine work is hard and lonely, and it takes place in dingy hotel rooms in dysfunctional countries, far from family. Any CIA officer who goes to hunt bin Laden, for example, will be living in tough and dangerous conditions for long periods of time. Absence from CIA headquarters means the officer will not develop the connections, friendships and administrative skills necessary for advancement. Any CIA officer who goes to hunt bin Laden will return years later, unknown and unpromoteable. Espionage has come to be regarded as low-level work, meant for newly trained employees or the naive. It's much better to become a headquarters manager, with regular hours, low stress, plenty of time with the family, and stronger promotion possibilities.

At an educational institution like Dartmouth, which like many universities has seen a dramatic increase in administrative staff, an administrative job can be attractive. If a dean is considered more important than an educator, there will be strong pressure to create more positions for deans and to become a dean oneself. Undergraduate education means hard work. Undergraduates can be exasperating and rebellious. At the end of each term they might write unpleasant evaluations of professors which can be read by everyone on campus. It's much better to seek power, rank, and closer access to Dartmouth 's president and board by becoming an administrator.

I once attended a meeting at CIA headquarters with a group of bureaucrats and was astonished to see that an admired friend and colleague had joined their ranks. He'd once done brave work in tracking nuclear proliferators in Africa . We laughed about his transition to bureaucrat, and he apologized for his sloth, but pointed out that his new path led to promotion, more money, and the chance to make big bucks some day through CIA contracts. He'd found a job for his wife as an administrator as well, and she sat in a nearby office. The CIA finds it easier to live a bureaucratic lifestyle within the United States - no getting arrested by foreign intelligence services, no hassles, clean drinking water. More than 90% of CIA employees now live and work entirely within the United States , which is in violation of the CIA's charter. The number of effective CIA officers operating overseas under deep cover is almost insignificant.

Professional relationships don't need much of the administrative support that bureaucracy thrives upon. Good intelligence can usually be sent directly to the person who needs it - the President, military commanders, law enforcement - without much supervision. Bureaucrats just slow it down. Intelligence on the "Underwear Bomber" was available at the US embassy in Nigeria in November 2009, thanks to the bomber's father, but the information could not be pushed through the masses of supervisors during the five weeks before the bomber boarded the plane.

Professional educators, like CIA officers, require little supervision and should not be burdened with excessive deans and other administrative personnel. Dartmouth professors such as John Rassias, renowned for his decades of close interaction with students, need little supervision. More importantly, such educators should not be removed from their fundamental work to become administrators themselves.

The real dollar cost of bureaucrats is much greater than their salaries and benefits alone, because bureaucrats strive to look busy and to rise within the establishment, to control more funds and people. So they invent programs. A CIA contractor may take home $300k and his or her spouse another $300, with benefits at perhaps another $50k. We can still bear this burden. What we cannot bear are the $100 million programs these people create in order to advance themselves. Programs crowd out real espionage, which doesn't cost much. Good operations need only the cost of hotel rooms, airline tickets, and payments to sources.

If highly paid employees at a college are not involved in education, then what are they doing? I suspect many are doing the same things that CIA managers do in Washington , DC: attending meetings, drawing up budgets, jockeying for position and influence, solidifying their political power, and doing whatever it takes to look busy.

Bureaucracy's effect on human nature is fascinating. Its growth into a living creature within the CIA provides important lessons and warnings for the design and leadership of other institutions.

Mr. Jones has set up a site for his book here. He writes that all book profits go to veterans' charities.


Title: Dismantling of Russian Operation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2010, 06:24:33 AM
The Dismantling of a Suspected Russian Intelligence Operation
July 1, 2010
By Fred Burton and Ben West

The U.S. Department of Justice announced June 28 that an FBI counterintelligence investigation had resulted in the arrest on June 27 of 10 individuals suspected of acting as undeclared agents of a foreign country, in this case, Russia. Eight of the individuals were also accused of money laundering. On June 28, five of the defendants appeared before a federal magistrate in U.S. District Court in Manhattan while three others went before a federal magistrate in Alexandria, Va., and two more went before a U.S. magistrate in Boston. An 11th person named in the criminal complaint was arrested in Cyprus on June 29, posted bail and is currently at large.

The number of arrested suspects in this case makes this counterintelligence investigation one of the biggest in U.S. history. According to the criminal complaint, the FBI had been investigating some of these people for as long as 10 years, recording conversations in their homes, intercepting radio and electronic messages and conducting surveillance on them in and out of the United States. The case suggests that the classic tactics of intelligence gathering and counterintelligence are still being used by Russia and the United States.


Cast of Characters





(click here to enlarge image)
The following are the 11 individuals detained in the investigation, along with summaries of their alleged activities listed in the criminal complaint:

Christopher Metsos

Claimed to originally be from Canada.
Acted as an intermediary between the Russian mission to the United Nations in New York and suspects Richard Murphy, Cynthia Murphy, Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills.
Traveled to and from Canada.
Met with Richard Murphy at least four times between February 2001 and April 2005 at a restaurant in New York.
Was first surveilled in 2001 in meetings with other suspects.
Left the United States on June 17 and was detained in Cyprus on June 29, but appears to have skipped bail.
Richard and Cynthia Murphy

Claimed to be married and to be U.S. citizens.
First surveilled by the FBI in 2001 during meetings with Mestos.
Also met with the third secretary in the Russian mission to the United Nations.
Communicated electronically with Moscow.
Richard Murphy’s safe-deposit box was searched in 2006 and agents found a birth certificate claiming he was born in Philadelphia; city officials claim there is no such birth certificate on record.
Engaged in electronic communications with Moscow.
Traveled to Moscow via Italy in February 2010.
Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley

Claimed to be married and to be natives of Canada who are naturalized U.S. citizens.
FBI searched a safe-deposit box listed under their names in January 2001.
FBI discovered that Donald Heathfield’s identity had been taken from a deceased child by the same name in Canada and found old photos of Foley taken with Soviet film.
Engaged in electronic communications with Moscow.
Tracey Foley traveled to Moscow via Paris in March 2010.
Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills

Claimed to be married and to be a U.S. citizen (Zottoli) and a Canadian citizen (Mills).
First surveilled in June 2004 during a meeting with Richard Murphy.
Engaged in electronic communications with Moscow.
Juan Lazaro and Vicky Pelaez

Claimed to be married and to be a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Peru (Pelaez) and a Peruvian citizen born in Uruguay (Lazaro).
First surveilled at a meeting in a public park in an unidentified South American country in January 2000.
Evidence against Vicky Pelaez was the first gathered on the 11 suspected operatives.
Lazaro appeared to communicate with a diplomat at the Russian Embassy in an unidentified South American country.
Engaged in electronic communications with Moscow.
Anna Chapman

First surveillance mentioned was in Manhattan in January 2010.
Communicated with a declared diplomat in the Russian mission to the United Nations on Wednesdays.
Knowingly accepted a fraudulent passport from an undercover FBI agent whom she believed to be a Russian diplomatic officer June 26, but turned it in to the police the next day shortly before her arrest.
Mikhail Semenko

First surveillance mentioned in the criminal complaint was in June 2010 in Washington.
Revealed to an undercover officer that he had received training and instruction from “the center” (a common term for the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR).
Accepted a payment of $5,000 and followed orders given by an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian diplomatic officer to deliver the money to a drop site in Washington.

Their Mission

According to the FBI, some of the alleged “undeclared agents” moved to the United States in the 1990s, while others (such as Anna Chapman) did not arrive until 2009. The FBI says nine of the suspects were provided with fake identities and even fake childhood photos and cover stories (part of what would be called a “legend”) in order to establish themselves in the United State under “deep cover.” Chapman and Semenko used their own Russian identities (Chapman is divorced and may have taken her surname from her former husband). The true nationalities of the other suspects are unknown, but several passages in the criminal complaint indicate that most of them were originally from Russia. The Russian SVR allegedly provided the suspects with bank accounts, homes, cars and regular payments in order to facilitate “long-term service” inside the United States, where, according to the criminal complaint, the individuals were supposed to “search [for] and develop ties in policymaking circles” in the United States.

The FBI criminal complaint provides evidence that two of the deep-cover couples (Heathfield/Foley and Lazaro/Palaez) and the two short-term cover agents (Semenko and Chapman) were operating without knowledge of each other or in connection with the other two couples and Metsos, who did interact. This suggests that they would not have formed one network, as is being reported, but perhaps discrete networks. The criminal complaint provides evidence indicating that most of the operatives were being run out of the SVR residence at the U.N. mission.

It is unclear exactly how successful the 11 accused individuals were in finding and developing those ties in policymaking circles. The criminal complaint accuses the individuals of sending everything from information on the gold market from a financier in New York (a contact that Moscow apparently found helpful, since it reportedly encouraged further contact with the source) to seeking out potential college graduates headed for jobs at the CIA. The criminal complaint outlines one recorded conversation in which Lazaro told Pelaez that his handlers were not pleased with his reports because he wasn’t attributing them properly. Pelaez then advised Lazaro to “put down any politician” (to whom the information could be attributed) in order to appease the handlers, indicating that the alleged operatives did not always practice scrupulous tradecraft in their work. Improperly identifying sources in the field ultimately diminishes the value of the information, since it cannot be adequately assessed without knowing where it came from. If these kinds of shortcuts were normally taken by Pelaez, Lazaro and others, then it would reduce their value to the SVR and the harm that they may have done to the United States. The suspects were allegedly instructed by their handlers in the United States and Russia to not pursue high-level government jobs, since their legends were not strong enough to withstand a significant background investigation. But they allegedly were encouraged to make contact with high-level government officials, in order to have a finger on the pulse of policymaking in Washington.


Tradecraft

The criminal complaint alleges that the suspects used traditional tradecraft of the clandestine services to communicate with each other and send reports to their handlers. The suspects allegedly transmitted messages to Moscow containing their reports encrypted in “radiograms” (short-burst radio transmissions that appear as Morse code) or written in invisible ink, and met in third countries for payments and briefings. They are also said to have used “brush passes” (the quick and discreet exchange of materials between one person and another) and “flash meets” (seemingly innocuous, brief encounters) to transfer information, equipment and money. The criminal complaint also gives examples of operatives using coded phrases with each other and with their operators to confirm each other’s identities.

In addition to the traditional tradecraft described in the criminal complaint, there are also new operational twists. The suspects allegedly used e-mail to set up electronic dead drops to transmit encrypted intelligence reports to Moscow, and several operatives were said to have used steganography (embedding information in seemingly innocuous images) to encrypt messages. Chapman and Semenko allegedly employed private wireless networks hosted by a laptop programmed to communicate only with a specific laptop. The FBI claims to have identified networks (and may have intercepted the messages transmitted) that had been temporarily set up when a suspect was in proximity to a known Russian diplomat. These electronic meetings occurred frequently, according to the FBI, and allowed operatives and their operators to communicate covertly without actually being seen together.

Operations are said to have been run largely out of Russia’s U.N. mission in New York, meaning that when face-to-face meetings were required, declared diplomats from the U.N. mission could do the job. According to the criminal complaint, Russian diplomats handed off cash to Christopher Metsos on at least two occasions, and he allegedly distributed it to various other operatives (which provided the grounds for the charge of money laundering). The actual information gathered from the field appears to have gone directly to Russia, according to the complaint.

It is important to note that the accused individuals were not charged with espionage; the charge of acting as an undeclared agent of a foreign state is less serious. The criminal complaint never alleges that any of the 11 individuals received or transmitted classified information. This doesn’t mean that the suspects weren’t committing espionage. (Investigators will certainly learn more about their activities during interrogation and trial preparation.) According to the criminal complaint, their original guidance from Moscow was to establish deep cover. This means that they would have been tasked with positioning themselves over time in order gain access to valuable information (it is important to point out that “valuable” is not synonymous with “classified”) through their established occupations or social lives. This allows agents to gain access to what they want without running unnecessary security risks.

Any intelligence operation must balance operational security with the need to gather intelligence. Too much security and the operative is unable to do anything; but if intelligence gathering is too aggressive, the handlers risk losing an intelligence asset. If these people were operating in deep cover, the SVR probably invested quite a bit of time and money training and cultivating them, likely well before they arrived in the United States. According to information in the criminal complaint, the suspects were actively meeting with potential sources, sending reports back to Moscow and interacting with declared Russian diplomats in the United States, all the while running the risk of being caught. But they also took security measures, according to the complaint. There is no evidence that they attempted to reach out to people who would have fallen outside their natural professional and social circles, which could have raised suspicions. In many ways, these individuals appear to have acted more like recruiters, seeking out people with access to valuable information, rather than agents trying to gain access to that information themselves. However, all we know now is based on what was released in the criminal complaint. An investigation that lasted this long surely has an abundance of evidence (much of it likely classified) that wasn’t included in the complaint.


Counterintelligence

According to authorities, the suspected operatives were under heavy surveillance by U.S. counterintelligence agents for 10 years. Working out of Boston, New York and Washington, the FBI employed its Special Surveillance Group to track suspects in person; place video and audio recorders in their homes and at meeting places to record communications; search their homes and safe-deposit boxes; intercept e-mail and electronic communications; and deploy undercover agents to entrap the suspects.

Counterintelligence operations don’t just materialize out of thin air. There has to be a tip or a clue that puts investigators on the trail of a suspected undeclared foreign agent. As suggested by interviews with the suspects’ neighbors, none of them displayed unusual behavior that would have tipped the neighbors off. All apparently had deep (but not airtight) legends going back decades that allayed suspicion. The criminal complaint did not suggest how the U.S. government came to suspect these people of reporting back to the SVR in Russia, although we did notice that the beginning of the investigation coincides with the time that a high-level SVR agent stationed at Russia’s U.N. mission in New York began passing information to the FBI. Sergei Tretyakov (who told his story in the book by Pete Earley called “Comrade J,” an abbreviation of his SVR codename, “Comrade Jean”), passed information to the FBI from the U.N. mission from 1997 to 2000, just before he defected to the United States in October 2000. According to the criminal complaint, seven of the 11 suspects were connected to Russia’s U.N. mission, though evidence of those links did not begin to emerge until 2004 (and some as late as 2010). The timing of Tretyakov’s cooperation with the U.S. government and the timing of the beginning of this investigation resulting in the arrest of the 11 suspects this week suggests that Tretyakov may have been the original source who tipped off the U.S. government. So far, the evidence is circumstantial — the timing and the location match up — but Tretyakov, as the SVR operative at Russia’s U.N. mission, certainly would have been in a position to know about operations involving most of the people arrested June 27.


Why Now?

Nothing in the complaint indicates why, after more than 10 years of investigation, the FBI decided to arrest the 11 suspects June 27. It is not unusual for investigations to be drawn out for years, since much information on tradecraft and intent can be obtained by watching foreign intelligence agencies operate without knowing they are being watched. Extended surveillance can also reveal additional contacts and build a stronger case. As long as the suspects aren’t posing an immediate risk to national security (and judging by the criminal complaint, these 11 suspects were not), there is little reason for the authorities to show their hand and conclude a fruitful counterintelligence operation.

It has been suggested that some of the suspects were a flight risk, so agents arrested all of them in order to prevent them from escaping the United States. Metsos left the United States on June 17 and was arrested in Cyprus on June 29, however, his whereabouts are currently unknown, as he has not reported back to Cypriot authorities after posting bail. A number of the suspects left and came back to the United States numerous times, and investigators appear not to have been concerned about these past comings and goings. It isn’t clear why they would have been concerned about someone leaving at this point.

The timing of the arrests so soon after U.S. President Barack Obama’s June 25 meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev also raises questions about political motivations. Medvedev was in Washington to talk with Obama in an attempt to improve relations between the two countries on the day the FBI officially filed the criminal complaint. The revelation of a network of undeclared foreign agents operating in the United States would ordinarily have a negative effect on relations between the United States and the foreign country in question. In this case, though, officials from both countries made public statements saying they hoped the arrests would not damage ties, and neither side appears to be trying to leverage the incident. Indeed, if there were political motivations behind the timing of the arrests, they remain a mystery.

Whatever the motivations, now that the FBI has these suspects in custody it will be able to interrogate them and probably gather even more information on the operation. The charges for now don’t include espionage, but the FBI could very well be withholding this charge in order to provide an incentive for the suspects to plea bargain. We expect considerably more information on this unprecedented case to come out in the following weeks and months, revealing much about Russian clandestine operations and their targets in the United States.
Title: retired CIA Russian expert says
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2010, 07:56:02 AM
Spy swap was a mistakeBy Gene Coyle, Special to CNNJuly 11, 2010 9:40 a.m. EDT
 STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Ex-CIA Russian expert says the quick spy swap will be seen as sign of U.S. weakness
He says it sends the message that there's no risk for Russia to spy on the U.S.
Coyle: U.S. is right to try to maintain good relations with Moscow
Alleged spies should have spent more time behind bars, he says
Editor's note: Gene Coyle is a retired, Russian-speaking, 30-year veteran of the CIA, who specialized for most of his career on Russian affairs. He is a recipient of the CIA's Intelligence Medal of Merit. He is now an adjunct professor at Indiana University and the author of two spy novels.

(CNN) -- The Obama administration's rush to sweep the recent Russian spy scandal off the table as quickly as possible with this swap is a bad move on several counts.

It is understandable and correct that President Barack Obama values the overall U.S.-Russian relationship above the question of whether a few Russian spies spend years in jail.

The "reset" campaign was an excellent idea; too bad no one in our Department of State knew how to correctly spell the word in Russian when Secretary Hillary Clinton presented the "button" to the Russian Foreign Minister. However, there is a line between seeking a mutually beneficial relationship and delusional pandering.

The history of U.S.-Russian relations shows that dealing respectfully but firmly is what works best. Most importantly, Moscow only agrees to anything that it perceives to be at least 50 percent in its self-interest, not because we've been nice guys. The only thing releasing all of these deep-cover Russian intelligence officers within a matter of days is going to teach Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, an old KGB officer, is that Obama is a pushover -- overly focused on making sure not to offend Russia.

Aside from sending the wrong political message, the quick swap also tells the leadership of the Russian government and the SVR, its intelligence service, that there is really no downside to being caught carrying out espionage in America.

Any intelligence service in the world, including Russia's, when deciding whether to carry out a particular espionage operation looks at the "risk factor." What will be the blow back if this becomes known?

Running "illegals" -- that is, Russians posing as citizens from a third country and who have no overt connection to the Russian embassy or consulates in America -- would usually be considered a high-risk operation by Moscow because those Russian citizens don't have diplomatic immunity if caught. It's bad press and it's bad for morale within the SVR if one, much less 11, of your deep cover officers get caught and are facing decades in prison. But Obama has now just told the SVR, "Hey, there is no penalty for spying in America. If we catch you, we'll just let you go so as not to damage 'big picture' relations."

We did show Russia certain appropriate courtesies in these arrests, which would have indicated we didn't want to harm our political relationship with Russia.

We waited until Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had made his visit to America. We waited until after the G20 meetings in Canada. We haven't even publicly named or expelled the Russian diplomats who were apparently observed being involved in the communications with these illegals. (Hopefully, the Department of State has at least told the Russian ambassador that certain of his diplomats should quietly leave America.) And speaking of morale, what message does this send to the hundreds of FBI special agents who spent thousands of hours working these cases?

According to various press accounts, the number of Russian intelligence officers in America and Western Europe has already returned to Cold War levels. Obama has now told the Russians, there isn't even a problem if we catch you. Try anything you want.

Normally, when any intelligence service has a major flap as this was, it would order an immediate stand down of other operations in that country for perhaps several months while it tried to figure out what had gone wrong. By immediately sending these SVR officers back to Moscow, they will be available to assist in that investigation.

Not knowing what all they were involved in -- it was certainly more than "penetrating the local PTA" -- I don't necessarily advocate having kept these people in prison for decades, but a year or two in prison before offering a swap would have sent a strong message to Putin and the SVR. And if the press accounts are accurate, getting four people out of Russian jails in return for these 10 doesn't seem like much of a bargain either. (An 11th suspect detained in Cyprus remains on the loose after being released on bail.)

Obama is no doubt an intelligent fellow, but he certainly didn't get very good advice from his intelligence community or Russian experts about how to handle this spy caper.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Gene Coyle.
Title: Stratfor: Russian Spies and Strategic Intel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2010, 08:17:26 AM
Russian Spies and Strategic Intelligence
July 13, 2010




By George Friedman

The United States has captured a group of Russian spies and exchanged them for four individuals held by the Russians on espionage charges. The way the media has reported on the issue falls into three groups:

That the Cold War is back,
That, given that the Cold War is over, the point of such outmoded intelligence operations is questionable,
And that the Russian spy ring was spending its time aimlessly nosing around in think tanks and open meetings in an archaic and incompetent effort.
It is said that the world is global and interdependent. This makes it vital for a given nation to know three things about all of the nations with which it interacts.

First, it needs to know what other nations are capable of doing. Whether militarily, economically or politically, knowing what other nations are capable of narrows down those nations’ possible actions, eliminating fantasies and rhetoric from the spectrum of possible moves. Second, the nation needs to know what other nations intend to do. This is important in the short run, especially when intentions and capabilities match up. And third, the nation needs to know what will happen in other nations that those nations’ governments didn’t anticipate.

The more powerful a nation is, the more important it is to understand what it is doing. The United States is the most powerful country in the world. It therefore follows that it is one of the prime focuses of every country in the world. Knowing what the United States will do, and shifting policy based on that, can save countries from difficulties and even disaster. This need is not confined, of course, to the United States. Each country in the world has a list of nations that it is interdependent with, and it keeps an eye on those nations. These can be enemies, friends or just acquaintances. It is impossible for nations not to keep their eyes on other nations, corporations not to keep their eyes on other corporations and individuals not to keep their eyes on other people. How they do so varies; that they do so is a permanent part of the human condition. The shock at learning that the Russians really do want to know what is going on in the United States is, to say the least, overdone.

Russian Tradecraft Examined
Let’s consider whether the Russian spies were amateurish. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets developed a unique model of espionage. They would certainly recruit government officials or steal documents. What they excelled at, however, was placing undetectable operatives in key positions. Soviet talent scouts would range around left-wing meetings to discover potential recruits. These would be young people with impeccable backgrounds and only limited contact with the left. They would be recruited based on ideology, and less often via money, sex or blackmail. They would never again be in contact with communists or fellow travelers. They would apply for jobs in their countries’ intelligence services, foreign or defense ministries, and so on. Given their family and academic backgrounds, they would be hired. They would then be left in place for 20 or 30 years while they rose in the ranks — and, on occasion, aided with bits of information from the Soviet side to move their careers ahead.

The Soviets understood that a recruited employee might be a double agent. But stealing information on an ad hoc basis was also risky, as the provenance of such material was always murky. Recruiting people who were not yet agents, creating psychological and material bonds over long years of management and allowing them to mature into senior intelligence or ministry officials allowed ample time for testing loyalty and positioning. The Soviets not only got more reliable information this way but also the ability to influence the other country’s decision-making. Recruiting a young man in the 1930s, having him work with the OSS and later the CIA, and having him rise to the top levels of the CIA — had that ever happened — would thus give the Soviets information and control.

These operations took decades, and Soviet handlers would spend their entire careers managing one career. There were four phases:

Identifying likely candidates,
Evaluating and recruiting them,
Placing them and managing their rise in the organization,
And exploiting them.
The longer the third phase took, the more effective the fourth phase would be.

It is difficult to know what the Russian team was up to in the United States from news reports, but there are two things we know about the Russians: They are not stupid, and they are extremely patient. If we were to guess — and we are guessing — this was a team of talent scouts. They were not going to meetings at the think tanks because they were interested in listening to the papers; rather, they were searching for recruits. These were people between the ages of 22 and 30, doing internships or entry level jobs, with family and academic backgrounds that would make employment in classified areas of the U.S. government easy — and who in 20 to 30 years would provide intelligence and control to Moscow.

In our view, the media may have conflated two of Moscow’s missions.

Twin Goals and the Espionage Challenge
One of the Russian operatives, Don Heathfield, once approached a STRATFOR employee in a series of five meetings. There appeared to be no goal of recruitment; rather, the Russian operative tried to get the STRATFOR employee to try out software he said his company had developed. We suspect that had this been done, our servers would be outputting to Moscow. We did not know at the time who he was. (We have since reported the incident to the FBI, but these folks were everywhere, and we were one among many.)

Thus, the group apparently included a man using software sales as cover — or as we suspect, as a way to intrude on computers. As discussed, the group also included talent scouts. We would guess that Anna Chapman was brought in as part of the recruitment phase of talent scouting. No one at STRATFOR ever had a chance to meet her, having apparently failed the first screening.

Each of the phases of the operatives’ tasks required a tremendous amount of time, patience and, above all, cover. The operatives had to blend in (in this case, they didn’t do so well enough). Russians have always had a tremendous advantage over Americans in this regard. A Russian long-term deployment took you to the United States, for example. Were the Americans to try the same thing, they would have to convince people to spend years learning Russian to near-native perfection and then to spend 20-30 years of their lives in Russia. Some would be willing to do so, but not nearly as many as there are Russians prepared to spend that amount of time in the United States or Western Europe.

The United States can thus recruit sources (and sometimes it gets genuine ones). It can buy documents. But the extremely patient, long-term deployments are very difficult for it. It doesn’t fit with U.S. career patterns or family expectations.

The United States has substituted technical intelligence for this process. Thus, the most important U.S. intelligence-collection agency is not the CIA; it is the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA focuses on intercepting communications, penetrating computer networks, encryption and the like. (We will assume that they are successful at this.) So whereas the Russians seek to control the career of a recruit through retirement, the NSA seeks access to everything that is recorded electronically. The goal here is understanding capabilities and intentions. To the extent that the target is unaware of the NSA’s capabilities, the NSA does well. In many ways, this provides better and faster intelligence than the placement of agents, except that this does not provide influence.

The Intelligence Assumption
In the end, both the U.S. and Russian models — indeed most intelligence models — are built on the core assumption that the more senior the individual, the more knowledge he and his staff have. To put it more starkly, it assumes that what senior (and other) individuals say, write or even think reveals the most important things about the country in question. Thus, controlling a senior government official or listening to his phone conversations or e-mails makes one privy to the actions that country will take — thus allowing one to tell the future.

Let’s consider two cases: Iran in 1979 and the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the collapse of the Soviet empire were events of towering importance for the United States. Assume that the United States knew everything the shah’s senior officials and their staffs knew, wrote, or said in the period leading up to the Iranian Revolution. Or assume that the shah’s prime minister or a member of the Soviet Union’s Politburo was a long-term mole.

Either of those scenarios would not have made any difference to how events played out. This is because, in the end, the respective senior leadership didn’t know how events were going to play out. Partly this is because they were in denial, but mostly this is because they didn’t have the facts and they didn’t interpret the facts they did have properly. At these critical turning points in history, the most thorough penetration using either American or Russian techniques would have failed to provide warning of the change ahead. This is because the basic premise of the intelligence operation was wrong. The people being spied on and penetrated simply didn’t understand their own capabilities — i.e., the reality on the ground in their respective countries — and therefore their intentions about what to do were irrelevant and actually misleading.

In saying this, we must be very cautious, since obviously there are many instances in which targets of intelligence agencies do have valuable information and their decisions do actually represent what will happen. But if we regard anticipating systemic changes as one of the most important categories of intelligence, then these are cases where the targets of intelligence may well know the least and know it last. The Japanese knew they were going to hit Pearl Harbor, and having intelligence on that fact was enormously important. But that the British would collapse at Singapore was a fact not known to the British, so there would have been no way to obtain that information in advance from the British.

We started with three classes of intelligence: capabilities, intentions and what will actually happen. The first is an objective measure that can sometimes be seen directly but more frequently is obtained through data held by someone in the target country. The most important issue is not what this data says but how accurate it is. Intentions, by contrast, represent the subjective plans of decision makers. History is filled with intentions that were never implemented, or that, when implemented, had wildly different outcomes than the decision maker expected. From our point of view, the most important aspect of this category is the potential for unintended consequences. For example, George W. Bush did not intend to get bogged down in a guerrilla war in Iraq. What he intended and what happened were two different things because his view of American and Iraqi capabilities were not tied to reality.

American and Russian intelligence is source-based. There is value in sources, but they need to be taken with many grains of salt, not because they necessarily lie but because the highest placed source may simply be wrong — and at times, an entire government can be wrong. If the purpose of intelligence is to predict what will happen, and it is source-based, then that assumes that the sources know what is going on and how it will play out. But often they don’t.

Russian and American intelligence agencies are both source-obsessed. On the surface, this is reasonable and essential. But it assumes something about sources that is frequently true, but not always — and in fact is only true with great infrequency on the most important issues. From our point of view, the purpose of intelligence is obvious: It is to collect as much information as possible, and surely from the most highly placed sources. But in the end, the most important question to ask is whether the most highly placed source has any clue as to what is going to happen.

Knowledge of what is being thought is essential. But gaming out how the objective and impersonal forces will interact and play out it is the most important thing of all. The focus on sources allows the universe of intelligence to be populated by the thoughts of the target. Sometimes that is of enormous value. But sometimes the most highly placed source has no idea what is about to happen. Sometimes it is necessary to listen to the tape of Gorbachev or Bush planning the future and recognize that what they think will happen and what is about to happen are very different things.

The events of the past few weeks show intelligence doing the necessary work of recruiting and rescuing agents. The measure of all of this activity is not whether one has penetrated the other side, but in the end, whether your intelligence organization knew what was going to happen and told you regardless of what well-placed sources believed. Sometimes sources are indispensable. Sometimes they are misleading. And sometimes they are the way an intelligence organization justifies being wrong.
Title: POTH: Scientist heads home
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2010, 08:37:57 AM
Scientist Heads Home, Iran Says
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM YONG
Published: July 14, 2010

 
WASHINGTON — An Iranian nuclear scientist who American officials say defected to the United States last year, provided information about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and then developed second thoughts, was flying home on Wednesday, less than two days after walking into the Iranian Interests Section of the Pakistani Embassy here and saying he wanted a ticket back to Tehran.

The scientist, Shahram Amiri, “has left the United States for the Iranian capital, Tehran,” Press TV, the state-run satellite broadcaster, reported. A few hours later, state television said he was flying via Doha, Qatar, and would arrived in Tehran on Thursday.

The bizarre episode was the latest in a tale that has featured a mysterious disappearance from a hotel room in Saudi Arabia, rumors of a trove of new intelligence about Iran’s nuclear facilities and a series of contradictory YouTube videos. It immediately set off a renewed propaganda war between Iran and the United States.

Iranian officials have said for months that Mr. Amiri, 32, was kidnapped in the spring of 2009, taken to the United States and imprisoned and tortured. Iranian media outlets quoted Mr. Amiri on Tuesday as saying that the United States had wanted to quietly return him to Iran and “cover up the kidnapping.”

American intelligence officials have scoffed at such accounts.

On Wednesday, Press TV said, “Analysts say U.S. intelligence officials decided to release Amiri after they failed to advance their propaganda campaign against Iran’s nuclear program via fabricating interviews with the Iranian national.”

State television showed footage of Mr. Amiri in what it said was an interview at the Iranian Interests Section of the Pakistan Embassy on Tuesday. He said had been under “psychological pressure” in the United States and had been offered financial incentives to tell American news outlets that he had come to America voluntarily to hand over a set of documents that were shown to him on a laptop. He had not agreed to do so, he said.

In the first official acknowledgment of Mr. Amiri’s presence in the United States, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that he had arrived in the country “of his own free will” and could leave whenever he wished — an indication, she said, that he was hardly a prisoner of the United States government.

But clearly the latest chapter in the saga of Mr. Amiri, a specialist in radiation detection, was an embarrassment to American intelligence agencies and offered a peephole view of what is informally called the “brain drain” program to lure Iranian scientists and engineers out of their country.

Mr. Amiri was described as an important confirming source about the Iranian nuclear program, but he was considered too junior and too removed from the program’s central leadership to have deep knowledge. According to an American intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Mr. Amiri used his expertise in radiation detection to monitor employee safety at many of Iran’s atomic plants and facilities.

The strange saga of Mr. Amiri began when he vanished during a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia 13 months ago. Almost immediately, it was clear that he was in the hands of Western intelligence agencies, and American officials now say that he was spirited quickly to the United States.

Shortly after Mr. Amiri disappeared, the Iranian government protested that he had been kidnapped by the United States, and it asked the United Nations secretary general to arrange for his return.

It is unclear when Mr. Amiri’s debriefings by American intelligence officials ended. But at some point he was placed in the national resettlement program, a sort of witness-protection program run by the C.I.A. for defectors, and starting in the spring his nervousness about the fate of his wife and child grew markedly.

A former senior American intelligence official said he believed that the Iranians had threatened Mr. Amiri’s family, and a current American official said that “the Iranians are not above using relatives to try to influence people.” Whatever the reason, one evening, looking haggard and unshaven, Mr. Amiri made a video, apparently on his laptop computer.

It showed a young man speaking in Persian through a computer phone hookup and saying that he had been kidnapped in a joint operation involving the C.I.A. and the Saudi intelligence service in Medina, Saudi Arabia, on June 3, 2009. State television offered a similar version on Wednesday, quoting Mr. Amiri as saying he had been offered a ride in a car by some Persian-speaking men in a car while he was on his way to a mosque in Medina.

The man who appeared in the earlier video also said he had been taken to a house and injected with something, and that when he awoke, he was on a plane heading to the United States.

He said he was recording the video on April 5 in Tucson.

=============

Page 2 of 2)



But hours later, another video appeared on YouTube, apparently made after the first one, with professional help. Appearing in a well-lighted room that appeared to be a library, with the added touch of a globe and a chessboard, Mr. Amiri looked well groomed. He identified himself as a student in a Ph.D. program and said he was eager to complete his studies and return to his family.

He insisted that he was free and safe, and he demanded an end to what he called false videos about himself, saying he had no interest in politics or experience in any nuclear weapons programs. He then made a third video, similar to the first.

On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton left it unclear why Mr. Amiri made his dramatic appearance at a storefront offshoot of the Pakistani Embassy on Monday evening, seeking refuge, a passport and a plane ticket.

Mrs. Clinton, answering reporters’ questions at a news conference at the State Department with Iraq’s foreign minister, said Mr. Amiri had been scheduled to leave for Iran a day earlier but “was unable to make all of the necessary arrangements” to travel through other countries. “He’s free to go,” she said. “He was free to come. Those decisions are his alone to make.”

It is unclear what awaits Mr. Amiri in Iran, whether a hero’s welcome or an interrogation by Iranian authorities. Iranian state television said on Wednesday that he would be met by members of his family when he arrives in Tehran on Thursday.

Mr. Amiri had worked at Malek Ashtar University in Iran, which is linked to the powerful Revolutionary Guards, and the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group based in France, reported in April that Mr. Amiri worked at the “Mojdeh” site, which they described as an atomic nerve center disguised as an academic complex.

Mr. Amiri is also believed to have once worked at Lavizan, a military research base outside Tehran that was razed in 2003 and 2004 as atomic inspectors in Vienna raised questions about its possession of highly enriched uranium.

Mrs. Clinton, in insisting that Mr. Amiri could leave, called for the release of three American hikers who were arrested and charged with entering Iranian territory in July 2009. But, unlike it did in the Russian prisoner swap last week, the United States made no effort to try to negotiate a trade, officials said.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Rarick on July 15, 2010, 03:34:44 AM
I would not sell Amiri any life insurance............  I hope the Intel guys do their homework, this could be a serious effort at various sorts of disinformation.  Given the typical bureaucratic NIH syndromes, even if a light bulb of comprehension lights up as to what is really going on, it will probably get missed.

Heck the goal could have simply been to muddy the political/ diplomatic discussion as leverage for more controversy/psychobabble?
Title: Stratfor: Passport Fraud
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2010, 07:27:04 AM
Who knows?  Certainly nothing we are getting on this is likely to be true :-P

In another vein, here's this:

The Shifting Landscape of Passport Fraud
July 15, 2010




By Scott Stewart

The recent case involving the arrest and deportation of the Russian intelligence network in the United States has once again raised the subject of document fraud in general and passport fraud in particular. The FBI’s investigation into the group of Russian operatives discovered that several of the suspects had assumed fraudulent identities and had obtained genuine passports (and other identity documents) in their assumed names. One of the suspects assumed the identity of a Canadian by the name of Christopher Robert Mestos, who died in childhood. The suspect was arrested in Cyprus but fled after posting bail; his true identity remains unknown. Three other members of the group also assumed Canadian identities, with Andrey Bezrukov posing as Donald Heathfield, Elena Vavilova as Tracey Foley and Natalia Pereverzeva as Patricia Mills.

Passport fraud is a topic that surfaces with some frequency in relation to espionage cases. (The Israelis used passport fraud during the January 2010 operation to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas militant commander.) Passport fraud is also frequently committed by individuals involved in crimes such as narcotics smuggling and arms trafficking, as well as by militants involved in terrorist plots. Because of the frequency with which passport fraud is used in these types of activities — and due to the importance that curtailing passport fraud can have in combating espionage, terrorism and crime — we thought it a topic worth discussing this week in greater detail.


Passports and Investigations

While the use of passports goes back centuries, the idea of a travel document that can be used to absolutely verify the identity of a traveler is a relatively new concept. Passports containing the photos of the bearer have only been widely used and mandated for international travel for about a century now, and in the United States, it was not until 1918 that Congress enacted laws mandating the use of U.S. passports for Americans returning from overseas and home country passports with visas for foreigners wishing to visit the United States. Passport fraud followed closely on the heels of these regulations. Following the American entry into World War I, special agents from the State Department’s Bureau of Secret Intelligence became very involved in hunting down German and Austrian intelligence officers who were then using forged documents to operate inside the United States.

In the decades after World War I, the Bureau of Secret Intelligence’s successor organization, the Office of the Chief Special Agent, became very involved in investigating Nazi and Communist agents who committed passport fraud to operate inside the United States. As the Office of the Chief Special Agent evolved into the State Department’s Office of Security and then finally the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), special agents from the organization continued to investigate passport and visa fraud. In addition to foreign intelligence officers, they have also investigated terrorists, fugitives and other criminals who have committed passport fraud. Since the State Department is the agency that issues U.S. passports and visas, it is also the primary agency charged with ensuring the integrity of those documents. Therefore, in much the same manner that U.S. Secret Service agents are charged with investigating counterfeit currency (and ensuring the integrity of currency for the Treasury Department), DS agents are charged with investigating passport fraud.

DS agents are not the only ones who investigate passport fraud, however. As the FBI matured organizationally and became the primary domestic counterintelligence agency, the bureau also began to work passport fraud investigations involving foreign intelligence officers. Soviet and other Communist “illegals” — intelligence officers operating without official cover — frequently assumed the identities of deceased infants, and because of this, the FBI developed a particular interest in passport fraud investigations involving infant death identity (IDI) cases. However, passport fraud is only one of the many criminal violations that the FBI investigates, and most FBI agents will not investigate a passport fraud case during their career.

As the agency primarily responsible for border and immigration enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also investigates identity-document fraud, including passport fraud, although many of the cases ICE agents work involve foreign passports. ICE also has a forensic document laboratory that is the best in the world when it comes to the technical investigation of fraudulent identity documents.

Another U.S. government agency that watches passport fraud with a great deal of interest is the CIA. Not only does it have an operational interest in the topic — the agency wants to be able to use fraud for its own purposes — but it is also very interested in being able to verify the true identities of walk-ins and other potential sources. Because of this, the CIA needs to have the ability to spot fraudulent documents. During the 1980s, the CIA produced an excellent series of unclassified guides on the terrorist use of passport and visa fraud called the “Redbook.” The Redbook was discontinued in 1992, just as the jihadist threat to the United States was beginning to emerge.

As in any area where there are overlapping jurisdictions and investigations, there is sometimes tension and bureaucratic jealously between the various agencies involved in investigating passport fraud. The level of tension is frequently lower in scenarios where the agencies work together (as on joint terrorism task forces) and where the agents and agencies have become accustomed to working together. In the forensic realm, the ICE laboratory generally has an excellent relationship with the State Department, the FBI (and the document section of the FBI laboratory) and the CIA’s document laboratory.


Types of Passport Fraud

There are several different types of passport fraud. The first is the intentional issuing of a genuine passport in a false identity by a government. Real passports are often issued in false identities to provide cover for intelligence officers, but this can also be done for other reasons. For example, in late 1990, during Operation Desert Shield, the Iraqi government provided a large group of Iraqi intelligence officers with Iraqi passports in false identities so that these officials could travel abroad and conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. These Iraqi teams were dispatched all over the world and were provided direction (as well as weapons and IED components) by Iraqi intelligence officers stationed in embassies abroad. The explosives and firearms were sent around the world via diplomatic pouches (which are exempt from search). Following failed terrorist attacks in Manila and Jakarta in January 1991, DS agents investigating the case discovered that the Iraqi operatives were traveling on sequentially numbered Iraqi passports. This discovery allowed a worldwide alert to go out and governments in several different regions of the world were able to arrest or deport scores of Iraqi agents.

A second type of fraud involving genuine passports is where the government is not knowingly involved in the issuance of the passport for the fraudulent identity. In such cases, an applicant uses fraudulent identification documents to apply for a passport. The group of documents needed to obtain a passport — called “breeder” documents — normally includes a birth certificate, a Social Security card and a driver’s license. A set of fraudulent breeder documents can be counterfeit, genuine but altered (this can be done by changing the name or date of birth) or genuine documents obtained by fraud.

This is where the IDI cases come in. In these cases, someone applies for a replacement birth certificate of a deceased infant or child of their approximate age and then uses the birth certificate to obtain a Social Security card and driver’s license. The person applying for the replacement birth certificate usually claims their original birth certificate was lost or stolen.

Due to changes in procedure and technology, however, it has become more difficult in recent years to obtain a copy of the birth certificate of an infant or child who died in the United States. Birth-certificate registries are now tied electronically to death registries in every state, and if someone attempts to get the birth certificate of a dead person, it is quickly noticed and an investigation launched. Also, Social Security numbers are now issued at birth, so it is very difficult for a 25- or 30-year-old person to apply for a new Social Security number. Because of these factors, IDI cases have declined significantly in the United States.

Breeder documents are generally easier to counterfeit or obtain by fraud than a passport. However, as identity documents become more cross-referenced in databases, it is becoming more difficult to obtain a passport using a counterfeit birth certificate and Social Security number. Because of this, it has become more common for a person to buy a set of genuine breeder documents from a drug user or criminal looking for some quick cash. It is also possible to buy a genuine birth certificate and Social Security card from a corrupt official. While such documents are genuine, and can carry the applicant’s true or chosen name, such genuine documents are much more expensive than the other options. Of course, passport office employees can also be bribed to issue a genuine passport with fraudulent breeder documents, though there is a remote risk that such fraud will be caught in an audit.

At the present time, it is far easier and cheaper to obtain a genuine foreign passport by fraud than it is a U.S. passport, but corruption and plain old mistakes still allow a small number of fraudulent U.S. passports to get into the system. There are still some countries where a genuine passport in any identity can be obtained for just a few hundred dollars. Generally, it is more difficult to get passports from more developed nations (such as those that participate in the U.S. visa waiver program) than it is from less developed nations, where corruption is more prevalent. Still, corruption is a worldwide problem when it comes to passports and other identity documents.

Stolen blank passports have also been used over the years. For example, after Operation Desert Storm, an Iraqi passport office in Basra was sacked and thousands of blank Iraqi passports were stolen and then sold on the black market. One of those blanks was bought by a Pakistani jihadist operative named Abdul Basit, who had the blank passport filled out with his photograph and the name of a fictitious Iraqi citizen named Ramzi Yousef. After he entered the United States, Basit organized the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The problem with stolen blanks is that they are usually reported fairly quickly and their numbers are entered into international databases. Furthermore, like a counterfeit passport, a stolen blank passport will not correspond to information entered into passport databases, and it is therefore difficult to travel using one. In the case of Basit, he used a British passport altered to include his photo to leave Pakistan but then used the Iraqi passport to make an asylum claim once he arrived in the United States.

This highlights another category of genuine passports used in passport fraud, those that are real but have been altered, usually by replacing the photo appearing on the passport. Passport fraud investigators refer to this as a photo-subbed passport. In the 1970s, it was fairly easy to photo-sub passports from most countries, but in the past couple of decades, many countries have taken great efforts to make this process more difficult. The use of high-tech laminates and now, in current U.S. passports, RFID chips that contain a photo that must match the one appearing on the passport make it far harder to photo-sub passports today. Of course, efforts to increase passport security haven’t always worked as planned. In 1993, the State Department began issuing a new high-tech passport with a green cover that was supposed to be impossible to photo-sub. Within a few months of the first issuance of the passports, document vendors discovered that the laminate on the green passports could be easily removed by placing a block of dry ice on the passport, changing the photo and then pressing the laminate back down with an iron. Due to the ease of photo-subbing these passports, their value on the black market skyrocketed, and the “fraud proof” green passports had to be taken out of circulation after less than a year.

Finally, we have counterfeit passports, which are passports created from scratch by a document vendor. Like counterfeit currency, there is a vast range of quality when it comes to counterfeit passports, and as a rule of thumb, you get what you pay for. On the streets of places like Bangkok, Hong Kong or New York, one can buy counterfeit passports from a wide array of countries. There is, however, a vast difference between the passport one can purchase for $100 and the one that can be purchased for $10,000. Also, like currency, some passport counterfeiters will even attempt to use elements of genuine passports, like the optically “dead” paper with little or no fluorescence used for the pages and the holographic laminates used on the photo pages. However, like photo-subbed passports, it is far more difficult to create a functional counterfeit passport today than it was several years ago. Not only does the passport have to be of high quality, but the number needs to correspond to the database of legitimately issued passports. Therefore, most counterfeit passports are useful for traveling in the third world but would not withstand the scrutiny of authorities in the developed world.

In spite of these problems, there is still a market for counterfeit and photo-subbed passports. While they may not be useful for traveling to a country like the United States or France, they can be used to travel from a place like Pakistan or China to a gateway country in the Western Hemisphere like Venezuela or a gateway country in Europe like Albania. Because of this, American and European passports still fetch a decent price on the black market and are frequently stolen from or sold by Westerners. Citizens of Western countries who travel to terrorist training camps are also frequently encouraged to “donate” their passports and other documents to the group that trains them. There are also many reports that Mossad makes use of the passports of foreign Jews who move to Israel and give their passports to the intelligence agency. Stolen or deliberately lost passports not only can be altered or cloned but also can be used for travel by people who physically resemble the original bearer, although once they are reported stolen or lost and entered into lookout databases, their utility declines.


A Shifting Focus

The difficulty in obtaining functional travel documents has affected the way criminal and terrorist organizations operate. With increasing scrutiny of travel documents, groups like al Qaeda have found it progressively more difficult to travel to the West. This is one of the factors that has led to their increasing use of operatives who have the ability to travel to where the planned attack is to be conducted, rather than sending a more professional terrorist operative to conduct the attack.

This difficulty in counterfeiting passports has even affected intelligence agencies, which are the best passport counterfeiters in the world. This is why we see intelligence agencies like Mossad having to clone passports — that is, create a counterfeit passport that bears the same name and number of a legitimate passport — or even resort to other types of fraud to obtain genuine passports for operatives. It has become difficult to fabricate a usable passport using a fictitious name. Mossad operatives have gotten in trouble for attempting to fraudulently obtain genuine passports in places like New Zealand. And Mossad is certainly not the only intelligence service experiencing this difficulty in obtaining documents for its operatives.

Because of these difficulties, intelligence agencies and militant and criminal organizations have begun to place increasing importance on recruiting assets involved in the issuance of identity documents. At an embassy, a consular officer is viewed as almost as important a person to recruit as a code clerk. A corrupt consular officer can make a great deal of money selling documents. But the threat can extend far from an overseas embassy. If an organization like the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (or the Sinaloa cartel) can recruit an employee at the New Jersey Office of Vital Statistics, they can arrange to have their agent occasionally issue a genuine birth certificate (camouflaged in a large stack of legitimately issued documents) in a fraudulent identity for their use. Likewise, if they can recruit a clerk at the Social Security office in Jersey City, they can get that agent to occasionally issue a Social Security number and card that corresponds to the birth certificate. These primary documents can then be used to obtain a driver’s license (the key identity document for living in the United States) and eventually a passport for international travel.

Of course, recruiting an agent who works inside an agency is not the only way to obtain identification documents. Several years ago, a cleaning company owned by a group of Nigerians placed a low bid on the contract to provide cleaning services to Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Florida. Shortly after the company began providing services to the DMV, the agency suffered a rash of thefts across the state that included not only blank driver’s licenses and laminates but an entire machine that took the photos and processed the blank licenses.

The advent of cross-referencing databases, machine-readable passports routinely checked against such databases, radio frequency identification technology and procedures intended to prevent fraud have helped curtail many types of passport fraud. That said, passports are still required to travel for nefarious purposes, and these security measures have caused resourceful criminals, terrorists and intelligence agencies to shift their focus from technical methods of fraud toward exploiting humans in the process. In many places, the effort made to vet and monitor employees issuing documents is far less extensive than the effort made to physically protect documents from counterfeiting. The end result is that humans have become the weakest link in the equation.
Title: POTH: Wikileaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 24, 2010, 09:41:44 AM
LONDON — Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.

He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.

“By being determined to be on this path, and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr. Assange said over lunch last Sunday, when he arrived sporting a woolen beanie and a wispy stubble and trailing a youthful entourage that included a filmmaker assigned to document any unpleasant surprises.

In his remarkable journey to notoriety, Mr. Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowers’ Web site, sees the next few weeks as his most hazardous. Now he is making his most brazen disclosure yet: 391,832 secret documents on the Iraqi war. He held a news conference in London on Saturday, saying that the release “constituted the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.”

Twelve weeks ago, he posted on his organization’s Web site some 77,000 classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict.

Much has changed since 2006, when Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, used years of computer hacking and what friends call a near genius I.Q. to establish WikiLeaks, redefining whistle-blowing by gathering secrets in bulk, storing them beyond the reach of governments and others determined to retrieve them, then releasing them instantly, and globally.

Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.

Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. “We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,” said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament. “If he could just focus on the important things he does, it would be better.”

He is also being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and molestation involving two Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied the allegations, saying the relations were consensual. But prosecutors in Sweden have yet to formally approve charges or dismiss the case eight weeks after the complaints against Mr. Assange were filed, damaging his quest for a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks. Though he characterizes the claims as “a smear campaign,” the scandal has compounded the pressures of his cloaked life.

“When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like,” he said over the London lunch.

Exposing Secrets

Mr. Assange has come a long way from an unsettled childhood in Australia as a self-acknowledged social misfit who narrowly avoided prison after being convicted on 25 charges of computer hacking in 1995. History is punctuated by spies, defectors and others who revealed the most inflammatory secrets of their age. Mr. Assange has become that figure for the Internet era, with as yet unreckoned consequences for himself and for the keepers of the world’s secrets.

“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to disclose information on a scale that might really make a difference,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed a 1,000-page secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Mr. Ellsberg said he saw kindred spirits in Mr. Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former Army intelligence operative under detention in Quantico, Va., suspected of leaking the Iraq and Afghan documents.

“They were willing to go to prison for life, or be executed, to put out this information,” Mr. Ellsberg said.

Underlying Mr. Assange’s anxieties is deep uncertainty about what the United States and its allies may do next. Pentagon and Justice department officials have said they are weighing his actions under the 1917 Espionage Act. They have demanded that Mr. Assange “return” all government documents in his possession, undertake not to publish any new ones and not “solicit” further American materials.

Mr. Assange has responded by going on the run, but has found no refuge. Amid the Afghan documents controversy, he flew to Sweden, seeking a residence permit and protection under that country’s broad press freedoms. His initial welcome was euphoric.

“They called me the James Bond of journalism,” he recalled wryly. “It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”

Within days, his liaisons with two Swedish women led to an arrest warrant on charges of rape and molestation. Karin Rosander, a spokesperson for the prosecutor, said last week that the police were continuing to investigate.

In late September, he left Stockholm for Berlin. A bag he checked on the almost empty flight disappeared, with three encrypted laptops. It has not resurfaced; Mr. Assange suspects it was intercepted. From Germany, he traveled to London, wary at being detained on arrival. Under British law, his Australian passport entitles him to remain for six months. Iceland, another country with generous press freedoms and a strong WikiLeaks following, has also lost its appeal, with Mr. Assange concluding that its government, like Britain’s, is too easily influenced by Washington. In his native Australia, ministers have signaled their willingness to cooperate with the United States if it opens a prosecution. Mr. Assange said a senior Australian official told him, “You play outside the rules, and you will be dealt with outside the rules.”

He faces attack from within, too.

After the Sweden scandal, strains within WikiLeaks reached a breaking point, with some of Mr. Assange’s closest collaborators publicly defecting. The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style.

Internal Turmoil

Effectively, as Mr. Assange pursues his fugitive’s life, his leadership is enforced over the Internet. Even remotely, his style is imperious. In an online exchange with one volunteer, a transcript of which was obtained by The Times, he warned that WikiLeaks would disintegrate without him. “We’ve been in a Unity or Death situation for a few months now,” he said.

When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. “I don’t like your tone,” he said, according to a transcript. “If it continues, you’re out.”

Mr. Assange cast himself as indispensable. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest,” he said. “If you have a problem with me,” he told Mr. Snorrason, using an expletive, he should quit.

In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. “He is not in his right mind,” he said. In London, Mr. Assange was dismissive of all those who have criticized him. “These are not consequential people,” he said.

“About a dozen” disillusioned volunteers have left recently, said Smari McCarthy, an Icelandic volunteer who has distanced himself in the recent turmoil. In late summer, Mr. Assange suspended Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who had been the WikiLeaks spokesman under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, accusing him of unspecified “bad behavior.” Many more activists, Mr. McCarthy said, are likely to follow.

Mr. Assange denied that any important volunteers had quit, apart from Mr. Domscheit-Berg. But further defections could paralyze an organization that Mr. Assange says has 40 core volunteers and about 800 mostly unpaid followers to maintain a diffuse web of computer servers and to secure the system against attack — to guard against the kind of infiltration that WikiLeaks itself has used to generate its revelations.

Mr. Assange’s detractors also accuse him of pursuing a vendetta against the United States. In London, Mr. Assange said America was an increasingly militarized society and a threat to democracy. Moreover, he said, “we have been attacked by the United States, so we are forced into a position where we must defend ourselves.”

Even among those challenging Mr. Assange’s leadership style, there is recognition that the intricate computer and financial architecture WikiLeaks uses to shield it against its enemies has depended on its founder. “He’s very unique and extremely capable,” said Ms. Jonsdottir, the Icelandic lawmaker.

A Rash of Scoops

Before posting the documents on Afghanistan and Iraq, WikiLeaks enjoyed a string of coups.

Supporters were thrilled when the organization posted documents on the Guantánamo Bay detention operation, the contents of Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo email account, reports of extrajudicial killings in Kenya and East Timor, the membership rolls of the neo-Nazi British National Party and a combat video showing American Apache helicopters in Baghdad in 2007 gunning down at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists.

But now, WikiLeaks has been met with new doubts. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing the organization for risking people’s lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.

A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan using the pseudonym Zabiullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that the Taliban had formed a nine-member “commission” after the Afghan documents were posted “to find about people who are spying.” He said the Taliban had a “wanted” list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided.

“After the process is completed, our Taliban court will decide about such people,” he said.

Mr. Assange defended posting unredacted documents, saying he balanced his decision “with the knowledge of the tremendous good and prevention of harm that is caused” by putting the information into the public domain. “There are no easy choices on the table for this organization,” he said.

But if Mr. Assange is sustained by his sense of mission, faith is fading among his fellow conspirators. His mood was caught vividly in an exchange on Sept. 20 with another senior WikiLeaks figure. In an encrypted online chat, a transcript of which was passed to The Times, Mr. Assange was dismissive of his colleagues. He described them as “a confederacy of fools,” and asked his interlocutor, “Am I dealing with a complete retard?”

In London, Mr. Assange was angered when asked about the rifts. He responded testily to questions about WikiLeaks’s opaque finances, Private Manning’s fate and WikiLeaks’s apparent lack of accountability to anybody but himself, calling the questions “cretinous,” “facile” and reminiscent of “kindergarten.”

Mr. Assange has been equivocal about Private Manning, talking in late summer as though the soldier was unavoidable collateral damage, much like the Afghans named as informers in the secret Pentagon documents.

But in London, he took a more sympathetic view, describing Private Manning as a “political prisoner” facing a jail term of up to 52 years, without confirming that he was the source of the disclosed war logs. “We have a duty to assist Mr. Manning and other people who are facing legal and other consequences,” he said.

Mr. Assange’s own fate seems as imperiled as Private Manning’s. Last Monday, the Swedish Migration Board said Mr. Assange’s bid for a residence permit had been rejected. His British visa will expire early next year. When he left the London restaurant at twilight, heading into the shadows, he declined to say where he was going. The man who has put some of the world’s most powerful institutions on his watch list was, once more, on the move.



Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan.


Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on October 24, 2010, 09:54:50 AM
Note how the media ignores the WMDs found in Iraq and the debunking of the Lancet study in the WikiLeak document drop. Assange is a melodramatic douche. If the CIA or the UK's intel entities wanted him, they'd have him.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on October 24, 2010, 10:03:04 AM
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/wikileaks_nails_the_wild_lancet_scare/

I’m not sure it’s what WikiLeaks intended, but its latest leaks reveal that the infamous Lancet paper which claimed the US-led liberation of Iraq cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis in fact exaggerated the death toll by at least 600 per cent:

    The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq (over six years). These include 66,081 “civilians,” 23,984 “enemy” insurgents, 15,196 “host nation” (Iraqi government forces), and 3,771 “friendly” (coalition) forces. Some 60 percent of the total is civilian deaths.

And that’s leaving aside the argument about who actually killed the Iraqis, and whether more would have died under Saddam. Note also that this death toll is less than the number of people murdered in South Africa over the same period, and that even allowing for population differences, Iraq’s death toll is now lower.

Settle back and see if that’s how the ABC and Fairfax report these latest leaks.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on October 24, 2010, 10:06:08 AM
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2010/10/wages-of-wikileaks-understanding-iraq.html

The wages of Wikileaks: Understanding the Iraq war casualties
By TigerHawk at 10/24/2010 11:07:00 AM


Glenn Reynolds notes that the early revelations from the "Wikileaks" exposure of classified Iraq war documents do not actually reflect well on the political left. In particular, the documents reveal that The Lancet's two infamous studies on casualties in Iraq, curiously released in October 2004 and October 2006, respectively, grossly overstated the death toll from that war. This should not surprise us, insofar as the second such study (which claimed 600,000 war-related deaths in Iraq through the summer of 2006, or almost six times the 109,000 deaths through 2009 revealed by Wikileaks) was funded and promoted by George Soros, a fact that was ignored in virtually all of the press coverage back when it mattered. Thus Wikileaks has torpedoed a "fact" to which the "reality-based community" ascribed totemic significance. Sadly, even now the respectable mainstream media neglects to make the point. Probably because George Soros was behind the original propaganda which the media dutifully transcribed. If that were widely understood it might not reflect well on the profession of journalism.

Now, you might say that whether there were 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq or 600,000, it hardly matters insofar as both numbers are huge. Well, maybe not.

    And that’s leaving aside the argument about who actually killed the Iraqis, and whether more would have died under Saddam. Note also that this death toll is less than the number of people murdered in South Africa over the same period, and that even allowing for population differences, Iraq’s death toll is now lower.


The first really objective history of the Iraq war will have to wait until somebody who did not live through the propaganda around that war is old enough to write it. When that book is written, its main conclusion will turn on the path of Iraq and the greater Middle East in the years following the war, a story that has not yet unfolded. The discussion of the human costs of the war will be particularly interesting, however, because it will judge the competing claims of those who oppose the war -- that American and Coalition soldiers fought a dirty war that inflicted an unacceptably large number of civilian casualties -- and those who support it -- that civilian casualties were almost unbelievably low given the ferocity and duration of the counterinsurgency and in any case lower than the deaths attributable to Ba'athist rule over a similar number of years.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on October 24, 2010, 11:24:46 AM
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/10/24/wikileaks-documents-show-wmds-found-in-iraq/

Wikileaks documents show WMDs found in Iraq

posted at 1:30 pm on October 24, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

In this case, the surprise isn’t the data but the source.  Wikileaks’ new release from purloined files of the Department of Defense may help remind people that, contrary to popular opinion and media memes, the US did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and in significant quantities.  While the invasion of Iraq didn’t find huge stockpiles of new WMDs, it did uncover stockpiles that the UN had demanded destroyed as a condition of the 1991 truce that Saddam Hussein abrogated for twelve years (via Instapundit):

    An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

    In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base. …

    Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells “that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. “The 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”

Some of these discoveries have been known for years.  To the extent that the media covered these at all, these finds were generally treated as long-forgotten leftovers that somehow never got addressed by the Iraqi military in twelve years of UN inspections.  That, however, disregards completely the kind of totalitarian state that Hussein had imposed on Iraq, up to the minute that circumstances forced him into his spider hole in 2003.  Had Saddam Hussein wanted those weapons destroyed, no lower-ranking military officer would have dared defy him by keeping them hidden.  It would have taken dozens of officers to conspire to move and hide those weapons, as well as a like number of enlisted men, any and all of whom could have been a spy for the Hussein clique.

That would have had to have happened a number of times, not just once, organically arising in the ranks.  And why create a vast conspiracy of defiance to save the weapons that Saddam Hussein liked the most while Hussein himself complied with the UN?  Why not a conspiracy to just remove Hussein and his sons and let the military run the country instead?  Obviously, Hussein wanted to keep enough WMDs to use as terror weapons, not against the US, but against Iran in the event of an invasion from the east.

This isn’t exactly vindication of one of the arguments the Bush administration gave for invading Iraq, which was that Hussein had already begun stockpiling new WMDs and was working on nuclear weapons, but it is another vindication of the primary reason for restarting the war: Hussein and Iraq had violated the truce and refused to comply even after 17 UN resolutions demanding compliance.  Hussein never had any intention of abiding by the truce, for whatever motivations one wants to assign to him.  After the invasion, the US proved (through an armed-version of Wikileaks in Iraq’s diplomatic files) that the UN had allowed Hussein to grab billions in personal wealth by perverting the embargo in the Oil-for-Food Program, which would have given Hussein the means to fuel another WMD program as soon as the West withdrew from Iraq, and to restart Hussein’s dreams of pan-Arab dominance through military adventurism.  In the end, there were no good options.
Title: Wikileaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2010, 08:24:16 AM


STRATFOR
---------------------------
October 28, 2010
 

WIKILEAKS AND THE CULTURE OF CLASSIFICATION

By Scott Stewart

On Friday, Oct. 22, the organization known as WikiLeaks published a cache of 391,832
classified documents on its website. The documents are mostly field reports filed by
U.S. military forces in Iraq from January 2004 to December 2009 (the months of May
2004 and March 2009 are missing). The bulk of the documents (379,565, or about 97
percent) were classified at the secret level, with 204 classified at the lower
confidential level. The remaining 12,062 documents were either unclassified or bore
no classification.

This large batch of documents is believed to have been released by Pfc. Bradley
Manning, who was arrested in May 2010 by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations
Command and charged with transferring thousands of classified documents onto his
personal computer and then transmitting them to an unauthorized person. Manning is
also alleged to have been the source of the classified information released by
WikiLeaks pertaining to the war in Afghanistan in July 2010.

WikiLeaks released the Iraq war documents, as it did the Afghanistan war documents,
to a number of news outlets for analysis several weeks in advance of their formal
public release. These news organizations included The New York Times, Der Spiegel,
The Guardian and Al Jazeera, each of which released special reports to coincide with
the formal release of the documents Oct. 22. 

Due to its investigation of Manning, the U.S. government also had a pretty good idea
of what the material was before it was released and had formed a special task force
to review it for sensitive and potentially damaging information prior to the
release. The Pentagon has denounced the release of the information, which it
considers a crime. It has also demanded the return of its stolen property and warned
that the documents place Iraqis at risk of retaliation and also the lives of U.S.
troops from terrorist groups that are mining the documents for operational
information they can use in planning their attacks. 

When one takes a careful look at the classified documents released by WikiLeaks, it
becomes quickly apparent that they contain very few true secrets. Indeed, the main
points being emphasized by Al Jazeera and the other media outlets after all the
intense research they conducted before the public release of the documents seem to
highlight a number of issues that had been well-known and well-chronicled for years.
For example, the press has widely reported that the Iraqi government was torturing
its own people; many civilians were killed during the six years the documents
covered; sectarian death squads were operating inside Iraq; and the Iranian
government was funding Shiite militias. None of this is news. But, when one steps
back from the documents themselves and looks at the larger picture, there are some
interesting issues that have been raised by the release of these documents and the
reaction to their release.

The Documents

The documents released in this WikiLeaks cache were taken from the U.S. government's
Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), a network used to distribute
classified but not particularly sensitive information. SIPRNet is authorized only
for the transmission of information classified at the secret level and below. It
cannot be used for information classified top secret or more closely guarded
intelligence that is classified at the secret level. The regulations by which
information is classified by the U.S. government are outlined in Executive Order
13526. Under this order, secret is the second-highest level of classification and
applies to information that, if released, would be reasonably expected to cause
serious damage to U.S. national security.

Due to the nature of SIPRNet, most of the information that was downloaded from it
and sent to WikiLeaks consisted of raw field reports from U.S. troops in Iraq. These
reports discussed things units encountered, such as IED attacks, ambushes, the
bodies of murdered civilians, friendly-fire incidents, traffic accidents, etc. For
the most part, the reports contained raw information and not vetted, processed
intelligence. The documents also did not contain information that was the result of
intelligence-collection operations, and therefore did not reveal sensitive
intelligence sources and methods. Although the WikiLeaks material is often compared
to the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, there really is very little similarity.
The Pentagon Papers consisted of a top secret-level study completed for the U.S.
secretary of defense and not raw, low-level battlefield reports. 

To provide a sense of the material involved in the WikiLeaks release, we will
examine two typical reports. The first, classified at the secret level, is from an
American military police (MP) company reporting that Iraqi police on Oct. 28, 2006,
found the body of a person whose name was redacted in a village who had been
executed. In the other report, also classified at the secret level, we see that on
Jan. 1, 2004, Iraqi police called an American MP unit in Baghdad to report that an
improvised explosive device (IED) had detonated and that there was another
suspicious object found at the scene. The MP unit responded, confirmed the presence
of the suspicious object and then called an explosive ordnance disposal unit, which
came to the site and destroyed the second IED. Now, while it may have been justified
to classify such reports at the secret level at the time they were written to
protect information pertaining to military operations, clearly, the release of these
two reports in October 2010 has not caused any serious damage to U.S. national
security.

Another factor to consider when reading raw information from the field is that,
while they offer a degree of granular detail that cannot be found in higher-level
intelligence analysis, they can often be misleading or otherwise erroneous. As
anyone who has ever interviewed a witness can tell you, in a stressful situation
people often miss or misinterpret important factual details. That's just how most
people are wired. This situation can be compounded when a witness is placed in a
completely alien culture. This is not to say that all these reports are flawed, but
just to note that raw information must often be double-checked and vetted before it
can be used to create a reliable estimate of the situation on the battlefield.
Clearly, the readers of these reports released by WikiLeaks now do not have the
ability to conduct that type of follow-up.

Few True Secrets

By saying there are very few true secrets in the cache of documents released by
WikiLeaks, we mean things that would cause serious damage to national security. And
no, we are not about to point out the things that we believe could be truly
damaging. However, it is important to understand up front that something that causes
embarrassment and discomfort to a particular administration or agency does not
necessarily damage national security.

As to the charges that the documents are being mined by militant groups for
information that can be used in attacks against U.S. troops deployed overseas, this
is undoubtedly true. It would be foolish for the Taliban, the Islamic State of Iraq
(ISI) and other militant groups not to read the documents and attempt to benefit
from them. However, there are very few things noted in these reports pertaining to
the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) used by U.S. forces that could not be
learned by simply observing combat operations -- and the Taliban and ISI have been
carefully studying U.S. TTP every hour of every day for many years now. These
documents are far less valuable than years of careful, direct observation and
regular first-hand interaction.

Frankly, combatants who have been intensely watching U.S. and coalition forces and
engaging them in combat for the better part of a decade are not very likely to learn
much from dated American after-action reports. The insurgents and sectarian groups
in Iraq own the human terrain; they know who U.S. troops are meeting with, when they
meet them and where. There is very little that this level of reporting is going to
reveal to them that they could not already have learned via observation. Remember,
these reports do not deal with highly classified human-intelligence or
technical-intelligence operations.

This is not to say that the alleged actions of Manning are somehow justified. From
the statements released in connection with the case by the government, Manning knew
the information he was downloading was classified and needed to be protected. He
also appeared to know that his actions were illegal and could get him in trouble. He
deserves to face the legal consequences of his actions.

This is also not a justification for the actions of WikiLeaks and the media outlets
that are exploiting and profiting from the release of this information. What we are
saying is that the hype surrounding the release is just that. There were a lot of
classified documents released, but very few of them contained information that would
truly shed new light on the actions of U.S. troops in Iraq or their allies or damage
U.S. national security. While the amount of information released in this case was
huge, it was far less damaging than the information released by convicted spies such
as Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames -- information that crippled sensitive
intelligence operations and resulted in the execution or imprisonment of extremely
valuable human intelligence sources.

Culture of Classification

Perhaps one of the most interesting facets of the WikiLeaks case is that it
highlights the culture of classification that is so pervasive inside the U.S.
government. Only 204 of the 391,832 documents were classified at the confidential
level, while 379,565 of them were classified at the secret level. This demonstrates
the propensity of the U.S. government culture to classify documents at the highest
possible classification rather than at the lowest level really required to protect
that information. In this culture, higher is better. 

Furthermore, while much of this material may have been somewhat sensitive at the
time it was reported, most of that sensitivity has been lost over time, and many of
the documents, like the two reports referenced above, no longer need to be
classified. Executive Order 13526 provides the ability for classifying agencies to
set dates for materials to be declassified. Indeed, according to the executive
order, a date for declassification is supposed to be set every time a document is
classified. But, in practice, such declassification provisions are rarely used and
most people just expect the documents to remain classified for the entire authorized
period, which is 10 years in most cases and 25 years when dealing with sensitive
topics such as intelligence sources and methods or nuclear weapons. In the culture
of classification, longer is also seen as better.

This culture tends to create so much classified material that stays classified for
so long that it becomes very difficult for government employees and security
managers to determine what is really sensitive and what truly needs to be protected.
There is certainly a lot of very sensitive information that needs to be carefully
guarded, but not everything is a secret. This culture also tends to reinforce the
belief among government employees that knowledge is power and that one can become
powerful by having access to information and denying that access to others. And this
belief can often contribute to the bureaucratic jealously that results in the
failure to share intelligence -- a practice that was criticized so heavily in the
9/11 Commission Report.

It has been very interesting to watch the reaction to the WikiLeaks case by those
who are a part of the culture of classification. Some U.S. government agencies, such
as the FBI, have bridled under the post-9/11 mandates to share their information
more widely and have been trying to scale back the practice. As anyone who has dealt
with the FBI can attest, they tend to be a semi-permeable membrane when it comes to
the flow of information. For the bureau, intelligence flows only one way -- in. The
FBI is certainly not alone. There are many organizations that are very hesitant to
share information with other government agencies, even when those agencies have a
legitimate need to know. The WikiLeaks cases have provided such people a
justification to continue to stovepipe information.

In addition to the glaring personnel security issues regarding Manning's access to
classified information systems, these cases are in large part the result of a
classified information system overloaded with vast quantities of information that
simply does not need to be protected at the secret level. And, ironically,
overloading the system in such a way actually weakens the information-protection
process by making it difficult to determine which information truly needs to be
protected. Instead of seeking to weed out the over-classified material and
concentrate on protecting the truly sensitive information, the culture of
classification reacts by using the WikiLeaks cases as justification for continuing
to classify information at the highest possible levels and for sharing the
intelligence it generates with fewer people. The ultimate irony is that the
WikiLeaks cases will help strengthen and perpetuate the broken system that helped
lead to the disclosures in the first place.


This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to
www.stratfor.com.

Copyright 2010 STRATFOR.


 
 
 
 
Title: POTH: Saudi Arabia comes through
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2010, 07:23:11 AM
Very interesting piece here from POTH.

I would like to mention that one of the reasons proffered for the Iraq War was to put an end to the dynamic where our troops were in SA to defend it from Saddam Hussein (which was THE proximate cause for the formation of AQ) and the Saudis would play both ends against the middle by buying off AQ to go after us instead of the House of Saud.  This line of thinking said that once our troops were out of SA, as they now essentially are, that the Saudis would be in a position where it would be in their self-interest to get tough with AQ.  This appears to have been the case; the news in the following piece is one of a line of such Saudi assists.


BEIRUT, Lebanon — As new facts emerge about the terrorist plot to send explosives from Yemen to the United States by courier, one remarkable strand has stood out: the plot would likely not have been discovered if not for a tip by Saudi intelligence officials.

Related
U.S. Sees Complexity of Bombs as Link to Qaeda Group (October 31, 2010) For many in the West, Saudi Arabia remains better known as a source of terrorism than as a partner in defeating it. It is the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet Western intelligence officials say the Saudis’ own experience with jihadists has helped them develop powerful surveillance tools and a broad network of informers that has become increasingly important in the global battle against terrorism.

This month, Saudi intelligence warned of a possible terrorist attack in France by Al Qaeda’s branch in the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudis have brought similar intelligence reports about imminent threats to at least two other European countries in the past few years, and have played an important role in identifying terrorists in Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Kuwait, according to Saudi and Western intelligence officials.

“This latest role is one in a series of Saudi intelligence contributions,” said Thomas Hegghammer, a research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. “They can be helpful because so much is going on in their backyard, and because they have a limitless budget to develop their abilities.”

The Saudis have stepped up their intelligence-gathering efforts in Yemen since last year, when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula came close to assassinating Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who runs the Saudi counterterrorism program. A suicide bomber posing as a reformed jihadist detonated a bomb hidden inside his body, cutting himself to shreds but only lightly injuring the prince.

The Qaeda group’s main goal is to topple the Saudi monarchy, which they consider illegitimate and a slave to the West.

Prince bin Nayef, whose tip to the United States led to the discovery of the two bombs on Thursday, is held in high esteem by Western intelligence agencies, and works closely with them. He appears to be building a network of informers across Yemen, and some terrorism analysts say they believe the tip may well have come from one of his spies, possibly even from inside Al Qaeda.

“The Saudis have really stepped up their efforts in Yemen, and I’m under the impression that they’ve infiltrated Al Qaeda, so that they can warn the Americans, the French, the British and others about plots before they happen,” said Theodore Karasik, an analyst at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai.

Saudi officials do not comment on delicate intelligence matters. But the Saudi role in a shadowy intelligence war in Yemen’s hinterlands has emerged in accounts from observers in Yemen and from Al Qaeda itself, which has often publicized its struggles to outwit Prince bin Nayef’s informers.

Last year, Al Qaeda’s regional branch killed a Yemeni security official named Bassam Sulayman Tarbush and issued a video of Mr. Tarbush describing the Saudi informer network in Marib Province, a haven for Qaeda members east of Sana, the Yemeni capital. More recently, Al Qaeda released a video detailing its success in misleading Saudi informers during the assassination attempt against Prince bin Nayef.

Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism program differs from its Western counterparts in striking ways. It includes a familiar “hard” element of commando teams that kill terrorists, along with vastly expanded surveillance. The streets of major Saudi cities are continuously watched by cameras, and most Internet traffic goes through a central point that facilitates monitoring.

But the program also has a softer side aimed at re-educating jihadists and weaving them back into Saudi society. The government runs a rehabilitation program for terrorists, including art therapy and efforts to find jobs and wives for the former convicts. The program suffered an embarrassment last year when two of its graduates, who had also been in Guantánamo, fled the country and became leading figures in Al Qaeda’s Arabian branch.

But Saudi officials defend their overall record, noting that the program now has 349 graduates, of whom fewer than 20 have returned to terrorism.

The Saudis’ growing expertise in counterterrorism has been the fruit of painful experience. Between 2003 and 2005, home-grown jihadists waged a brutal campaign of bombings in the kingdom, leaving scores of Saudis and foreigners dead and forcing the nation to wake up to a reality it had long refused to acknowledge. The puritanical strain of Islam fostered by the state, sometimes called Wahhabism, was breeding extremists who were willing to kill even Muslims for their cause.

Saudi officials acknowledge that they still have a long way to go; the powerful religious establishment remains deeply conservative, and public schools continue to teach xenophobic and anti-Semitic material. But public opinion, once relatively supportive of figures like Mr. bin Laden, has shifted decisively since Al Qaeda began killing Muslims on Saudi soil.

And when the Saudi Interior Ministry released its list of the top 85 wanted militants last year, all of them were said to be outside the kingdom, including some in Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s problem, in other words, has become the world’s problem.

Title: Wikileaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 30, 2010, 01:12:35 PM
This piece faces questions that must be asked. 

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/11/30/yes-wikileaks-terrorist-organization-time-act/

Whether it addresses the matter of the law of unintended consequences is another matter. 
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 30, 2010, 05:26:49 PM
If Julian Assange was named Haj al-Jihad and wikileaks were alqaedaleaks, would there be any question what to do? There are laws that cover espionage and the unauthorized release of classified material.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 30, 2010, 08:54:11 PM
Yes, there are-- and IIRC the Pentagon Papers decision of the Supreme Court says that those that publish cannot be punished-- only those that violated their duty by giving them the secret material can be prosecuted.    So, question presented:  What is to be done with Assange?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 30, 2010, 09:51:24 PM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101130/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_wikileaks_prosecution

Washington lawyer Bob Bittman expressed surprise the Justice Department has not already charged Assange under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property over his earlier release of classified documents about U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bittman said it was widely believed those disclosures harmed U.S. national security, in particular U.S. intelligence sources and methods, meeting the requirement in several sections of the act that there be either intent or reason to believe disclosure could injure the United States.

"These are not easy questions," said Washington lawyer Stephen Ryan, a former assistant U.S. attorney and former Senate Government Affairs Committee general counsel. Ryan said it would be legally respectable to argue Assange is a journalist protected by the First Amendment and never had a duty to protect U.S. secrets.

But Ryan added, "The flip side is whether he could be charged with aiding and abetting or conspiracy with an individual who did have a duty to protect those secrets."

On the question of conspiracy there's a legal difference between being a passive recipient of leaked material and being a prime mover egging on a prospective leaker, legal experts say.

Much could depend on what the investigation uncovers.

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is being held in a maximum-security military brig at Quantico, Va., charged with leaking video of a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver. WikiLeaks posted the video on its website in April.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2010, 06:57:19 AM
OK, so conspiracy can be the basis, but what then of things that we WANT revealed?  Governments often lie and coverup, and that includes ours.  Is stamping everything "secret" and prosecuting whistle blowers and their publishers the solution for The State in covering up?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 01, 2010, 08:39:04 AM
US law protects whistleblowers, if they follow the proper procedures, which includes not releasing classified materials to those not cleared for it.

http://www.whistleblowers.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=984&Itemid=173
Title: WSJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2010, 01:00:17 PM
My apologies, I confess I have not enough time to read every thing you post :oops:

Here's the WSJ's take on all this:

"Regarding the latest WikiLeaks dump of U.S. secrets ... [it] does less immediate harm than the previous leaks did to the lives of Afghans and Iraqis who have cooperated with us on the battlefield, but it certainly will damage U.S. foreign policy. In most cases, of course, the leaks merely pull back the curtain on disputes and the character of global leaders that are already widely known. That the Turkish government of the AK Party is an unreliable ally, or is chock full of Islamists, will not surprise anyone who's been paying attention. The private rage of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against Iraqi democracy is also no shocker; a modern Pharaoh doesn't like the voter precedent. Yet in some cases the damage will be real because effective policy often requires secrecy about detail. Foreign officials will only speak candidly to U.S. emissaries if they believe their words won't be splashed all over the world's front pages. ... One lesson is that it is much harder to keep secrets in the Internet age, so our government is going to have to learn to keep fewer secrets and confine them to fewer people. It is amazing to discover that so many thousands of cables might have been accessible by Private First Class Bradley Manning, who is suspected of being the main source for the Wikileaks documents. The bureaucratic excuse is that the government was trying to encourage more cross-agency cooperation post-9/11, but why does an Army private need access to the details of a conversation between Yemen's dictator and General David Petraeus? ... If [Julian Assange] were exposing Chinese or Russian secrets, he would already have died at the hands of some unknown assailant. As a foreigner (Australian citizen) engaged in hostile acts against the U.S., Mr. Assange is certainly not protected from U.S. reprisal under the laws of war. ... For all of his self-justification as an agent of 'pure' transparency, Mr. Assange is not serving the interest of free societies. His mass, indiscriminate exposure of anything labeled secret that he can lay his hands on is a hostile act against a democracy that is fighting a war against forces bent on killing innocents. Surely, the U.S. government can do more to stop him than send a stiff letter." --The Wall Street Journal

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 01, 2010, 02:50:10 PM
My nutshell explanation of the applicable laws for whistleblowers who wish to blow the whistle on things that are classified. I note that I am not a lawyer, and there are very few that practice this very esoteric law, though those that do usually have the security clearances required to represent whistleblowers in any legal proceedings. The key thing is the whistleblower cannot disclose classified information to anyone not cleared to hear it. As an example, the CIA has an IG's office that should have personnel that are cleared to take a complaint from a CIA employee alleging waste, fraud, abuse or criminal conduct. The FBI, would have Agents with a clearance to take a criminal complaint and investigate it. I'm sure the congressional oversight committees have the clearances to hear from whistleblowers from within the Nat'l Security structure.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2010, 03:55:50 PM
OK, that helps clarify things.  So, what do we do when our government is doing something secret/illegal/etc and doesn't want we the people to know about it?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 01, 2010, 04:04:14 PM
Well, if we don't know about it, then we don't do anything about it. It's happened before and I'm sure it will happen again. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that most things eventually come to the surface. The US had a bad reputation for keeping secrets long before wikileaks, and I'm sure you're aware of how many things were leaked to the press during our last president's time in office, despite their classified nature.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2010, 06:06:58 PM
Yes, the difference being that intuitively it seems like something needs to be done about this SOB.  How do we go about that yet retain the ability to find out about nefarious deeds of our government?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 01, 2010, 06:17:18 PM
**I would argue that the CIA has become too legalized and risk adverse to do much of what it's supposed to do.**

http://www.gertzfile.com/gertzfile/breakdownexcerpt2.html

The National Security Agency flagged the intercepted electronic communication from Iran as an urgent message. The next day, its contents were on the desk of White House National Security Adviser Anthony Lake.

The Iranian message said the CIA, using the White House National Security Council as cover, was planning to assassinate Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The plot, it said, was being hatched by a CIA officer working in northern Iraq under the code name Robert Pope.


The top-secret report detailed a message snatched from the air by NSA's worldwide network of electronic eavesdropping stations after it was sent from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran to a foreign station.


A furious Mr. Lake assumed the information was accurate, and that the CIA was moving against Saddam on its own. He called President Clinton and said he needed to see him right away. Inside the Oval Office, the national security adviser waved the NSA report at the president and shouted: "How can I run foreign policy with the CIA running rogue coups?"


Mr. Clinton advised Mr. Lake to ask the FBI to start an investigation. Mr. Lake telephoned FBI Director Louis Freeh, who obediently pursued the request.


It was March 1, 1995. Several weeks later the CIA recalled clandestine service officer Robert Baer, one of its few Arabic-speaking case officers, to agency headquarters in Langley Mr. Baer was pulled home from a covert operation in northern Iraq backing opponents of Saddam, an operation that the CIA hoped would lead to a coup in Baghdad.


His supervisor, Fred Turco, informed Mr. Baer that two FBI agents were waiting to talk to him. "We're conducting an investigation of you for suspicion of attempting to assassinate Saddam Hussein," one agent told the astonished CIA officer.


The Bob Baer case illustrates how the Central Intelligence Agency is no longer "central" or an "intelligence" agency, but very much an agency of government in the worst sense of the term - where preservation of its budget takes precedence over its performance.


What matters to the well-informed, highly trained Mr. Baer after September 11 is not how he became a whipping boy for Anthony Lake. What matters is how a vindictive CIA bureaucracy later ignored intelligence on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists that Mr. Baer urgently supplied after leaving the agency and writing a book about it.


The FBI investigation of Mr. Baer was not frivolous. Assassination of foreign officials is prohibited by a presidential executive order dating to the 1970s. Every CIA officer sent to the field must sign a statement confirming that he understands the prohibition.


But the Clinton Justice Department decided to investigate Mr. Baer, then a 19-year CIA veteran, for more than violating an executive order. He faced prosecution under a federal murder-for-hire statute.


The intercepted message turned out to be false information from the Iranians. The fact that a U.S. national security adviser trusted the Iranian government over the CIA, however, showed the low regard for that service held by Mr. Clinton and top advisers.


Mr. Baer explained to the FBI that he was not "Robert Pope," and that the Iranian assertion of an assassination attempt against Saddam was a lie. But it would take until April 1996, more than a year later, before the Justice Department would issue a "declination" letter stating that it would not prosecute one of the CIA's best field officers. Mr. Baer was cleared only after agreeing to take a lie-detector test.


The CIA did not come to the defense of its agent, an FBI official said. In fact, it was the FBI that warned Justice Department lawyers that the Baer investigation could be devastating for morale. But a CIA less concerned with results than political correctness had come to accept such probes as routine.


"Look, Bob, you've been overseas for almost 20 years," CIA lawyer Rob Davis told Mr. Baer. "Washington really has changed a lot. These kinds of investigations go on all the time now."


Lawyers, not spies


The CIA had years to penetrate the inner circle of bin Laden's al Qaeda network before the attacks of September 11. It had years to try to work successfully with other Middle Eastern intelligence services that managed to get fairly close. But the CIA failed.


And today's CIA sends scores of new officers into the field under the same failed, risk-avoiding policies that left the spy agency blind to and ignorant of the September 11 terrorist attacks.


Case officers, those who are supposed to conduct espionage operations, routinely file embassy-based reports to Washington instead of working the streets and befriending terrorists (or at least their friends and supporters).


"All this pads reporting volume and builds careers," one intelligence professional in the U.S. government says. "And yet we will have no new assets, we will not have penetrated the hard targets and we will not know more about anything central to our national interest. But the political people - most of them anyway - will not understand this, or want to understand it."
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 01, 2010, 06:25:44 PM
The US is a very open society compared with most. During the cold war, the soviets literally shipped tons of documents ordered from the US Gov't printing office back to Russia every year for analysis. In the USSR, even the most minor thing was a state secret. We have no internal borders and very little in the way of laws restricting infomation that could be useful to our enemies, with the execption of that which is classified by law.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2010, 02:31:06 AM
I read Baer's book several years ago and remember the passage about being ready to go on the coup.  Truly a moment of tragedy in that so much more tragedy could have been averted.  That said, a fair case can be made that the CIA has created a lot of problems with some of its unleashed forays.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 02, 2010, 07:54:40 AM
Hindsight is always 20/20. Any foreign policy decision made has the potential for unintended consequences. Isolationism and non-intevention also has consequences.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2010, 10:44:53 AM
Yes, but who gets to make the decisions matters quite a bit.

Changing subjects,

http://wikileaks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/01/welcome_to_wikileaked
Title: WSJ: Assange
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 06, 2010, 10:14:55 AM
Whatever else WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has accomplished, he's ended the era of innocent optimism about the Web. As wiki innovator Larry Sanger put it in a message to WikiLeaks, "Speaking as Wikipedia's co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.—not just the government, but the people."

The irony is that WikiLeaks' use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. The outrage is that this is Mr. Assange's express intention.


This batch includes 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, the kind of confidential assessments diplomats have written since the era of wax seals. These include Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah urging the U.S. to end Iran's nuclear ambitions—to "cut the head off the snake." This alignment with the Israeli-U.S. position is not for public consumption in the Arab world, which is why leaks will curtail honest discussions.

Leaks will also restrict information flows within the U.S. A major cause of the 9/11 intelligence failures was that agencies were barred from sharing information. Since then, intelligence data have been shared more widely. The Obama administration now plans to tighten information flows, which could limit leaks but would be a step back to the pre-9/11 period.

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he's a whistleblower—there's no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—"conspirators" in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange's view this way: "While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to 'think' as a system, to communicate with itself." Mr. Assange's idea is that with enough leaks, "the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller."

Or as Mr. Assange told Time magazine last week, "It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society." If leaks cause U.S. officials to "lock down internally and to balkanize," they will "cease to be as efficient as they were."
This worldview has precedent. Ted Kaczynski, another math-obsessed anarchist, sent bombs through the mail for almost 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23. He offered to stop in 1995 if media outlets published his Unabomber Manifesto. The 35,000-word essay, "Industrial Society and Its Future," objected to the "industrial-technological system" that causes people "to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior." He's serving a life sentence for murder.

Mr. Assange doesn't mail bombs, but his actions have life-threatening consequences. Consider the case of a 75-year-old dentist in Los Angeles, Hossein Vahedi. According to one of the confidential cables released by WikiLeaks, Dr. Vahedi, a U.S. citizen, returned to Iran in 2008 to visit his parents' graves. Authorities confiscated his passport because his sons worked as concert promoters for Persian pop singers in the U.S. who had criticized the theocracy.

The cable reported that Dr. Vahedi decided to escape by horseback over the mountains of western Iran and into Turkey. He trained by hiking the hills above Tehran. He took extra heart medication. But when he fell off his horse, he was injured and nearly froze. When he made it to Turkey, the U.S. Embassy intervened to stop him being sent back to Iran.
"This is very bad for my family," Dr. Vahedi told the New York Daily News on being told about the leak of the cable naming him and describing his exploits. Tehran has a new excuse to target his relatives in Iran. "How could this be printed?"

Excellent question. It's hard being collateral damage in the world of WikiLeaks.
Title: Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) on Assange
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2010, 08:24:44 AM
By DIANNE FEINSTEIN
When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation."

The Espionage Act also makes it a felony to fail to return such materials to the U.S. government. Importantly, the courts have held that "information relating to the national defense" applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

No doubt aware of this law, and despite firm warnings, Mr. Assange went ahead and released the cables on Nov. 28.

In a letter sent to Mr. Assange and his lawyer on Nov. 27, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Koh warned in strong terms that the documents had been obtained "in violation of U.S. law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action."

Mr. Koh's letter said that publication of the documents in Mr. Assange's possession would, at minimum:

• "Place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals—from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security;

• "Place at risk on-going military operations, including operations to stop terrorists, traffickers in human beings and illicit arms, violent criminal enterprises and other actors that threaten global security; and,

• "Place at risk on-going cooperation between countries—partners, allies and common stakeholders—to confront common challenges from terrorism to pandemic diseases to nuclear proliferation that threaten global stability."

View Full Image

AFP/Getty Images
 
That WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is breaking the law is clear.
.None of this stopped Mr. Assange. That he is breaking the law and must be stopped from doing more harm is clear. I also believe a prosecution would be successful.

In an October analysis of earlier WikiLeaks disclosures, the Congressional Research Service reported that "it seems that there is ample statutory authority for prosecuting individuals who elicit or disseminate the types of documents at issue, as long as the intent element can be satisfied and potential damage to national security can be demonstrated."

Both elements exist in this case. The "damage to national security" is beyond question. As for intent, Mr. Assange's own words paint a damning picture.

In June, the New Yorker reported that Mr. Assange has asserted that a "social movement" set on revealing secrets could "bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the U.S. administration." The same piece revealed Mr. Assange's stunning disregard for the grave harm his actions could bring to innocent people, which he dismisses as "collateral damage."

Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions. But he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.

More
U.K. Police Seek Assange Interview
.As for the First Amendment, the Supreme Court has held that its protections of free speech and freedom of the press are not a green light to abandon the protection of our vital national interests. Just as the First Amendment is not a license to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, it is also not a license to jeopardize national security.

This latest WikiLeaks release demonstrates Mr. Assange's willingness to disseminate plans, comments, discussions and other communications that compromise our country. And let there be no doubt about the depth of the harm. Consider the sobering assessment, delivered in an email to employees of U.S. intelligence agencies late last month, by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: "The actions taken by WikiLeaks are not only deplorable, irresponsible, and reprehensible—they could have major impacts on our national security. The disclosure of classified documents puts at risk our troops, law enforcement, diplomats, and especially the American people."

Mrs. Feinstein, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from California and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: JDN on December 07, 2010, 08:48:43 AM
While I deplore the leaks, it does seem like a First Amendment defense is viable for WikiLeaks.  I think Senator Feinstein is merely posturing.

New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), was a United States Supreme Court per curiam decision. The ruling made it possible for the New York Times and Washington Post newspapers to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers without risk of government censure.
President Richard Nixon had claimed executive authority to force the Times to suspend publication of classified information in its possession. The question before the court was whether the constitutional freedom of the press under the First Amendment was subordinate to a claimed Executive need to maintain the secrecy of information. The Supreme Court ruled that First Amendment did protect the New York Times' right to print said materials.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States

But someone who actually leaked the classified information, like Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers, might not evade the long arm of the law.

In other words, if WikiLeaks was simply a passive recipient of the material, it’s likely free from culpability. If it played a more active role, the calculus might change depending on just how involved it was. “ (WikiLeaks has said, however, that it didn’t pay for the documents.)

Jack Balkin, a First Amendment expert at Yale Law, “I can’t imagine that given the current situation, any criminal charges are going to be filed against any [media organization].”

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/07/26/pentagon-papers-ii-on-wikileaks-and-the-first-amendment/
Title: Wikileaks: There WERE WMD in Iraq
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2010, 08:23:39 AM


http://www.examiner.com/public-safety-in-national/wikileaks-wmd-program-existed-iraq-prior-to-us-invasion
Title: The Prequel to Iran-Contragate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2010, 01:54:08 PM


http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/the-truth-about-israel-iran-and-1980s-u-s-arms-deals-1.326987
Title: ISI drops dime on CIA station chief
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2010, 08:53:27 PM

Reporting from Washington and Islamabad, Pakistan —

The CIA station chief in Pakistan has been called home, a U.S. official said, after a lawyer for a local journalist publicly revealed the officer's name and said he should be held accountable for the deaths of the client's relatives in a U.S. drone strike.

The development is likely to worsen the mistrust roiling Washington's fragile alliance with Islamabad, which is central to its military campaign in neighboring Afghanistan and the struggle against Islamic militants.



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Pakistani journalist Karim Khan filed a police complaint Monday alleging that his brother and son were killed when a missile fired from a CIA drone hit their home in North Waziristan in December 2009. The complaint and a separate notice to the U.S. Embassy of his intent to sue identified a person they claimed was the CIA station chief in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

Khan said his two relatives were teachers and that they did not have any connection to Islamic militants, who are the targets of covert U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas. His lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, said Friday that he obtained the CIA officer's name from two Pakistani newspaper reporters, and included it in the lawsuit because he believed the man should be punished for civilian deaths caused by the drone strikes.

"He should be arrested and executed in this country," Khan said outside an Islamabad police station, according to news reports.

Although Akbar refused to identify the reporters, suspicions about the source of the information fell on Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. The ISI historically has maintained strong ties with certain Pakistani journalists, who have published information aimed at bolstering the agency's interests.

Pakistani intelligence sources denied involvement.

The agency's relationship with the U.S. has been rocky in recent years. It cooperates with Washington by providing intelligence that helps the CIA target Taliban and Al Qaeda militants. But the U.S. suspects elements in the ISI of providing support to Afghan Taliban militants and commanders who attack U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

New U.S. intelligence reports say Pakistan has proved unwilling to stop its clandestine support of militants who mount attacks from the tribal areas. And according to military and State Department documents disclosed this year by the WikiLeaks website, U.S. intelligence suggests that elements of the ISI are continuing to arm, train and fund militants.

The CIA station chief's departure "is understandable, because once his name is out, his utility is over," said a Pakistani intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The officer, whose name remains classified, is returning to the U.S. because "terrorist threats against him in Pakistan were of such a serious nature that it would be imprudent not to act," said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing a sensitive personnel matter.

CIA spokesman George Little declined to address the matter directly, but said, "Our station chiefs routinely encounter major risk as they work to keep America safe … their security is obviously a top priority for the CIA, especially when there's an imminent threat."

Khan says his son and brother were killed by a drone strike in North Waziristan on Dec. 31. The number of drone strikes in North Waziristan has risen steeply in the last year as the U.S. targets refuges of the Haqqani network, a wing of the Afghan Taliban regarded as one of the biggest threats against American and allied forces in Afghanistan.

U.S. Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on a surprise visit Friday to Kabul, the Afghan capital, that U.S. officials had begun to speak bluntly to Pakistani officials, including army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, about the need to attack militants in areas such as North Waziristan.

"To make the kind of progress we need to make in Afghanistan, progress in Pakistan is critical," Mullen said.

Akbar and Khan held a news conference in Islamabad on Nov. 29. Front-page articles in Pakistani newspapers and television newscasts publicized the CIA officer's name the next day. When Khan and other protesters marched to the parliament building Dec. 9 and held a sit-in against U.S. drone strikes, several demonstrators held up posters with the officer's name printed in large black letters.

One Pakistani newspaper claimed the agent entered the country on a business visa without diplomatic immunity. CIA officers sometimes pose as diplomats, in which case they usually cannot be prosecuted. In other cases they operate under "nonofficial cover," which exposes them to foreign legal action.

Though U.S. officials sometimes speak privately about the drone program in general, they tend not to discuss individual strikes. U.S. officials have acknowledged noncombatant deaths through drone strikes but say they are extremely rare.

Other groups challenge the U.S. count and say that as many as a third of the people killed in the strikes are not militants.

The government of Pakistan cooperates with the strikes, even though it sometimes denounces them to the public.

It has been a record year for drone strikes in Pakistan, with 113 so far, up from 53 last year and 34 in 2008, according to the New America Foundation. On Friday, U.S. missiles struck compounds in Pakistan's Khyber district, killing 54 alleged militants, according to news reports citing Pakistani officials.

The CIA post of Pakistan station chief is a crucial one because that station is the epicenter of the spy agency's program to attack militants with missiles fired from unmanned aerial drones. John D. Bennett, who in July was named to head the National Clandestine Service, the CIA's operations arm, had previously served as Islamabad station chief.

The outing of a station chief is rare but not without precedent.

Last year, an Italian prosecutor won convictions in absentia of 23 Americans, all but one allegedly CIA officers, in connection with the "extraordinary rendition" of an Egyptian cleric from Milan to Egypt in 2003. The cleric says he was tortured by the Egyptians. Among those convicted were former Rome station chief Jeffrey Castelli and former Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, whose names became public as a result of the court case.

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

alex.rodriguez@latimes.com

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 17, 2010, 10:34:46 PM
You mean the intelligence agency that created the taliban and is filled with AQ sympathizers that ran a double agent/suicide bomber that killed CIA personnel might burn a station chief? Heavens!  :-o
Title: POTH: CIA secrets could surface in Swiss Nuclear Case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 24, 2010, 09:49:46 AM
C.I.A. Secrets Could Surface in Swiss Nuclear Case
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: December 23, 2010
 
A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world’s most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on Thursday when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for making nuclear arms.

The prospect of a prosecution, and a public trial, threatens to expose some of the C.I.A.’s deepest secrets if defense lawyers try to protect their clients by revealing how they operated on the agency’s behalf. It could also tarnish what the Bush administration once hailed as a resounding victory in breaking up the nuclear arms network by laying bare how much of it remained intact.
“It’s like a puzzle,” Andreas Müller, the Swiss magistrate, said at a news conference in Bern on Thursday. “If you put the puzzle together you get the whole picture.”

The three men — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco — helped run the atomic smuggling ring of A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, officials in several countries have said. In return for millions of dollars, according to former Bush administration officials, the Tinners secretly worked for the C.I.A. as well, not only providing information about the Khan network’s manufacturing and sales efforts, which stretched from Iran to Libya to North Korea, but also helping the agency introduce flaws into the equipment sent to some of those countries.

The Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to protect the men from prosecution, even persuading Swiss authorities to destroy equipment and information found on their computers and in their homes and businesses — actions that may now imperil efforts to prosecute them.

While it has been clear since 2008 that the Tinners acted as American spies, the announcement by the Swiss magistrate on Thursday, recommending their prosecution for nuclear smuggling, is a turning point in the investigation. A trial would bring to the fore a case that Pakistan has insisted is closed. Prosecuting the case could also expose in court a tale of C.I.A. break-ins in Switzerland, and of a still unexplained decision by the agency not to seize electronic copies of a number of nuclear bomb designs found on the computers of the Tinner family.

One of those blueprints came from an early Chinese atomic bomb; two more advanced designs were from Pakistan’s program, investigators from several countries have said.

Ultimately, copies of those blueprints were found around the globe on the computers of members of the Khan network, leading investigators to suspect that they made their way to Iran, North Korea and perhaps other countries. In 2003, atomic investigators found one of the atomic blueprints in Libya and brought it back to the United States for safekeeping.

Mr. Müller, the Swiss magistrate, investigated the Tinner case for nearly two years. He said Thursday that his 174-page report recommended that the three men face charges for “supporting the development of atomic weapons” in violation of Swiss law.

They are accused of supplying Dr. Khan’s operation with technology used to make centrifuges, the machines that purify uranium into fuel for bombs and reactors. Dr. Khan then sold the centrifuges to Libya, Iran and North Korea and perhaps other countries.

Mr. Müller’s recommendation comes as a new book describes previously unknown details of the C.I.A.’s secret relationship with the Tinners, which appears to have started around 2000.

The book, “Fallout,” by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, scheduled to be published next month, tells how the C.I.A. sent the men coded instructions, spied on their family, tried to buy their silence and ultimately had the Bush administration press Switzerland to destroy evidence in an effort to keep the Tinners from being indicted and testifying in open court.

Ms. Collins is a freelance writer and investigator, and her husband, Mr. Frantz, is a former investigations editor for The New York Times and a former managing editor of The Los Angeles Times. He currently works on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The C.I.A. has never commented on its relationship with the Tinners. But the story has leaked out, in bits and pieces, after news reports of Dr. Khan’s illicit atomic sales forced Pakistan’s government to expose the atomic ring and place Dr. Khan under house arrest. But Pakistan never allowed him to be interrogated by the C.I.A. or international nuclear inspectors, perhaps out of fear that he would implicate other Pakistani senior officials.

==========

(Page 2 of 2)



As a result, there has never been a full accounting of his activities, few of his associates have been tried or jailed, and there are strong indications that some of his suppliers are still operating.


But if the Pakistanis were worried about revelations surrounding Dr. Khan and whom he might have worked with in the Pakistani military and political hierarchy, the C.I.A. was worried about the Tinners.
The new book says the Bush administration grew so alarmed at possible disclosures of C.I.A. links to the family that in 2006 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lobbied Swiss officials to drop their investigation.

The book says the C.I.A. broke into a Tinner home in 2003 and found that the family possessed detailed blueprints for several types of nuclear bombs.

Paula Weiss, a spokeswoman for the C.I.A., declined to comment, and lawyers for the Tinners did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Tinners have said that they were not aware that the equipment they supplied was intended for nuclear weapons projects.

Based on Swiss investigators’ findings, the book suggests that the bomb designs may have spread to a half dozen outposts of Dr. Khan’s empire around the globe — including Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa — and sharply criticizes the C.I.A. for leaving those plans in the hands of people suspected of being nuclear traffickers.

In late 2007, the Swiss government, under strong American pressure, decided to drop legal proceedings on espionage charges against the Tinners and other charges against a number of C.I.A. operatives who had operated on Swiss soil in violation of the country’s laws.

In early 2008, the more limited investigation on trafficking charges inched forward with great difficulty because the Swiss government — again at the behest of United States officials — had destroyed an enormous trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of the atomic family. That action led to an uproar in the Swiss Parliament.

But in 2008 Swiss investigators discovered that 39 Tinner files scheduled for destruction had been overlooked, giving the authorities fresh insights into the ring’s operation — and new life for the legal case.

In his news conference on Thursday, Mr. Müller harshly criticized the Swiss government for having “massively interfered in the wheels of justice by destroying almost all the evidence.” He added that the government had also ordered the federal criminal police not to cooperate with his investigation.

If the Tinners are formally charged and their case goes to trial in Switzerland, they face up to 10 years in prison if they are found guilty of breaking laws on the export of atomic goods. All three men spent time in Swiss jails pending the outcome of the espionage and trafficking inquiries. The time they have already spent in jail would count toward any possible sentence.

In early 2009, Marco Tinner was freed after more than three years of investigative detention, and his brother Urs was released in late 2008 after more than four years in jail. Their father, Friedrich, was released in 2006.

Mr. Müller recommended that, in addition to charges of atomic smuggling, Marco Tinner should be accused of money laundering.

The Swiss attorney general is now studying the magistrate’s report and will decide next year whether to file charges against the Swiss family of atomic spies and entrepreneurs.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 24, 2010, 09:58:38 AM
You can't try dead people. Unfortunately, we got away from that long ago.
Title: POTH on consequences of Wikileaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2011, 03:18:41 AM
Given that the source is POTH, one wonders just how many inconvenient facts are being left out from those acknowledged here.  At least it acknowledges the issue , , ,
==================================

WASHINGTON — The State Department is warning hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and businesspeople identified in leaked diplomatic cables of potential threats to their safety and has moved a handful of them to safer locations, administration officials said Thursday.

The operation, which involves a team of 30 in Washington and embassies from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, reflects the administration’s fear that the disclosure of cables obtained by the organization WikiLeaks has damaged American interests by exposing foreigners who supply valuable information to the United States.
Administration officials said they were not aware of anyone who has been attacked or imprisoned as a direct result of information in the 2,700 cables that have been made public to date by WikiLeaks, The New York Times and several other publications, many with some names removed. But they caution that many dissidents are under constant harassment from their governments, so it is difficult to be certain of the cause of actions against them.

The officials declined to discuss details about people contacted by the State Department in recent weeks, saying only that a few were relocated within their home countries and that a few others were moved abroad.

The State Department is mainly concerned about the cables that have yet to be published or posted on Web sites — nearly 99 percent of the archive of 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks. With cables continuing to trickle out, they said, protecting those identified will be a complex, delicate and long-term undertaking. The State Department said it had combed through a majority of the quarter-million cables and distributed many to embassies for review by diplomats there.

“We feel responsible for doing everything possible to protect these people,” said Michael H. Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, who is overseeing the effort. “We’re taking it extremely seriously.”

Contrary to the administration’s initial fears, the fallout from the cables on the diplomatic corps itself has been manageable. The most visible casualty so far could be Gene A. Cretz, the ambassador to Libya, who was recalled from his post last month after his name appeared on a cable describing peculiar personal habits of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. While no decision has been made on Mr. Cretz’s future, officials said he was unlikely to return to Tripoli. In addition, one midlevel diplomat has been moved from his post in an undisclosed country.

But other senior diplomats initially considered at risk — for example, the ambassador to Russia, John R. Beyrle, whose name was on cables critical of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin — appeared to have weathered the disclosures.

There is anecdotal evidence that the disclosure of the cables has chilled daily contacts between human rights activists and diplomats. An American diplomat in Central Asia said recently that one Iranian contact, who met him on periodic trips outside Iran, told him he would no longer speak to him. Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, said people in Afghanistan and Pakistan had become more reluctant to speak to human rights investigators for fear that what they said might be made public.

WikiLeaks came under fire from human rights organizations last July, after it released a large number of documents about the war in Afghanistan without removing the names of Afghan citizens who had assisted the American military. When it later released documents about the Iraq war, the group stripped names from the documents.

A Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Chris Perrine, said Thursday that the military was not aware of any confirmed case of harm to anyone as a result of being named in the Afghan war documents. But he noted that the Taliban had said it would study the WikiLeaks documents to punish collaborators with the Americans.

State Department officials believe that a wide range of foreigners who have spoken candidly to American diplomats could be at risk if publicly identified. For example, a businessman who spoke about official corruption, a gay person in a society intolerant of homosexuality or a high-ranking government official who criticized his bosses could face severe reprisals, the officials said.

Human rights advocates share the State Department’s concern that many people could be at risk if cables become public without careful redaction. “There are definitely people named in the cables who would be very much endangered,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch.

In one case, Mr. Malinowski said, the State Department asked Human Rights Watch to inform a person in a Middle Eastern country that his exchanges with American diplomats had been reported in a cable.

In addition to The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel have had the entire cable database for several months. The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten said last month that it had obtained the entire collection, and newspapers in several other countries have obtained a selection of cables relating to their regions.

WikiLeaks’s founder, Julian Assange, has said the group will continue to release additional cables on its own Web site as well, though to date it has moved cautiously and has reproduced the redactions made by newspapers publishing the cables.

Government officials are also worried that foreign intelligence services may be trying to acquire the cable collection, a development that would heighten concerns about the safety of those named in the documents.

For human rights activists in this country, disclosures by WikiLeaks, which was founded in 2006, have been a decidedly mixed development. Amnesty International gave WikiLeaks an award in 2009 for its role in revealing human rights violations in Kenya. Human Rights Watch wrote to President Obama last month to urge the administration not to pursue a prosecution of WikiLeaks or Mr. Assange.

But they are concerned that the cables could inflict their own kind of collateral damage, either by endangering diplomats’ sources or discouraging witnesses and victims of abuses from speaking to foreign supporters.

Sam Zarifi, director of Amnesty International’s operations in Asia, said the cables had provided valuable “empirical information” on abuses in several countries. “This is a new way to distribute information,” Mr. Zarifi said. “We just want to make sure it has the same safeguards as traditional journalism.”
Title: NYTimes/POTH: Free Market CIA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 23, 2011, 10:25:14 AM
WASHINGTON — Duane R. Clarridge parted company with the Central Intelligence Agency more than two decades ago, but from poolside at his home near San Diego, he still runs a network of spies.

Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class.
Hatching schemes that are something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy,” Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge’s suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict, associates say.

Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.

His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.

For all of the can-you-top-this qualities to Mr. Clarridge’s operation, it is a startling demonstration of how private citizens can exploit the chaos of combat zones and rivalries inside the American government to carry out their own agenda.

It also shows how the outsourcing of military and intelligence operations has spawned legally murky clandestine operations that can be at cross-purposes with America’s foreign policy goals. Despite Mr. Clarridge’s keen interest in undermining Afghanistan’s ruling family, President Obama’s administration appears resigned to working with President Karzai and his half brother, who is widely suspected of having ties to drug traffickers.

Charles E. Allen, a former top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security who worked with Mr. Clarridge at the C.I.A., termed him an “extraordinary” case officer who had operated on “the edge of his skis” in missions abroad years ago.

But he warned against Mr. Clarridge’s recent activities, saying that private spies operating in war zones “can get both nations in trouble and themselves in trouble.” He added, “We don’t need privateers.”

The private spying operation, which The New York Times disclosed last year, was tapped by a military desperate for information about its enemies and frustrated with the quality of intelligence from the C.I.A., an agency that colleagues say Mr. Clarridge now views largely with contempt. The effort was among a number of secret activities undertaken by the American government in a shadow war around the globe to combat militants and root out terrorists.

The Pentagon official who arranged a contract for Mr. Clarridge in 2009 is under investigation for allegations of violating Defense Department rules in awarding that contract. Because of the continuing inquiry, most of the dozen current and former government officials, private contractors and associates of Mr. Clarridge who were interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Clarridge declined to be interviewed, but issued a statement that likened his operation, called the Eclipse Group, to the Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.’s World War II precursor.

“O.S.S. was a success of the past,” he wrote. “Eclipse may possibly be an effective model for the future, providing information to officers and officials of the United States government who have the sole responsibility of acting on it or not.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Col. David Lapan, declined to comment on Mr. Clarridge’s network, but said the Defense Department “believes that reliance on unvetted and uncorroborated information from private sources may endanger the force and taint information collected during legitimate intelligence operations.”

Whether military officials still listen to Mr. Clarridge or support his efforts to dig up dirt on the Karzai family is unclear. But it is evident that Mr. Clarridge — bespectacled and doughy, with a shock of white hair — is determined to remain a player.

On May 15, according to a classified Pentagon report on the private spying operation, he sent an encrypted e-mail to military officers in Kabul announcing that his network was being shut down because the Pentagon had just terminated his contract. He wrote that he had to “prepare approximately 200 local personnel to cease work.”

In fact, he had no intention of closing his operation. The very next day, he set up a password-protected Web site, afpakfp.com, that would allow officers to continue viewing his dispatches.

A Staunch Interventionist

From his days running secret wars for the C.I.A. in Central America to his consulting work in the 1990s on a plan to insert Special Operations troops in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, Mr. Clarridge has been an unflinching cheerleader for American intervention overseas.

Typical of his pugnacious style are his comments, provided in a 2008 interview for a documentary now on YouTube, defending many of the C.I.A.’s most notorious operations, including undermining the Chilean president Salvador Allende, before a coup ousted him 1973.

“Sometimes, unfortunately, things have to be changed in a rather ugly way,” said Mr. Clarridge, his New England accent becoming more pronounced the angrier he became. “We’ll intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national security interests to intervene.”

“Get used to it, world,” he said. “We’re not going to put up with nonsense.”

===================

He is also stirred by the belief that the C.I.A. has failed to protect American troops in Afghanistan, and that the Obama administration has struck a Faustian bargain with President Karzai, according to four current and former associates. They say Mr. Clarridge thinks that the Afghan president will end up cutting deals with Pakistan or Iran and selling out the United States, making American troops the pawns in the Great Game of power politics in the region.

Mr. Clarridge — known to virtually everyone by his childhood nickname, Dewey — was born into a staunchly Republican family in New Hampshire, attended Brown University and joined the spy agency during its freewheeling early years. He eventually became head of the agency’s Latin America division in 1981 and helped found the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center five years later.
In postings in India, Turkey, Italy and elsewhere, Mr. Clarridge, using pseudonyms that included Dewey Marone and Dax Preston LeBaron, made a career of testing boundaries in the dark space of American foreign policy. In his 1997 memoir, he wrote about trying to engineer pro-American governments in Italy in the late 1970s (the former American ambassador to Rome, Richard N. Gardner, called him “shallow and devious”), and helping run the Reagan administration’s covert wars against Marxist guerrillas in Central America during the 1980s.

He was indicted in 1991 on charges of lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-contra scandal; he had testified that he was unaware of arms shipments to Iran. But he was pardoned the next year by the first President George Bush.

Now, more than two decades after Mr. Clarridge was forced to resign from the intelligence agency, he tries to run his group of spies as a C.I.A. in miniature. Working from his house in a San Diego suburb, he uses e-mail to stay in contact with his “agents” — their code names include Willi and Waco — in Afghanistan and Pakistan, writing up intelligence summaries based on their reports, according to associates.

Mr. Clarridge assembled a team of Westerners, Afghans and Pakistanis not long after a security consulting firm working for The Times subcontracted with him in December 2008 to assist in the release of a reporter, David Rohde, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Mr. Rohde escaped on his own seven months later, but Mr. Clarridge used his role in the episode to promote his group to military officials in Afghanistan.

In July 2009, according to the Pentagon report, he set out to prove his worth to the Pentagon by directing his team to gather information in Pakistan’s tribal areas to help find a young American soldier who had been captured by Taliban militants. (The soldier, Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, remains in Taliban hands.)

Four months later, the security firm that Mr. Clarridge was affiliated with, the American International Security Corporation, won a Pentagon contract ultimately worth about $6 million. American officials said the contract was arranged by Michael D. Furlong, a senior Defense Department civilian with a military “information warfare” command in San Antonio.

To get around a Pentagon ban on hiring contractors as spies, the report said, Mr. Furlong’s team simply rebranded their activities as “atmospheric information” rather than “intelligence.”

Mr. Furlong, now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general, was accused in the internal Pentagon report of carrying out “unauthorized” intelligence gathering, and misleading senior military officers about it. He has said that he became a scapegoat for top commanders in Afghanistan who had blessed his activities.

As for Mr. Clarridge, American law prohibits private citizens from actively undermining a foreign government, but prosecutions under the so-called Neutrality Act have historically been limited to people raising private armies against foreign powers. Legal experts said Mr. Clarridge’s plans against the Afghan president fell in a gray area, but would probably not violate the law.

Intelligence of Varying Quality

It is difficult to assess the merits of Mr. Clarridge’s secret intelligence dispatches; a review of some of the documents by The Times shows that some appear to be based on rumors from talk at village bazaars or rehashes of press reports.

===================

Others, though, contain specific details about militant plans to attack American troops, and about Taliban leadership meetings in Pakistan. Mr. Clarridge gave the military an in-depth report about a militant group, the Haqqani Network, in August 2009, a document that officials said helped the military track Haqqani fighters. According to the Pentagon report, Mr. Clarridge told Marine commanders in Afghanistan in June 2010 that his group produced 500 intelligence dispatches before its contract was terminated.

When the military would not listen to him, Mr. Clarridge found other ways to peddle his information. For instance, his private spies in April and May were reporting that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive cleric who leads the Afghan Taliban, had been captured by Pakistani officials and placed under house arrest. Associates said Mr. Clarridge believed that Pakistan’s spy service was playing a game: keeping Mullah Omar confined but continuing to support the Afghan Taliban.
Both military and intelligence officials said the information could not be corroborated, but Mr. Clarridge used back channels to pass it on to senior Obama administration officials, including Dennis C. Blair, then the director of national intelligence.

And associates said that Mr. Clarridge, determined to make the information public, arranged for it to get to Mr. Thor, a square-jawed writer of thrillers, a blogger and a regular guest on Mr. Beck’s program on Fox News.

Most of Mr. Thor’s books are yarns about the heroic exploits of Special Operations troops. In interviews, he said he was once embedded with a “black special ops team” and helped expose “a Taliban pornography/murder ring.”

On May 10, biggovernment.com — a Web site run by the conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart — published an “exclusive” by Mr. Thor, who declined to comment for this article.

“Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr. Thor wrote, “I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar, has been taken into custody.”

Just last week, he blogged about another report — unconfirmed by American officials — from Mr. Clarridge’s group: that Mullah Omar had suffered a heart attack and was rushed to a hospital by Pakistan’s spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.

“America is being played,” he wrote.

Taking on Afghan Leaders

Mr. Clarridge and his spy network also took sides in an internecine government battle over Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Khandahar Provincial Council.

For years, the American military has believed that public anger over government-linked corruption has helped swell the Taliban’s ranks, and that Ahmed Wali Karzai plays a central role in that corruption. He has repeatedly denied any links to the Afghan drug trafficking.

According to three American military officials, in April 2009 Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top American commander in Afghanistan, told subordinates that he wanted them to gather any evidence that might tie the president’s half brother to the drug trade. “He put the word out that he wanted to ‘burn’ Ahmed Wali Karzai,” said one of the military officials.

In early 2010, after General McKiernan left Afghanistan and Mr. Clarridge was under contract to the military, the former spy helped produce a dossier for commanders detailing allegations about Mr. Karzai’s drug connections, land grabs and even murders in southern Afghanistan. The document, provided to The Times, speculates that Mr. Karzai’s ties to the C.I.A. — which has paid him an undetermined amount of money since 2001 — may be the reason the agency “is the only member of the country team in Kabul not to advocate taking a more active stance against AWK.”

Ultimately, though, the military could not amass enough hard proof to convince other American officials of Mr. Karzai’s supposed crimes, and backed off efforts to remove him from power.

Mr. Clarridge would soon set his sights higher: on President Hamid Karzai himself. Over the summer, after the Pentagon canceled his contract, Mr. Clarridge decided that the United States needed leverage over the Afghan president. So the former spy, running his network with money from unidentified donors, came up with an outlandish scheme that seems to come straight from the C.I.A.’s past playbook of covert operations.

There have long been rumors that Hamid Karzai uses drugs, in part because of his often erratic behavior, but the accusation was aired publicly last year by Peter W. Galbraith, a former United Nations representative in Afghanistan. American officials have said publicly that there is no evidence to support the allegation of drug use.

Mr. Clarridge pushed a plan to prove that the president was a heroin addict, and then confront him with the evidence to ensure that he became a more pliable ally. Mr. Clarridge proposed various ideas, according to several associates, from using his team to track couriers between the presidential palace in Kabul and Ahmed Wali Karzai’s home in Kandahar, to even finding a way to collect Hamid Karzai’s beard clippings and run DNA tests. He eventually dropped his ideas when the Obama administration signaled it was committed to bolstering the Karzai government.

Still, associates said, Mr. Clarridge maneuvered against the Karzais last summer by helping promote videos, available on YouTube, purporting to represent the “Voice of Afghan Youth.” The slick videos disparage the president as the “king of Kabul” who regularly takes money from the Iranians, and Ahmed Wali Karzai as the “prince of Kandahar” who “takes the monthly gold from the American intelligence boss” and makes the Americans “his puppet.”

The videos received almost no attention when they were posted on the Internet, but were featured in July on the Fox News Web site in a column by Mr. North, who declined to comment for this article. Writing that he had “stumbled” on the videos on the Internet, he called them a “treasure trove.”

Mr. Clarridge, his associates say, continues to dream up other operations against the Afghan president and his inner circle. When he was an official spy, Mr. Clarridge recalled in his memoir, he bristled at the C.I.A.’s bureaucracy for thwarting his plans to do maximum harm to America’s enemies. “It’s not like I’m running my own private C.I.A.,” he wrote, “and can do what I want.”
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on January 23, 2011, 10:29:16 AM
I think there is a place for such contractors. The CIA seemingly is too big and too risk adverse to do much of what is required.
Title: Clapper off
Post by: G M on February 12, 2011, 08:09:01 AM
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFTV6qPh1u4&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]


Mark Steyn: 'The guy in charge of U.S. intelligence is an idiot'
Title: Intel Matters: single most foolish statement ever
Post by: DougMacG on February 12, 2011, 09:15:36 AM
Mark Steyn has it right.
-----
John Bolton: "It's a sad day for the intelligence community.  That statement made by Clapper I think is the single most foolish statement ever made by a senior intelligence official." time stamp 6:40 on this interview. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1iIVsOEJFQ
----
Surprised to find out Clapper is an 'idiot'?  Obama also picked Joe Biden.

Politico points out bipartisan opposition to the Clapper appointment, PeterHoekstra was the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee related the existence of "bipartisan opposition" to Clapper's nomination, and complained that Clapper failed to brief Congress on "an extraordinarily sensitive program." http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38158.html#ixzz0q4kreu2l

Powerline suggested that the American intelligence community badly needs The Muslim Brotherhood for Dummies, unfortunately, the book doesn't exist.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 12, 2011, 09:23:50 AM
Doing a quick search on "Muslim Brotherhood" on this forum brings up posts on them at least as far back as 2003. It's not like there isn't a huge body of knowledge in english documenting the malevolent, and very non-secular nature of the MB.

Sad.
Title: WSJ: Will Bill Donovan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2011, 10:49:15 AM
By ANDREW ROBERTS
William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, has long been a controversial figure. If a man can be judged by the quality of his enemies, Donovan—who was cordially disliked or distrusted by Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall and especially by J. Edgar Hoover—was a giant of his era. That President Franklin Roosevelt eventually came to like and admire Donovan, a Republican enemy of the New Deal, says much for both men. As Douglas Waller makes clear in his fast-moving and well-written biography, "Wild Bill Donovan," Roosevelt's approval was the foundation of Donovan's place at the center of American intelligence operations from July 1941 to September 1945.

Hailing from a poor Catholic neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., Donovan (1883-1959) won early renown as the most-decorated officer of World War I, earning the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal with two oak-leaf clusters, two Purple Hearts and the Congressional Medal of Honor. When he later sent any of his 10,000 OSS operatives into harm's way during World War II, they knew that he was not asking anything of them that he hadn't himself already done.

After World War I, Donovan went into the law and politics, failing to become lieutenant governor of New York in 1922 or governor in 1932. In the course of the gubernatorial campaign, he described the Democratic presidential nominee Roosevelt as "a new kind of red, white and blue dictator" with "delusions of grandeur." Worse, when he met Mussolini in 1936 he congratulated the dictator on Italy's "unity of spirit" and the Italian general Pietro Badoglio on his "great victory" over the poor, gassed, brutalized Abyssinian tribesmen. On German fascism, Donovan was far sounder, protesting in 1933 over the Nazis' ill treatment of Jewish judges.

By July 1940, Donovan was one of the leading advocates of active aid to Britain and an opponent of America First isolationism, visiting London in a semi-official capacity and becoming convinced that Winston Churchill was fighting civilization's fight. The prime minister reciprocated by praising Donovan's "animating heart-warming flame" to FDR. With British assistance, Donovan toured Yugoslavia, Turkey, the Middle East and Spain, sending back encouraging cables. Walter Lippmann claimed that Donovan had "almost singlehandedly overcome the unmitigated defeatism which was paralyzing Washington."

View Full Image

Library of Congress
 
Col. William J. Donovan in 1919. His Wound Chevrons are visible on his right sleeve.
.Donovan, who had come to admire FDR proposed to the president the creation of a spy and sabotage service based on Britain's MI6, "with men calculatingly reckless with disciplined daring." With the support of the secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, but in the teeth of the opposition of practically everyone else, Donovan was appointed "Coordinator of Information" in July 1941. Roosevelt loved the intelligence with which Donovan then deluged him—more than 200 memos in his first six months—calling him "my secret legs."

For all the deliberate opacity of his title, the coordinator had a precise sense of his mission. He now opened a door on the world of codepads, pistols with silencers, lock-picking sets, matchbox cameras, bombs that looked like baking flour, stiletto knives, chemical and biological assassination weapons, and suicide capsules (which Donovan always carried with him, although his aides worried lest he mix them up with his identical-looking aspirin).

"Hush-Hush" Donovan hired anyone of ability, believing that "later on we'll find out what they can do." Future CIA directors Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby and William Casey all served under Donovan. From its headquarters at 25th & E streets on Navy Hill in Washington and at Rockefeller Center in New York, the Office of Strategic Services became America's first world-wide intelligence service. World-wide except for Latin America, which Hoover managed to ring-fence for the FBI. Donovan and Hoover—who each kept files on the other—maintained a fiction of professionalism that barely hid their mutual detestation.

The tales of OSS derring-do—one agent, Virginia Hall, had a prosthetic leg from a prewar hunting accident but was still parachuted into Occupied France— are thrilling and none more so than the elaborate effort, in July 1941, to burgle the safe in the Spanish embassy in Washington for the diplomatic codebooks. The meticulous preparation and sheer chutzpah of the operation—infiltrating a secretary, distracting the embassy staff, sending in a safe-cracker, photographing and replacing the codebooks within hours—was extraordinary, not least because it had to be undertaken monthly when the codes changed. One can't help sympathizing with Donovan when the OSS had to curtail its activities because the FBI turned out to be up to the same thing. (When FDR ordained that it was henceforth to be the FBI's job to break into embassies, Donovan promptly started spying on the FBI, concluding that Hoover was "a fairy" —just as Hoover was concluding that Donovan was a serial adulterer.)

The stories of the OSS's homelier operations are superb, too. Gland experts produced female sex hormones to inject into Hitler's vegetable so that his mustache would fall out and his voice go soprano. Planes released bats that were fitted with time-delayed incendiary devices. They were supposed to fly under the eaves of German houses and blow them up; in fact, the poor creatures dropped like stones.

For every success Donovan could claim —such as the German agent Fritz Kolbe, who stole 1,600 documents from the foreign ministry in Berlin and took them to an OSS safe house in Switzerland—there was a failure: for example Donovan's prediction, supposedly based on firm intelligence, that the Third Reich would "collapse . . . a few months" after D-Day.

Yet he was always an invigorating, thrusting, positive force. He insisted on taking part in the Salerno, Anzio and Normandy landings, hitting the beaches virtually in the second wave each time. At one point at Salerno, this 200-pound, 5-foot-9-inch, 60-year-old man with thickening heart muscles actually got into a firefight with an Italian patrol. It left him "happy as a clam."

Mr. Waller, a former Newsweek and Time correspondent, makes a powerful case that Donovan was a great American. He does not, however, even attempt to make the case that the OSS significantly affected the outcome of the war. Yet Donovan had no fewer than 28 networks working in southern France by the spring of 1944, which was no mean feat.

The author is caustic about the OSS operations in Italy, citing several "bad operational breakdowns and security lapses," not least when some OSS officers pocketed the cash intended for bribing Axis officials. Yet Donovan got a grip on the situation by the time of the fall of Rome in June 1944, setting himself up at the Grand Hotel Plaza there and sending no fewer than half his officers home. As Gen. Mark Clark fought his way up the peninsula, the OSS dropped 75 commando teams behind enemy lines, with 2,000 tons of arms and supplies, in support of the estimated 85,000 Italian partisans fighting against the Germans.

Just as he had no great respect for the inviolability of embassies, Donovan had little time for the Geneva Convention. In an operation codenamed "Sauerkraut," he organized the recruitment of angry and disaffected German soldiers from POW camps—i.e., sour krauts—and slipped them behind enemy lines in their Wehr macht uniforms to plant subversive propaganda, gather intelligence and lower enemy morale. The scheme worked better than the absurd idea of having planes drop leaflets over Germany showing, as Donovan put it in a memo, "pictures of succulent, appetizing dishes that would make a hungry person almost go mad with longing."

Wild Bill Donovan
By Douglas Waller
Free Press, 466 pages, $30
.Another black propaganda wheeze was to produce fake German mailbags stuffed with poison-pen letters whose addresses were copied from prewar German phone directories. The mailbags were then air-dropped in the hope that German civilians would give them to postmen to deliver. The commitment of the OSS to getting every detail right was such that when it produced fake Polish army uniforms, the buttons had to be sewn onto coats by threading the holes parallel, in the European style, rather than crisscrossing them.

The value of Donovan's organization is best seen at the time of Operation Overlord, when the OSS and the British Special Operations Executive dropped 10,000 tons of weaponry and equipment to the French Resistance, which put it to good use in slowing down the German counter attack. As he watched the D-Day landings from the deck of the USS Tuscaloosa, which was giving and receiving fire off Utah Beach, Donovan was in his element. His contribution to the winning of the war is necessarily hard to quantify, but by the end of Mr. Waller's chronicle a fair-minded reader will judge it to have been considerable.

President Truman disbanded the OSS on Sept. 20, 1945, within a week of the Japanese surrender and just as the Soviet Union seemed to pose a new threat. His antipathy toward Donovan was fueled by Hoover's disgusting (and untruthful) allegation that among Wild Bill's many mistresses was Donovan's own daughter-in-law. Yet such was America's need for an OSS substitute that only two years later the organization was resuscitated with a new name —the Central Intelligence Agency—but without its great wartime leader. He deserved better.

—Mr. Roberts's latest book is "The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War," to be published in the United States in May by Harper.
 
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 17, 2011, 05:30:55 AM
Two nations that may not survive Barry-O's presidency:

1. Israel

2. Taiwan

Looking at the debt, we better the US at #3.
Title: How does Pravda on the Hudson know this, and why
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2011, 02:15:21 PM
are they publishing it?

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Mon, February 21, 2011 -- 12:14 PM ET
-----

American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.

The American arrested in Pakistan after shooting two men at a
crowded traffic stop was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team of
operatives conducting surveillance on militant groups deep
inside the country, according to American government
officials.

Working from a safe house in the eastern city of Lahore, the
detained American contractor, Raymond A. Davis, a retired
Special Forces soldier, carried out scouting and other
reconnaissance missions for a Central Intelligence Agency
task force of case officers and technical surveillance
experts, the officials said.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/asia/22pakistan.html?emc=na
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 21, 2011, 04:39:28 PM
Probably from sources within the ISI.

Why are they publishing it? Because unlike Mao or Stalin, Raymond Davis is an American patriot, and thus outside the protection the MSM gives to those who wish America ill.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2011, 09:52:35 PM
Your general point about ISI is well-taken, but here the article says it was US government officials.  Do you doubt the POTH on this point?  And, if not, who the hell on our team would want to leak this? Qui bono?!?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 26, 2011, 07:53:00 AM
A Pakistani source could tip the POTH on "background". The POTH reporter could then get a source within the USG to confirm it "on background". The POTH then runs to publish it. It's not something like a mohammed cartoon.....  :roll:
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2011, 01:32:20 PM
That sounds plausible.
Title: Stratfor: Libya's diplomatic missions
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2011, 09:06:44 AM
Vice President of Intelligence Fred Burton discusses the diplomatic targets that intelligence agencies are watching in their efforts to disrupt terrorist plots.


While the world is focused on the war in Libya, intelligence agencies like the CIA and MI6 are focused on Libyan diplomatic missions around the globe in an effort to disrupt terror plots.

Libya has a long history of using their diplomatic missions as a hub for terrorist-related activity. Intelligence agencies around the globe will be focusing on three specific targets for the surveillance teams. The first is missions or the diplomatic facility. The second would be known or suspected intelligence officers. And the third would be diplomatic pouches.

The first target for the surveillance team would be the official diplomatic mission, embassy, consulate or front company where some sort of clandestine action could be taking place. The focus of the surveillance team would be the individuals that are suspected intelligence officers of the Libyan government as well as people that may be walking into the embassy or front company. The surveillance team would maintain a log with photographs or video of the individuals, and an effort will be made to identify who these individuals are through in-country investigations.

The second target set would be the Libyan diplomatic officers, with a laser focus on the suspected intelligence officers or known intelligence officers. You’re going to have surveillance of individuals that are meeting with these individuals that spin off into various webs of activity, and there is going to be an ongoing effort to identify who those people are that are meeting with the Libyan intelligence officers. The purpose of this surveillance activity is to create an umbrella, a quick read of activity to indicate whether or not there is some sort of terror plot in the works.

The third target set for the surveillance team would be Libyan diplomatic pouches. This is something that we learn through investigation of other terror plots: that the Libyans would utilize the diplomatic pouch to facilitate the transport of weapons, explosives, identity documents to third countries in an effort to carry out any kind of an attack. The interesting aspect of diplomatic pouches are that nations cannot search them, they don’t get x-rayed, they’re not opened, so you literally have no idea what’s in the diplomatic pouch. These items are escorted by diplomatic couriers that also have immunity.

Evidence has shown based on past specific acts of terrorism that I’ve personally investigated that Gadhafi uses his diplomatic missions as a center of gravity for terrorism activity, and it’s also going to be a concern for what other surrogate groups he could be reaching out to to facilitate acts of terrorism all around the world.

Title: SAS officers busted
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 10, 2011, 02:48:34 PM


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375048/SAS-officers-held-trying-leak-secrets-Libya-Afghanistan.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Title: Stratfor: Fred Burton on tracking OBL's courier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2011, 08:44:31 AM

Vice President of Intelligence Fred Burton examines the sophisticated surveillance operation that led to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s safe house in Pakistan.


Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

In this week’s Above the Tearline, we thought we’d take a look at the highly sophisticated surveillance operation that took place many weeks before the SEAL Team Six takedown of the Osama bin Laden safe house.

In the aftermath of the bin Laden takedown, most of the mainstream media has been focused on the brilliant SEAL Team Six assault on the compound. What we would like to take a look at is the highly sophisticated CIA surveillance operation that took place on the courier, who was bin Laden’s lifeline to the free world. Trade craft wise, the surveillance of the courier is the brilliance in this operation in my assessment, meaning you had to set up a standalone safe house in country for a CIA team to operate it in without the knowledge of the Pakistani government. In essence you’re operating behind enemy lines.

One of the other concepts of operating a unilateral surveillance team in a foreign country is the notion of third-party intelligence services trying to figure out what you’re doing. Such as the Indian Intelligence Bureau, the Russian SVR, as well as the very aggressive intelligence capabilities of and organizations such as al Qaeda getting wind of what your team could be doing. The personnel operating in this surveillance team are on a very dangerous mission. In essence, if caught they are committing crimes against Pakistan and they are on their own. They’re operating - the term is black - in country so the U.S. would not acknowledge any activities on the part of our government if the surveillance team had been picked up before the bin Laden operation went down.

The courier was operationally very secure. For example he would remove his cell phone battery so the cell phone could not have been used to track his movements to the compound. And think about the surveillance team and the ability to follow that man without getting caught. At any point along this operation if the courier saw the surveillance team, the operation would’ve been blown. I know from first-hand experience in the Ramzi Yousef case, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, that elements within the Pakistani ISI cannot be trusted so this is why the CIA decided to put together a unilateral operation once they had the lead on the courier. And the logistics, and the care and feeding and the backstop of what took place to get this team into country to surveil all the courier from many, many weeks before the bin Laden operation is probably the most brilliant CIA surveillance operation in quite some time.

Title: WSJ: Intel Denial on Iran
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2011, 06:38:39 PM
By FRED FLEITZ
Mounting evidence over the last few years has convinced most experts that Iran has an active program to develop and construct nuclear weapons. Amazingly, however, these experts do not include the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community. They are unwilling to conduct a proper assessment of the Iranian nuclear issue—and so they remain at variance with the Obama White House, U.S. allies, and even the United Nations.

The last month alone has brought several alarming developments concerning Tehran's nuclear program. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano said last month that his agency has new information pointing to the military ambitions of Iran's nuclear program. As of today, Iran has over 4,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium—enough, according to the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, for four nuclear weapons if enriched to weapons grade.

Iran has accelerated its production of low-enriched uranium in defiance of U.N. and IAEA resolutions. It has also announced plans to install advanced centrifuge machines in a facility built deep inside a mountain near the city of Qom. According to several U.S. diplomats and experts, the facility is too small to be part of a peaceful nuclear program and appears specially constructed to enrich uranium to weapons grade.

To top this off, an item recently posted to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps website mused about the day after an Iranian nuclear test (saying, in a kind of taunt, that it would be a "normal day"). That message marked the first time any official Iranian comment suggested the country's nuclear program is not entirely peaceful.

Despite all this, U.S. intelligence officials are standing by their assessment, first made in 2007, that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and has not restarted it since.

In February, the 17 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community issued a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate updating their 2007 assessment. That estimate had been politicized by several officials who feared how President George W. Bush might respond to a true account of the Iranian threat. It also was affected by the wave of risk aversion that has afflicted U.S. intelligence analysis since the 2003 Iraq War. Intelligence managers since then have discouraged provocative analytic conclusions, and any analysis that could be used to justify military action against rogue states like Iran.

I read the February 2011 Iran NIE while on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee. I believe it was poorly written and little improvement over the 2007 version. However, during a pre-publication classification review of this op-ed, the CIA and the Office of the Director of Intelligence censored my criticisms of this analysis, including my serious concern that it manipulated intelligence evidence. The House Intelligence Committee is aware of my concerns and I hope it will pursue them.

Censors also tried to prevent me from discussing my most serious objection to the 2011 Iran NIE: its skewed set of outside reviewers. The U.S. intelligence community regularly employs reviewers who tend to endorse anything they review: former senior intelligence officers, liberal professors and scholars from liberal think tanks. These reviewers tend to share the views of senior intelligence analysts, and they also want to maintain their intelligence contacts and high-level security clearances.

I believe that senior intelligence officials tried to block me from naming the NIE's outside reviewers because the names so strongly suggest that intelligence agencies took no chances of an outside reviewer unraveling the document's poorly structured arguments and cavalier manipulation of intelligence.

I have been permitted to say the following about the outside reviewers: Two of the four are former CIA analysts who work for the same liberal Washington, D.C., think tank. Neither served under cover, and their former CIA employment is well known. Another reviewer is a liberal university professor and strong critic of George W. Bush's foreign policy. The fourth is a former senior intelligence official. Not surprisingly, the 2011 NIE included short laudatory excerpts from these reviewers that offered only very mild criticism.

It is unacceptable that Iran is on the brink of testing a nuclear weapon while our intelligence analysts continue to deny that an Iranian nuclear weapons program exists. One can't underestimate the dangers posed to our country by a U.S. intelligence community that is unable to provide timely and objective analysis of such major threats to U.S. national security—or to make appropriate adjustments when it is proven wrong.

If U.S. intelligence agencies cannot or will not get this one right, what else are they missing?

Mr. Fleitz retired this year after a 25-year career at the CIA, DIA, State Department and House Intelligence Committee staff. He now writes for Newsmax.com. This op-ed was amended to obtain classification clearance from the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Title: POTH: Spying on Israel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2011, 04:39:25 AM


When Shamai K. Leibowitz, an F.B.I. translator, was sentenced to 20 months in prison last year for leaking classified information to a blogger, prosecutors revealed little about the case. They identified the blogger in court papers only as “Recipient A.” After Mr. Leibowitz pleaded guilty, even the judge said he did not know exactly what Mr. Leibowitz had disclosed.
 
“All I know is that it’s a serious case,” Judge Alexander Williams Jr., of United States District Court in Maryland, said at the sentencing in May 2010. “I don’t know what was divulged other than some documents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea.”
Now the reason for the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the Obama administration’s first prosecution for leaking information to the news media seems clear: Mr. Leibowitz, a contract Hebrew translator, passed on secret transcripts of conversations caught on F.B.I. wiretaps of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Those overheard by the eavesdroppers included American supporters of Israel and at least one member of Congress, according to the blogger, Richard Silverstein.

In his first interview about the case, Mr. Silverstein offered a rare glimpse of American spying on a close ally.

He said he had burned the secret documents in his Seattle backyard after Mr. Leibowitz came under investigation in mid-2009, but he recalled that there were about 200 pages of verbatim records of telephone calls and what seemed to be embassy conversations. He said that in one transcript, Israeli officials discussed their worry that their exchanges might be monitored.

Mr. Leibowitz, who declined to comment for this article, released the documents because of concerns about Israel’s aggressive efforts to influence Congress and public opinion, and fears that Israel might strike nuclear facilities in Iran, a move he saw as potentially disastrous, according to Mr. Silverstein.

While the American government routinely eavesdrops on some embassies inside the United States, intelligence collection against allies is always politically delicate, especially one as close as Israel.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation listens in on foreign embassies and officials in the United States chiefly to track foreign spies, though any intelligence it obtains on other matters is passed on to the C.I.A. and other agencies. The intercepts are carried out by the F.B.I.’s Operational Technology Division, based in Quantico, Va., according to Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence writer who describes the bureau’s monitoring in a book, “Intel Wars,” scheduled for publication in January. Translators like Mr. Leibowitz work at an F.B.I. office in Calverton, Md.

Former counterintelligence officials describe Israeli intelligence operations in the United States as quite extensive, ranking just below those of China and Russia, and F.B.I. counterintelligence agents have long kept an eye on Israeli spying.

For most eavesdropping on embassies in Washington, federal law requires the F.B.I. to obtain an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret at the Justice Department. If an American visiting or calling an embassy turns up on a recording, the F.B.I. is required by law to remove the American’s name from intelligence reports, substituting the words “U.S. person.” But raw transcripts would not necessarily have undergone such editing, called “minimization.”

Mr. Silverstein’s account could not be fully corroborated, but it fits the publicly known facts about the case. Spokesmen for the F.B.I., the Justice Department and the Israeli Embassy declined to comment on either eavesdropping on the embassy or Mr. Leibowitz’s crime. He admitted disclosing “classified information concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States,” standard language for the interception of phone calls, e-mails and other messages by the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, which generally focuses on international communications.

Mr. Leibowitz, now in a Federal Bureau of Prisons halfway house in Maryland, is prohibited by his plea agreement from discussing anything he learned at the F.B.I. Two lawyers who represented Mr. Leibowitz, Cary M. Feldman and Robert C. Bonsib, also would not comment.

Mr. Silverstein, 59, writes a blog called Tikun Olam, named after a Hebrew phrase that he said means “repairing the world.” The blog gives a liberal perspective on Israel and Israeli-American relations. He said he had decided to speak out to make clear that Mr. Leibowitz, though charged under the Espionage Act, was acting out of noble motives. The Espionage Act has been used by the Justice Department in nearly all prosecutions of government employees for disclosing classified information to the news media, including the record-setting five such cases under President Obama.

Mr. Silverstein said he got to know Mr. Leibowitz, a lawyer with a history of political activism, after noticing that he, too, had a liberal-minded blog, called Pursuing Justice. The men shared a concern about repercussions from a possible Israeli airstrike on nuclear facilities in Iran. From his F.B.I. work from January to August of 2009, Mr. Leibowitz also believed that Israeli diplomats’ efforts to influence Congress and shape American public opinion were excessive and improper, Mr. Silverstein said.

===================

Page 2 of 2)



“I see him as an American patriot and a whistle-blower, and I’d like his actions to be seen in that context,” Mr. Silverstein said. “What really concerned Shamai at the time was the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, which he thought would be damaging to both Israel and the United States.”

Mr. Silverstein took the blog posts he had written based on Mr. Leibowitz’s material off his site after the criminal investigation two years ago. But he was able to retrieve three posts from April 2009 from his computer and provided them to The New York Times.  The blog posts make no reference to eavesdropping, but describe information from “a confidential source,” wording Mr. Silverstein said was his attempt to disguise the material’s origin.
One post reports that the Israeli Embassy provided “regular written briefings” on Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza to President Obama in the weeks between his election and inauguration. Another describes calls involving Israeli officials in Jerusalem, Chicago and Washington to discuss the views of members of Congress on Israel. A third describes a call between an unnamed Jewish activist in Minnesota and the Israeli Embassy about an embassy official’s meeting with Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, who was planning an official trip to Gaza.

Mr. Silverstein said he remembered that embassy officials talked about drafting opinion articles to be published under the names of American supporters. He said the transcripts also included a three-way conversation between a congressman from Texas, an American supporter of the congressman and an embassy official; Mr. Silverstein said he could not recall any of the names.

At his sentencing, Mr. Leibowitz described what he had done as “a one-time mistake that happened to me when I worked at the F.B.I. and saw things which I considered were violation of the law, and I should not have told a reporter about it.”

That was a reference to Israeli diplomats’ attempts to influence Congress, Mr. Silverstein said, though nothing Mr. Leibowitz described to him appeared to be beyond the bounds of ordinary lobbying.

Mr. Leibowitz, 40, the father of 6-year-old twins at the time of sentencing, seems an unlikely choice for an F.B.I. translation job. He was born in Israel to a family prominent in academic circles. He practiced law in Israel for several years, representing several controversial clients, including Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader convicted of directing terrorist attacks on Israelis, who Mr. Leibowitz once said reminded him of Moses. In 2004, Mr. Leibowitz moved to Silver Spring, Md., outside Washington, where he was a leader in his synagogue. Mr. Silverstein said Mr. Leibowitz holds dual American and Israeli citizenship.

In court, Mr. Leibowitz expressed anguish about the impact of the case on his marriage and family, which he said was “destitute.” He expressed particular sorrow about leaving his children. “At the formative time of their life, when they’re 6 years old and they’re just finishing first grade, I’ll be absent from their life, and that is the most terrible thing about this case,” he said.

While treated as highly classified by the F.B.I., the fact that the United States spies on Israel is taken for granted by experts on intelligence. “We started spying on Israel even before the state of Israel was formally founded in 1948, and Israel has always spied on us,” said Mr. Aid, the author. “Israeli intercepts have always been one of the most sensitive categories,” designated with the code word Gamma to indicate their protected status, he said.

Douglas M. Bloomfield, an American columnist for several Jewish publications, said that when he worked in the 1980s for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, he assumed that communications with the embassy were not private.

“I am not surprised at all to learn that the F.B.I. was listening to the Israelis,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s a wise use of resources because I don’t see Israel as a threat to American security.”
Title: WSJL Wikileaks lies with dogs and gets fleas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2011, 05:46:05 PM
The argument would be almost amusing if the potential consequences weren't so grave.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has accused the Guardian newspaper—one of the five news organizations with which he collaborated in publishing edited versions of confidential U.S. State Department cables—of disclosing the password to his entire, unredacted cache of 250,000 cables. They are now freely available on the Internet. Not so, replied an indignant Guardian, which insisted it had been assured by Mr. Assange that "it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours."

We're (somewhat) inclined to believe the Guardian on this one, especially since Mr. Assange seems to have made up his mind long ago to release all the files anyway. He has now done so, and the damage is already being felt: On Friday, Australia's attorney general confirmed that one of the cables gives away the name of an Australian intelligence officer. Expect many more covers blown, careers ruined and lives placed in jeopardy before all this is over.

Then again, there's a saying about sleeping with dogs, and the Guardian's editors are responsible for trusting Mr. Assange that the password they published would be changed. The paper and its fellow Wikileaks collaborators have now issued a joint statement in which they say they are "united in condemning" the release of the unredacted cables. "The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone," they say. Maybe so. But they have been his witting—and unwitting—enablers, and the consequences of the latest disclosures rest on their shoulders, too
Title: StratforMedical Intel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 10, 2011, 08:35:27 AM


One of the primary purposes of intelligence agencies is to help countries plan for the future. One way that’s accomplished is by monitoring the health of foreign leaders. In this week’s Above the Tearline, we’re going to take a look at how that’s done from a tactical perspective.

Knowledge of health of a foreign leader gives you leverage points — points that can be exploited either clandestinely or in diplomatic negotiations. Intelligence surrounding the health of a foreign leader also helps you gameboard succession plans. This enables the analysts to hopefully figure out who’s next in line, who may take the country in a different direction or change the geopolitics of a nation.

The intelligence services of many nations today are monitoring the health of world leaders. Some notables come to mind, such as Gadhafi, Chavez from Venezuela as well as Castro. The health of Castro is always a topic of discussion and whoever replaces them poses a new challenge to the United States as to the direction of the country and the geopolitics of the region.

From a tactical perspective, in order to monitor the health of the foreign leader, the first thing you’re going to acquire is open source video or pictures that can be looked at and examined by the analysts at headquarters as well as by subject matter medical experts. A storyboard is put together looking back at pictures of the world leader to draw some assessments based on their physical appearance. Some of the things that are easily done are noticeable weight loss, or loss of hair as well as color of the skin: are they pale; are they suntan; are they bloated? Are there any outward physical blemishes or moles that could be indicative of a more concerning underlying health issue.

The open source is a wonderful tool to also track foreign leader health concerns such as Chavez traveling to Cuba to receive cancer treatment. Most Western intelligence agencies have full-time medical staff and nurses on the payroll. Those individuals can also be used to help you draw assessments of foreign leaders.

On the clandestine side of the house, you may try to recruit sources who would have access to hospital records such as a hospital administrator or individuals that conduct outsource blood tests or other kinds of tissue exams. Intelligence agencies can also attempt to obtain hair and urine samples from locations that the head of state or VIP has frequented. In addition, you could pay a maid or a hotel staff employee to secure trash from the hotel room, which may contain prescription bottles or other kinds of evidence of a medical issue, such as syringes.

Another interesting window into the health of a foreign leader is restricted or special diets, so an effort can be made to secure that from outsource catering staff or hotel employees. World-class subject matter medical experts that provide specialized healthcare to foreign leaders could also be targeted for recruitment by an intelligence agency. They would have very unique insight into exactly what’s occurring with that world leader. That’s also the kind of person that you would want to recruit if you needed that information.

The Above the Tearline aspect with this video is: medical intelligence about the health of a foreign leader can help you forecast the future of a nation and can help you predict and shape of the geopolitics of that specific country. Your ability to get that data is the challenge. It’s usually there — you just have to assign your intelligence agency to go out and collect it. But, in many cases, there’s so many people who have access to medical records that it’s usually there for the taking provided you want to spend the cash.

Title: Wanna make some money?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2011, 06:55:20 AM
In this Above the Tearline we’re going to discuss the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program and the Libyan bomber of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
The Rewards for Justice program is a very effective counterterrorism tool used to pay for information that leads to the capture of international terrorists, but more importantly helps prevent terrorist attacks from occurring. In 1988 after the bombing of Pan Am 103, the Rewards for Justice program announced a reward offer for those responsible for the bombing of the aircraft. There was a Libyan intelligence officer by the name of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi that was identified as being responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103. Al-Megrahi was subsequently arrested and served many years in a Scottish prison.
However, a deal was cut between the U.K. authorities and the Scottish authorities to allow al-Megrahi to return to Libya because he was allegedly suffering from cancer. Al-Megrahi is living in Libya and appears to not be protected by the Libyan government anymore since the collapse of the Gadhafi regime. He has recently given very high-profile international interviews where he’s professed that he is innocent of some of the charges surrounding the Pan Am 103 bombing. There is no doubt based on my first-hand knowledge of his involvement in the bombing of Pan Am 103 that he was clearly engaged in the act of terrorism.
The Above the Tearline aspect with this video is the politics of counterterrorism investigations — how backroom deals with governments can allow a terrorist to just go free. In this case, al-Megrahi is very vulnerable, he’s unprotected, and it’s my understanding that he is covered under the broad brush of the Rewards for Justice program, and yet his picture is not specifically displayed on their website. There’s no doubt some politics involved with him not being there. Having said that, I think that money is a powerful motivator and that if al-Megrahi is wanted by the U.S. government, that enterprising individuals might take the opportunity to pick him up and claim their reward.
Title: drones infected by virus
Post by: bigdog on October 11, 2011, 03:50:06 AM
It appears that military drones have been infected with a virus that the Air Force is unable to cleanse:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/#more-59492
Title: Re: drones infected by virus
Post by: G M on October 11, 2011, 05:49:33 AM
It appears that military drones have been infected with a virus that the Air Force is unable to cleanse:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/#more-59492

I'd take a hard look at the big chicken shaped country in east asia first.....
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on October 11, 2011, 01:35:21 PM
That makes two of us, GM. 
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: prentice crawford on October 11, 2011, 01:47:21 PM
Woof,
 This could have came out of my book as well. :-D
                                       P.C.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on October 11, 2011, 04:25:54 PM
Woof,
 This could have came out of my book as well. :-D
                                       P.C.

If the three of us agree, it must make sense! 
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2011, 09:51:00 AM
In general, I sense that we are WAY behind the curve viz the Chinese and cyber war.  They have determined that our reliance on such things is an Achilles heel for us and have focused their considerable talents on this.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on October 12, 2011, 10:02:29 AM
In general, I sense that we are WAY behind the curve viz the Chinese and cyber war.  They have determined that our reliance on such things is an Achilles heel for us and have focused their considerable talents on this.

Shashou Jiang: Assassin's mace doctrine.
Title: Strat assesses Iranian plot accussations
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 14, 2011, 01:13:43 PM

The alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States has been dismissed by most commentators as too far-fetched to be true. Indeed, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, which the U.S. government is accusing of coordinating the plot, generally stays in the Middle East and South Asia and prefers to work with proxy militant groups, rather than handling assassinations far abroad. However, Washington’s confidence in its accusation is notable, as is the possibility for other, unreleased evidence. If the plot was real, it says much about the Iranian intelligence services’ scope, ambitions and capabilities.

Analysis
The alleged Iranian plot to kill Saudi Ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir on U.S. soil has been dismissed by most commentators as being too far-fetched to be true. Indeed, the plan the U.S. government is accusing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of coordinating is well outside the organization’s traditional sphere.

However, Washington’s confidence in its accusation is notable, as is the possibility for other, unreleased evidence. If the plot was real, it says much about the Iranian intelligence services’ scope, ambitions and capabilities.

The IRGC and its elite Quds Force generally have not been responsible for covert operations that do not involve proxy groups or that are far abroad. They mostly stay in the Middle East and South Asia (with a notable appearance in Venezuela in 2010), working to establish ties with insurgent groups they can use as proxies in volatile areas such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Jaish-al-Mahdi brigades in Iraq and parts of the Afghan Taliban. Traditionally, the IRGC brings members of these groups to Iran for training. The Quds Force is thought of as a corollary to special operations forces that train foreign militaries and carry out clandestine military operations. Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), on the other hand, is generally responsible for operations in Europe and the United States, including a series of assassinations carried out in the 1980s. MOIS is a known operator in the United States and would likely have the resources and experience to carry out a clandestine operation there.

This was not the case in the recent incident. Manssor Arbabsiar, the man charged in the plot, allegedly met with an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who was posing as a member of a Mexican cartel. This informant never went to Iran, and there is no indication the IRGC is involved in training or arming cartels. It is also odd that the IRGC would use Arbabsiar, a U.S. citizen with both Iranian and U.S. passports who has no apparent connection to the IRGC other than, allegedly, a cousin in the Quds Force. Typically, a trained intelligence officer would be the one to contact a potential proxy group for development, not a new recruit.

There also is the question of why al-Jubeir was targeted. It would be much easier for Iranian forces, particularly the IRGC, to kill a Saudi official in the Middle East. Moreover, assassinating al-Jubeir in the United States would likely have serious consequences for Iran — perhaps even in the form of a U.S. military response.

The dubiousness of the alleged plot did not stop U.S. officials from blaming it on the IRGC, something they would be unlikely to do without substantial evidence. U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed confidence in the evidence against Iran when speaking Oct. 13. In any criminal prosecution in espionage matters, information is often left out for fear of exposing sources and methods. It is possible — though not verifiable — that this is the case in the recent alleged plot.

The indictment against Arbabsiar focuses on his confession and the DEA source’s activities, but it contains clues about other intelligence the United States could have. The Obama administration reportedly was informed about the plot as far back as June, meaning it had time to assess and confirm its existence. The indictment also never mentions how exactly the informant came in contact with Arbabsiar. If the plot was real, U.S. intelligence officials likely caught onto it by other means than through the informant.

The IRGC’s ties to the plot could be confirmed with one of the following five pieces of evidence, any of which the United States could have collected with signals intelligence:

If Arbabsiar’s cousin is confirmed as being a member of the Quds Force
If phone numbers Arbabsiar called after his arrest were connected to the Quds Force
If the $100,000 Arbabsiar used as a down payment for the attack came from a Quds Force-linked bank
If other Iranian officers traveled to Mexico to meet the informant
If the Iranian Embassy in Mexico knew about the operation
The most damning of these would be if Arbabsiar’s post-arrest phone calls were traced back to previously identified IRGC offices in Iran.

If we assume that at least one of these possible indicators is true, it reveals a few things about Iranian operations. First, it would appear that the IRGC is trying to operate in new territory — though showing a lack of experience operating in the United States and limited capability in such plots. STRATFOR sources also have suggested that a new organization within Iran’s intelligence and security services may have been responsible for the plot, which would explain the several mistakes that led to its exposure.

One possible connection here would be to two alleged Iranian plots to assassinate dissidents in Los Angeles and London, exposed in the trial of Mohammad Reza Sadeghnia in California and U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks. Sadeghnia allegedly carried out preoperational surveillance on Jamshid Sharmahd, who made radio broadcasts for the Iranian opposition group Tondar while in Glendora, Calif., and Ali Reza Nourizadeh, who worked for Voice of America in London. Sadeghnia’s activities became obvious to his targets, and the fact that he monitored both of them and then returned to Tehran while on bail supports the claims against him. Sadeghnia’s profile of an unemployed housepainter from Iran who lived in the United States for many years is very similar to that of Arbabsiar, a used car salesman. Sadeghnia’s purported plan to use a third man as a hit man and for the man to employ a used van purchased by Sadeghnia to murder Sharmahd points to a similar lack of sophisticated assassination methodology.

While many people believe it possible that U.S. investigators were led on a wild goose chase that they have not yet realized, the investigators’ confidence and the possibility for other supporting evidence is notable. It is also quite possible the capabilities of Iran’s intelligence services are not nearly as good as previously thought, or at least that some more clumsy organization is involved.



Read more: More Questions over Alleged Iranian Plot | STRATFOR
Title: FBI on Russian spies
Post by: bigdog on November 01, 2011, 03:28:13 AM
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/31/fbi-releases-russian-spy-trove/?hpt=hp_c2
Title: Sell out Taiwan for debt forgiveness – Possibly the most vile NY Times Op-Ed
Post by: G M on November 11, 2011, 06:28:36 PM
Two nations that may not survive Barry-O's presidency:

1. Israel

2. Taiwan

http://legalinsurrection.com/2011/11/sell-out-taiwan-for-debt-foregiveness-possibly-the-most-vile-ny-times-op-ed-ever/

Sell out Taiwan for debt forgiveness – Possibly the most vile NY Times Op-Ed ever

 



Posted by William A. Jacobson   Friday, November 11, 2011 at 4:03pm



Although scholars of the history of the NY Times Op-Ed pages may be able to find a more vile Op-Ed, I dare them.
 
From Paul Kane, a suggestion that the United States sell-out Taiwan to China in exchange for forgiveness of $1.14 trillion in debt, To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan:
 

WITH a single bold act, President Obama could correct the country’s course, help assure his re-election, and preserve our children’s future….
 
He should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015.
 
This would be a most precious prize to the cautious men in Beijing, one they would give dearly to achieve. After all, our relationship with Taiwan, as revised in 1979, is a vestige of the cold war.

**Read it all.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2011, 10:40:54 PM
WOW  :cry: :cry: :cry:

though probably better in US-China thread , , ,
Title: spies rings busted
Post by: bigdog on November 22, 2011, 03:22:54 AM
http://gma.yahoo.com/exclusive-cia-spies-caught-fear-execution-middle-east-233819159.html
Title: Re: spies rings busted Did Hezbollah outplay CIA in Lebanon?
Post by: G M on December 02, 2011, 07:06:42 PM
http://gma.yahoo.com/exclusive-cia-spies-caught-fear-execution-middle-east-233819159.html

Did Hizballah Beat the CIA at Its Own Techno-Surveillance Game?
By Robert Baer Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011
 

The CIA found itself in some rough waters in the Middle East last week. On Thursday, an influential member of Iran's parliament announced that the Islamic republic had arrested 12 "CIA agents" who had allegedly been targeting Iran's military and its nuclear program. The lawmaker didn't give the nationality of the agents, but the presumption is that they were Iranians recruited to spy for the CIA. The agency hasn't yet commented, but from what I've heard it was a serious compromise, one which the CIA is still trying to get to the bottom of.

Even more curious was the flap in Lebanon. In June, Hizballah's secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah announced that the movement had arrested two of its own members as CIA spies. But it wasn't until last week that the story got traction in Washington. The CIA confirmed that operations in Beirut had been compromised but declined to offer details. As in the case of the alleged Iranian debacle, it's no doubt still doing a "damage assessment" — a process that can take years. Even then, it will be difficult to determine exactly what happened.
(See photos of the misadventures of the CIA.)
 

From what I've been able to piece together, Hizballah aggressively went after the CIA in Lebanon using telephone "link analysis." That's a form of electronic intelligence gathering that uses software capable of combing through trillions of gigabytes of phone-call data in search of anomalies — prepaid cell phones calling each other, series of brief calls, analysis of a cell-phone company's GPS tracking. Geeks who do this for a living understand how it works, and I'll take their word for it.

But it's not the technology that's remarkable, as much as the idea that it's being employed by Hizballah, a militant Islamic organization better known for acts of terror than for electronic counterespionage. That's another reminder that Hizballah has effectively supplanted the Lebanese state, taking over police and security functions that in other countries are the exclusively the domain of sovereign authority. Indeed, since Nasrallah's announcement of catching the CIA agents, no Lebanese authority has questioned why Hizballah, rather than Lebanese intelligence, would be responsible for catching alleged spies for foreign powers in Lebanon. Nobody bothers to ask what would be a pointless question; everyone knows that when it comes to military and security functions, Hizballah might as well be the state.
(Watch a video of Hizballah's theme park.)
 

Since I served in Beirut during the '80s, I've been struck by the slow but inexorable shift of sovereign power to Hizballah. Not only does the movement have the largest military, with nearly 50,000 rockets pointed at Israel; it has de facto control over Lebanon's spies, both military and civilian. It green-lights senior appointments. Hizballah also is wired into all the databases, keeping track of who enters the country, who leaves, where they stay, whom they see and call. It's capable of monitoring every server in the country. It can even tap into broadband communications like Skype. And, of course, it doesn't bother with such legal niceties as warrants. If foreigners are going to be caught spy in Lebanon, it will be Hizballah that catches them.

I have a feeling last week's events bodes ill for U.S. intelligence because it suggests that anyone capable from organized crime to terrorist groups can greatly enhance their counterintelligence capability by simply buying off-the-shelf equipment and the know-how to use it. Like a lot of people, I thought it would be easy coasting at the end of the Cold War after the KGB was defanged. Instead, globalization and the rapid spread of sophisticated technologies have opened an espionage Pandora's box.

Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2100667,00.html
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2011, 06:59:30 AM
Vice President of Intelligence Fred Burton examines holes in Tehran’s claims that an Iranian-American recently arrested in Iran was working as a CIA spy.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Last Sunday, Iranian state TV broadcast an interview of Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, reportedly a 28-year-old U.S.-raised duel citizen of Iran and the U.S. and a CIA spy. According to the Iranian interview, Hekmati was sent to Iran to infiltrate Iran’s secret services and serve as a double agent. We examined the interview and concluded that there is a problem with the Iranian version of the story. It simply does not add up.
According to the Farsi-language interview, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati claimed that he entered the U.S. Army after finishing high school in the United States in 2001 and reportedly served as an intelligence analyst in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years. Then he began his intelligence mission inside Iran. Iranian media also showed an expired U.S. armed forces identification card in Hekmati’s name, along with several photographs of a person depicted as Hekmati, together with various U.S. military personnel. The media story also indicated that the Iranian intelligence service uncovered Hekmati as part of their overall counterintelligence mission.
Let’s take a look now at the inconsistencies in the Iranian report: First, the CIA would not be using a young, American-born recruit from the U.S. Army for a clandestine mission inside Iran. The cost of getting caught spying for American intelligence would be very high. It could most certainly lead to a life sentence and possibly even death. Second, the armed forces identity card shown by Iranian TV indicated that Hekmati was in the U.S. Marines as a reservist and not in the army. Another card shows he was an “army contractor.” Furthermore, the U.S. Armed Forces identity card shown on Iranian TV does not indicate that Hekmati’s job duties were intelligence-related. However, we have seen another reference indicating that Hekmati may have been an analyst.
I would not expect him to be carrying identity documents from the U.S. Government. Clandestine operatives don’t carry such incriminating documents. Intelligence-collection missions are usually carried out under cover positions, such as businessmen, students, academics or journalists. Common sense also dictates that a true intelligence asset of the CIA would not be traveling inside Iran with U.S. government identity documents or photographs indicating prior military experience in the U.S. Army. That would be very poor tradecraft, and the CIA does a great job of training their assets on cover for action and status, how to travel cleanly, communications protocols, and how to live in a hostile environment. They also provide intricate cover identities complete with documentation for their real assets.
What’s the Above the Tearline of this video? Let’s look at another explanation that makes the most sense to me: Hekmati was a “walk-in” to the Iranians. His purpose was to volunteer — or most likely sell — what he knew about the U.S. military — for personal motivations. This also would explain why he was carrying the U.S. military pictures. He needed the pictures as proof of his bona fides. One other factor worth noting: The Iranian intelligence services have gone to a lot of trouble putting the video together. Why? The Iranians are taking advantage of the walk-in’s services, seizing the moment to capitalize on his American birth and military background for propaganda purposes. The CIA is carrying out a covert war against Iran, but this case was not part of that effort.
Title: WSJ: Cranial-Rectal Interface of Intel Agencies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 04, 2012, 06:18:53 AM


By EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN
Whether or not it wins an Oscar, the movie adaptation of John Le Carre's 1974 novel "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" demonstrates the power of the classic spy story about the struggle of a fallen intelligence officer to uncover a high-level mole. The obstacle to finding the mole is the intelligence service itself, which attempts to rid itself of the mole hunter. It doesn't want to admit that it has been gulled—a story that's all too rooted in reality.

Consider, for example, the findings of an internal CIA investigation in 1995. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the CIA's inspector general examined how in the late 1980s and early 1990s the CIA had incorporated Russian disinformation into its own reporting. He discovered that over those years the KGB had dispatched at least a half-dozen double agents who provided disinformation cooked up in Moscow to their CIA case officers. Between 1986 and 1994, some of this data had routinely been passed to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in reports with a distinctive blue stripe to signify their importance.

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 .When the inspector general traced the path of this disinformation, he found that the "senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence." CIA Director John Deutch, who had received the blue-border reports when he was deputy secretary of defense, told Congress that the CIA's failure to disclose that the intelligence emanated from KGB-controlled agents was "an inexcusable lapse."

The only way that the KGB could have duped the CIA for years was by modifying its data so that it would continue to seem plausible—and that required some form of feedback. As it later turned out, the KGB had no fewer than three moles in American intelligence capable of providing such feedback: In the CIA it had Aldrich Ames starting in 1985. And in the FBI the KGB had both Robert Hanssen since 1978 and Earl Edwin Pitts starting in 1987. They survived as moles—Hanssen for 22 years—because of the sort of institutional blindness, born out of bureaucratic fear, so well described in Le Carre's novel.

These double agents came to light largely because of the defections from the KGB that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, under more normal circumstances, entrenched bureaucracies can be expected to resist reappraisals of their past work, especially where careers are at stake. The intelligence community's 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is a case in point.

Based on intelligence, including reports from agents and defectors, that an Iranian nuclear weapon-design program—code-named Project 111—had ended, the NIE declared: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program," including "nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium enrichment." The intelligence community took at least partial credit for this success by attributing Iran's change to "increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work."

Today no one, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, believes that Iran gave up its nuclear weaponization ambitions. Indeed we now know from satellite imagery and other means that in 2003 the regime was secretly completing a new uranium-enrichment facility at Fordo, 20 miles north of the holy city of Qom. That was after it closed down Project 111, which in any case had been compromised by a laptop stolen from Iran and smuggled into Turkey and then into CIA hands.

Nor can the CIA rely on its own espionage apparatus, because a communications accident in 2004 compromised most, if not all, of its agents in Iran: The CIA inadvertently sent a list of its operatives to a double agent, a disaster described by the reporter James Risen in his book "State of War." As a result, the CIA could not be sure how much of the data it received from those operatives was disinformation.

Yet, as far as is known, the CIA has still never reappraised the sources and methods that led to its conclusion that Iran had abandoned its quest for a nuclear weapon.

Mr. Epstein's latest book is "James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?" (EJE Publications, 2011).

Title: EX-CIA agent busted for blabbing to POTH and others
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 23, 2012, 06:00:55 PM
Ex-CIA man accused of leaking classified info
 

January 23, 2012 7:20 PM EST
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — An ex-CIA officer who helped track down and capture a top al-Qaida figure was charged Monday with disclosing classified secrets, including the role of one of his associates on that covert mission, in the latest of a series of prosecutions by the Obama administration against suspected leakers.

John Kiriakou, 47, of Arlington, is charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and the Espionage Act. A federal judge ordered Kiriakou to be released on a $250,000 unsecured bond. Kiriakou declined to comment as he left the courthouse Monday.

According to authorities, Kiriakou divulged to three journalists, including a New York Times reporter, the role of "Officer B," who worked with Kiriakou on the capture of suspected al-Qaida financier Abu Zubaydah in the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, and his case has been made an example by those who believe the interrogation technique should be outlawed. And Kiriakou's public discussions of Zubaydah's waterboarding were a key part of the debate.

In a separate accusation, Kiriakou is alleged to have disclosed the identity of a covert operator to an unidentified journalist. Authorities say that journalist then gave the officer's name to a team of defense lawyers representing a suspect the U.S. held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. When the lawyers included information about the officer in a sealed legal brief in 2009, the CIA became suspicious and the government began to investigate.

The affidavit states that the defense lawyers were found to have done nothing wrong.

According to the affidavit, FBI agents interviewed Kiriakou last week, and he denied leaking the information. When specifically asked whether he had provided the Zubaydah interrogator's name to the Times for a 2008 article, he replied "Heavens, no." A New York Times spokeswoman declined to comment.

Kiriakou's attorney, Plato Cacheris, told reporters after the hearing that his client will plead not guilty. He also said a potential defense argument could be that the charges criminalize conduct that has been common between reporters and government sources for decades.

If convicted, Kiriakou could face up to 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

The case was secretly investigated by a top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of the Northern District of Illinois. Fitzgerald is best known for his successful prosecutions of Scooter Libby, former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, for perjury and of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for corruption.

Kiriakou has worked as a consultant to ABC News, although he hasn't appeared on the network since early 2009. ABC declined to comment on his arrest. In a 2007 interview with the network, Kiriakou said that waterboarding was used — effectively — to break down Zubaydah. But he expressed ambivalence about pouring water into a suspect's breathing passages to simulate drowning to try to get them to talk.

"(W)e were really trying to do anything that we could to stop another major attack from happening," Kiriakou said, describing the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. "I don't think we're in that mindset right now. ... And, as a result, waterboarding, at least right now, is unnecessary."

The attorney who represents Zubaydah in the prisoner's civil petition for release said he is not involved in the Kiriakou prosecution and has never met him. However, Brent Mickum said he had wanted to interview Kiriakou for information that might help the case, but the ex-CIA man refused, by email, to speak with him.

"He was basically out there talking to the whole world about our client and his involvement . I would have loved to hear what he had to say, but he refused to talk to me," Mickum said.

Mickum said he has come to believe Kiriakou has overstated his knowledge and involvement in the case against Zubaydah, who has been held without charges at Guantanamo since 2006.

Mickum said he and other attorneys who work at Guantanamo take security restrictions seriously and know not to reveal classified information such as the names of covert investigators. But he also said the government abuses the classification system, selectively leaking information and keeping secret anything that could embarrass U.S. officials.

The charges also accuse Kiriakou of lying about his actions in an effort to convince the CIA to let him publish a book, "The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror," in 2010. The book explores "the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus," according to its description on Amazon.com, and "chillingly describes what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11."

Since leaving the agency, Kiriakou has also worked as a consultant and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to his LinkedIn profile. He earned a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies in 1986 and a master's degree in legislative affairs in 1988, both from George Washington University in Washington.

The Justice Department's campaign to prosecute leakers has been particularly aggressive under Obama. This is the sixth criminal leak case opened under the administration and the second involving a former CIA officer and the Times. Federal prosecutors in Alexandria claim Jeffrey Sterling divulged classified information to Times reporter James Risen about CIA efforts to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Sterling's trial has been delayed while prosecutors appeal several pre-trial rulings, including the judge's decision to effectively quash a government subpoena demanding that Risen testify. His attorneys argued that unless his testimony is absolutely critical to a government's case then prosecutors should not be able to subpoena a reporter and require him to testify about anonymous sources.

The Sterling case is not the only leak prosecution to run into trouble. In a case against former National Security Agency executive Thomas Drake, a judge sentenced him only to probation and scolded prosecutors for how they pursued the case.

Prosecutions under the Espionage Act have been particularly contentious. Opponents say the law can be used to unfairly target those who expose government misdeeds. The law was used, for instance, to charge Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case, and a grand jury has been investigating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be prosecuted for the mass of disclosures by WikiLeaks that were allegedly fostered by leaks from Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.

"Safeguarding classified information, including the identities of CIA officers involved in sensitive operations, is critical to keeping our intelligence officers safe and protecting our national security," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "Today's charges reinforce the Justice Department's commitment to hold accountable anyone who would violate the solemn duty not to disclose such sensitive information."

In light of the indictment, CIA Director David Petraeus reminded his agency's employees of the essential need for secrecy in their work.

"When we joined this organization, we swore to safeguard classified information; those oaths stay with us for life," he said "Unauthorized disclosures of any sort — including information concerning the identities of other agency officers — betray the public trust, our country, and our colleagues."

___

Associated Press writers Ben Fox in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Brett Zongker in Washington contributed to this story.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on February 15, 2012, 04:51:26 AM
To what extent does intelligence, from the IC, impact presidential decision making?

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/03/intelligence
Title: WaPo: Convert to Islam leads Terrorist Hunt
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2012, 04:04:56 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/at-cia-a-convert-to-islam-leads-the-terrorism-hunt/2012/03/23/gIQA2mSqYS_story.html
Convert to Islam leads the terrorist hunt
By Greg Miller, Published: March 24The Washington Post
For every cloud of smoke that follows a CIA drone strike in Pakistan, dozens of smaller plumes can be traced to a gaunt figure standing in a courtyard near the center of the agency’s Langley campus in Virginia.
The man with the nicotine habit is in his late 50s, with stubble on his face and the dark-suited wardrobe of an undertaker. As chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center for the past six years, he has functioned in a funereal capacity for al-Qaeda.
Roger, which is the first name of his cover identity, may be the most consequential but least visible national security official in Washington — the principal architect of the CIA’s drone campaign and the leader of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In many ways, he has also been the driving force of the Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killing as a centerpiece of its counterterrorism efforts.
Colleagues describe Roger as a collection of contradictions. A chain-smoker who spends countless hours on a treadmill. Notoriously surly yet able to win over enough support from subordinates and bosses to hold on to his job. He presides over a campaign that has killed thousands of Islamist militants and angered millions of Muslims, but he is himself a convert to Islam.
His defenders don’t even try to make him sound likable. Instead, they emphasize his operational talents, encyclopedic understanding of the enemy and tireless work ethic.
“Irascible is the nicest way I would describe him,” said a former high-ranking CIA official who supervised the counterterrorism chief. “But his range of experience and relationships have made him about as close to indispensable as you could think.”
Critics are less equivocal. “He’s sandpaper” and “not at all a team player,” said a former senior U.S. military official who worked closely with the CIA. Like others, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the director of CTC — as the center is known — remains undercover.
Remarkable endurance
Regardless of Roger’s management style, there is consensus on at least two adjectives that apply to his tenure: eventful and long.
Since becoming chief, Roger has worked for two presidents, four CIA directors and four directors of national intelligence. In the top echelons of national security, only Robert S. Mueller III, who became FBI director shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has been in place longer.
Roger’s longevity is all the more remarkable, current and former CIA officials said, because the CTC job is one of the agency’s most stressful and grueling. It involves managing thousands of employees, monitoring dozens of operations abroad and making decisions on who the agency should target in lethal strikes — all while knowing that the CTC director will be among the first to face blame if there is another attack on U.S. soil.
Most of Roger’s predecessors, including Cofer Black and Robert Grenier, lasted less than three years. There have been rumors in recent weeks that Roger will soon depart as well, perhaps to retire, although similar speculation has surfaced nearly every year since he took the job.
The CIA declined to comment on Roger’s status or provide any information on him for this article. Roger declined repeated requests for an interview. The Post agreed to withhold some details, including Roger’s real name, his full cover identity and his age, at the request of agency officials, who cited concerns for his safety. Although CIA officials often have their cover identities removed when they join the agency’s senior ranks, Roger has maintained his.
A native of suburban Virginia, Roger grew up in a family where several members, across two generations, have worked at the agency.
When his own career began in 1979, at the CIA’s southern Virginia training facility, known as The Farm, Roger showed little of what he would become. A training classmate recalled him as an underperformer who was pulled aside by instructors and admonished to improve.
“Folks on the staff tended to be a little down on him,” the former classmate said. He was “kind of a pudgy guy. He was getting very middling grades on his written work. If anything, he seemed to be almost a little beaten down.”
His first overseas assignments were in Africa, where the combination of dysfunctional governments, bloody tribal warfare and minimal interference from headquarters provided experience that would prove particularly useful in the post-Sept. 11 world. Many of the agency’s most accomplished counterterrorism operatives, including Black and Richard Blee, cut their teeth in Africa as well.
“It’s chaotic, and it requires you to understand that and deal with it psychologically,” said a former Africa colleague. Roger developed an “enormous amount of expertise in insurgencies, tribal politics, warfare — writing hundreds of intelligence reports.”
He also married a Muslim woman he met abroad, prompting his conversion to Islam. Colleagues said he doesn’t shy away from mentioning his religion but is not demonstrably observant. There is no prayer rug in his office, officials said, although he is known to clutch a strand of prayer beads.
Roger was not part of the first wave of CIA operatives deployed after the Sept. 11 attacks, and he never served in any of the agency’s “black sites,” where al-Qaeda prisoners were held and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques.
But in subsequent years, he was given a series of high-profile assignments, including chief of operations for the CTC, chief of station in Cairo, and the top agency post in Baghdad at the height of the Iraq war.
Along the way, he has clashed with high-ranking figures, including David H. Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, who at times objected to the CIA’s more pessimistic assessments of those wars. Former CIA officials said the two had to patch over their differences when Petraeus became CIA director.
“No officer in the agency has been more relentless, focused, or committed to the fight against al-Qaeda than has the chief of the Counterterrorism Center,” Petraeus said in a statement provided to The Post.
Harsh, profane demeanor
By 2006, the campaign against al-Qaeda was foundering. Military and intelligence resources had been diverted to Iraq. The CIA’s black sites had been exposed, and allegations of torture would force the agency to shut down its detention and interrogation programs. Meanwhile, the Pakistani government was arranging truces with tribal leaders that were allowing al-Qaeda to regroup
Inside agency headquarters, a bitter battle between then-CTC chief Robert Grenier and the head of the clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, was playing out. Rodriguez regarded Grenier as too focused on interagency politics, while Grenier felt forced to deal with issues such as the fate of the interrogation program and the CIA prisoners at the black sites. Resources in Pakistan were relatively scarce: At times, the agency had only three working Predator drones.
In February that year, Grenier was forced out. Rodriguez “wanted somebody who would be more ‘hands on the throttle,’ ” said a former CIA official familiar with the decision. Roger was given the job and, over time, the resources, to give the throttle a crank.
Grenier declined to comment.
Stylistically, Grenier and Roger were opposites. Grenier gave plaques and photos with dignitaries prominent placement in his office, while Roger eschewed any evidence that he had a life outside the agency. Once, when someone gave him a cartoon sketch of himself — the kind you can buy from sidewalk vendors — he crumpled it up and threw it away, according to a former colleague, saying, “I don’t like depictions of myself.”
His main addition to the office was a hideaway bed.
From the outset, Roger seemed completely absorbed by the job — arriving for work before dawn to read operational cables from overseas and staying well into the night, if he left at all. His once-pudgy physique became almost cadaverous. Although he had quit smoking a decade or so earlier, his habit returned full strength.
He could be profane and brutal toward subordinates, micromanaging operations, second-guessing even the smallest details of plans, berating young analysts for shoddy work. “This is the worst cable I’ve ever seen,” was a common refrain.
Given his attention to operational detail, Roger is seen by some as culpable for one of the agency’s most tragic events — the deaths of seven CIA employees at the hands of a suicide bomber who was invited to a meeting at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009.
An internal review concluded that the assailant, a Jordanian double-agent who promised breakthrough intelligence on al-Qaeda leaders, had not been fully vetted, and it cited failures of “management oversight.” But neither Roger nor other senior officers were mentioned by name.
One of those killed, Jennifer Matthews, was a highly regarded analyst and protege of Roger’s who had been installed as chief of the base despite a lack of operational experience overseas. A person familiar with the inquiry said that “the CTC chief’s selection of [Matthews] was one of a great number of things one could point to that were weaknesses in the way the system operated.”
Khost represented the downside of the agency’s desperation for new ways to penetrate al-Qaeda, an effort that was intensified under President Obama.
Roger’s connection to Khost and his abrasive manner may have cost him — he has been passed over for promotions several times, including for the job he is thought to have wanted most: director of the National Clandestine Service, which is responsible for all CIA operations overseas.
A new flavor of activity’
But current and former senior U.S. intelligence officials said it is no accident that Roger’s tenure has coincided with a remarkably rapid disintegration of al-Qaeda — and the killing of bin Laden last year.

continued
Title: Patriot Games
Post by: bigdog on April 18, 2012, 11:18:03 PM
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/18/patriot_games?page=full

In 1990, the FBI began picking up on rumors about an effort to reconstitute a notorious terrorist-criminal gang known as The Order.

The group's name was taken from the infamous racist 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, which told the story of a fictional cabal carrying out acts of terrorism and eventually overthrowing the U.S. government in a bloody, nihilistic racial purge. The book was an inspiration to a generation of white nationalists, including Timothy McVeigh, whose path to radicalization climaxed in the Oklahoma City bombing 17 years ago Thursday.
 
During the 1980s, extremists inspired by the book began robbing banks and armored cars, stealing and counterfeiting millions of dollars and distributing some of the money to racist extremist causes. Members of The Order assassinated Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg in 1984, before most of its members were arrested and its leader killed in a standoff. Less than 10 percent of the money stolen by The Order was ever recovered, and investigators feared members of the group who were still at large would use it to further a campaign of terrorism.
 
To prevent the rise of a "Second Order," FBI undercover agents would become it.
Title: WSJ: Bomber in plot was double agent
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 08, 2012, 03:50:33 PM
prev next
•   
•   MIDDLE EAST NEWS
•   Updated May 8, 2012, 6:38 p.m. ET
Would-Be Bomber Was Informant, New Details Suggest
By SIOBHAN GORMAN, LAURA MECKLER and EVAN PEREZ
WASHINGTON—New details about a foiled terror plot in Yemen suggested the would-be suicide bomber was an informant who funneled vital information to the U.S., a scenario that would represent a successful infiltration of terrorism's inner circles.
The U.S. has thwarted a suicide bombing plot by al Qaeda's Yemeni branch that would have used a more stealthy version of the underwear bomb deployed in the failed 2009 Christmas Day bombing attempt. Laura Meckler has details on The News Hub.
The would-be bomber is under the control of a foreign government but isn't being held in detention, according to new details provided by officials briefed on the matter.
The officials declined to elaborate on the individual's whereabouts, citing ongoing operations, but were adamant Tuesday that he poses no security threat even though not in formal criminal custody.
The latest description, while far from complete, pointed to the possibility that the individual was also an informant on the plot.
U.S. officials announced Monday that the CIA, working with foreign security services and other agencies, had thwarted a bomb plot by al Qaeda's Yemeni branch aimed at bringing down a U.S. jetliner with a more advanced version of an underwear bomb used in a failed 2009 Christmas Day attempt. Officials said they headed off the plot in its early stages.
In the past, Saudi Arabia has used ex-Qaeda militants as informants to disrupt plots by the Yemeni branch, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.
Investigators on Tuesday tracked additional leads, hunting for any other explosive devices that may have been crafted by AQAP. The group's top bomb-maker, Ibrahim Hassan Tali al-Asiri, is in the CIA's crosshairs.

There were other signs that U.S. officials don't view the bomber as an active suspect. Officials didn't activate the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which was created in response to the 2009 bomb plot and has been used to extract information from suspects believed to have actionable intelligence on terror plots.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which oversees the interrogation group, wasn't informed of the operation to foil the airline plot until it had been completed and the CIA had the bomb. FBI technicians are now examining the bomb.
Details of how the plot was disrupted remained sketchy Tuesday. U.S. officials said the individual involved in the plot wasn't under Yemeni control but wouldn't specify which government is guarding the individual.
If the individual was in fact an al Qaeda mole, it would also help explain why U.S. officials insisted that they always had control of the plot and why they believed no lives or airliners were in danger.
Saudi Arabia has a network of informants in Yemen, including former al Qaeda militants, which it uses as informants to help the U.S. in a widening campaign of counterterrorism and drone strikes in Yemen. It was a Saudi tip that helped thwart a 2010 plan by al Qaeda in Yemen to implant explosives in airborne cargo.
Despite foiling the plot, the White House said it shows that al Qaeda's offshoot in Yemen is "the most operationally active" branch of the worldwide terrorist organization and a "cancer" that has to be excised from the Arabian Peninsula.
Investigators are closely scrutinizing the construction of the bomb for clues that would lead to its makers and would also help aviation security experts improve and adjust airport detection systems. Investigators say the bomb contained no metal, meaning would have likely evaded detection by airport screeners.
"We're trying to understand different aspects of the design to make sure that we're able to take preventive action in the future to prevent this or other types of devices" from reaching their intended targets, probably U.S.-bound jetliners, John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser said in televised interviews.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at a news conference Tuesday while traveling in India, repeated the admonition that the plot shows why Americans and others must remain vigilant, despite official assessments that al Qaeda has weakened considerably in recent years.
"They keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people," Mrs. Clinton said. She added that U.S. officials are deepening counterterrorism partnerships with other countries, and called on Pakistan to do more "to make sure that its territory is not used as launching pads for terrorist attacks anywhere, including inside of Pakistan."
Meanwhile, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said he will review the administration's handling of the alleged plot out of concern that officials failed to inform Congress of planned covert action, as is required by law. He also said that the leak of details of the operation could have endangered it, and that the administration may be politicizing national security.
"I'm very concerned," the chairman, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, said in an interview. "This does not pass the smell test when it comes to politicization of national security information. I hope I am wrong, but we'll find out in our review."
U.S. officials had no comment on charges by Mr. Roger that the incident was being politicized. The plot was reported Monday by the Associated Press despite administration requests to delay the report. "It was an unauthorized leak that we attempted to delay as long as possible for operational reasons," a U.S. official said.
Another member of the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said he wasn't concerned about the belated briefing because the government often has reasons to hold information close when operations are ongoing. But he backed an investigation into the leak of plot details.
The Senate is not planning a review of whether the administration failed to inform Congress in accordance with the law.
—Adam Entous and Devlin Barrett contributed to this article.
Title: POTH: US-Saudi cooperation led to plot's failure
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 10, 2012, 11:06:42 AM


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/world/middleeast/years-of-us-saudi-teamwork-led-to-airline-plots-failure.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120510
Title: Stratfor: The Exceptional Individual
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2012, 09:08:47 AM
Not sure where to put this, so I put it here:
=================


Terrorism and the Exceptional Individual
May 17, 2012 | 0858 GMT
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart

There has been a lot of chatter in intelligence and academic circles about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) bombmaker Ibrahim al-Asiri and his value to AQAP. The disclosure last week of a thwarted AQAP plot to attack U.S. airliners using an improved version of an "underwear bomb" used in the December 2009 attempted attack aboard a commercial airplane and the disclosure of the U.S. government's easing of the rules of engagement for unmanned aerial vehicle strikes in Yemen played into these discussions. People are debating how al-Asiri's death would affect the organization. A similar debate undoubtedly will erupt if AQAP leader Nasir al-Wahayshi is captured or killed.   

AQAP has claimed that al-Asiri trained others in bombmaking, and the claim makes sense. Furthermore, other AQAP members have received training in constructing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) while training and fighting in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This means that al-Asiri is not the only person within the group who can construct an IED. However, he has demonstrated creativity and imagination. His devices consistently have been able to circumvent existing security measures, even if they have not always functioned as intended. We believe this ingenuity and imagination make al-Asiri not merely a bombmaker, but an exceptional bombmaker.

Likewise, al-Wahayshi is one of hundreds -- if not thousands -- of men currently associated with AQAP. He has several deputies and numerous tactical field commanders in various parts of Yemen. Jihadists have had a presence in Yemen for decades, and after the collapse of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, numerous Saudi migrants fleeing the Saudi government augmented this presence. However, al-Wahayshi played a singular role in pulling these disparate jihadist elements together to form a unified and cohesive militant organization that has been involved not only in several transnational terrorist attacks but also in fighting an insurgency that has succeeded in capturing and controlling large areas of territory. He is an exceptional leader.

Individuals like al-Asiri and al-Wahayshi play critical roles in militant groups. History has shown that the loss of exceptional individuals such as these makes a big difference in efforts to defeat such organizations.

Exceptional Individuals

One of Stratfor's core geopolitical tenets is that at the strategic level, geography is critical to shaping the limits of what is possible -- and impossible -- for states and nations to achieve in the long run. Quite simply, historically, the strategic political and economic dynamics created by geography are far more significant than the individual leader or personality, no matter how brilliant. For example, in the U.S. Civil War, Robert E. Lee was a shrewd general with a staff of exceptional military officers. However, geographic and economic reality meant that the North was bound to win the civil war despite the astuteness and abilities of Lee and his staff.

But as the size of an organization and the period of time under consideration shrink, geopolitics is little more than a rough guide. At the tactical level, intelligence takes over from geopolitics, and individuals' abilities become far more important in influencing smaller events and trends within the greater geopolitical flow. This is the level where exceptional military commanders can win battles through courage and brilliance, where exceptional businessmen can revolutionize the way business is done through innovative new products or ways of selling those products and where the exceptional individuals can execute terrorist tradecraft in a way that allows them to kill scores or even hundreds of victims.

Leadership is important in any type of organization, but it is especially important in entrepreneurial organizations, which are fraught with risk and require unique vision, innovation and initiative. For example, hundreds of men founded automobile companies in the early 1900s, but Henry Ford was an exceptional individual because of his vision to make automobiles a widely available mass-produced commodity rather than just a toy for the rich. In computer technology, Steve Jobs was exceptional for his ability to design devices with an aesthetic form that appealed to consumers, and Michael Dell was exceptional for his vision of bypassing traditional sales channels and selling computers directly to customers.   

These same leadership characteristics of vision, daring, innovation and initiative are evident in the exceptional individuals who have excelled in the development and application of terrorist tradecraft. Some examples of exceptional individuals in the terrorism realm are Ali Hassan Salameh, the operations chief of Black September, who not only revolutionized the form that terrorist organizations take by instituting the use of independent, clandestine cells, but also was a visionary in designing theatrical attacks intended for international media consumption. Some have called Palestinian militant leader Abu Ibrahim the "grandfather of all bombmakers" for his innovative IED designs during his time with Black September, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and his own group, the 15 May Organization. Ibrahim was known for creating sophisticated devices that used plastic explosives and a type of electronic timer called an "e-cell" that could be set for an extended delay. Another terrorism innovator was Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh, who helped pioneer the use of large suicide truck bombs to attack hardened targets, such as military barracks and embassies.

In the jihadist realm, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is being tried by a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was such an individual. Not only did Mohammed mastermind the 9/11 attacks for al Qaeda in which large hijacked aircraft were transformed into guided missiles, but he also was the operational planner behind the coordinated attacks against two U.S. embassies in August 1998 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Mohammed's other innovations included the idea to use modular IEDs concealed in baby dolls to attack 10 aircraft in a coordinated attack (Operation Bojinka) and the shoe bomb plot. Mohammed's video beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl in February 2002 started a grisly trend that was followed not only by jihadists in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia but also by combatants in Mexico's drug war.

Leadership

One of the places where exceptional individuals have been most evident in the terrorist realm is in leadership roles. Although on the surface it might seem like a simple task to find a leader for a militant group, in practice, effective militant leaders are hard to come by. This is because militant leadership requires a rather broad skill set. In addition to personal attributes such as ruthlessness, aggressiveness and fearlessness, militant leaders also must be charismatic, intuitive, clever and inspiring. This last attribute is especially important in an organization that seeks to recruit operatives to conduct suicide attacks. Additionally, an effective militant leader must be able to recruit and train operatives, enforce operational security, raise funds, plan operations and methodically execute the plan while avoiding the security forces that are constantly hunting down the militants.

The trajectory of al Qaeda's franchise in Saudi Arabia is a striking illustration of the importance of leadership to a militant organization. Under the leadership of Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, the Saudi al Qaeda franchise was extremely active in 2003 and 2004. It carried out a number of high-profile attacks inside Saudi Arabia and put everyone there, from the Saudi monarchy to multinational oil companies, in a general state of panic. With bombings, ambushes and beheadings, it seemed as if Saudi Arabia was on its way to becoming the next Iraq. However, after the June 2004 death of al-Muqrin, the organization began floundering. The succession of leaders appointed to replace al-Muqrin lacked his operational savvy, and each one proved ineffective at best. (Saudi security forces quickly killed several of them.) Following the unsuccessful February 2006 attack against the oil facility at Abqaiq, the group atrophied further, succeeding in carrying out only one more attack -- an amateurish small-arms assault in February 2007 against a group of French tourists.

The disorganized remaining jihadists in Saudi Arabia ultimately grew frustrated at their inability to operate on their own. Many of them traveled to places such as Iraq or Pakistan to train and fight. In January 2009, many of the militants who remained in the Arabian Peninsula joined with al Qaeda's franchise in Yemen to form a new group -- AQAP -- under the leadership of al-Wahayshi, the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen who served under Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan before being arrested in Iran. An extradition deal between the Yemeni and Iranian governments returned al-Wahayshi to Yemen in 2003. He subsequently escaped from a high-security prison outside Sanaa in 2006.

Al Qaeda in Yemen's operational capability improved under al-Wahayshi's leadership, and its operational tempo increased (although those operations were not terribly effective). Considering this momentum, it is not surprising that the frustrated members of the all-but-defunct Saudi franchise agreed to swear loyalty to al-Wahayshi and join his new umbrella group, AQAP. The first widely recognized product of this merger was the attempted assassination of Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef on Aug. 28, 2009, using a device designed by al-Asiri and carried by his brother, Abdullah al-Asiri.

As with the Saudi group, the fortunes of other al Qaeda regional franchises have risen or fallen based on the ability of the franchise's leadership. In Indonesia, for example, following the arrests and killings of several top jihadist commanders, the capabilities of the regional jihadist franchise there were deeply degraded. Al Qaeda announced with great fanfare in August 2006 that a splinter of the Egyptian jihadist group Gamaah al-Islamiyah had become al Qaeda's franchise in Egypt, and in November 2007 al Qaeda announced that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group had become a regional franchise. But neither of these franchises ever really began operations. While a great degree of the groups' ineffectiveness could have resulted from the oppressive natures of the Egyptian and Libyan governments -- and those governments' aggressive efforts to control the new al Qaeda franchises -- Stratfor believes the groups' failures also stem in large part from their lack of effective, dynamic leadership. 

Arms Race
Leadership is not the only factor that influences a militant group's ability to carry out terrorist attacks. Groups planning to conduct bombing attacks also require a proficient bombmaker, and an innovative bombmaker like Abu Ibrahim or Hamas' Yahya Ayyash can greatly expand a group's operational reach and effectiveness. This is especially true for groups hoping to conduct attacks in the United States and Europe.

As outlined in last week's Security Weekly, those planning terrorist attacks against aircraft have been in a continual arms race with airline security measures. Every time security is changed to adapt to a particular threat, whether it be 9/11-style hijackings, shoe bombs, liquid bombs or underwear bombs, the terrorist planner must come up with a new attack plan to defeat the enhanced security measures. This is where innovation and imagination become critical. A master bombmaker might be able to show a pupil how to build a simple IED or maybe even something like a shoe bomb. The pupil may even become quite proficient at assembling such devices. But unless the pupil is innovative and imaginative, he will not be able to invent and perfect the next technology needed to stay ahead of security countermeasures.

There is a big difference between a technician and an inventor, and perhaps the best way to illustrate this principle is by drawing a parallel to the music world. A student can learn to play the saxophone, and perhaps even to mimic a jazz recording note for note. But it is quite another thing for that student to develop the ability to improvise a masterful solo like saxophonist John Coltrane could. In music, individuals like Coltrane are rare, and in terrorism, so are exceptional bombmakers -- masters of destruction who can create imaginative and original IEDs capable of defeating security measures.

Following the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, AQAP's English-language preacher, we noted that we did not believe his death would have much operational impact on the group due to his role as the group's English-language ideologue. That argument was based upon the fact that al-Wahayshi, al-Asiri and AQAP operational leader Qasim al-Raymi, who were much more responsible for the group's operations, were still alive. However, if the group were to lose an exceptional individual -- such as its dynamic and effective leader, al-Wahayshi, or its imaginative and creative bombmaker, al-Asiri -- the loss would make a significant difference unless the group could find someone equally capable to replace that individual.


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Read more: Terrorism and the Exceptional Individual | Stratfor
Title: Alexrod at security meetings?
Post by: ccp on June 07, 2012, 07:40:52 AM
Sen McCain seems convinced the leaks are political and from the WH.   Congressman Peter King was on cable a day or two ago pointing out to the visibly annoyed (partisan) CNN anchor that the leaks absolutely *have to be* coming from high up at the WH because they include converstaions from only the very few high ranking individuals who were even at these meetings.

I would cherish the fantasy that FBI investigation will take us to Axeljerk as the source.  Of course, I would not hold my breath enough evidence will ever be discovered to make such a link (if it exists).   In the end, probably the maid or cleaning guy will go down:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/06/obama-aide-says-little-about-fight-with-holder/1
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2012, 07:47:01 AM
I am glad to see that apparently some serious folks are taking this seriously.  Even Sen. Diane Feinstein, a long-time member of the Sen. Intel committee is lending her weight to calling for serious investigations.
Title: PJ Media: Leaks and Lies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2012, 01:10:47 PM


http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2012/06/10/leaks-and-lies/?singlepage=true
Title: Morris: Pravda on the Hudson vs. His Glibness
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2012, 05:34:13 PM
New York Times v. Obama
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on June 12, 2012

Printer-Friendly Version
Both can't be telling the truth. One is lying.
The New York Times says that the national-security leaks that exposed our cyber-war against Iran and how our drone strikes against terrorists operate came from "aides" to the president and "members of the president's national security team who were in the [White House Situation Room]" during key discussions, as well as current American officials involved with the program who spoke anonymously because "the effort remains highly classified." The author of one of the Times stories, David Sanger, writes that some of his sources would be fired for divulging classified material to him.

White House press secretary Jay Carney calls the charges "grossly irresponsible" and attacks Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for making them.

They can't both be right.

My money is on The New York Times.
 
At stake is not just some routine Washington leak. Both the substance conveyed and the motivation for passing the information along separate this story from the run of the mill.

The material leaked could not be more sensitive. It includes the procedure by which kill targets among al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen and the Horn of Africa are selected and the personal role the president exercises in the decisions. Another leak explored the details of America's cyber-war against the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

But the intent of these leaks is what makes them all the more extraordinary -- indeed, sui generis. While most national-security leaks (like those of Daniel Ellsberg and WikiLeaks) are aimed at exposing and discrediting a program, these leaks are friendly fire -- designed to enhance the president's image during a tough reelection campaign.

These leaks are just means to the end of the president's reelection. They are of a kind with the spiking of the football presidents do.

When George W. Bush declares, "Mission accomplished" or Obama rehashes the details of his decision to kill bin Laden, these are justifiable victory laps around the stadium. But when the leaks compromise ongoing security operations, they fall into an entirely different category. Indeed, they border on treason.

Yet compare the fury generated by the leaking of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA agent with the silence that has greeted these leaks. Plame's leaking involved no threat to our nation and did not interdict or threaten any ongoing operation. The leaks were investigated out of pure partisan bloodlust.

The outrage the leaks have kindled in Congress is bipartisan. But from the White House we hear no outrage. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) said the leaks are, "frankly, all against [our] national-security interest. I think they are dangerous, damaging, and whoever is doing that is not acting in the interest of the United States of America." Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the leaks "endanger American lives and undermine America's national security." Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has convened hearings about the leaks.

But from the administration come only the sounds of silence and the accusation that criticism of the leaks is "grossly irresponsible."

Top political consultant Pat Caddell speculated that National Security Adviser Tom Donilon might be the source of the leaks. That makes sense. What made no sense was to appoint a political consultant to the role of national security adviser (unless it was for this very purpose -- to turn state secrets into campaign ads). But as the leaks surfaced in the newspapers, the president himself must have figured out that it was his top people doing the leaking. But he has resisted calls for an independent counsel to investigate the source of the leaks and relies, instead, on his own discredited attorney general to locate their source.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on June 12, 2012, 07:06:03 PM
One point to add to leakgate is that it seems to me that the President cannot leak.  The Commander in Chief always has the power to declassify.  So some top aide is in big trouble or else it is just another example of being sloppy with our national security.

If Fast and Furious had been dealt with quickly and decisively it wouldn't.feel. so much like drowning.in scandals now.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2012, 08:05:02 PM
But then he would have to justify his declassification of the material , , ,
Title: Declassification
Post by: bigdog on June 13, 2012, 09:35:11 AM
FWIW, here is the EO that describes, among other things, how material is declassified:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-classified-national-security-information
Title: Patriot Post: National Insecurity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2012, 11:15:41 AM


National Insecurity
Most U.S. presidents understood that campaign rules-of-engagement don't include leaking classified national security information. But of course, most presidents aren't The Chosen One. That seems to be the attitude behind a series of White House leaks apparently aimed at bolstering Barack Obama's "I'm strong on national security" image. Despite his presidential oath to the Constitution and to defend America against all enemies, the operative criterion here is whether the compromise will make Mr. Hope-&-Change look good this November.

What "highly secret information" was compromised, exactly? For starters, how about a "deep-black" U.S. cyberspook operation using a computer worm called "Stuxnet" to trash centrifuges and computers used in Iran's nuclear program?

Obama proselytes at The New York Times ("All the news fit to print, classified or not") could hardly wait -- and, of course, didn't -- to publish details related to this special-access, über-sensitive program. But wait, there's more ... much more.
Other leaks include: The "Kill List" revelation that the president is personally involved with the selection process for targeting and assassinating terrorists; the selling-out of Dr. Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who helped locate Osama bin Laden through DNA testing in a CIA fake-polio vaccine campaign, leading to a 33-year sentence for high treason for the good doctor by "our ally" Pakistan; a thwarted underwear bomber plot -- a leak that threatened the lives of U.S.-friendly operatives working in covert operations abroad by exposing information that directly pointed to infiltrated terrorist groups in Yemen.

The list goes on -- the "Zero Dark Thirty" leak, the CIA's involvement in introducing faulty parts in Iran's nuclear-program-related systems, the White House-blessed exposé on the bin Laden takedown, etc. Unfortunately, an exhaustive list is impossible within this space. Suffice it to say that leaks within this administration have done more grave damage to U.S. national security than perhaps any since Julius Rosenberg turned over U.S. and British nuclear-bomb-building secrets to the Russians.

Don't look for an apology from the sorry lot of squatters occupying the Executive Branch, however. During the latest damage control session, Obama announced, "The idea that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive." Note that he didn't say the White House didn't release highly classified national security secrets, nor that the accusation was untrue -- only that the "idea ... is offensive." Of course it's offensive -- accusations of treason often are. Here's a question for Mr. Offended, though: Is that "idea" any less offensive than the idea of putting American lives at risk for political gain?

Regarding the leaks themselves, only two options exist. Either: (1) the sources were legally authorized to leak the information, or (2) they were not. If the former were true, although a duly authorized person may release classified information, doing so would require the president's knowledge and approval. If the latter is true, then the leak source(s) must be investigated and prosecuted.

This least-damaging approach seems to be the administration's preference.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has promised a thorough investigation of the leaks. Sadly, the fact that he is a known liar, at least regarding the "Fast and Furious" congressional probe, promises that his commitment to the pursuit of truth won't produce much. Ultimately, American voters will decide with whom they feel more comfortable guarding national secrets. To most Patriots, however, the answer is obvious.
Title: Noonan: Qui Bono?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2012, 11:34:33 AM
second post

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303734204577466910796158718.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

What is happening with all these breaches of our national security? Why are intelligence professionals talking so much—divulging secret and sensitive information for all the world to see, and for our adversaries to contemplate?

In the past few months we have read that the U.S. penetrated Al Qaeda in Yemen and foiled a terror plot; that the Stuxnet cyberworm, which caused chaos in the Iranian nuclear program, was a joint Israeli-American operation; and that President Obama personally approves every name on an expanding "kill list" of those targeted and removed from life by unmanned drones. According to the New York Times, Mr. Obama pores over "suspects' biographies" in "what one official calls 'the macabre 'baseball cards' of an unconventional war."

From David Sanger's new book, "Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power," we learn that Stuxnet was "the most sophisticated, complex cyberattack the United States had ever launched." Its secret name was "Olympic Games." America and Israel developed the "malicious software" together, the U.S. at Fort Meade, Md., where it keeps "computer warriors," Israel at a military intelligence agency it "barely acknowledges exists."

 
Martin Kozlowski
 .The Pentagon has built a replica of Iran's Natanz enrichment plant. The National Security Agency "routinely taps the ISI's cell phones"—that's the Pakistani intelligence agency. A "secret" U.S. program helps Pakistan protect its nuclear facilities; it involves fences and electronic padlocks. Still, insurgents bent on creating a dirty bomb, if they have a friend inside, can slip out "a few grams of nuclear material at a time" and outwit security systems targeted at major theft. In any case, there's a stockpile of highly enriched uranium sitting "near an aging research reactor in Pakistan." It could be used for several dirty bombs.

It's a good thing our enemies can't read. Wait, they can! They can download all this onto their iPads at a café in Islamabad.

It's all out there now. Mr. Sanger's sources are, apparently, high administration officials, whose diarrhetic volubility marks a real breakthrough in the history of indiscretion.

What are they thinking? That in the age of Wikileaks the White House itself should be one big Wikileak?

More from the Sanger book: During the search for Osama bin Laden, American intelligence experts had a brilliant idea. Bin Laden liked to make videotapes to rouse his troops and threaten the West. Why not flood part of Pakistan with new digital cameras, each with a "unique signature" that would allow its signals to be tracked? The signal could function as a beacon for a drone. Agents got the new cameras into the distribution chain of Peshawar shops. The plan didn't catch Osama, because he wasn't in that area. But "traceable digital cameras are still relied on by the CIA . . . and remain highly classified."

Well, they were.

There was a Pakistani doctor named Shakil Afridi who was sympathetic to America. He became involved in a scheme to try and get the DNA of Osama's family. He "and a team of nurses" were hired by the U.S. to administer hepatitis B vaccinations throughout Abbotabad. The vaccinations were real. Dr. Afridi got inside Osama's compound but never got to vaccinate any bin Ladens.

In the days after bin Laden was killed, the doctor was picked up by Pakistani agents and accused of cooperating with the Americans. He was likely tortured. He's in prison now, convicted of conspiring against the state.

No word yet on the nurses, but stand by.

Mr. Sanger writes that President Obama "will go down in history as the man who dramatically expanded" the use of drones. They are cheaper than boots on the ground, more efficient. But some of those who operate the unmanned bombers are getting upset. They track victims for days. They watch them play with their children. "It freaks you out," a former drone operator told Mr. Sanger. "You feel less like a pilot than a sniper."

During the Arab Spring, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was insistent that Mr. Obama needed to stick with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, even, Mr. Sanger reports, "if he started shooting protestors in the streets."

King Abdullah must be glad he called. Maybe he'll call less in the future.

***
All of this constitutes part of what California Sen. Dianne Feinstein calls an "avalanche of leaks." After she read the Stuxnet story in the Times, she was quoted as saying "my heart stopped" as she considered possible repercussions.

Why is this happening? In part because at our highest level in politics, government and journalism, Americans continue to act as if we are talking only to ourselves. There is something narcissistic in this: Only our dialogue counts, no one else is listening, and what can they do about it if they are? There is something childish in it: Knowing secrets is cool, and telling them is cooler. But we are talking to the world. Should it know how, when and with whose assistance we gather intelligence? Should it know our methods? Will this make us safer?

Liberally quoted in the Sanger book, and in Dan Klaidman's "Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency," is the White House national security adviser, Thomas Donilon. When I was a child, there was a doll called Chatty Cathy. You pulled a string in her back, and she babbled inanely. Tom Donilon appears to be the Chatty Cathy of the American intelligence community.

It is good Congress has become involved. They wonder if the leaks have been directed, encouraged or authorized, and by whom. One way to get at that is the classic legal question: Who benefits?

That is not a mystery. In all these stories, it is the president and his campaign that benefit. The common theme in the leaks is how strong and steely Mr. Obama is. He's tough but fair, bold yet judicious, surprisingly willing to do what needs to be done. He hears everyone out, asks piercing questions, doesn't flinch.

He is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer.

And he is up for re-election and fighting the constant perception that he's weak, a one-man apology tour whose foreign policy is unclear, unsure, and lacking in strategic depth.

There's something in the leaks that is a hallmark of the Obama White House. They always misunderstand the country they seek to spin, and they always think less of it than it deserves. Why do the president's appointees think the picture of him with a kill list in his hand makes him look good? He sits and personally decides who to kill? Americans don't think of their presidents like that. And they don't want to.

National security doesn't exist to help presidents win elections. It's not a plaything or a tool to advance one's prospects.

After the killing of bin Laden, members of the administration, in a spirit of triumphalism, began giving briefings and interviews in which they said too much. One of the adults in the administration, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, reportedly went to Mr. Donilon's office. "I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend," he said. What? asked Mr. Donilon.

"Shut the [blank] up," Mr. Gates said.

Still excellent advice, and at this point more urgently needed.

Title: VDH: The Scandal of our Age
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2012, 09:43:33 AM
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-scandal-of-our-age/?singlepage=true
The Scandal of our Age:  VD Hanson
Like Nothing Before

In the Watergate scandal, no one died, at least that we know of. Richard Nixon tried systematically to subvert institutions. Yet most of his unconstitutional efforts were domestic in nature — and an adversarial press soon went to war against his abuses and won, as Congress held impeachment hearings.

As far as national security went, Nixon’s crimes were in part culpable for destroying the political consensus that he had won in 1972, at a critical time when the Vietnam War to save the south was all but over, and had been acknowledged as such at the Paris Peace Talks. But Watergate and the destruction of Nixon’s foreign policy spurred congressional cutbacks of aid to South Vietnam and eroded all support for the administration’s promised efforts to ensure that North Vietnam kept to its treaty obligations.

Iran-Contra was as serious because there was a veritable war inside the Reagan administration over helping insurgents with covert cash that had in part been obtained by, despite denials, selling arms to enemy Iran to free hostages — all against U.S. laws and therefore off the radar. The Reagan administration was left looking weak, hypocritical, incompetent, and amoral — and never quite recovered. Yet even here the media soon covered the story in detail, and their disclosures led to several resignations and full congressional hearings.

Quite Different

What I call “Securitygate” — the release of the most intricate details about the cyber war against Iran, the revelations about a Yemeni double-agent, disclosures about covert operations in and against Pakistan, intimate details about the Osama bin Laden raid and the trove of information taken from his compound, and the Predator drone assassination list and the president’s methodology in selecting targets — is far more serious than either prior scandal. David Sanger and others claim that all this was sort of in the public domain anyway; well, “sort of” covers a lot of ground. We sort of knew about the cyber war against Iran, but not to the detail that Sanger provides and not through the direct agency of the Obama administration itself.

Here is the crux of the scandal: Obama is formulating a new policy of avoiding overt unpopular engagements, while waging an unprecedented covert war across the world. He’s afraid that the American people do not fully appreciate these once-secret efforts and might in 2012 look only at his mishaps in Afghanistan or his public confusion over Islamic terror. Ergo, feed information to a Sanger or Ignatius so that they can skillfully inform us, albeit with a bit of dramatic “shock” and “surprise,” just how tough, brutal, and deadly Barack Obama really is.

Yet these disclosures will endanger our national security, especially in the case of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. They will probably get people killed or tortured, and they will weaken America’s ability for years to work covertly with allies. Our state-to-state relations will be altered, and perhaps even the techniques and technology of our cyber and special operations wars dispersed into the wrong hands. There is nothing in the recent “exclusive” writings of David Sanger or David Ignatius that was necessary for the American people to know at this stage, unless one thinks that we had a right to the full story of the Doolittle Raid in 1942, or that Americans by July 1944 needed an insider account of the date and planning of D-Day, or that we should have been apprised about what was really going on in New Mexico in 1944.

Here is why Securitygate is a national outrage and goes to the heart of a free and civil society.

National Security

Iran probably knew of U.S. covert involvement against its nuclear facilities, but now it knows that that the entire world also knows. There is no more plausible deniability on our part. The information about the nature of the cyber war is so detailed, the partnership with the Israelis rendered so complex, and the disclosures about technology and technique so explicit, that the Iranians will not only better defend themselves, but use these details to encourage and support even more terror against the United States. How ironic that Obama once called Guantanamo al-Qaeda’s “chief recruiting tool” only to keep it open, and instead give them a real recruiting tool in the disclosure of the inner workings of the war on terror.

Pakistan is a veritable enemy and Iran an explicit one. But now both will recite endlessly David Sanger’s catalog of our efforts to subvert them, and claim any new anti-American efforts on their part were simply justified tit-for-tat. Why would the Gulf states help us, when they come off as brutal supporters of the old doomed dictatorships? Europe and our allies no doubt knew all about predators and the cyber war, but their publics did not. Expect even more anti-Americanism, as our enemies decry targeted assassinations and efforts at subverting governments.

George W. Bush turned off the world by waterboarding three known and confessed terrorists — with help from the American Left who publicized that fact hourly for eight years. Barack Obama, we now read, has not only personally selected several hundred suspected terrorists for airborne execution, but alternates between reading their terrorist biographies and theology as he picks who lives and who dies. I am sure Catholic theologians appreciate the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine bulked up the American president’s fortitude when he chose to press the kill button over Waziristan. Crude presidents watch Patton or wear flight suits under “Mission Accomplished” banners; sophisticated metrosexual wartime Presidents read theology. I am surprised only that we did not hear from leaks that Obama had read these didactic texts in the original Latin.

Is the world to be outraged that Russia sends war material to Syria or Iran arms to Hezbollah — when it matter-of-factly now reads that almost all communications inside Pakistan are intercepted? Do we need to know that the U.S. warped medical vaccination programs to gain information about bin Laden — right out of a scene from the film Man on Fire? I bet the Gates Foundation and other American philanthropic organizations will appreciate the doubt that will now be cast on their own vaccination efforts. In the world war of ideas, we accuse Iran of wanting to wipe out Israel and they now will accuse us of resorting even to manipulating vaccination programs for the sick and poor for our own national security.  Do we really need to know — or rather does the world need to know — that we sabotaged video cameras in Pakistan? Wait — I err in the use of the past tense: we are still sabotaging video and photographic equipment in Pakistan.

We live in dangerous times, with a war in Afghanistan, a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, a duplicitous nuclear Pakistan, an estranged nuclear ally Israel, an Arab Spring gone haywire, a failed reset with Russia, and almost all of the above conniving over Syria. The work of National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, New York Times reporter David Sanger, and all their assorted subordinate reporters and Obama administration officials may well help to set off a conflagration unlike any in our time.

The Timing and Theme

Why are we suddenly learning in spring of 2012 of all sorts of classified information about the administration’s war on terror? Why not in 2009? Why is all the disclosed information in the press predictably designed to offer another side of Barack Obama in an election year? The president turns out not to be the familiar senator or presidential candidate Obama, who once demanded that Guantanamo be shut down, who mocked renditions and tribunals, who opposed preventative detentions, who wanted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court, and whose team characterized the Major Hasan murders as workplace violence and the Mutallab plot as “allegedly” or came up with the laughable euphemisms “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters.”

In other words, all the prior public knowledge of the Obama administration’s conduct of the war on terror had helped contribute to real public worries about its national security reliability. In contrast, all the recent disclosures paint a much different picture of the real “Obama Doctrine” — a Nobel Peace Prize laureate reading his St. Thomas Aquinas as he struggles with blowing up bad guys from the air, takes out bin Laden, unleashes a cyber war against Iran, or sends his agents into Yemen. A Hollywood scriptwriter could have done Obama the “paradox” no better: ruthlessly sensitive, decisively reflective, and tragically underappreciated.

The decision to disclose a multifaceted covert war on terror and ensure the continuance of the administration Barack Obama is supposedly far more important to our long-term national security than is any short-term damage that follows these disclosures.

The Role of the Press

We all know how the deplorable practice of “leaking” works. But in truth, these were not quite leaks: information was not “leaked” by rogue insiders or hostile outsiders, but rather given freely to the press by administration officials.
That fact alone makes Securitygate different from any other past scandal over publicized classified documents or insider accounts of covert operations — or even Bob Woodward’s mythography and insider psychodramas, where he only imagines what presidents and secretary of states are “really” thinking silently to themselves.

Usually liberal reporters nurture and stroke unnamed sources and would-be whistle-blowers who claim worry about an administration’s stealthy and dangerous national security efforts. Sometimes they divide and conquer — warning reluctant sources that when the proverbial stuff hits the fan, their own silent narratives will be drowned out by the connivers who squawked. Message? If you can’t beat them, then beat them to the punch.

When the leaked story goes public, the administration in question goes bananas; after all, its most private protocols and operations are rendered worthless as they enter the public domain. Our Woodstein-like reporters in question predictably fancy themselves Edward R. Murrows, as if speaking truth to power. They earn praise from the New York-Washington, D.C., corridor, with all the accruing beneficia of strong book sales, career promotions, TV appearances, or often prizes for their “courage.” The leaker, if found out, often likewise is canonized, in Daniel Ellsberg fashion, as he usually beats the rap.

None of that was true of the released information about the bin Laden mission, subversion in Pakistan, the Yemeni double agent, the Predator drone protocols, and the cyber war against Iraq, or our covert war in Africa. The press were lapdogs, not bull terriers. The leakers were not misguided whistle-blowers, but careerist insiders. We don’t quite have an investigative press these days, but rather a Ministry of Truth put in charge of Barack Obama’s public relations: when the worldwide Left worries that Obama is too militaristic, we heard of deep engagement with Catholic theologians and a desire to go after former CIA agents, or more plans to close Guantanamo; when the Right is up in arms that Obama is not pursuing Islamic terrorists, then the drone tally, cyber war, and more details about Osama bin Laden suddenly are all over the news.
Complicity not skepticism is the theme of the work of a Sanger or Ignatius and their kindred reporters. Their aim is that we should be “surprised” about just how muscular is the Obama version of the war on terror — an appreciation that is especially timely in mid-2012, rather than, say, 2009 or 2010.

Doubt all that? The subtitle of David Sanger’s book – Surprising Use of American Power – says it all, does it not? “Surprising” is a rather mild adjective that one might not usually expect from a New York Times “investigative” reporter hell-bent on rushing into print leaked material about controversial, legally questionable, and covert U.S. operations. “Surprising” is the sort of loaded adjective that reminds us of the press’s other favored word – “unexpectedly” – when citing the latest dismal economic news.

Cui Bono?

But outrage was not the intent of Sanger, nor of any of the other “reporters” who have been given exclusive access to either Obama administration insiders or once sort of, now kind of, classified materials. When one reads David Ignatius on the covert bin Laden raid, here are the sort of inanities that pop out: “This desire to reattach al-Qaeda to the Muslim mainstream is evident in the documents I reviewed that were taken from bin Laden’s compound the night he was killed. … As Wednesday’s anniversary of bin Laden’s death approaches, I have been going back over my notes of these messages. I found some unpublished passages that show how bin Laden’s legacy is an ironic mix.” Or “The scheme is described in one of the documents taken from bin Laden’s compound by U.S. forces on May 2, the night he was killed. I was given an exclusive look at some of these remarkable documents by a senior administration official. They have been declassified and will be available soon to the public in their original Arabic texts and translations.”

How does one seriously claim an “exclusive look” at “remarkable documents” that have been “declassified” and “will be available soon.”  (Note the tense gymnastics.) Either a document is in the public domain for all, or it is not. One does not have an “exclusive” look at otherwise common knowledge. This is incoherent: “A senior administration official” calls up a senior Washington Post reporter to provide him with an “exclusive” look at unclassified documents in the public domain. Why would a “senior” official have to remain unnamed when all he was doing was passing along unclassified information?

What Next?

What should we expect next from the administration rather pleased at these disclosures? More of  “how dare you!” denials from Barack Obama who is “shocked” that we might possibly conclude that he runs the defense of the United States like a poorly managed Tony Rezko land deal.

Expect the New York Times and Washington Post stable to likewise be aghast at any hint they were massaged, and in vain to point to all sorts of nuanced little qualifiers in their stories that we missed, but that really do prove their own independence and “worry,” “skepticism,” and “concern” over some of the shocking things they wrote.

“Classified” is now a postmodern idea, as we see from Ignatius. I think the damage-control procedure will go like this: although we, the public, could not read what the New York Times and Washington Post people read, these “classified” sources were still not really classified. You see, the president decides from moment to moment what is legally classified, what not. When given to a reporter to ensure the public knows that an Achilles rather than a Paris is our commander in chief, the documents in a nanosecond became declassified. In other words, once these leaks go into print, then immediately postfacto all such information was declassified all along: stupid us, we just never asked to read it or talk with these folks who had.

If — a big if — and when either Congress or the media goes after the damage that was done to U.S. interests, expect that almost every subpoenaed source imaginable is now “classified” — as in “How dare you ask for classified information that might endanger the national security just to find out how and why we released ‘declassified’ information that did no harm at all.”

Reader, forget politics. Just digest the nature, theme, the timing, and the damage of these disclosures. Do that and most of you will conclude they are offenses to the security of the United States — or, in the words of Barack Obama on another matter, “unpatriotic.”

Title: Mukasey: Plugging the leaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2012, 12:48:37 PM

By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY
The imprudent release of secrets has become a hallmark of the current administration.

It began in April 2009 with the attorney general's disclosure of Justice Department legal opinions, written in 2003, describing classified interrogation techniques that were harsh but lawful by the standards then in force—and effective, although used on only a tiny fraction of captured terrorists. That disclosure informed the nation's enemies of the absolute limit of what they could face if captured, and it demoralized the intelligence operatives who had thought they could rely on Justice Department opinions but were then told that those opinions were no longer valid.

Imprudence accompanied even the splendid achievement of killing Osama bin Laden, with revelations about the intelligence seized from his residence. These included knowledge about the location of al Qaeda safe houses, which warned those who would otherwise have been targets and thereby frustrated the use of that information. There was also the disclosure of a Pakistani physician's cooperation with U.S. intelligence agents trying to obtain bin Laden's DNA to confirm his presence in Abbottabad, which caused the physician's imprisonment for 33 years on a charge of treason and will probably deter many potential foreign sources in the future.

Imprudence has now degenerated into incontinence: detailed disclosure in newspapers of how the drone program operates; how an undercover agent was said to have penetrated an al Qaeda operation and frustrated a plot to put a bomb aboard an airliner bound for this country; and how the United States and Israel allegedly developed and then inserted into Iranian nuclear-enrichment equipment a computer virus that caused centrifuges to spin out of control and destroy themselves, and then another virus that allowed us to monitor the workings of Iran's nuclear program.

It would be difficult to overstate the damage inflicted by these revelations, and a comprehensive assessment will be impossible even decades from now. Consider that in May 2011, the Defense Department announced that a cyber attack that inflicted physical damage on the U.S. would be considered an act of war and would justify a kinetic response. As one general put it, if anyone took down our power grid with a cyber attack, we would feel justified in putting a missile down the smokestack of one or more buildings where the attack originated.

Has a so-far-unnamed U.S. official, in boasting about the physical damage caused by a computer virus we allegedly helped develop, now justified a kinetic response from Iran or some group claiming to act in its behalf? What protective steps will our enemies take to counteract the programs described in these newspaper articles? What valuable information will foreign intelligence agencies now withhold from us in the justified belief that we cannot be trusted to protect secrets?

Assuming the information in these articles is true, it is of a sort that is closely held, known only to a few and treated with the strictest of confidence. That includes, among other things, conversations in the White House Situation Room—conversations that occurred only among people who hold the highest security clearance known to our government, and in a place open only to such people. Documents setting forth such information may not be taken out of secure facilities even by those people, who are finite in number.

The outrage about this seems to be bipartisan (for once), with calls for investigations by various congressional committees and by prosecutors both ordinary and special. The attorney general, who regrettably opened the bidding with his 2009 disclosure of the previously classified interrogation memos, said he was asking not one but two U.S. attorneys to investigate the latest disclosures. And of course there have been numerous calls for appointment of a special prosecutor—more precisely an "independent counsel," although "special prosecutor" sounds so much more . . . special.

As to the two U.S. attorneys, both may be assumed to be honest and competent, and it is not unheard of for a U.S. attorney to ask a grand jury to indict even a high government official; I worked for the U.S. attorney who secured the indictment of an incumbent attorney general, John Mitchell, in 1973 (for alleged crimes connected to an attempt to improperly influence the Securities and Exchange Commission).

But those bent on concealment can assure that even diligent investigations are prolonged for months (even past a certain November election). Independent counsels proceed no faster. The time needed to set up and staff the office of an independent prosecutor can itself delay an investigation.

Moreover, the record of such counsels has been spotty, not to mention their constitutionally anomalous status—within yet supposedly independent of the executive. Criminal investigations would also frustrate any congressional subpoena, which would be met with the claim that disclosure to Congress could compromise the criminal proceedings. In addition, the standard under current criminal law could require a showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the leaker in question acted with intent to injure the security of the U.S., or with knowledge that such injury likely would occur—a difficult standard to meet.

Nor is it clear that there has been a violation of any criminal law. Those empowered to classify information are also empowered to declassify it. If these disclosures came from, or with authorization from, people allowed to declassify information—including but not limited to the president—there was no crime even in the disclosure of purported cyber activity.

But there is every reason why this inquiry should proceed in Congress, where oversight authority resides. If the bipartisan outrage is genuine, Congress is peculiarly well suited to investigate and disclose what went on here, and who is responsible. An informed electorate would be grateful.

To prevent further intelligence disclosures during the process, a joint congressional committee, populated by lawmakers from intelligence and armed services committees already used to handling classified information, could meet when necessary in executive session, with limited and cleared staff, and eventually make findings in which the nation could have confidence.

The president, too, has a role. For one thing, he could order any of the finite number of public officials who had access to this information and who is summoned for questioning to waive any assurance of confidentiality that might have been received from a journalist. Thus the journalists involved would be free to testify without offending the rules of their craft. An official who refused to sign would be justly suspect and could be dismissed, serving as he does at the pleasure of the president.

Holding people to account is far more useful at this time and in this situation than putting people in prison, and it avoids the difficulty of proving a conventional crime.

To be sure, the Constitution hints broadly that more than mere disclosure could result. It empowers Congress to investigate, prosecute and try what our founding charter quaintly refers to as "high crimes and misdemeanors," a category that may include conventional crimes but is certainly not limited to them. Rather, it embraces all grave breaches of public trust, criminal or not, and the public trust assuredly was breached here.

I do not advocate impeaching anyone, particularly not at this late stage in the electoral cycle. But at a minimum, investigating diligently and disclosing candidly would allow Congress to pull up its dismal level of public approval. It's worth a try.

Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general from 2007-09, and as a U.S. district judge from 1988-2006.

Title: Thirty-one GOP senators call for special counsel to investigate security leaks
Post by: bigdog on June 26, 2012, 10:25:01 AM
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/234761-thirty-one-gop-senators-call-for-special-counsel-to-investigate-security-leaks
Title: suspected leaker is Biden's lawyer's brother
Post by: ccp on June 26, 2012, 11:14:18 AM
ZERO chance of special prosecuter with this corrupt WH.  It is sad but expected not one Dem Senator calling for the sp. pros.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_E._Donilon
Title: Darrell Issa Puts Details of Secret Wiretap Applications in Congressional Record
Post by: bigdog on June 29, 2012, 12:42:00 PM
I am trying to keep thread integrity, and I hope this is the place. It might also belong in the Constitutional Issues thread and/or Gun Rights?

http://www.rollcall.com/news/darrell_issa_puts_details_of_secret_wiretap_applications_in_congressional-215828-1.html

In the midst of a fiery floor debate over contempt proceedings for Attorney General Eric Holder, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) quietly dropped a bombshell letter into the Congressional Record.
 
The May 24 letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member on the panel, quotes from and describes in detail a secret wiretap application that has become a point of debate in the GOP’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking probe.
 
The wiretap applications are under court seal, and releasing such information to the public would ordinarily be illegal. But Issa appears to be protected by the Speech or Debate Clause in the Constitution, which offers immunity for Congressional speech, especially on a chamber’s floor.
 
According to the letter, the wiretap applications contained a startling amount of detail about the operation, which would have tipped off anyone who read them closely about what tactics were being used.

continued on web site.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2012, 02:59:38 PM
Excellent find; "Gun Rights" is the correct thread for this.
Title: Temple of Silence
Post by: bigdog on July 09, 2012, 10:57:22 AM
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/magazine/104219/jack-goldsmith-SCOTUS-Leaks-CIA

WHEN SUPREME COURT Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rose to speak to the American Constitution Society on June 15, many in the audience hoped she would hint at the fate of the Affordable Care Act. The justices had voted on Obamacare on March 30, and by mid-June the Court’s opinion, as well as any concurrences or dissents, had been drafted and circulated internally. But despite palpable panting by journalists, no one outside the Court knew what it had decided. And Ginsburg gave no clue. “Those who know don’t talk,” she said. “And those who talk don’t know.”

In the national security bureaucracy, the opposite rule has prevailed: Those who know talk quite a lot. In recent weeks, the press has reported on U.S. cyber-attacks on Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities, a double agent inside the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, and internal deliberations about drone operations. And by all accounts, the primary sources for these revelations were executive branch officials. “The accelerating pace of such disclosures, the sensitivity of the matters in question, and the harm caused to our national security interests is alarming and unacceptable,” charged congressional intelligence committee leaders in rare bipartisan unison. Why is the Court so much better at stopping leaks than the government agencies entrusted with the country’s most critical secrets?

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2012, 11:28:46 AM
Lifetime job security?-- i.e. no need to seek political advantage to keep one's job?

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on July 09, 2012, 12:25:44 PM
"Why is the Court so much better at stopping leaks than the government agencies entrusted with the country’s most critical secrets?"

Yes. I had that same thought, though not posted.  Quite impressive the secrecy of this opinion in particular. 

Jan Crawford had nice inside stories on the case buy there was no indication at all that she had them early.

"Lifetime job security?-- i.e. no need to seek political advantage to keep one's job?"

That's a pretty good guess, but the aides don't stay for a lifetime.

Besides trying to understand why it happened, the secrecy of the Court proves it is possible.  Intelligence agencies and oversight and enforcement of classified secrets personnel could stand to learn from that.

Perhaps a public beheading (or legal equivalent) would persuade officials not to leak military secrets to the NY Times.  We could at least conduct an investigation and try to enforce our laws. 

Scooter Libby went to prison for not leaking.  Now THAT was an investigation.  They had the truth in the first 15 minutes and decided to run a year or so with the investigation. The zeal for getting at the truth and enforcing federal laws sadly depends upon the political implications.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: JDN on July 09, 2012, 08:21:37 PM
Scooter Libby went to prison for not leaking.  Now THAT was an investigation.  They had the truth in the first 15 minutes and decided to run a year or so with the investigation. The zeal for getting at the truth and enforcing federal laws sadly depends upon the political implications.

Actually Scooter Libby was a Criminal.

Libby was indicted on five counts: Two counts of perjury, two counts of making false statements to federal investigators, and one count of obstruction of justice.

In the subsequent federal trial, United States v. Libby, the jury convicted Libby on four of the five counts in the indictment (one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and one count of making false statements.
Title: House Judiciary Chairman Launches Investigation Into National Security Leaks
Post by: bigdog on July 13, 2012, 06:07:17 AM
http://www.rollcall.com/news/house_judiciary_chairman_launches_investigation_into_national_security-216104-1.html?ET=rollcall:e13631:80133681a:&st=email&pos=eam
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2012, 06:41:05 AM
GOOD.
Title: Dark Soldiers of the New Order
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2012, 08:35:46 PM
Pasting yet again BD's post in this thread as well:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/13/dark_soldiers_of_the_new_order
Title: In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm:
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 18, 2012, 06:59:44 AM
Haven't had a chance to give this a proper look yet, but wanted to get it posted:
================================================

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839153/in-q-tel-the-cias-tax-funded-player-in-silicon-valley

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/22/145587161/cia-tracks-public-information-for-the-private-eye

In the years since its formation, many have been led to speculate about In-Q-Tel and its investments, but what requires no speculation is an understanding that a privately owned venture capital firm, created by and for the CIA, in which well-connected board members drawn from the private sector can then profit from the investments made with CIA funds that itself come from the taxpayer represent an erosion of the barrier between the public and private spheres that should give even the most credulous pause for thought.

What does it mean that emerging technology companies are becoming wedded to the CIA as soon as their technology shows promise?

What can be the public benefit in fostering and encouraging technologies which can be deployed for spying on all internet users, including American citizens, in direct contravention of the CIA’s own prohibitions against operating domestically?

http://www.corbettreport.com/meet-in-q-tel-the-cias-venture-capital-firm-preview/

http://business-news.thestreet.com/mercury-news/story/spy-agency-fund-targets-bay-area-technology/1
==================


Title: Former Special Ops forces put out must-watch new video:
Post by: objectivist1 on August 16, 2012, 08:05:40 AM
www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Xfti7qtT0&feature=player_embedded
Title: Spy scandal of which you have never heard
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2012, 05:12:03 AM
Also posted in the Islam in America thread:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-biggest-d-c-spy-scandal-you-havent-heard-about-part-two/?singlepage=true
Title: Intel leaks from White House
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2012, 01:57:13 PM
Have not watched this yet but posting it here so it does not fall off my radar screen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Xfti7qtT0

Title: Obama dismisses allegations of deliberate "leaks"...
Post by: objectivist1 on August 21, 2012, 01:17:33 PM
OBAMA AND THE POLITICS OF TREASON

Posted on August 21, 2012

BUCK SEXTON
Buck Sexton is The Blaze's national security editor and a GBTV contributor. Before joining the Blaze, Buck served in the U.S. Intelligence Community for six years.

President Obama has dismissed and derided the former military and intelligence officers who believe his administration passed out sensitive national security information for partisan gain. In a press conference yesterday, he said of the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund and similar groups—“I don’t take these folks too seriously.”

Unsurprisingly, the White House has been quick to attack the men behind these accusations instead of explaining to the American people that this administration has not leveraged defense secrets for positive press reports. The best Obama was able to muster in his defense yesterday was “this kind of stuff springs up before election time.”

Of course, this does not adequately address accusations of leaks that many believe could amount to treason.  While the specific source of the leaks remains in question, as a former intelligence officer, I see why so many informed observers, including the OPSEC whistleblowers, smell something rotten at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Let’s press into the facts of the case.

From the start of the controversy, the news articles that leaked the information claimed that their sources were members of “Obama’s national security team.” That would seem the drain the pool of possible leakers rather quickly, but alas—no progress has been made on the White House-approved investigation.

Even without that massive clue, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to the White House as the source. The leaks are obviously political because they are positive. Leaks usually hurt administrations, but not these leaks. Whoever told the press about these sensitive national security matters had very high-level access and used it to lionize the President. From the Bin Laden raid details to the President’s so-called “Kill List,” the leaks bolstered the perception that Obama had transformed into a hawk.

In response to the OPSEC group’s accusations, media outlets often tout that Obama’s Department of Justice has brought more Espionage Act prosecutions—six and counting—than every President before him combined. They cite this to further a narrative that Obama takes leaking seriously, but that’s a misreading. The prosecutions have everything to do with appearances for Obama and very little to do with national security.

Leaks can create major political headaches, as seen during the Bush years. To blunt this liability, the Obama administration established an early precedent: leak, and Attorney General Holder’s DOJ will ruin your life.  This approach ensnared a range of offenders—from legitimately dangerous offenses to a case against former NSA analyst Thomas Drake that completely fell apart in court.

Thus the Obama administration has maintained a two-track enforcement approach to leakers. Senior political operatives seem to get away with them; working-level national security professionals cower in fear of DOJ’s wrath.

Instead of pulling clearances and firing alleged leakers, Obama’s DOJ jumped right to felony charges in these instances. Regardless of the trial outcomes, the message to all who have classified access and a political disagreement with Obama was heard loud and clear.

And what liberals claimed was laudable behavior under President Bush—leaking– was now treasonous under Obama. For a President who ran on a promise of transparency, this was a particularly craven abandonment of previously espoused principle.

Contrast the draconian enforcement approach to working-level intelligence employees with the zero arrests that have been made in relation to the major national security disclosures that set off the current furor. Despite the reckless revelation of sources and methods in the recent leaks, it is a near certainty that no senior White House officials will face charges or even lose their security clearance because of them.

Instead, the White House will make the Pentagon and intelligence agencies turn the screws even tighter on civil servants who had nothing to do with these disclosures. To appear tough, the executive branch has empowered prosecutors and internal bureaucrats to ferret out leakers that do not exist. Countless patriotic Americans who protect classified information every day will be harassed and slowed in their work so that connected political advisors and special assistants in the White House can continue to tell whatever they want to whomever they want.

Of course, all of this would have been avoided if President Obama had decided to release the information officially, as is his purview as Commander-in-Chief. Instead, somebody with seemingly unrestricted classified access gave the stories behind closed doors to favored media mouthpieces. Had President Obama declassified the information himself on record, his administration could also be held to account for the intelligence fallout afterwards. Thus the current White House policy of disclose-and-deny gives the administration de facto credit without suffering any blowback.

Once again, politics, not the safety of the nation, is the primary factor at work.

President Obama’s national security record is unlikely to determine the election this fall. But to groups like OPSEC Education Fund and countless national security professionals still working in the shadows, the spate of leaks plays into a broader narrative of a solipsistic President and administration that appear to value reelection above all else.

Though we will likely never find out the source of the leaks, President Obama appears more upset about them as a political liability than a possible threat to our national security. That alone is cause for concern.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: JDN on August 21, 2012, 01:38:08 PM
"Of course, all of this would have been avoided if President Obama had decided to release the information officially, as is his purview as Commander-in-Chief."


I'm not defending the leaks; I suppose it depends upon who is doing it and on what authority.

But Obama IS Commander in Chief.  At his discretion, for reasons known only to him and his immediate staff (he is under no obligation to offer an explanation) isn't he entitled to release information (leak it) if he deems it appropriate officially or unofficially?

As for the special ops video, saying that the soldiers on the ground killed bin Laden, well that's like saying the Tibbets dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, not Truman.  Technically true, but ......
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on August 21, 2012, 06:38:48 PM
"Leaks usually hurt administrations...".

I'm not sure that this empirically accurate. Usually when the adminstration leaks it is just called something different. A "trial balloon" perhaps. There is plenty of evidence that suggests that adminstrations have leaked info for benefit for years.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2012, 06:53:41 AM
True enough BD but you're a bright guy with intellectual integrtiy.  Do you really think what appears to be the case here (destroying the value of extraordinary intel gathered at extraordinary effort and cost, costing lives, and destroying the value of ongoing programs) to be run of the mill.

I sure don't.  Indeed I seethe at what appears to have happened here.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on August 23, 2012, 02:26:14 AM
That's not what I said. I was taking issue with what I suspect is a fallacious claim in the article.

And, it is worth noting that "Obama's national security team" includes people from outside government, so I don't think the circle is as small as the author implies.

By the way... here is an article about a forthcoming book from a SEAL who was part of the OBL raid team: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/48754703/ns/today-the_new_york_times/.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2012, 04:43:36 AM
*Not sure I'm following the distinction you're making but OK.

*My understanding is that some of the intel leaked could ONLY have come from certain high placed individuals.

*Obama sure did not and does not seem very upset that this intel got leaked.  What of the guy that SecDef Gates told "STFU"?  No consequences there , , ,

IMHO this simply is as bad as it looks.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on August 23, 2012, 06:51:18 AM
*Not sure I'm following the distinction you're making but OK.
One of the points made in the article to support the thesis that Obama and/or a proxy is that an administration usually looks bad due to a leak. Since the Obama administration didn't look bad, the implication is that the leak was purposeful. I am NOT saying that it wasn't on purpose, I am saying the supporting argument isn't true.

*My understanding is that some of the intel leaked could ONLY have come from certain high placed individuals.
But how do you, or any reporter, know for sure how many people are in the circle. And, given the number of people supporting those in the circle, the reality is there are likely many people with access to at least some of that specific information. Why couldn't 2 or 3 people have leaked? A recent book by Jack Goldsmith, which I highly recommend, states that there were at least 183 since 2005. He also quotes Richard Helms as saying"the probability of leaks escalates expontentially each time a classified document is exposed to another person--be it an Agency employee, a member of Congress, a senior official, a typist, or a file clerk." Given the amount of support needed for the mission, there were MANY eyes.

*Obama sure did not and does not seem very upset that this intel got leaked.  What of the guy that SecDef Gates told "STFU"?  No consequences there , , ,

IMHO this simply is as bad as it looks.

And, despite all of the above, I agree with you here. I suspect it was purposeful, and I agree that it is likely bad, at least in the short term, for the IC. I just think the people making the argument should make without holes in the logic.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2012, 09:14:20 AM
*I'm going to quibble on the number of people with access point.  My understanding is that certain passages described events taking place and things being said in a particular room/office to which the number of people who have access could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

*SecDef Gates certainly thought he knew who was responsible. :evil:

*Still not following your point about unsound logic-- "Qui bono?" seems a valid analytical concept to me , , ,

*I'd argue that the damage is serious and long term.  We've always been suspect-- with good reason!-- in this regard, but i the eyes of friends, possible friends, and enemies to have the President's innermost circle and possibly/presumably the President himself be willing to sell out sources, methods, and operations (e.g. the Pakistani doctor, the Saudi double agent, etc) is going to be remembered by the real players in these things for a very long time.

For the President to be an "amateur" is one thing, but for him to be a sociopathic narcissist who puts his personal political gain above the lives of those who serve in dark and dangerous places fills me with loathing.  I could be wrong, but my impression from body language, choice of words, and the career implications for the people (and these are very serious people who have dedicated themselves and literally their asses on the line apolitically in the service of our country) in this clip lead me to surmise that my loathing comes in second to theirs.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on August 23, 2012, 09:54:01 AM
*I'm going to quibble on the number of people with access point.  My understanding is that certain passages described events taking place and things being said in a particular room/office to which the number of people who have access could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Feel free, of course. I've not seen the same.

*SecDef Gates certainly thought he knew who was responsible. :evil:

I'd like to see a quote, if I may, that makes this crystal clear. I've looked at http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/06/11/obama-and-intel-leaks-investigation-this-smells-like-fix/ and http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/gates-national-security-team-osama-raid-shut-f_646731.html?nopager=1 and http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2892376/posts and http://www.npr.org/2012/06/11/154749427/weekly-standard-leaker-in-chief. Only the last story seems to implicate the National Security Advisor, and even then the story hedges, by saying that Gates felt the he was responsible "directly or indirectly." All of the other stories relate the leak was somewhere in the administration's circle of advisers, with Donilon being the point, seemingly because of the position.

*Still not following your point about unsound logic-- "Qui bono?" seems a valid analytical concept to me , , ,

You can have logical structure but have specious precepts. He does.

*I'd argue that the damage is serious and long term.  We've always been suspect-- with good reason!-- in this regard, but i the eyes of friends, possible friends, and enemies to have the President's innermost circle and possibly/presumably the President himself be willing to sell out sources, methods, and operations (e.g. the Pakistani doctor, the Saudi double agent, etc) is going to be remembered by the real players in these things for a very long time.

For the President to be an "amateur" is one thing, but for him to be a sociopathic narcissist who puts his personal political gain above the lives of those who serve in dark and dangerous places fills me with loathing.  I could be wrong, but my impression from body language, choice of words, and the career implications for the people (and these are very serious people who have dedicated themselves and literally their asses on the line apolitically in the service of our country) in this clip lead me to surmise that my loathing comes in second to theirs.

"At least in the short term," as I said, certainly does not preclude the possibility of the long term damage you discuss.

Title: POTH: Benghazi attack major blow to intel efforts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2012, 08:10:32 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/world/africa/attack-in-libya-was-major-blow-to-cia-efforts.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120924
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2012, 06:00:19 PM
Ex-CIA chief slams Biden for throwing U.S. spies under the bus during debate by 'blaming those who put their lives on the line' for Benghazi debacle


Two former intelligence chiefs today blasted Vice President Joe Biden for making the U.S. intelligence community a scapegoat for 'the inconsistent and shifting response of the Obama Administration'.

Michael Hayden, former CIA director, and Michael Chertoff, who served as Homeland Security chief, hit out after Biden stunned many in the intelligence community by insisting that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi did not ask for additional security before it was attacked on September 11 - directly contradicting what security officials and diplomats have testified under oath.

The tough joint statement was issued via the Romney campaign. In it they added: 'Blaming those who put their lives on the line is not the kind of leadership this country needs.'

'During the Vice Presidential debate, we were disappointed to see Vice President Biden blame the intelligence community for the inconsistent and shifting response of the Obama Administration to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi.  Given what has emerged publicly about the intelligence available before, during, and after the September 11 attack, it is clear that any failure was not on the part of the intelligence community, but on the part of White House decision-makers who should have listened to, and acted on, available intelligence. Blaming those who put their lives on the line is not the kind of leadership this country needs.'

Hayden, a career intelligence officer and retired U.S. Air Force general, and Chertoff, a former prosecutor, both served in the Bush administration.

Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's vice-presidential running mate, hit out at the Obama administration's handling of the Libya assault which killed ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The Vice President defended the government's handling of the crisis and denied that the State Department had turned down a request for security reinforcements in the months before the raid.

The heated debate exchange came just hours after presidential candidate Mitt Romney launched his own denunciation of Barack Obama's response to the attack, saying the administration 'failed to grasp the seriousness of the challenges that we face'.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Stevens himself expressed concerns about security at the facility.

Also, the head of a special operations team helping out with security asked for 'more, not less' reinforcements before the government pulled dozens from Libya earlier this year.

But Biden, when asked about it by debate moderator Martha Raddatz, said: 'We weren't told they wanted more security there.'

Ryan kept up his attack, saying: 'There were requests for extra security - those requests were not honoured.'

He compared the situation in Libya with the heavily guarded American embassy in France as he insisted: 'Our ambassador in Paris has a Marine detachment guarding him, shouldn't we have a Marine detachment guarding our ambassador in Benghazi?'

The Vice President attempted to deflect the blame for the security failures onto Republicans in Congress, saying that Ryan's fiscal plan 'cut embassy security in his budget by $300million below what we asked for.'

The pair also sparred over another controversial issue connected to the Benghazi assault, as Biden again insisted that the administration initially believed the deadly raid was the result of protests over an anti-Muslim YouTube video which were sweeping the Islamic world at the time.

'The intelligence community told us that,' he said. 'As they learned more facts about exactly what happened, they changed their assessment.'

But Ryan replied: 'It took the President two weeks to acknowledge this was a terrorist attack. He went to the UN and in his speech at the UN six times talked about the YouTube video.

'Look, if we are hit by terrorists, we are going to call it for what it is: a terrorist attack.'

Former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich predicted on Friday that Biden's uncompromising statements would 'haunt' the Obama campaign ahead of next month's election.

'Biden on Benghazi was so wrong last night, it’s going to haunt them from now until the next debate,' the former House speaker told CBS This Morning.

Romney also launched a blistering assault on the Obama administration's treatment of the crisis as he spoke at a campaign rally in North Carolina.

After an Obama official suggested that the tragedy had been politicised by Republicans, the GOP candidate responded: 'I think today we got another indication of how President Obama and his campaign fail to grasp the seriousness of the challenges that we face here in America.'

He continued: 'Mr President, this is an issue because we were attacked successfully by terrorists on the anniversary of 9/11.

'President Obama, this is an issue because Americans wonder why it was it took so long for you and your administration to admit that this was a terrorist attack.'

The White House today defended Biden's comments saying what he meant to say was that the Sate Department handles security and that Obama and Biden weren't told of the need for security.

Hours before the debate, two top security officials who had been to the consulate testified on Capitol Hill that they had made requests for more troops.

Former regional security forces officer Eric Nordstrom and Lt Col Andrew Wood, who was head of a Special Forces 'Site Security Team' in the country, placed blame on Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb for rejecting their requests.

'The takeaway... for me and my staff, was abundantly clear - we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident,' Nordstrom said. 'And the question that we would ask is: how thin does the ice have to get before someone falls through?'

'We were fighting a losing battle,' Wood added. 'We couldn't even keep what we had.'

Lamb and Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management, testified that they believed the security measures in place were enough.

On September 11, the day he died, Stevens wrote to Washington officials detailing a dispute involving the leaders of two prominent Benghazi militias who were responsible for security in the city, according to the Daily Beast.

The two men, Wissam bin Ahmed and Muhammad al-Gharabi, claimed that the U.S. was lobbying for centrist politician Mahmoud Jibril to become Libya's prime minister.

They said that if he won the vote, they 'would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, a critical function they asserted they were currently providing,' according to Stevens.

Despite that warning, Stevens did not ask for more U.S. troops, and commented that Benghazi officials believed the city was becoming safer.

The cable made no mention of a U.S.-made YouTube video mocking the Prophet Muhammad which was originally thought to have been the motivation for the deadly assault on the consulate later that night.
Pleas: Lt. Col. Andrew Wood said he asked for reinforcements in Libya but faced troop withdrawals instead.

The American compound was being guarded by members of the 'February 17 Martyrs Brigade', a militia which shared members with the groups run by Mr bin Ahmed and Mr al-Gharabi.

It was not only Stevens who saw potential security issues cropping up in Libya before the September 11 raid.

Wood said officials felt 'like we were being asked to play the piano with two fingers' after a number of troops were withdrawn from Libya in August.

He told CBS This Morning that worried embassy staff had approached him to ask if they would still be safe when his team had left.

'I could only answer that what we were being told is that they're working on it,' he said.

He added: 'Shooting instances occurred, many instances involved the local security guard force that we were training. Constantly, there were battles going on between militias, criminal activity and that became an increasing danger as time went on as well.'

Wood claimed that other senior officials, including Stevens, had requested a boost in the U.S. security presence, saying: 'We felt we needed more, not less.'

Although his team was based in the city's capital Tripoli, Wood said he would have accompanied the ambassador to Benghazi had he still been in the country. State Department officials said that as the Site Security Team was intended to help re-open the embassy in Tripoli, their departure from Libya was irrelevant to the subsequent security situation. 
They also claimed that Wood did not know the details of the situation in Benghazi, which is 400 miles from the capital.
Title: POTH: Tale of wild ruse to get Awlaki
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2012, 05:08:17 AM


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/world/middleeast/danes-wild-tale-of-ruse-to-find-anwar-al-awlaki.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121020&_r=0
Title: The CIA Burglar Who Went Rogue
Post by: bigdog on October 21, 2012, 04:20:19 AM
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-CIA-Burglar-Who-Went-Rogue-169800816.html

The CIA is not in the habit of discussing its clandestine operations, but the agency’s purpose is clear enough. As then-chief James Woolsey said in a 1994 speech to former intelligence operatives: “What we really exist for is stealing secrets.” Indeed, the agency declined to comment for this article, but over the course of more than 80 interviews, 25 people—including more than a dozen former agency officers—described the workings of a secret CIA unit that employed Groat and specialized in stealing codes, the most guarded secrets of any nation.

Title: Mexico
Post by: DDF on October 21, 2012, 02:31:51 PM
Wondering if anyone here has any info on CISEN. Thank you in advance.
Title: Re: Mexico
Post by: G M on October 22, 2012, 02:17:06 PM
Wondering if anyone here has any info on CISEN. Thank you in advance.

Yo sabe nada.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2012, 03:01:53 PM
First person conjugation of the verb "saber" is "se' "  :lol:
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on October 22, 2012, 03:08:11 PM
Mi espanol es muy feo.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on October 22, 2012, 03:15:42 PM
 :-D :-D
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DDF on October 22, 2012, 04:01:13 PM
Gracias todos modos a todos.  :-D
Title: Re: Mexico
Post by: bigdog on October 22, 2012, 04:18:37 PM
Wondering if anyone here has any info on CISEN. Thank you in advance.

More seriously, what do you need to know? Structure? Budget? Size? Mission? Quality? History?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2012, 09:29:05 PM
D) All of the above.  Please email me and we can take if from there.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DDF on October 24, 2012, 08:58:54 PM
Just got the email GC. Thank you Sir.
Title: WSJ: Petraeus out
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 09, 2012, 04:33:23 PM
CIA Chief Resigns Over Affair
Petraeus Relationship With Biographer Surfaced After FBI Probe of His Email .
By DEVLIN BARRETT, SIOBHAN GORMAN and JULIAN E. BARNES
 
(FILES) CIA Director David Petraeus, seen testifying on Capitol Hill in January 2012.

WASHINGTON—Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus resigned after a probe into whether someone else was using his email led to the discovery that he was having an extramarital affair, according to several people briefed on the matter.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into use of one of Mr. Petraeus's personal email accounts led agents to believe the woman or someone close to her had accessed them, the people said.

Multiple officials familiar with the investigation identified the woman with whom Mr. Petraeus had the affair as Paula Broadwell, who wrote a biography of him called "All In: The Education of Gen. David Petraeus.'' Efforts to reach Ms. Broadwell on Friday weren't successful. A spokeswoman for her publisher didn't immediately comment.

The resignation, which surprised the nation's capital on Friday afternoon, represented an abrupt fall in the career of a man who had been one of the most celebrated military leaders of his time, a four-star general credited with turning the tide in Iraq and reversing the momentum of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The computer-security investigation points to one reason Mr. Petraeus and the White House believed the popular official couldn't remain in the senior intelligence position: The affair raised the possibility his improper relationship could have compromised national security.

Administration officials said the White House was briefed on the affair on Wednesday, the day after the election. President Barack Obama was informed of the affair on Thursday by his staff and met with Mr. Petraeus that day. Mr. Petraeus then offered to resign.

 CIA Director David Petraeus resigned as head of the intelligence agency, saying he "showed extremely poor judgment" by engaging in an extramarital affair. Neil King has details on The News Hub. Photo: AFP/Getty Images.
."After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair," Mr. Petraeus said in a statement to CIA employees Friday. "Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours."

Mr. Petraeus leaves the CIA at a time when it is embroiled in controversy surrounding the events of Sept. 11, 2012, when four Americans were killed in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. After weeks of conflicting accounts of what happened that night, the CIA acknowledged that it had played a central role in gathering intelligence and providing security for the U.S. presence there.

Mr. Petraeus's wife, Holly, works at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as the head of its office for service-member affairs.

The leading contenders to succeed Mr. Petraeus include acting CIA Director Michael Morell and Defense intelligence chief Michael Vickers. Another option mentioned was Rep. Michael Rogers (R., Mich.), who is chairman of the House intelligence committee.

More
 Resignation letter
 Obama's statement
 Intelligence Director's statement
.A former CIA official called Mr. Morell an "odds-on favorite," adding "he would bring over three decades of experience inside the agency. He's the consummate straight shooter. He's very well liked inside the agency. He has enormous street creds on Capitol Hill. He projects an image of calm."

The computer probe began this spring, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Mr. Petraeus, however, was not interviewed by the FBI until recently.

While Mr. Petraeus was still a general, he had email exchanges with the woman, but there were no physical transgressions, the person said. The affair began only after Mr. Petraeus retired from the military in August 2011, and ended months ago, the person said.

An extramarital affair has significant implications for an official in a highly sensitive post, because it can open the official to blackmail and compromise of his security clearance.

Mr. Obama praised Mr. Petraeus on Thursday for his "extraordinary service to the United States for decades," and added: "By any measure, through his lifetime of service, David Petraeus has made our country safer and stronger."

Mr. Obama tapped Mr. Petraeus, a favorite of President George W. Bush, to serve as his top commander in Afghanistan after the abrupt resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in 2010. Mr. Obama nominated him as CIA director in 2011. Messrs. Petraeus and Obama did not have the close chemistry that the president has with other top officials in his cabinet.

Title: Col. Ralph Peters on Gen. Petraeus
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 09, 2012, 09:07:24 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a87vzzfKb-A

and this on the woman in question:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/linked-to-petraeus-paula-broadwell-is-lifelong-high-achiever.html?_r=1&
Title: Who authorized? And, POTH to the rescue!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 10, 2012, 07:45:23 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/10/who-authorized-fbi-surveillance-of-petraeus

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Saturday, November 10, 2012 -- 1:45 PM EST
-----

F.B.I. Said to Have Stumbled Into News of Petraeus Affair

The F.B.I. investigation that led to the resignation of David H. Petraeus as C.I.A.
director began with a complaint several months ago about “harassing” e-mails sent by
Paula Broadwell, Mr. Petraeus’s biographer, to an unidentified third person, a
government official briefed on the case said Saturday. 

When F.B.I. agents following up on the complaint began to examine Ms. Broadwell’s
e-mails, they discovered exchanges between her and Mr. Petraeus that revealed that
they were having an affair, said the official, who spoke of the investigation on the
condition of anonymity. 

The person who complained about harassing messages from Ms. Broadwell, according to
the official, was not a family member or a government official. One Congressional
official who was briefed on the matter said senior intelligence officials had
explained that the F.B.I. investigation “started with two women.” 

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/us/fbi-said-to-have-stumbled-into-news-of-david-petraeus-affair.html?emc=na

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 12, 2012, 06:14:04 AM
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/petraeus-a-sad-day-for-the-united-states.htm
Title: Michael Yon on General Petraeus
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2012, 08:53:05 AM


http://www.michaelyon-online.com/second-chances.htm
Title: More on Benghazi-Petraeus
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 14, 2012, 06:30:45 AM
Bringing this thread into the mix for the Benghazi affair.

Not sure of the provenance of these two, but Brett Baier last night was also reporting on the "secret prison" angle, with the added point that there was a temporary handling of prisoners exception to the presidential order ending the dark operations i.e. the CIA operation may have been legal due to an exception.

===========

Petraeus Mistress Suggests Benghazi Attack Was Aimed At Secret CIA Prison

by Tony Lee 11 Nov 2012, 6:43 PM PDT


Former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus may have told his alleged mistress Paula Broadwell what really happened in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 when terrorists murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Broadwell, whose alleged affair with Petraeus forced him to resign last Friday, revealed during an October 26 speech at the University of Denver that Libyan terrorists may have attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 in order to take back Libyan militia members the CIA Annex had taken prisoner.

Furthermore, Broadwell confirmed that the CIA Annex in Libya had requested reinforcements and could have “reinforced the consulate and the CIA annex that were under attack.” Broadwell also said Petraeus and administration officials knew within 24 hours the possible motives behind the terrorist attacks.

In January of 2009, the Obama administration ordered secret interrogation camps abroad to be closed. Broadwell's comments about the CIA Annex having captured Libyan militia members may reveal some of these overseas prisons may still be operational.

“Now, I don't know if a lot of you have heard this but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner, and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try get these prisoners back, so that’s still being vetted,” Broadwell said during the question-and-answer session of her presentation when an audience member asked her to comment on Libya.

Broadwell, who was speaking at her alma mater about her biography of Petraeus, confirmed the Fox News report (Broadwell said Jennifer Griffin's report had "insightful information") that came out on the day of her speech that said the Obama administration denied Americans on the ground in Libya the security and help they requested, telling NAVY Seals in Libya who wanted to help U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans who were eventually murdered to “stand down.”

“The facts that came out today is that the ground forces there at the CIA annex, which is different from the consulate, were requesting reinforcements,” Broadwell said. “They were requesting the – it's called the CINC’s (Commander-in-Chief’s) In Extremis Force – a group of Delta Force operators, our very, most talented guys we have in the military. They could have come and reinforced the consulate and the CIA annex that were under attack. “

Broadwell said the “challenging thing” for Petraeus was, as Director of the CIA, he was “not allowed to communicate with the press.”

“So he's known all of this – they had correspondence with the CIA station chief in Libya, within 24 hours they kind of knew what was happening,” Broadwell said.

The Obama administration tried to claim an anti-Muhammed video caused the terrorist attacks and has repeatedly punted on whether they they turned down additional security measures and reinforcements that were requested. Broadwell, though, said there was a system failure that led to four Americans being murdered in part because additional security forces were denied.

“It is a tragedy that we lost an ambassador and two other government officials, and there was a failure in the system because there was additional security requested,” Broadwell said. “It's frustrating to see the sort of political aspect of what's going on with this whole investigation."

Broadwell said "the challenge has been the fog of war, and the greater challenge is that it's political hunting season, and so this whole thing has been" politicized.

Petreaus was slated to testify before Congress this week about Libya before his prompt resignation. Republicans in Congress said Petreaus's resignation does not preclude him from testifying in the future.

On Sunday, it was revealed Broadwell allegedly sent threatening emails to a Florida woman, whom she may have suspected was having an affair with Petreaus. Jill Kelley -- the woman who received the threatening emails -- reported them to the FBI. The FBI conducted an investigation and discovered Petraeus and Broadwell were having an affair.


=========================
Cover-up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

- Doug Hagmann (Bio and Archives) Sunday, November 11, 2012


According to two well-vetted sources with intimate knowledge of the CIA operations and events in Benghazi, the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus is directly related to the testimony he was expected to provide before a closed-door hearing next week before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sources close to the controversy, citing the need for anonymity due to their positions, stated that Barack Hussein Obama was aware of the CIA director’s indiscretions “long before” the November 6, 2012 elections, and knew about the FBI’s investigative findings weeks before the election, but “erected a firewall” to prevent any disclosure before November 6th.

“What I do know is that an integral part of that firewall involved having information on Petraeus that would potentially damage his career, legacy and marriage. A sort of political blackmail, if you will. What I don’t know, but suspect, is that Petraeus was placed in the unenviable but self-inflicted position of having to choose between providing truthful testimony under oath and having his professional and personal life destroyed while systematically being impeached due to this incident, or keeping quiet before the Senate Intelligence Committee,” stated one source.

A second intelligence source stated that “the announcement [of Petraeus’ resignation] was carefully timed. It was announced in a Friday afternoon news dump three days after the election, and days before the Senate Intelligence Committee was to hear his testimony, despite the President having knowledge of these events weeks ago. Friday’s announcement served two purposes; it kept controversy from emerging before the election, while allowing the administration to buy time regarding testimony by a federal official about CIA’s involvement in Benghazi.”

The resignation of David Petraeus is merely one, albeit a very high-profile one, of several coordinated moves to push any meaningful investigation into the events of Benghazi well into the future. “Obama and other high ranking officials learned many valuable lessons from Fast & Furious,” a fact agreed upon by both sources. Fast & Furious is the name given to the gun running operation from the U.S. into Mexico. “They understand that the longer they can delay and obstruct the truth, reassign key personnel with important information to positions and locations that hinder any meaningful investigation, the more the public interest wanes. As the public loses interest, it also takes the pressure off Congress from getting to the bottom of things.”

Both sources agreed that it is difficult to speculate whether Petraeus decided to extract himself from the leverage that the controversy had over him by the Obama regime on his terms, or whether his resignation was conducted solely by the terms of the Obama regime. Otherwise, both sources agreed that his resignation would buy the administration some valuable time, and the change in status of Petraeus as the active CIA director would also have an effect on the manner in which he is required to provide testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The change of status, from an active CIA official and government employee, to a citizen bound by far reaching confidentiality agreements, would change his ability to testify before the committee. “He can also lawyer-up,” added one source.

According to another CIA source, the resignation of Christopher Kubasik, president and CEO-elect of defense and aerospace company Lockheed Martin, announced on the same day as Petraeus, might have ties to the events at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “There is a relationship between Lockheed Martin and the defense department, as well as the CIA, that ties into current events in Turkey and Syria. This is particularly relevant in the operation taking place in Benghazi and when investigation into where the ‘black-ops’ money went. Don’t forget, Congress appropriated money, at the behest of Obama, for humanitarian aid, not weapons.”

Like Petraeus, Kubasik cited an “inappropriate relationship” for his resignation. “The timing is beyond coincidental, and the operation much too big for this to be merely coincidental.”

Both intelligence sources interviewed for this report agree that there is an exceptional cover-up campaign taking place. “All roads lead to Benghazi, and this cover-up is exponentially bigger than anything we’ve seen in Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair combined. The American people are being lied to at every turn, and the Obama administration has become emboldened by the election results and a disinterested media.”
Title: Broadwell speaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 14, 2012, 09:01:28 AM
second post:

"It appears we have a couple generals taking orders from their privates."


Broadwell speaks:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/11/all-in-benghazi-edition.php
Title: Sen. Feinstein gets a bit feisty; Real Housewives of Centcom
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2012, 01:42:09 PM

http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-feinstein-an-ally-for-benghazi-truth-seekers/

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/11/13/the-real-housewives-of-centcom-or-who-should-solve-benghazi/?singlepage=true
Title: WSJ: Petraeus's final days
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2012, 02:15:18 PM
In Final Days, Petraeus Hurt by Libya Clash, Then Affair
By ADAM ENTOUS And SIOBHAN GORMAN

WASHINGTON—In David Petraeus's final days at the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency, his relations with chiefs of other U.S. agencies, including his boss, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, took a contentious turn.  At issue was whether the CIA should break its silence about its role in Benghazi, Libya, to counter criticism that increasingly was being leveled at the agency and Mr. Petraeus, said senior officials involved in the discussions.  Mr. Petraeus wanted his aides to push back hard and release their own timeline of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi and a nearby CIA safe house, seeking to set the record straight and paint the CIA's role in a more favorable light. Mr. Clapper and agencies including the Pentagon objected, but Mr. Petraeus told his aides to proceed, said the senior officials.

By all accounts, the driving force behind Mr. Petraeus's departure last Friday was the revelation about his extramarital affair with his biographer. But new details about Mr. Petraeus's last days at the CIA show the extent to which the Benghazi attacks created a climate of interagency finger-pointing. That undercut the retired four-star general's backing within the Obama administration as he struggled with the decision to resign.

On Nov. 7, Mr. Clapper spoke to Mr. Petraeus by phone, advising him "that the right thing to do would be to step down," said Mr. Clapper's spokesman, Shawn Turner, adding that it was a hard message for Mr. Clapper to deliver. Mr. Turner denied there was any connection between Mr. Clapper's advice and efforts by the CIA to explain its role in the Benghazi attacks.

Many officials say Mr. Petraeus didn't act like someone who intended to resign as he mounted an aggressive defense of the CIA over Benghazi a week before Mr. Clapper was told about the affair.

The crisis in Benghazi was the first major test within the administration of Mr. Petraeus's 14-month tenure at the CIA, officials said.

Streaming

The CIA director's resignation over an affair with his biographer came amid questions about national security, in a case that already has engulfed a senior military commander, a Tampa social planner and an FBI agent. Follow all of the updates in the rapidly moving case in the Petraeus Affair stream.

Mr. Petraeus had struggled to win over CIA employees, who initially viewed him with suspicion because he was a high-profile former general accustomed to the hierarchical respect conferred within the military. The CIA, by contrast, is a less hierarchical institution.

"That was a big change for him," said Michael Hurley, a former agency officer. "Authority comes with rank in the military, but CIA directors have to earn the respect of agency officers."

Agency officers saw his CIA office as much more regimented compared with the relative ease with which they could stop in to see top agency officials under Leon Panetta, Mr. Petraeus's predecessor. Mr. Petraeus appeared to be surprised when much younger analysts would disagree with a point he made, a former official said.

Mr. Petraeus's attempts to connect with agency officers over running—he extended an invitation to exercise with him as long as they could keep up with his six- to seven-minute miles—often fell flat as many analysts and operatives weren't as athletic.

On more substantive issues, agency officers sometimes chafed under what they saw as Mr. Petraeus's more controlling style, the former official said. In his efforts to more closely align the CIA's drone program, aimed at killing terror suspects, with diplomatic sensitivities, Mr. Petraeus sometimes clashed with the agency's Counterterrorism Center chief, with Mr. Petraeus denying requests to strike a particular target.

Administration officials respected Mr. Petraeus's success in Iraq and Afghanistan, and President Barack Obama praised him in a news conference Wednesday for his "extraordinary career." But he didn't have a deep bench of backers within Mr. Obama's powerful inner circle, current and former officials say.

Not being fully aligned with the administration is sometimes good for the head of an intelligence agency that prides itself on being apolitical, the former intelligence official said.

Some lawmakers and administration officials have questioned why Mr. Petraeus had to resign over an affair that apparently didn't compromise national security. But throughout his tenure, Mr. Obama has shown little patience with aides who are at the center of what he sees as unwelcome media spectacles.

Moreover, some of Mr. Obama's aides viewed Mr. Petraeus as a potential rival. Republicans have long talked about him as a possible candidate for president. Mr. Petraeus has repeatedly said he isn't interested in running for office.

Criticism of Mr. Petraeus within the administration rose after the Benghazi attacks. Some senior administration officials at the time described Mr. Petraeus as disengaged in the attacks' aftermath.

The CIA decided to keep secret its extensive security and intelligence-collection role in Benghazi, and Mr. Petraeus didn't attend ceremonies for two CIA security contractors killed in the attacks.

Officials close to Mr. Petraeus said he was fully engaged, reviewing intelligence reports and taking part in meetings about the attacks.

Some administration officials felt they took the blame for using the CIA's shifting accounts of what happened in Benghazi. Initially, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and other top policy makers used CIA talking points to make the case that the attacks were preceded by a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video created in the U.S.—an assessment the agency later abandoned. Critics said the attacks had the markings of an organized strike by al Qaeda-linked militants but the White House was initially more cautious about making such links.

Mr. Obama on Wednesday came to Ms. Rice's defense, saying she had relied on the intelligence she had been given.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation in May began looking into complaints about cyberstalking made by Jill Kelley, a Tampa, Fla., woman who was a social friend of Mr. Petraeus. The case uncovered the extramarital affair between Mr. Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell, according to U.S. officials familiar with the investigation.

It is unclear when Mr. Petraeus realized the FBI knew of his affair. The FBI investigation was picking up steam as reaction to the Benghazi attacks became a major challenge to the CIA.

Ms. Broadwell was first interviewed by the FBI in late September, and Mr. Petraeus was interviewed in late October. Both admitted to the affair, according to the U.S. officials.

During the same period, the CIA's role in Benghazi, initially kept secret, had come into sharper and more critical focus. "He had a lot on his plate," a senior official said of Mr. Petraeus.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., officials began debating whether the CIA should be more active in countering the criticism. Mr. Petraeus, in particular, advocated a more aggressive defense.

As questions mounted, a Fox News report Oct. 26 alleged that the CIA delayed sending a security force to protect U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and others who were under attack. Mr. Stevens and three other Americans died.

The CIA denied the report, then began pulling together its own timeline of events.

The Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies objected to Mr. Petraeus's decision to mount a solo defense. "We conveyed our objections. Multiple agencies did," a senior military official said.

Mr. Petraeus's decision to release the CIA's timeline to the press didn't sit well with Mr. Clapper, who was unaware it would be made public, officials said. Other agencies saw Mr. Petraeus's decision as a step aimed at presenting the CIA and Mr. Petraeus in the best light and forcing them to accept the brunt of the criticism.

At CIA headquarters, officials believed it was important to make their case. "Clearly, when people are insinuating things about a situation that just aren't true, there has to be a response," a senior U.S. official said. The official added that the briefing was considered effective. "The record was corrected," he said."Smart people can disagree on the best way to do this, while at the same time agreeing that something must be done."

Meanwhile, one week after the turf fight over the CIA's release of its Benghazi timeline, the FBI told Mr. Clapper about Mr. Petraeus's extramarital affair, said officials familiar with the timeline.

Mr. Turner said Mr. Clapper had no doubt when he spoke to Mr. Petraeus on Nov. 7 that "resigning was the honorable thing for Petraeus to do," describing the discussion as "difficult" and "painful." He didn't consult with the White House first. Mr. Clapper informed the White House that day that Mr. Petraeus was considering resigning, these officials said. The next morning, Mr. Petraeus called Tom Donilon, Mr. Obama's national security adviser, to request a meeting with the president, the officials said.

Mr. Donilon then briefed Mr. Obama. The president met Nov. 8 with Mr. Petraeus, who offered to resign. Mr. Obama told Mr. Petraeus he would think about it overnight, the officials said.

Officials said Mr. Obama didn't try to talk Mr. Petraeus out of leaving. On Nov. 9, Mr. Obama called Mr. Petraeus and accepted the resignation.

At CIA headquarters, the reaction among officers has primarily been one of shock, said a former intelligence official who worked with Mr. Petraeus. Employees frequently joked that Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell must be having an affair, but they saw it as implausible because they considered it unlikely that two people would be seen together so frequently if they were hiding a relationship.

"It was so obvious it couldn't be true," the former official said. "It was really surprising because he's so disciplined."
Title: !!!!
Post by: bigdog on November 16, 2012, 09:30:29 AM
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers & Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein
to Appear on NBC’s Meet the Press

 

HPSCI Chairman Rogers and SSCI Chairwoman Feinstein will be guests on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, November 18, 2012
Date:                           Sunday, November 18, 2012
Time:                           10:30am ET  - in the DC market  (check your local listings for air time)
Organization:              NBC
Show:                          Meet the Press

From Meet the Press  
SUNDAY: House and Senate Intelligence Chairs Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) will be on #MTP for the latest on the Benghazi attacks, Gen. Petraeus, and Israel.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2012, 02:42:17 PM
BD:  That promises to be very interesting.

All:

WSJ  "Mr. Petraeus said Friday that initial drafts of CIA talking points referred to the attack as a terrorist act, but that reference was removed from the final drafts after other agencies weighed in, lawmakers said."
Title: WSJ: Petraeus vs. Petraeus
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 19, 2012, 06:09:14 PM


Petraeus vs. Petraeus The former CIA director's shifting Benghazi story puts the spotlight back on top Obama administration officials.By WILLIAM MCGURNLike this columnist ..
Article Video Comments (22) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».
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When David Petraeus told Congress on Friday that he knew almost from the get-go that Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in a terror attack in Libya, the former CIA director was contradicting information put out by two prominent Obama appointees.

The first is United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice. The Sunday after the attack, Ms. Rice took to the talk shows to blame everything, falsely, on an Islamic mob outraged by a blasphemous YouTube video. Mr. Petraeus says the CIA's original talking points mentioned al Qaeda. If this was edited out, we ought to know who did it—and why.

 
Columnist Bill McGurn on the conflict among Susan Rice, David Petraeus and Eric Holder over the Benghazi terrorist attack. Photo: Getty Images
.The other person whom Mr. Petraeus contradicted on Friday was the Mr. Petraeus who briefed the intel committees in the first days after the killings in Benghazi. Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) sadly noted the discrepancy after leaving the latest briefing. Back in September, said Mr. King, Mr. Petraeus had left "the clear impression" that "the overwhelming amount of evidence" was that the atrocity "rose out of a spontaneous demonstration and it was not a terrorist attack."

Mr. King's recollection is supported by press accounts at the time, which until now Mr. Petraeus did not correct. Mr. King's characterization is further supported, however inadvertently, by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.). Appearing on CNN shortly after hearing Mr. Petraeus speak to her own Intelligence Sommittee in September, she said she had seen "no evidence or no assessment" indicating that Benghazi was a planned attack.

What do these discrepancies mean? In the narrowest sense, they explain why Mr. Petraeus was so compromised. Even if his initial testimony supporting the Obama administration's version of events wasn't affected by the FBI investigation into his extramarital affair, reasonable people might conclude otherwise. At the time he was leaving Rep. King and Sen. Feinstein with the impression Benghazi had been a spontaneous event, others—including the CIA station chief in Libya—were saying otherwise.

As bad as this may be for Mr. Petraeus, it pales next to what it says about how this White House handles security. Start with President Obama. We saw his flash of anger over the contention by Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) that Ms. Rice is unfit to be secretary of state. Why no presidential outrage for his own team, who (supposedly) kept him in the dark about an investigation into his CIA director and later put his administration's name on a patently false account of the Benghazi killings?

At the top of that team would be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The president says it is deeply unfair to blame Ms. Rice for her misleading information because she "had nothing to do with Benghazi." So why was she picked to speak? Might it be that Mrs. Clinton prudently decided she didn't want to go on the record knowing what she did about the real story?

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Associated Press
 
David Petraeus
.Then there's Attorney General Eric Holder. The idea that the Tampa office of the FBI was investigating the CIA director without direction from Mr. Holder's Department of Justice is ridiculous. Then again, even the ridiculous can serve a purpose.

Take the now-infamous "shirtless FBI agent." For days America was given the impression that this was a man who had the hots for Jill Kelley, the Florida socialite whose complaint about emails sparked the investigation. She came to him with those emails, and he came on to her with an Anthony Weiner-like photo of his shirtless self.

Now we have learned that this photo was sent in 2010; that it was an obvious joke with no sexual overtures; and that the agent in question is a little more competent and complicated than he has been made out to be. Not only did Fred Humphries foil an al Qaeda plot to blow up the Los Angeles airport, he shared Mr. Obama's criticism of harsh interrogation techniques and made his views well known.

Still, the "shirtless FBI agent" made for a nice media distraction. Otherwise the press corps might have been asking Mr. Holder whether he ordered FBI Director Robert Mueller not to tell the president about the Petraeus investigation, at least until after the election. Or asking how Justice officials could conclude so quickly that there were no criminal violations, especially since prosecutors didn't see documents from Paula Broadwell's home until the FBI had searched it—days after the affair became public.

In the end, all we know is this. Four Americans were killed in an al Qaeda assault on our consulate. A filmmaker falsely accused of inciting that attack is now in prison. A member of Mr. Obama's cabinet peddled a false account of how they died when the president's intelligence team knew better. And no one, including Mr. Obama, can tell us what was done to follow his order to "do whatever we need to do" to help those Americans in Benghazi when they were still alive.

It's a baffling sequence of events and evasions—one that makes sense only in a place where the No. 1 priority is not so much securing American lives in danger but sustaining the political narrative.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on November 20, 2012, 05:11:53 AM
BD:  That promises to be very interesting.

The video: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUKW-m2PjLM&list=UUoz5rfqaOTTa7lKdgxcIkBg&index=1&feature=plcp[/youtube]
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2012, 08:46:01 AM
While I respect Feinstein for not being a complete political hack in all this, I must say I do not follow some of her logic e.g. that Rice could only say what was in the unclassified briefing/talking points.  This sure sounds to me like there was classified material to which she (our Ambassador to the UN after all!) was privy contrary to the unclassified talking points.  Thus, doesn't Feinstein's statement here boil down to an admission that Rice was lying? As were the people who gave her the false info she used as part of lying to the American people? (As the interviewer here aptly asks about the disparity between the classified and unclassified material "Why not just tell the Truth?")  The utterly weird speciousness of Obama's statement "Don't blame her, we sent her because she didn't know anything" contrasts nicely here.

To me it looks like the plan was for Rice to have plausible deniability as part of this lie to get Obama past the election.   Given the determination with which the Obama administration held on to the dissemination of this false meme about disconcerted video clip viewers getting out of hand and its efforts to blame the video maker (e.g. SecState Hillary telling the mourning father, "Don't worry, we'll get the video maker" WTF  :?  :-P :x) well past the date of Rice's Sunday talk show performance I think we the people are well justified in shooting them all and let God sort it out. 

If Rice wasn't lying-- and it sure smells to me that she did or she's too stupid/incompetent/naive to be SecState-- , no way she should come up for SecState until we find out who was.
Title: Schlussel continues on notion of Jill Kelley as a foreign agent
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2012, 08:55:14 AM
Not sure of how reliable Debbie Schlussel is, but given the paucity of transparency in all this, I think this worth considering:

===============================================================================


http://www.debbieschlussel.com/56333/jill-kelley-helped-muslim-nations-hezbollahs-lebanon-infiltrate-central-command-macdill-base-go-to-girl-for-muslim-parties-w-generals/
November 15, 2012, - 12:08 pm

Jill Kelley Helped Muslim Nations, Hezbollah Infiltrate Central Command, MacDill Base; “Go To Girl” For Muslim Parties w/ Generals
By Debbie Schlussel

Jill Khawam Kelley was the hand-picked lobbyist for Muslim nations and their agenda at Central Command.

Kelley, who is part of the soap opera that the Petraeus scandal spawned, was in charge of hosting parties and social events to push the Islamic agenda of Middle Eastern countries. She was seen by Muslim Mid-East nations, especially Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, as the “go to” woman to push their agenda on top American generals. She was a lobbyist for their cause and, yet, wasn’t required to register as a lobbyist, like all others who host lavish parties for top American officials, like she did, in an attempt to influence U.S. policy in the Middle East.


Gen. David Petraeus w/ the Arab Nations’ Agent of Influence @ Central Command, Jill Kelley

Kelley, a dhimmi Christian Arab of Lebanese descent, was well known in the Muslim Arab embassies of Washington for doing their bidding and hosting their parties at and near MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, where our nation’s top generals are based. It’s where Central Command–the U.S. Armed Forces’ leadership over wars and military personnel Middle East–is headquartered.







When a friend of mine said that he thought the financially troubled Khawam sisters, Kelley and Natalie Khawam, were spies for Lebanon and the Arab world, I originally expressed skepticism. I believed that these twin sisters with obvious twin nose jobs were merely bimbo gold diggers in slutty outfits, who used their Delilah ways to first nab rich husbands, and then nab idiotic top American generals to participate in Lifetime-Channel-worthy bitter child custody disputes. But then I learned that Ms. Kelley, who was until this week under the radar, was quietly involved in pushing the agenda of Muslim Arab nations on our nation’s top generals with whom she’d grown close by design. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ms. Kelley got her hooks into our two top generals in the Middle East, David Petraeus and John Allen. I’m now convinced that my friend, lawyer Gary Welsh of Advance Indiana, who has excellent instincts, was correct.

I’ve long written about the infiltration of Central Command at MacDill Air Base in Tampa by Islamic terrorists. Islamic Jihad founder and convicted Islamic terrorist, Sami Al-Arian, was an instructor on the Middle East to our top generals at MacDill Air Force Base AT THE VERY SAME TIME that he was planning mergers and terrorist attacks in Israel with “the brothers of HAMAS” and while he was bringing Muslim illegal alien Islamic terrorists to the U.S. Al-Arian’s friend and co-conspirator, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah (one of those Al-Arian brought here), who became the Secretary-General of the worldwide Islamic Jihad terrorist group, was also a lecturer at MacDill and also taught our top generals his poisonous views on the Middle East and Israel. FBI and INS agents who investigated Shallah and Al-Arian were alarmed at the influence these two top Islamic terrorists had over CentCom. They were also alarmed to find many books on the inner workings of MacDill in Shallah’s house when they raided it.

So when people ask me how I think these women were able to insert themselves into top generals’ lives and topple them (along with, apparently, the men they married), I think back to the fact that our top generals gladly allowed top terrorists to infiltrate Central Command as alleged “professors” on the Middle East. And when generals like Petraeus and Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. openly attack Israel and America’s relationship with Israel, people like Jill Khawam Kelley and Al-Arian and Shallah are the reason why. Khawam Kelley isn’t an innocent socialite. She’s an agent of influence for Arab Muslim nations.

The Washington Post reports:

A military officer who is a former member of Petraeus’s staff said Kelley was a “self-appointed” go-between for Central Command officers with Lebanese and other Middle Eastern officials. . . . At the parties Jill Kelley hosted at her Tampa mansion, guests were frequently treated to the indulgences of celebrity life: valet parking, string quartets on the lawn, premium cigars and champagne, and caviar-laden buffets.

The main recipients of the largess were military brass — including some of the nation’s most senior commanders — based at nearby MacDill Air Force Base.

Kelley flaunted her access to these military VIPs. . . . The investigations of Petraeus’s and Allen’s actions, nonetheless, have raised questions about how Kelley, a woman with no formal military role, cultivated such close ties to two of the nation’s most revered generals.

One former aide to Allen, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the case, suggested that Kelley had become a de facto social ambassador among high-ranking personnel at MacDill, home to the U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Middle Eastern diplomats in Washington also knew Ms. Kelley, who came from a Lebanese immigrant family and who helped arrange social activities when dignitaries from the region visited Tampa, diplomats said. She also sometimes attended parties at Washington embassies.

I guarantee you that Jill Khawam Kelley wasn’t hosting visits from dignitaries from Israel. And, other than those from Israel, every single “Middle Eastern diplomat” in Washington is a Muslim, most of them Muslim Arabs. And all of them Muslims with an agenda that is anti-Israel and anti-Western. And definitely not in America’s best interests. They come to Tampa for one reason and one reason only–to ingratiate themselves with the top military brass at CentCom at MacDill.

And Jill Khawam Kelley was their social director in that mission.

Kelley’s sister, Natalie Khawam, was married to a top Bush administration official, Grayson Wolfe, Director of Broader Middle East Initiatives and Iraqi Reconstruction at the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and frequently accompanied him on trips to the Middle East, including to Pakistan. Before that position, Wolfe was the Bush-installed Manager of the Private Sector Development Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq. How many of the Khawam’s insider Arab Muslim friends did he give sweetheart contracts to? Before It’s News has more and asks more questions about the consulting and contracting firm that Wolfe now heads. Although they are now embroiled in a bitter custody fight over their son, you have to wonder what influence Khawam had on him and what was done in the Middle East. She recently sued her former employer, a Jewish lawyer, Barry Cohen, but gave up after her lawsuit was shown to be phony. Cohen struck back and found that Khawam engaged in bankruptcy fraud.

My friend wasn’t so far-fetched when he insisted the Khawam chicks are modern day Mata Haris for the Muslim Arabs.

Just look at what they’ve accomplished for the Muslim Mid-East, all of it under the radar . . . until Paula Broadwell had the stupidity to send her threatening e-mails and Jill Khawam Kelley had the stupidity of complaining about it to shirtless FBI agent Frederic Humphries.
Title: Court Says Agency Classification Decision is Not “Logical”
Post by: bigdog on November 28, 2012, 11:00:50 AM
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2012/03/not_logical.html

From the article:

In an opinion published this week, DC District Judge Richard W. Roberts did an astonishing thing that federal courts almost never do:  He probed into the decision to classify a government document and concluded that it was not well-founded.  He ordered the agency to release the document under the Freedom of Information Act.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on November 30, 2012, 11:18:47 AM
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers & Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein
to Appear on Face the Nation (CBS) – Sunday, December 2, 2012



HPSCI Chairman Rogers and SSCI Chairwoman Feinstein will be guests on Face the Nation (CBS) on Sunday, December 2, 2012


Date:                          Sunday, December 2, 2012
Time:                          10:30am ET  - in the DC market  (check your local listings for air time)
Organization:           CBS
Show:                         Face the Nation

Topics:                       Developments in North Africa and the Middle East, Potential Cabinet Nominations, and the Fiscal Cliff
Title: CIA officer facing prison time for leaking to reporter
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 05, 2013, 02:15:26 PM


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/us/former-cia-officer-is-the-first-to-face-prison-for-a-classified-leak.html?emc=na
Title: Col. Ken Allard: Who leaked about STUXNET?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2013, 12:30:51 PM
ALLARD: Who leaked the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran?
The CIA nominee must be grilled about this damaging disclosure
By Col. Ken Allard
 Friday, January 18, 2013


Because of the looming conflict with Iran, Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be secretary of defense has attracted wide attention. Yet Senate Republicans may have a chance to advance their own national security agenda by zeroing in on John O. Brennan, President Obama’s choice for CIA director. This approach will require courage as well as a return to those thrilling days of yesteryear and the scandal-before-last.

Long before Benghazigate, we were still basking in the afterglow of the raid on Osama bin Laden and the joys of the Arab Spring when The New York Times published an astonishing story. In a book and a widely quoted series of articles by David Sanger, its chief Washington correspondent, the newspaper essentially published the beyond-top-secret playbook of the Obama national security team.

While sympathetically portraying a technically savvy president coolly orchestrating drone strikes against foreign terrorists, the book also dropped a truly astonishing revelation. The worrying appearance of the Stuxnet virus — infecting at least 100,000 computers around the globe — was actually blow-back, collateral damage from a U.S.-Israeli campaign to sabotage the centrifuges of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. It was difficult to know whether to be happy that a macho Barack Obama was bamboozling the mullahs or angry that a Pulitzer-hungry journalist had spilled the beans.

There were also other nagging worries. Since industrial sabotage is an act of war, the soft underbelly of the U.S. electronic infrastructure might be vulnerable to Iranian retaliation.

There was the usual amount of descrying and harrumphing with predictably bipartisan calls for congressional investigations. I even testified before one of them, telling the House Judiciary Committee that Mr. Sanger’s revelations could hardly have been more damaging had a team of KGB moles taken up residence in the West Wing. For a time, there was loose talk about subpoenas and follow-on investigations. However, there was little real stomach in a divided Congress to take on a Fourth Estate sanctimoniously defending its right to recycle national secrets into ratings, royalties and partisan advantage.

This is where Mr. Brennan comes in. A career CIA officer, Mr. Brennan is steeped in an organizational milieu that, to the unwashed, epitomizes secrecy. To the cognoscenti, however, artful press leaks are to the CIA what haute cuisine is to French culture. When a promising operative progresses toward the higher echelons, he typically is mentored by a more-skilled Auguste Escoffier, carefully groomed in the finer points of modern media practice. Rather than courageously presenting truth to power, the savvy intelligence officer views his press patsy as just another target to manipulate. The primary objective: Always make the boss and the agency look good.

If you don’t believe that, then you probably haven’t read any of Bob Woodward’s books. In “Obama’s Wars,” for example, he mined sources in the Obama transition team to reveal top-secret code words, the existence of the CIA’s “3,000-man covert Army in Afghanistan” and, for good measure, the offensive Computer Network Attack capabilities of the super-secret National Security Agency. How did Mr. Woodward do it? By convincing willing sources that they had nothing to fear by telling him what they knew, exactly as any competent intelligence agent does when recruiting spies.

Because the news is a highly competitive business, it is not surprising that Mr. Sanger and The New York Times had their own motivations for one-upping Mr. Woodward’s penetration of the Obama White House. There is little doubt those motivations included politics, specifically the polishing of the president’s national security resume. For precisely that reason, it is also likely that Mr. Sanger had what the FBI typically calls the “witting cooperation” of senior White House officials. Compare the Sanger and Woodward books, and certain names keep recurring, especially Tom Donilon, the national security adviser and his deputy, Mr. Brennan, who also oversaw the CIA drone program.

Because the Sanger book extensively profiled that previously covert program, it is worth asking — under oath and with corroborating witnesses — exactly what Mr. Brennan knew of The New York Times moles and when he knew it. Did he, for example, ever receive explicit or implicit instructions from his superiors in the White House to cooperate with Mr. Sanger or his principal sources? If so, from whom?

To some, Senate confirmation hearings might not be the ideal venue for revisiting old headlines. Yet Mr. Brennan may become CIA director at precisely the moment when the long-postponed Iranian confrontation reaches critical mass. As The New York Times reported last week, without any trace of irony, Iranian cyberteams are now mounting denial-of-service attacks against U.S. bank websites. Mr. Brennan, as an experienced intelligence officer, please begin your hearing by telling us why the mullahs might be conducting such unprovoked acts?

Retired Army Col. Ken Allard is a former NBC News military analyst and author on national security issues.
Title: IPT: Brennan very wrong man for the job
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2013, 03:23:21 PM


Obama CIA Nominee John Brennan Wrong for the Job
by Steven Emerson and John Rossomando
IPT News
February 5, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3902/obama-cia-nominee-john-brennan-wrong-for-the-job
 
America's top spy needs to be a steely-eyed realist, sensitive to emerging threats and keen about our foes' intent to deceive us.

Unfortunately, President Obama's nominee to head the CIA, Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, has shown a tendency to fall for the bait from radical Islamists. Globally, he repeatedly expressed a hope that "moderates" within Iran and its terror proxy Hizballah would steer their respective constituencies away from terrorism.
Domestically, he claims that radical Islam does not pose its own, unique threat to American security. He has helped strip language about "radical Islam," "jihad" and similar terms from government vernacular, choosing instead to refer to "violent extremism" in an attempt to deny terrorists religious credibility. When it comes to jihad, he stubbornly maintains the word does not belong in conversations about terror, no matter what terrorists themselves say.

Likewise, he also yielded to demands from American Islamists to purge law enforcement and intelligence training material of the terms "jihad" and "radical Islam."

Despite these positions, some American Islamists still oppose Brennan's nomination because he is considered the architect of the drone program which has killed scores of al-Qaida terrorists.

That should tell him something. But there is little in Brennan's record to indicate he'll learn from the experience.

Brennan Promotes Iran-Hizballah Outreach

Brennan's complacency regarding the jihad threat was made clear in May 2010, when he expressed a desire to encourage "moderate elements" of Hizballah, which is a State Department-designated terrorist organization.

"There is certainly the elements of Hizballah that are truly a concern to us what they're doing. And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements," a Reuters report quoted Brennan saying.

He did not explain where such elements could be found, how they could be identified, or what separated them from the Hizballah "extremists."

That was just the latest in a series of similar statements Brennan has made about Hizballah, the group which ranks second only to al-Qaida in killing Americans in terrorist attacks. The Iranian-founded and funded group "started out as purely a terrorist organization back in the early '80s and has evolved significantly over time," Brennan said in an Aug. 6, 2009 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And now it has members of parliament, in the cabinet; there are lawyers, doctors, others who are part of the Hezbollah organization.

"However, within Hezbollah, there's still a terrorist core. And hopefully those elements within the Shia community in Lebanon and within Hezbollah at large -- they're going to continue to look at that extremist terrorist core as being something that is anathema to what, in fact, they're trying to accomplish in terms of their aspirations about being part of the political process in Lebanon. And so, quite frankly, I'm pleased to see that a lot of Hezbollah individuals are in fact renouncing that type of terrorism and violence and are trying to participate in the political process in a very legitimate fashion."

In a paper published a year earlier, Brennan called on U.S. officials to "cease public Iran-bashing," and recommended that the U.S. "tolerate, and even … encourage, greater assimilation of Hizballah into Lebanon's political system, a process that is subject to Iranian influence."

In "The Conundrum of Iran: Strengthening Moderates without Acquiescing to Belligerence," published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science in July 2008, Brennan claimed that Hizballah's participation in Lebanese politics was evidence that it was leaving behind its terrorist roots:

"This political involvement is a far cry from Hizballah's genesis as solely a terrorist organization dedicated to murder, kidnapping, and violence. Not coincidentally, the evolution of Hizballah into a fully vested player in the Lebanese political system has been accompanied by a marked reduction in terrorist attacks carried out by the organization.

The best hope for maintaining this trend and for reducing the influence of violent extremists within the organization – as well as the influence of extremist Iranian officials who view Hizballah primarily as a pawn of Tehran – is to increase Hizballah's stake in Lebanon's struggling democratic processes."

The record since then could not be further from Brennan's idealistic hopes. Four Hizballah members have been indicted by an international tribunal in connection with the 2005 car-bomb assassination of Lebanon's President Rafiq Hariri. Hizballah has helped Iran send fighters and advisers into Syria to try to aid dictator Bashar al-Assad's ruthless assault on his own people. A new report finds Hizballah, working with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is responsible for a wave of terrorist plots throughout the world. Any move away from violence may have been a strategic lull aimed at avoiding being "caught in the crosshairs of Washington's 'war on terror.'"

That lull appears to be over, the report finds.

Brennan's analysis also was refuted by a senior Hizballah leader. Engaging in Lebanese parliamentary politics does not make Hizballah moderate and Hizballah politicians are still part of the mother ship.

"The same leadership that directs the parliamentary and government work also leads jihad actions," Naim Qassem, a deputy to Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah, told the Los Angeles Times.

The retired Israeli Brigadier General Shimon Shapira observed: "Hizbullah's own analysis of itself contradicts what Brennan has been writing and stating in recent years.
"Today, saying that Hizbullah has moderate elements that have moved away from terrorism can lead the political echelons in the West to ignore how Hizbullah is serving its Iranian sponsors by directly threatening Israel's civilian population. On May 20, 2010, Hizbullah military sources boasted to the Kuwaiti daily al-Rai that Israel will be bombarded with 15 tons of explosives a day if a future war breaks out. Hizbullah clearly does not care about the implications of its military build-up for the people of Lebanon, because it only seeks to serve the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

In his 2008 paper, Brennan also advocated direct engagement with Iran despite its well-earned reputation as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. He minimized the threat of Iran's nuclear weapons program and blamed American rhetoric as "brash labeling" for hardening Tehran's position toward the United States. Brennan's recommendations assumed Iranian interest in backing away from terrorism and a nuclear bomb.

A presidential envoy – Brennan suggested Colin Powell – would allow the United States to persuade Iran to behave more responsibly and peacefully and rein in its terrorist proxies, Brennan wrote.

"Initially, Washington should press Iranian officials to cease their vitriolic anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric and to condemn publicly acts of violence that clearly are terrorism. Iran can also take some more tangible steps. For example, Iranian financial and military support to Hezbollah gives Tehran significant leverage over its Lebanese ally, and Iran has the ability to direct Hezbollah to refrain from carrying out any attacks against civilian targets, such as settlements in northern Israel," he wrote.

History again proved Brennan's assumption wrong. While there is still talk of direct negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program, four years of tempered rhetoric and invitations for negotiation have done nothing to slow Iran's march toward the bomb.

Brennan Lets Radical Islamists Dictate Policy

During his time as a White House advisor, Brennan displayed a disturbing tendency to engage with Islamist groups which often are hostile to American anti-terrorism policies at home and abroad. Those meetings confer legitimacy upon the groups as representatives of all Muslim Americans, despite research indicating that the community is far too diverse to have anyone represent its concerns.

A Feb. 13, 2010 speech Brennan gave at the New York University School of Law serves as an example.

Organized by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the talk became an outlet for Brennan's argument that terrorists benefit from being identified by religious terms, including "jihadist." In doing so, Brennan waded into theological revisionism by denying the Quranic foundation exists, even though jihadists routinely cite chapter and verse.
"As Muslims you have seen a small fringe of fanatics who cloak themselves in religion, try to distort your faith, though they are clearly ignorant of the most fundamental teachings of Islam. Instead of creating, they destroy – bombing mosques, schools and hospitals. They are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children," Brennan said. "We're trying to be very careful and precise in our use of language, because I think the language we use and the images we project really do have resonance. It's the reason why I don't use the term jihadist to refer to terrorists. It gives them the religious legitimacy they so desperately seek, but I ain't gonna give it to them."

Like his positions on Iran and Hizballah, Brennan's views about using religious references like "jihad" have been uttered repeatedly and consistently. "President Obama [does not] see this challenge as a fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term 'jihad,' which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve," Brennan said in an Aug. 6, 2009 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

He returned to the narrative in a May 26, 2010 speech, also at CSIS.

"Nor do we describe our enemy as 'jihadists' or 'Islamists' because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenant of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children," Brennan said.

Brennan's interpretation of jihad stands in stark contrast with how the term has been consistently understood, especially by the intellectual founders of the global Islamist movement.

Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, whose ideas have influenced all subsequent Islamic extremists including Hamas and Al-Qaida, rejected the definition of jihad that Brennan suggests is correct.

In a pamphlet titled "Jihad," al-Banna wrote: "Many Muslims today mistakenly believe that fighting the enemy is jihad asghar (a lesser jihad) and that fighting one's ego is jihad akbar (a greater jihad). The following narration [athar] is quoted as proof: 'We have returned from the lesser jihad to embark on the greater jihad.' They said: 'What is the greater jihad?' He said: 'The jihad of the heart, or the jihad against one's ego. This narration is used by some to lessen the importance of fighting, to discourage any preparation for combat, and to deter any offering of jihad in Allah's way. This narration is not a saheeh (sound) tradition …"

Sayyid Qutb, al-Banna's successor in defining Islamist thought, clearly endorsed the idea of violent jihad, suggesting that it should not be fought merely in a defensive manner.
"Anyone who understands this particular character of this religion will also understand the place of Jihaad bis saif (striving through fighting), which is to clear the way for striving through preaching in the application of the Islamic movement. He will understand that Islam is not a 'defensive movement' in the narrow sense which today is technically called a 'defensive war.' This narrow meaning is ascribed to it by those who are under the pressure of circumstances and are defeated by the wily attacks of the orientalists, who distort the concept of Islamic Jihaad," Qutb wrote in his book Milestones. "It was a movement to wipe out tyranny and to introduce true freedom to mankind, using resources according to the actual human situation, and it had definite stages, for each of which it utilized new methods."

Even Brennan's NYU host advocated violent jihad. A December 1986 article appearing in ISNA's official magazine Islamic Horizons notes that "jihad of the sword is the actual taking up of arms against the evil situation with the intention of changing it," that "anyone killed in jihad is rewarded with Paradise," and that "a believer who participates in jihad is superior to a believer who does not."

Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the senior Muslim Brotherhood imam who the Obama administration reportedly has used in its negotiations with the Taliban, connects jihad with fighting in his book Fiqh of Jihad. In it, he says that Muslims may engage in violent jihad in the event Muslim lands are threatened by or occupied by non-Muslims as he contends is the case with Israel.

These Brotherhood treatises are relevant because Brennan's host, ISNA, was founded by Muslim Brotherhood members in the United States, some of whom remain active with the organization. And, although it denied any Brotherhood connection in 2007, exhibits in evidence in a Hamas-support trial show ISNA's "intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood." In addition, the federal judge in the case found "ample evidence" connecting ISNA to Muslim Brotherhood operations known as the Holy Land Foundation, the Islamic Association for Palestine and Hamas.

ISNA has sought to publicly moderate its image, yet it has kept radicals such as Jamal Badawi on its board of directors and granted a 2008 community-service award to Jamal Barzinji, a founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, as well as a former ISNA board member.

Badawi has defended violent jihad including suicide bombings and has suggested that Islam is superior to secular democracy. Barzinji was named in a federal affidavit as being closely associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Barzinji's name appears in a global phone book of Muslim Brotherhood members recovered by Italian and Swiss authorities in November 2001 from the home of Al-Taqwa Bank of Lugano founder Youssef Nada, one of the leaders of the international Muslim Brotherhood and an al-Qaida financier.

At the NYU event, Brennan was introduced by then-ISNA President Ingrid Mattson, who made Qutb's writings required reading in a course she taught. Mattson has advocated against using terms like "Islamic terrorism" since the earliest days after 9/11. During his speech, Brennan praised Mattson as "an academic whose research continues the rich tradition of Islamic scholarship and as the President of the Islamic Society of North America, where you have been a voice for the tolerance and diversity that defines Islam."
Brennan met privately around the time of the NYU speech with another advocate of ignoring the Islamic motivation driving many terrorists. Both Salam al-Marayati and his organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) have long records of defending suspected terrorists and terror supporters and of arguing the terrorist threat in America is exaggerated.

During a 2005 ISNA conference, al-Marayati blasted the idea that Muslims would be used as informants to thwart possible terrorist plots. "Counter-terrorism and counter-violence should be defined by us. We should define how an effective counter-terrorism policy should be pursued in this country," he said. "So, number one, we reject any effort, notion, suggestion that Muslims should start spying on one another."

The White House invited al-Marayati to attend the NYU speech despite his prior comments suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, condemning the FBI's use of informants in counter-terror investigations, and his argument that Hizballah engages in "legitimate resistance."

After the meeting, MPAC claimed credit for the administration's policy of sugar-coating terrorist motives. "Mr. Brennan made two important points in his address that signified the importance of MPAC's government engagement over the last 15 years in Washington," an MPAC statement said. Among them, "He rejected the label of 'jihadist' to describe terrorists, because it legitimates violent extremism with religious validation, a point MPAC made in its 2003 policy paper on counterterrorism."

Terrorists Disagree

While Brennan and his associates like Mattson and al-Marayati may wish to disconnect terrorism from religion, this strategy has proven meaningless among those who plot attacks against Americans. Many describe acting out of a belief that America is at war with Islam. Asserting that religious motivation doesn't exist does nothing to lessen the threat.

When Army Pvt. Naser Jason Abdo's mother asked her son what would drive him to plot a bombing and shooting attack on a restaurant that serves personnel at Fort Hood, Tex., his answer was succinct.

"The reason is religion, Mom," he said.

Similarly, would-be bombers Faisal Shahzad and Farooque Ahmed justified their attempts to blow people up in New York and Washington as part of a war, a jihad, they felt compelled to join.

"This time it's the war against people who believe in the book of Allah and follow the commandments, so this is a war against Allah," Shahzad said at his October 2010 sentencing for trying to detonate a car-bomb in Times Square. "So let's see how you can defeat your Creator, which you can never do. Therefore, the defeat of U.S. is imminent and will happen in the near future, inshallah [God willing], which will only give rise to much awaited Muslim caliphate, which is the only true world order."

Ahmed, who scouted subway stations along the Washington, D.C. Metro line in hopes of aiding a bombing plot, acted in response to "an incessant message that is delivered by radical followers of Islam," his lawyer said at Ahmed's April 2011 sentencing, "that one cannot be true to the faith unless they take action, including violent action, most especially violent action … that is a message that can unfortunately take root in individuals who feel like if they don't do something, that they literally will not find salvation under their faith."

Brennan grew prickly when challenged on this view of jihad. The Washington Times editorial board pressed him about the role of armed jihad in history during an Aug. 23, 2010 interview. After acknowledging that history – "Absolutely it has" happened – Brennan tried to deflect the question, saying "I'm not going to go into this sort of history discussion here."

He cut the interview short and walked out after the editorial board pressed the point, asking Brennan to distinguish between those historical armed jihads and al-Qaida's current jihad.

Brennan further displayed his eagerness to kowtow to Islamist demands in the fall of 2011. After a small number of materials in FBI training manuals and libraries were found to be excessively negative in describing Islam as a religion and Muslims as a people, Islamist groups demanded a purge of anything they considered offensive.

An Oct. 19, 2011 letter to Brennan written by Muslim Advocates Executive Director Farhana Khera and signed by 57 Muslim, Arab, and South Asian organizations demanded that Brennan create "an interagency task force, led by the White House," that would, among other things, review all counterterror trainers, so as to purge those that the Muslim organizations, which included many with Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood ties, found unacceptable. The task force would also "purge all federal government training materials of biased materials"; "implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training"; and more to ensure that only the message about Islam and jihad preferred by the signatories would get through to intelligence and law enforcement agents.
Brennan readily agreed, promising in a November 3, 2011 response to Khera written on White House stationery obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, that such an interagency task force was indeed "necessary," and agreeing to purge training programs of all materials that the Muslim groups found objectionable.

To this day, officials have declined to identify those with whom they consulted in identifying the material to be removed. During an April 2012 talk at the New York Police Department, Brennan refused to answer when asked specifically whether Muslim Advocates was among those consulted.

"Now I'm not going to, you know, take on any individuals or claim or charge on this. But I just want to underscore that at least from the national government perspective and all my discussions with Commissioner Kelly and others, there is a real interest in trying to make sure that all of the different communities of different religious backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, political affiliations, have an opportunity to express themselves, so that we are able to do this," he said. "When we talk about, you mentioned about, you know, Muslim Advocates … obviously al-Qaeda, which is, purports to be an Islamic organization, is anything but; it's a murderous organization. They certainly misrepresent what they stand for. But we need to make sure that we're able to talk with the Muslim community here in the United States. The Muslim community is as much a part of the United States as any other community of any religious background. The Muslim community is part of the solution on terrorism, not part of the problem. We need to make sure that we have all the expertise, the representation and the perspective, so that we can bring it to bear."

But in his letter to Khera, Brennan acquiesced to virtually every demand.

"We share your sense of concern over these recent unfortunate incidents, and are moving forward to ensure problems are addressed with a keen sense of urgency," he wrote. "They do not reflect the vision that the President has put forward, nor do they represent the kind of approach that builds the partnerships that are necessary to counter violent extremism, and to protect our young people and our homeland. American's greatest strength is its values, and we are committed to pursuing policies and approaches that draw strength from our values and our people irrespective of their race, religion or ethnic background.

While much work remains, I am confident that concrete actions are being taken to address the valid concerns you raised. Thank you again for your letter and for your leadership in addressing an isue that is crticial to ensuring the security of the United States."

Denies Religious Dogma Entices Terrorists

In addition to purging training material at the behest of Islamist groups, Brennan's theories about what drives people to plot terrorist acts betrays a further desire to conceal religious dogma. Economic conditions, more than religious beliefs, account for the draw of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, he has said.

"This includes those upstream factors – the political and economic causes and conditions that help to fuel hatred and violence, including loss of faith in political systems to improve daily life and the vulnerability of young minds to predators like gangs and terrorist recruiters," Brennan said during his NYU speech. "And while poverty and lack of opportunity do not cause terrorism, it is obvious that the lack of education, of basic human services and hope for the future make vulnerable populations more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death."

That may be true in some cases. But numerous examples expose this as a misguided stereotype. And terrorist leaders – those who recruit terrorist operatives – hail from professional classes. Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is a physician. So was Palestinian Islamic Jihad founder Fathi Shikaki. Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook has a master's degree and pursued a PhD. Would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad had a steady job and a decent wage. Many of the 9/11 hijackers were middle class or affluent. The Times of London observed in an April 3, 2005 article that a large percentage of 500 al-Qaida members had discovered that an overwhelming percentage came from middle class or affluent backgrounds.

Scholar Daniel Pipes reached a similar conclusion in a Winter 2002 article examining militants held in Egyptian jails.

"What is true of Egypt holds equally true elsewhere: Like fascism and Marxism-Leninism in their heydays, militant Islam attracts highly competent, motivated and ambitious individuals. Far from being the laggards of society, they are its leaders," Pipes wrote.

INTERPOL similarly warned in a Sept. 21, 2010 press release that the proliferation of extremist websites showed that al-Qaida recruiters were deliberately targeting middle-class youth.

"Speaking at the two-day International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) summit (21-22 September) in Paris … INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said that terrorist recruiters exploited the web to their full advantage as they targeted young, middle class vulnerable individuals who were usually not 'on the radar of law enforcement,'" the INTERPOL press release said.

Al-Qaida publications such as Inspire magazine, along with its other media, make it clear that its followers are driven by religious zeal rather than by economics. Its slick, glossy production and the content of its articles appealed to educated people with access to at least some money. "How to Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom" is a notorious example.

Fawwaz bin Muhammad Al-Nashami, leader of the jihadists who killed 22 people in a 1994 attack on Americans in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, invoked Islam's prophet: "We are Mujahideen, and we want the Americans. We have not come to aim a weapon at the Muslims, but to purge the Arabian Peninsula, according to the will of our Prophet Muhammad, of the infidels and the polytheists who are killing our brothers in Afghanistan and Iraq. "

John Brennan's recipe for fighting terror seems to cast these motivations aside. That's the mindset poised to direct American intelligence gathering for the next four years.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 05, 2013, 04:52:06 PM
This, like other times Buraq does something to empower the global jihad isn't accidental.
Title: Allard: Who leaked the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 07, 2013, 09:51:48 AM
ALLARD: Who leaked the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran? (Marc: inter alia, this open admission gives Iran, China, Russia et al propaganda cover for their deeds)
The CIA nominee must be grilled about this damaging disclosure
By Col. Ken Allard
Friday, January 18, 2013

 
Because of the looming conflict with Iran, Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be secretary of defense has attracted wide attention. Yet Senate Republicans may have a chance to advance their own national security agenda by zeroing in on John O. Brennan, President Obama’s choice for CIA director. This approach will require courage as well as a return to those thrilling days of yesteryear and the scandal-before-last.
 
Long before Benghazigate, we were still basking in the afterglow of the raid on Osama bin Laden and the joys of the Arab Spring when The New York Times published an astonishing story. In a book and a widely quoted series of articles by David Sanger, its chief Washington correspondent, the newspaper essentially published the beyond-top-secret playbook of the Obama national security team.
 
While sympathetically portraying a technically savvy president coolly orchestrating drone strikes against foreign terrorists, the book also dropped a truly astonishing revelation. The worrying appearance of the Stuxnet virus — infecting at least 100,000 computers around the globe — was actually blow-back, collateral damage from a U.S.-Israeli campaign to sabotage the centrifuges of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. It was difficult to know whether to be happy that a macho Barack Obama was bamboozling the mullahs or angry that a Pulitzer-hungry journalist had spilled the beans.
 
There were also other nagging worries. Since industrial sabotage is an act of war, the soft underbelly of the U.S. electronic infrastructure might be vulnerable to Iranian retaliation.
 
There was the usual amount of descrying and harrumphing with predictably bipartisan calls for congressional investigations. I even testified before one of them, telling the House Judiciary Committee that Mr. Sanger’s revelations could hardly have been more damaging had a team of KGB moles taken up residence in the West Wing. For a time, there was loose talk about subpoenas and follow-on investigations. However, there was little real stomach in a divided Congress to take on a Fourth Estate sanctimoniously defending its right to recycle national secrets into ratings, royalties and partisan advantage.
 
This is where Mr. Brennan comes in. A career CIA officer, Mr. Brennan is steeped in an organizational milieu that, to the unwashed, epitomizes secrecy. To the cognoscenti, however, artful press leaks are to the CIA what haute cuisine is to French culture. When a promising operative progresses toward the higher echelons, he typically is mentored by a more-skilled Auguste Escoffier, carefully groomed in the finer points of modern media practice. Rather than courageously presenting truth to power, the savvy intelligence officer views his press patsy as just another target to manipulate. The primary objective: Always make the boss and the agency look good.
 
If you don’t believe that, then you probably haven’t read any of Bob Woodward’s books. In “Obama’s Wars,” for example, he mined sources in the Obama transition team to reveal top-secret code words, the existence of the CIA’s “3,000-man covert Army in Afghanistan” and, for good measure, the offensive Computer Network Attack capabilities of the super-secret National Security Agency. How did Mr. Woodward do it? By convincing willing sources that they had nothing to fear by telling him what they knew, exactly as any competent intelligence agent does when recruiting spies.
 
Because the news is a highly competitive business, it is not surprising that Mr. Sanger and The New York Times had their own motivations for one-upping Mr. Woodward’s penetration of the Obama White House. There is little doubt those motivations included politics, specifically the polishing of the president’s national security resume. For precisely that reason, it is also likely that Mr. Sanger had what the FBI typically calls the “witting cooperation” of senior White House officials. Compare the Sanger and Woodward books, and certain names keep recurring, especially Tom Donilon, the national security adviser and his deputy, Mr. Brennan, who also oversaw the CIA drone program.
 
Because the Sanger book extensively profiled that previously covert program, it is worth asking — under oath and with corroborating witnesses — exactly what Mr. Brennan knew of The New York Times moles and when he knew it. Did he, for example, ever receive explicit or implicit instructions from his superiors in the White House to cooperate with Mr. Sanger or his principal sources? If so, from whom?
 
To some, Senate confirmation hearings might not be the ideal venue for revisiting old headlines. Yet Mr. Brennan may become CIA director at precisely the moment when the long-postponed Iranian confrontation reaches critical mass. As The New York Times reported last week, without any trace of irony, Iranian cyberteams are now mounting denial-of-service attacks against U.S. bank websites. Mr. Brennan, as an experienced intelligence officer, please begin your hearing by telling us why the mullahs might be conducting such unprovoked acts?
 
Retired Army Col. Ken Allard is a former NBC News military analyst and author on national security issues.


Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/18/who-leaked-the-stuxnet-virus-attack-on-iran/#ixzz2KEk944hG
 Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
Title: EX-FBI agent claims Brennan is a secret agent for the Saudis , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2013, 08:34:30 PM
I have not had a chance to give this a serious look yet , , ,

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/11/rumor-check-ex-fbi-agent-claims-obamas-cia-nominee-is-really-a-secret-muslim-recruited-by-saudis/
Title: Written by our own BigDog!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2013, 02:38:53 PM


http://www.afio.com/publications/GIBSON%20Draft%20IntelOversight%20Draft%20ver2.pdf
Title: Re: Written by our own BigDog!
Post by: G M on February 19, 2013, 02:44:24 PM


http://www.afio.com/publications/GIBSON%20Draft%20IntelOversight%20Draft%20ver2.pdf

Very well done.
Title: Re: Written by our own BigDog!
Post by: bigdog on February 19, 2013, 02:53:31 PM


http://www.afio.com/publications/GIBSON%20Draft%20IntelOversight%20Draft%20ver2.pdf

Very well done.

Thank you, GM. I appreciate it.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2013, 03:32:43 PM
I confess to being more than a little proud of our little braintrust  :-D
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on February 23, 2013, 03:14:36 PM
He doesn't have a hotness score at rate my professors dot com though....


 :-D
Title: ODNI intel report
Post by: bigdog on March 13, 2013, 06:47:19 AM
http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Intelligence%20Reports/2013%20ATA%20SFR%20for%20SSCI%2012%20Mar%202013.pdf
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2013, 07:08:29 AM
Care to give us a brief description of what it is BD?
Title: Re: ODNI intel report
Post by: bigdog on March 13, 2013, 07:47:08 AM
http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Intelligence%20Reports/2013%20ATA%20SFR%20for%20SSCI%2012%20Mar%202013.pdf

2013 Report on Worldwide Threat Assessment of US Intelligence Community presented to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Title: alarms on intelligence blind spots because of AQ focus
Post by: bigdog on March 22, 2013, 04:17:28 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/secret-report-raises-alarms-on-intelligence-blind-spots-because-of-aq-focus/2013/03/20/1f8f1834-90d6-11e2-9cfd-36d6c9b5d7ad_story.html

From the article:

U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that demands on spy agencies have grown in recent years, driven by political turmoil associated with the Arab Spring, the cyber-espionage threat posed by China and the splintering of militant groups in North Africa. The pressure has been compounded by shrinking or stagnant budgets for most agencies after years of double-digit increases.
Title: 10 best real-life spies
Post by: bigdog on April 15, 2013, 04:13:15 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2013/apr/13/10-best-real-life-spies?CMP=twt_gu&CMP=SOCNETTXT6965#/?picture=407008970&index=0
Title: Brookings: Organizing and Managing Intelligence Analysis to Fight Terrorism
Post by: bigdog on April 28, 2013, 04:03:25 AM
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/04/22-intelligence-terrorism#ref-id=20130422_fullevent
Title: Boston's suspects uncle was married to top CIA official
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 04, 2013, 09:22:18 AM
Reliability unknown:

http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/boston-suspects-mom-was-also-in-terror-database-sources-tell-ap-theblaze-com/
Title: Huma Abedin's Nefarious Connections...
Post by: objectivist1 on May 20, 2013, 10:23:24 AM
More Secrets From Huma Abedin

Posted By Arnold Ahlert On May 20, 2013 - www.frontpagemag.com

To order the Freedom Center’s pamphlet, “The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration” by Frank Gaffney, click here.

Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary’s Clinton’s long time aide with extensive ties to Muslim Brotherhood groups, was granted an arrangement by the State Department to do outside consulting work, even as she remained a top advisor in the Department. Abedin did not disclose either the arrangement, or how much she earned from it, on her financial report, despite a requirement that public officials must disclose significant sources of income. Clinton advisor Philippe Reines contended she was under no obligation to do so.

Abedin, who has served Clinton for 15 years, became a “special government employee” when she returned from maternity leave in June 2012, according to an unidentified source familiar with the arrangement. According to several sources who spoke to Politico, Abedin did work for outside clients, and one of her friends confirmed they totaled four entities in all: the State Department, Hillary Clinton, the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a firm co-founded by Doug Band, a former counselor for Bill Clinton.

Teneo, which promotes itself as a company that “brings together the disciplines of government and public affairs, investor and public relations and investment banking advisory in an integrated approach that allows us to provide clients with unparalleled strategic counsel and operational support,” has advised clients such as Coca Cola and MF Global, the brokerage firm that went bankrupt while it was being run by Jon Corzine, former Governor of New Jersey, and big-donor “bundler” for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

The disclosure was revealed as Abedin’s husband, disgraced former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, has begun preparations for a New York City mayoral run next year in an attempt to resuscitate his career. The city’s Conflict of Interest Board requires mayoral candidates to disclose personal financial information, including spousal sources of income, but that part of a candidate’s filing is not made public. Furthermore, because Abedin relinquished her job as deputy chief of staff last June, that change abrogated her requirement to disclose private earnings for the rest of the year on her own disclosure forms. The change of Abedin’s employment status was done so quietly, she continued to be identified in news reports as employed in her former job. On March 1, Abedin was tapped to run Clinton’s post-State Department transition team, comprised of a six-person “transition office” located in Washington.

Good government groups have questioned the potential conflict of interest that representing the public, while maintaining private clients, suggests. “If she was being held out as a deputy chief of staff, it would be highly unusual for her to be a part-time employee or a consultant,” said Melanie Sloane, executive director of CREW, an ethics watchdog group. “Being a deputy chief of staff at the State Department is generally considered more than a full-time job.”

It is not clear what role, if any, Hillary Clinton played in approving Abedin’s transition to her new job. State Department officials, as well as people who work with the Clintons, refused to talk on the record about the arrangement. And while Weiner released a copy of the couple’s 2012 tax return revealing income of more than $490,000, he also declined to discuss what portion of that income was earned by Abedin apart from her job at State, which paid her around $135,000 for the year. The remaining amount of approximately $365,000 combines consulting fees for both husband and wife, sources said.

The change in Abedin’s status permitted her to work from home in New York, rather than at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., allowing her to spend more time with her husband and child. While Abedin was pregnant, Weiner was forced to resign from his congressional seat when it was discovered that he had Tweeted sexually charged messages, as well as nude photos of himself, to several women. Weiner vehemently denied the allegations at first, saying his account had been hacked. But mounting political pressure forced him to admit the truth and abruptly resign.

Abedin’s arrangement is similar to those of other Clinton loyalists who received compensation for their work on Clinton’s government staff, and her political action committee, while she was a U.S. Senator from New York. Furthermore, while there is no exact number of State Department officials who have a similar arrangement, a Department source told Politico it was “not uncommon.”

Perhaps not. But Abedin is anything but a common government employee. While the mainstream media remains temporarily focused on Abedin’s role with regard to her husband’s political campaign, it remains calculatingly incurious about her work with the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, and the tens of millions of dollars in donations it has received from such entities as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the governments of Kuwait and Qatar, Saudi businessman Nasser Al-Rashid, who has close ties to the Saudi royal family, Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi, reputed to be one of the richest men in the world, and a group called Friends of Saudi Arabia and the Dubai Foundation.

Abedin’s earlier career also remains below the radar as well. She began working with Hillary Clinton in 1996, as the then-First Lady’s intern. She remained a loyal staffer as Clinton transitioned to the Senate, and the State Department.

During part of that time, Abedin had another job as well. From 1996-2008, she also worked as assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), a publication founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef.

Naseef was also secretary general of the Muslim World League in Saudi Arabia, a highly significant Muslim Brotherhood organization Osama Bin Laden once characterized as one of his terrorist group’s chief funding sources.

Using that connection, Naseef founded the Rabita Trust, a designated terrorist organization. In the late seventies, he hired Abedin’s parents to run his newly formed Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA). Editing its journal has remained a family enterprise to this day, and Naseef’s tenure as a member of the journal’s advisory editorial board, seven years of which coincided with Huma’s Abedin’s tenure there, lasted until 2003–the same year he was named as a defendant in a civil case brought by victims of 9/11. Naseef was dropped from the suit in 2010, when a court decided it lacked jurisdiction over him.

Dr. Saleha Abedin, Huma’s mother, still edits the JMMA. She took over when Huma’s father, Syed Zainul Abedin, passed away. Both of Abedin’s parents, as well as her brother, Hassan Abedin, have deep, documented ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, her mother runs the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, which is part of yet another terror-designated organization known as the Union of Good.

It remains impossible to understand how Abedin received security clearance to work at the State Department, which allows her access to top-secret documents. Even if one makes the case that she should not be tainted by the dubious relationships maintained by her family members, it is impossible to disassociate her from her own relationship with Abdullah Omar Naseef and his organization.

Yet in a testament to the power of PC-inspired denial, when these and other sordid relationships were documented in a letter sent by Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), and Tom Rooney (R-FL) to the State Department’s Deputy Inspector General, politicians in both parties, as well as the mainstream media, accused Bachmann of engaging in a McCarthy-esque smear campaign.

The letter to the Inspector General was sent in June, the same month Abedin relinquished her position as deputy chief of staff. Whether one assumes this to be a mere coincidence or not, there is no denying that Abedin’s change in status was kept secret for nearly a year. The Obama administration could quickly put an end to this controversy by revealing the contents of Abedin’s responses contained in Standard Form 86, a “Questionnaire for National Security Positions.” That questionnaire should have been completed prior to Abedin serving in her capacity at State beginning in 2009.

No doubt a State Department up to its neck in the Benghazi scandal is too busy to respond.
Title: Espionage Act explained
Post by: bigdog on May 23, 2013, 04:38:28 AM
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/05/an-explainer-on-the-espionage-act-and-the-third-party-leak-prosecutions/
Title: The Case for Drones
Post by: bigdog on May 23, 2013, 04:39:04 AM
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-case-for-drones/
Title: AG letter to Leahy
Post by: bigdog on May 23, 2013, 04:39:42 AM
http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/AG-letter-5-22-132.pdf
Title: Re: The Case for Drones
Post by: DougMacG on May 23, 2013, 01:05:01 PM
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-case-for-drones/

Excellent post BD, a very well reasoned article!  The unmanned aircraft used prudently can be an equalizer when fighting the martyr enemy who is not afraid of losing his own life.  Drone use against terror targets without a liberal uproar has been one of the few benefits we received by having Barack Obama as our President.  The movement to ban them will start as soon as a Republican again becomes Commander in Chief.  Understanding and assessing their value now is quite timely IMO.

The potential for mis-use is huge, and the blowback point is well covered.  Enemies and rivals will someday have these same capabilities that we will have to deal with.  The negatives do not change the positive case for having them and using them when needed for our own national security.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2013, 08:07:07 PM
BD has been paying attention to this subject for some time now, this is not the first quality post he has made on the subject.
Title: Pres. Obama's NDU speech on drones/Gitmo
Post by: bigdog on May 24, 2013, 10:57:58 AM
The Future of our Fight against Terrorism
 Remarks of President Barack Obama – As Prepared for Delivery
National Defense University
May 23, 2013
 
As Prepared for Delivery –
It’s an honor to return to the National Defense University. Here, at Fort McNair, Americans have served in uniform since 1791– standing guard in the early days of the Republic, and contemplating the future of warfare here in the 21st century.
For over two centuries, the United States has been bound together by founding documents that defined who we are as Americans, and served as our compass through every type of change. Matters of war and peace are no different. Americans are deeply ambivalent about war, but having fought for our independence, we know that a price must be paid for freedom. From the Civil War, to our struggle against fascism, and through the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War, battlefields have changed, and technology has evolved. But our commitment to Constitutional principles has weathered every war, and every war has come to an end.
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a new dawn of democracy took hold abroad, and a decade of peace and prosperity arrived at home. For a moment, it seemed the 21st century would be a tranquil time. Then, on September 11th 2001, we were shaken out of complacency. Thousands were taken from us, as clouds of fire, metal and ash descended upon a sun-filled morning. This was a different kind of war. No armies came to our shores, and our military was not the principal target. Instead, a group of terrorists came to kill as many civilians as they could.
And so our nation went to war. We have now been at war for well over a decade. I won’t review the full history. What’s clear is that we quickly drove al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but then shifted our focus and began a new war in Iraq. This carried grave consequences for our fight against al Qaeda, our standing in the world, and – to this day – our interests in a vital region.
Meanwhile, we strengthened our defenses – hardening targets, tightening transportation security, and giving law enforcement new tools to prevent terror. Most of these changes were sound. Some caused inconvenience. But some, like expanded surveillance, raised difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy. And in some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values – by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.
After I took office, we stepped up the war against al Qaeda, but also sought to change its course. We relentlessly targeted al Qaeda’s leadership. We ended the war in Iraq, and brought nearly 150,000 troops home. We pursued a new strategy in Afghanistan, and increased our training of Afghan forces. We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.
Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants. There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure. Fewer of our troops are in harm’s way, and over the next 19 months they will continue to come home. Our alliances are strong, and so is our standing in the world. In sum, we are safer because of our efforts.
Now make no mistake: our nation is still threatened by terrorists. From Benghazi to Boston, we have been tragically reminded of that truth. We must recognize, however, that the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11. With a decade of experience to draw from, now is the time to ask ourselves hard questions – about the nature of today’s threats, and how we should confront them.
These questions matter to every American. For over the last decade, our nation has spent well over a trillion dollars on war, exploding our deficits and constraining our ability to nation build here at home. Our service-members and their families have sacrificed far more on our behalf. Nearly 7,000 Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice. Many more have left a part of themselves on the battlefield, or brought the shadows of battle back home. From our use of drones to the detention of terrorist suspects, the decisions we are making will define the type of nation – and world – that we leave to our children.
So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society. What we can do – what we must do – is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend. To define that strategy, we must make decisions based not on fear, but hard-earned wisdom. And that begins with understanding the threat we face.
Today, the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on a path to defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us. They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston. They have not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11. Instead, what we’ve seen is the emergence of various al Qaeda affiliates. From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse, with Al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula – AQAP –the most active in plotting against our homeland. While none of AQAP’s efforts approach the scale of 9/11 they have continued to plot acts of terror, like the attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009.
Unrest in the Arab World has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria. Here, too, there are differences from 9/11. In some cases, we confront state-sponsored networks like Hizbollah that engage in acts of terror to achieve political goals. Others are simply collections of local militias or extremists interested in seizing territory. While we are vigilant for signs that these groups may pose a transnational threat, most are focused on operating in the countries and regions where they are based. That means we will face more localized threats like those we saw in Benghazi, or at the BP oil facility in Algeria, in which local operatives – in loose affiliation with regional networks – launch periodic attacks against Western diplomats, companies, and other soft targets, or resort to kidnapping and other criminal enterprises to fund their operations.
Finally, we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States. Whether it’s a shooter at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin; a plane flying into a building in Texas; or the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City – America has confronted many forms of violent extremism in our time. Deranged or alienated individuals – often U.S. citizens or legal residents – can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad. That pull towards extremism appears to have led to the shooting at Fort Hood, and the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
Lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism. We must take these threats seriously, and do all that we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11. In the 1980s, we lost Americans to terrorism at our Embassy in Beirut; at our Marine Barracks in Lebanon; on a cruise ship at sea; at a disco in Berlin; and on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. In the 1990s, we lost Americans to terrorism at the World Trade Center; at our military facilities in Saudi Arabia; and at our Embassy in Kenya. These attacks were all deadly, and we learned that left unchecked, these threats can grow. But if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.
Moreover, we must recognize that these threats don’t arise in a vacuum. Most, though not all, of the terrorism we face is fueled by a common ideology – a belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West, and that violence against Western targets, including civilians, is justified in pursuit of a larger cause. Of course, this ideology is based on a lie, for the United States is not at war with Islam; and this ideology is rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, who are the most frequent victims of terrorist acts.
Nevertheless, this ideology persists, and in an age in which ideas and images can travel the globe in an instant, our response to terrorism cannot depend on military or law enforcement alone. We need all elements of national power to win a battle of wills and ideas. So let me discuss the components of such a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy.
First, we must finish the work of defeating al Qaeda and its associated forces.
In Afghanistan, we will complete our transition to Afghan responsibility for security. Our troops will come home. Our combat mission will come to an end. And we will work with the Afghan government to train security forces, and sustain a counter-terrorism force which ensures that al Qaeda can never again establish a safe-haven to launch attacks against us or our allies.
Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America. In many cases, this will involve partnerships with other countries. Thousands of Pakistani soldiers have lost their lives fighting extremists. In Yemen, we are supporting security forces that have reclaimed territory from AQAP. In Somalia, we helped a coalition of African nations push al Shabaab out of its strongholds. In Mali, we are providing military aid to a French-led intervention to push back al Qaeda in the Maghreb, and help the people of Mali reclaim their future.
Much of our best counter-terrorism cooperation results in the gathering and sharing of intelligence; the arrest and prosecution of terrorists. That’s how a Somali terrorist apprehended off the coast of Yemen is now in prison in New York. That’s how we worked with European allies to disrupt plots from Denmark to Germany to the United Kingdom. That’s how intelligence collected with Saudi Arabia helped us stop a cargo plane from being blown up over the Atlantic.
But despite our strong preference for the detention and prosecution of terrorists, sometimes this approach is foreclosed. Al Qaeda and its affiliates try to gain a foothold in some of the most distant and unforgiving places on Earth. They take refuge in remote tribal regions. They hide in caves and walled compounds. They train in empty deserts and rugged mountains.
In some of these places – such as parts of Somalia and Yemen – the state has only the most tenuous reach into the territory. In other cases, the state lacks the capacity or will to take action. It is also not possible for America to simply deploy a team of Special Forces to capture every terrorist. And even when such an approach may be possible, there are places where it would pose profound risks to our troops and local civilians– where a terrorist compound cannot be breached without triggering a firefight with surrounding tribal communities that pose no threat to us, or when putting U.S. boots on the ground may trigger a major international crisis.
To put it another way, our operation in Pakistan against Osama bin Laden cannot be the norm. The risks in that case were immense; the likelihood of capture, although our preference, was remote given the certainty of resistance; the fact that we did not find ourselves confronted with civilian casualties, or embroiled in an extended firefight, was a testament to the meticulous planning and professionalism of our Special Forces – but also depended on some luck. And even then, the cost to our relationship with Pakistan – and the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory – was so severe that we are just now beginning to rebuild this important partnership.
It is in this context that the United States has taken lethal, targeted action against al Qaeda and its associated forces, including with remotely piloted aircraft commonly referred to as drones. As was true in previous armed conflicts, this new technology raises profound questions – about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law; about accountability and morality.
Let me address these questions. To begin with, our actions are effective. Don’t take my word for it. In the intelligence gathered at bin Laden’s compound, we found that he wrote, “we could lose the reserves to the enemy’s air strikes. We cannot fight air strikes with explosives.” Other communications from al Qaeda operatives confirm this as well. Dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, U.S. transit systems, European cities and our troops in Afghanistan. Simply put, these strikes have saved lives.
Moreover, America’s actions are legal. We were attacked on 9/11. Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces. We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first. So this is a just war – a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.
And yet as our fight enters a new phase, America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion. To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power – or risk abusing it. That’s why, over the last four years, my Administration has worked vigorously to establish a framework that governs our use of force against terrorists – insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday.
In the Afghan war theater, we must support our troops until the transition is complete at the end of 2014. That means we will continue to take strikes against high value al Qaeda targets, but also against forces that are massing to support attacks on coalition forces. However, by the end of 2014, we will no longer have the same need for force protection, and the progress we have made against core al Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.
Beyond the Afghan theater, we only target al Qaeda and its associated forces. Even then, the use of drones is heavily constrained. America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists – our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute them. America cannot take strikes wherever we choose – our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty. America does not take strikes to punish individuals – we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.
This last point is critical, because much of the criticism about drone strikes – at home and abroad – understandably centers on reports of civilian casualties. There is a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties, and non-governmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives. To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places –like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold. Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.
Where foreign governments cannot or will not effectively stop terrorism in their territory, the primary alternative to targeted, lethal action is the use of conventional military options. As I’ve said, even small Special Operations carry enormous risks. Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage. And invasions of these territories lead us to be viewed as occupying armies; unleash a torrent of unintended consequences; are difficult to contain; and ultimately empower those who thrive on violent conflict. So it is false to assert that putting boots on the ground is less likely to result in civilian deaths, or to create enemies in the Muslim world. The result would be more U.S. deaths, more Blackhawks down, more confrontations with local populations, and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars.
So yes, the conflict with al Qaeda, like all armed conflict, invites tragedy. But by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us, and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life. Indeed, our efforts must also be measured against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of civilians died in a war where the boundaries of battle were blurred. In Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the courage and discipline of our troops, thousands of civilians have been killed. So neither conventional military action, nor waiting for attacks to occur, offers moral safe-harbor. Neither does a sole reliance on law enforcement in territories that have no functioning police or security services – and indeed, have no functioning law.
This is not to say that the risks are not real. Any U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies, and impacts public opinion overseas. Our laws constrain the power of the President, even during wartime, and I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. The very precision of drones strikes, and the necessary secrecy involved in such actions can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites. It can also lead a President and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.
For this reason, I’ve insisted on strong oversight of all lethal action. After I took office, my Administration began briefing all strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan to the appropriate committees of Congress. Let me repeat that – not only did Congress authorize the use of force, it is briefed on every strike that America takes. That includes the one instance when we targeted an American citizen: Anwar Awlaki, the chief of external operations for AQAP.
This week, I authorized the declassification of this action, and the deaths of three other Americans in drone strikes, to facilitate transparency and debate on this issue, and to dismiss some of the more outlandish claims. For the record, I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen – with a drone, or a shotgun – without due process. Nor should any President deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.
But when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team
That’s who Anwar Awlaki was – he was continuously trying to kill people. He helped oversee the 2010 plot to detonate explosive devices on two U.S. bound cargo planes. He was involved in planning to blow up an airliner in 2009. When Farouk Abdulmutallab – the Christmas Day bomber – went to Yemen in 2009, Awlaki hosted him, approved his suicide operation, and helped him tape a martyrdom video to be shown after the attack. His last instructions were to blow up the airplane when it was over American soil. I would have detained and prosecuted Awlaki if we captured him before he carried out a plot. But we couldn’t. And as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took out Awlaki.
Of course, the targeting of any Americans raises constitutional issues that are not present in other strikes – which is why my Administration submitted information about Awlaki to the Department of Justice months before Awlaki was killed, and briefed the Congress before this strike as well. But the high threshold that we have set for taking lethal action applies to all potential terrorist targets, regardless of whether or not they are American citizens. This threshold respects the inherent dignity of every human life. Alongside the decision to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way, the decision to use force against individuals or groups – even against a sworn enemy of the United States – is the hardest thing I do as President. But these decisions must be made, given my responsibility to protect the American people.
Going forward, I have asked my Administration to review proposals to extend oversight of lethal actions outside of warzones that go beyond our reporting to Congress. Each option has virtues in theory, but poses difficulties in practice. For example, the establishment of a special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action has the benefit of bringing a third branch of government into the process, but raises serious constitutional issues about presidential and judicial authority. Another idea that’s been suggested – the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch – avoids those problems, but may introduce a layer of bureaucracy into national-security decision-making, without inspiring additional public confidence in the process. Despite these challenges, I look forward to actively engaging Congress to explore these – and other – options for increased oversight.
I believe, however, that the use of force must be seen as part of a larger discussion about a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy. Because for all the focus on the use of force, force alone cannot make us safe. We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war – through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments – will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.
So the next element of our strategy involves addressing the underlying grievances and conflicts that feed extremism, from North Africa to South Asia. As we’ve learned this past decade, this is a vast and complex undertaking. We must be humble in our expectation that we can quickly resolve deep rooted problems like poverty and sectarian hatred. Moreover, no two countries are alike, and some will undergo chaotic change before things get better. But our security and values demand that we make the effort.
This means patiently supporting transitions to democracy in places like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya – because the peaceful realization of individual aspirations will serve as a rebuke to violent extremists. We must strengthen the opposition in Syria, while isolating extremist elements – because the end of a tyrant must not give way to the tyranny of terrorism. We are working to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians – because it is right, and because such a peace could help reshape attitudes in the region. And we must help countries modernize economies, upgrade education, and encourage entrepreneurship – because American leadership has always been elevated by our ability to connect with peoples’ hopes, and not simply their fears.
Success on these fronts requires sustained engagement, but it will also require resources. I know that foreign aid is one of the least popular expenditures – even though it amounts to less than one percent of the federal budget. But foreign assistance cannot be viewed as charity. It is fundamental to our national security, and any sensible long-term strategy to battle extremism. Moreover, foreign assistance is a tiny fraction of what we spend fighting wars that our assistance might ultimately prevent. For what we spent in a month in Iraq at the height of the war, we could be training security forces in Libya, maintaining peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors, feeding the hungry in Yemen, building schools in Pakistan, and creating reservoirs of goodwill that marginalize extremists.
America cannot carry out this work if we do not have diplomats serving in dangerous places. Over the past decade, we have strengthened security at our Embassies, and I am implementing every recommendation of the Accountability Review Board which found unacceptable failures in Benghazi. I have called on Congress to fully fund these efforts to bolster security, harden facilities, improve intelligence, and facilitate a quicker response time from our military if a crisis emerges.
But even after we take these steps, some irreducible risks to our diplomats will remain. This is the price of being the world’s most powerful nation, particularly as a wave of change washes over the Arab World. And in balancing the trade-offs between security and active diplomacy, I firmly believe that any retreat from challenging regions will only increase the dangers we face in the long run.
Targeted action against terrorists. Effective partnerships. Diplomatic engagement and assistance. Through such a comprehensive strategy we can significantly reduce the chances of large scale attacks on the homeland and mitigate threats to Americans overseas. As we guard against dangers from abroad, however, we cannot neglect the daunting challenge of terrorism from within our borders.
As I said earlier, this threat is not new. But technology and the Internet increase its frequency and lethality. Today, a person can consume hateful propaganda, commit themselves to a violent agenda, and learn how to kill without leaving their home. To address this threat, two years ago my Administration did a comprehensive review, and engaged with law enforcement. The best way to prevent violent extremism is to work with the Muslim American community – which has consistently rejected terrorism – to identify signs of radicalization, and partner with law enforcement when an individual is drifting towards violence. And these partnerships can only work when we recognize that Muslims are a fundamental part of the American family. Indeed, the success of American Muslims, and our determination to guard against any encroachments on their civil liberties, is the ultimate rebuke to those who say we are at war with Islam.
Indeed, thwarting homegrown plots presents particular challenges in part because of our proud commitment to civil liberties for all who call America home. That’s why, in the years to come, we will have to keep working hard to strike the appropriate balance between our need for security and preserving those freedoms that make us who we are. That means reviewing the authorities of law enforcement, so we can intercept new types of communication, and build in privacy protections to prevent abuse. That means that – even after Boston – we do not deport someone or throw someone in prison in the absence of evidence. That means putting careful constraints on the tools the government uses to protect sensitive information, such as the State Secrets doctrine. And that means finally having a strong Privacy and Civil Liberties Board to review those issues where our counter-terrorism efforts and our values may come into tension.
The Justice Department’s investigation of national security leaks offers a recent example of the challenges involved in striking the right balance between our security and our open society. As Commander-in Chief, I believe we must keep information secret that protects our operations and our people in the field. To do so, we must enforce consequences for those who break the law and breach their commitment to protect classified information. But a free press is also essential for our democracy. I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.
Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law. That is why I have called on Congress to pass a media shield law to guard against government over-reach. I have raised these issues with the Attorney General, who shares my concern. So he has agreed to review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters, and will convene a group of media organizations to hear their concerns as part of that review. And I have directed the Attorney General to report back to me by July 12th.
All these issues remind us that the choices we make about war can impact – in sometimes unintended ways – the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends. And that is why I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.
The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.
And that brings me to my final topic: the detention of terrorist suspects.
To repeat, as a matter of policy, the preference of the United States is to capture terrorist suspects. When we do detain a suspect, we interrogate them. And if the suspect can be prosecuted, we decide whether to try him in a civilian court or a Military Commission. Duringthe past decade, the vast majority of those detained by our military were captured on the battlefield. In Iraq, we turned over thousands of prisoners as we ended the war. In Afghanistan, we have transitioned detention facilities to the Afghans, as part of the process of restoring Afghan sovereignty. So we bring law of war detention to an end, and we are committed to prosecuting terrorists whenever we can.
The glaring exception to this time-tested approach is the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The original premise for opening GTMO – that detainees would not be able to challenge their detention – was found unconstitutional five years ago. In the meantime, GTMO has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law. Our allies won’t cooperate with us if they think a terrorist will end up at GTMO. During a time of budget cuts, we spend $150 million each year to imprison 166 people –almost $1 million per prisoner. And the Department of Defense estimates that we must spend another $200 million to keep GTMO open at a time when we are cutting investments in education and research here at home.
As President, I have tried to close GTMO. I transferred 67 detainees to other countries before Congress imposed restrictions to effectively prevent us from either transferring detainees to other countries, or imprisoning them in the United States. These restrictions make no sense. After all, under President Bush, some 530 detainees were transferred from GTMO with Congress’s support. When I ran for President the first time, John McCain supported closing GTMO. No person has ever escaped from one of our super-max or military prisons in the United States. Our courts have convicted hundreds of people for terrorism-related offenses, including some who are more dangerous than most GTMO detainees. Given my Administration’s relentless pursuit of al Qaeda’s leadership, there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened.
Today, I once again call on Congress to lift the restrictions on detainee transfers from GTMO. I have asked the Department of Defense to designate a site in the United States where we can hold military commissions. I am appointing a new, senior envoy at the State Department and Defense Department whose sole responsibility will be to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries. I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen, so we can review them on a case by case basis. To the greatest extent possible, we will transfer detainees who have been cleared to go to other countries. Where appropriate, we will bring terrorists to justice in our courts and military justice system. And we will insist that judicial review be available for every detainee.
Even after we take these steps, one issue will remain: how to deal with those GTMO detainees who we know have participated in dangerous plots or attacks, but who cannot be prosecuted – for example because the evidence against them has been compromised or is inadmissible in a court of law. But once we commit to a process of closing GTMO, I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved, consistent with our commitment to the rule of law.
I know the politics are hard. But history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those of us who fail to end it. Imagine a future – ten years from now, or twenty years from now – when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not a part of our country. Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?
Our sense of justice is stronger than that. We have prosecuted scores of terrorists in our courts. That includes Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit; and Faisal Shahzad, who put a car bomb in Times Square. It is in a court of law that we will try Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is accused of bombing the Boston Marathon. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, is as we speak serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison here, in the United States. In sentencing Reid, Judge William Young told him, “the way we treat you…is the measure of our own liberties.” He went on to point to the American flag that flew in the courtroom – “That flag,” he said, “will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag still stands for freedom.”
America, we have faced down dangers far greater than al Qaeda. By staying true to the values of our founding, and by using our constitutional compass, we have overcome slavery and Civil War; fascism and communism. In just these last few years as President, I have watched the American people bounce back from painful recession, mass shootings, and natural disasters like the recent tornados that devastated Oklahoma. These events were heartbreaking; they shook our communities to the core. But because of the resilience of the American people, these events could not come close to breaking us.
I think of Lauren Manning, the 9/11 survivor who had severe burns over 80 percent of her body, who said, “That’s my reality. I put a Band-Aid on it, literally, and I move on.”
I think of the New Yorkers who filled Times Square the day after an attempted car bomb as if nothing had happened.
I think of the proud Pakistani parents who, after their daughter was invited to the White House, wrote to us, “we have raised an American Muslim daughter to dream big and never give up because it does pay off.”
I think of the wounded warriors rebuilding their lives, and helping other vets to find jobs.
I think of the runner planning to do the 2014 Boston Marathon, who said, “Next year, you are going to have more people than ever. Determination is not something to be messed with.”
That’s who the American people are. Determined, and not to be messed with.
Now, we need a strategy – and a politics –that reflects this resilient spirit. Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony on a battleship, or a statue being pulled to the ground. Victory will be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ballgame; a veteran starting a business; a bustling city street. The quiet determination; that strength of character and bond of fellowship; that refutation of fear – that is both our sword and our shield. And long after the current messengers of hate have faded from the world’s memory, alongside the brutal despots, deranged madmen, and ruthless demagogues who litter history – the flag of the United States will still wave from small-town cemeteries, to national monuments, to distant outposts abroad.  And that flag will still stand for freedom.
Thank you. God Bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2013, 05:42:00 PM
BD:  That would also fit in the Foreign Policy thread as well.  Would you put it there too please?

Interesting on many levels and as I wait to be picked up for dinner I cannot address them, but I can briefly note that this caught my attention:

"Whether it’s a shooter at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin; a plane flying into a building in Texas; or the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City – America has confronted many forms of violent extremism in our time. Deranged or alienated individuals – often U.S. citizens or legal residents – can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad. That pull towards extremism appears to have led to the shooting at Fort Hood, and the bombing of the Boston Marathon.  Lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists."
Title: Intel Debate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2013, 07:55:39 PM
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20130527/6cfda5b1-7eaf-4ba7-acc2-26860703e096
Title: Re: Intel Debate
Post by: G M on May 28, 2013, 05:32:50 AM
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20130527/6cfda5b1-7eaf-4ba7-acc2-26860703e096

The most surprising thing about the article was that EarthLink is still in business.  :wink:

As far as problems, the fact that Clapper is anywhere near the US intelligence infrastructure is the first clue.
Title: new drone policy leaves room for CIA
Post by: bigdog on May 29, 2013, 05:17:54 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obamas-new-drone-policy-has-cause-for-concern/2013/05/25/0daad8be-c480-11e2-914f-a7aba60512a7_story.html

From the article:

President Obama’s decision also came down to a determination that the CIA was simply better than the Defense Department at locating and killing al-Qaeda operatives with armed drones, according to current and former U.S. officials involved in the deliberations. Even now, as the president plans to shift most drone operations back to the military, many U.S. counter­terrorism officials are convinced that gap in capabilities has not been erased.
Title: Comey in line to become FBI director
Post by: bigdog on May 30, 2013, 04:46:12 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/comey-in-line-to-become-fbi-director-officials-say/2013/05/29/7a730b0a-c8af-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html?hpid=z1
Title: Donilon out; Rice up
Post by: bigdog on June 05, 2013, 09:07:39 AM
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/05/donilons_legacy

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/28/barack_obama_s_gray_man_tom_donilon_national_security

More on Tom Donilon and Susan Rice.
Title: Bradley Manning Trial Begins
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on June 05, 2013, 10:58:01 AM
Bradley Manning Trial Begins

The court-martial of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning for offenses related to the leak of classified information has begun. Manning, who has been detained since his 2010 arrest, allegedly gave more than 700,000 government and military documents to WikiLeaks. Among the 22 charges. Manning faces is a count of aiding the enemy, which could bring a life sentence without the chance of parole.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/bradley-manning-court-martial-opens/2013/06/03/9c65ea48-cc51-11e2-8f6b-67f40e176f03_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/bradley-manning-leak-trial-set-to-open-monday-amid-secrecy-and-controversy/2013/06/01/b2bad2fa-c93a-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html
Title: SecDef Panetta leaked SEAL Team 6 info
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2013, 11:58:42 AM
but not to worry, it was to Hollywood folks for the good of the President

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/leon-panetta-seal-leak-92263.html
Title: The oversight of too much oversight
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2013, 12:21:51 PM
a) Hat tip to our BigDog:

http://themonkeycage.org/2013/06/14/the-oversight-of-too-much-oversight/

b)

Title: more on NSA
Post by: bigdog on June 21, 2013, 07:52:06 PM
http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/21/the_british_are_spying_on_us_and_theyve_got_more_access_than_the_nsa

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/06/facebooks-former-security-chief-now-works-nsa/66432/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant
Title: US in through the Brit back door?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2013, 09:25:09 PM
BD:

If I am reading that piece on UK spying, they are reading content and sharing it with us?!?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on June 22, 2013, 11:30:26 AM
Indeed.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2013, 04:22:14 PM
 :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o

What percentage of US correspondence content do you think is being read by the Brits?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2013, 08:33:50 AM
I saw it surmised that Snowden flew to Russia precisely because it enabled him to use Aeroflot, which is owned by the Russian government, so that he would not have to worry about being arrested on behalf of the US by Interpol. 

I'm guessing he used Aeroflot to fly to Ecuador too, or maybe Interpol doesn't operate in Moscow so that may not have been necessary.
Title: Europe furious, 'shocked' by report of U.S. spying
Post by: bigdog on June 30, 2013, 06:05:47 PM
:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o

What percentage of US correspondence content do you think is being read by the Brits?

This suggests an answer, and MUCH more:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/30/world/europe/eu-nsa/index.html
Title: Contracting out US national security
Post by: bigdog on July 03, 2013, 05:36:50 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/02/contracting-out-us-national-security

From the article:

Despite the cheers and jeers at leakers such as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden over the last few years, it would seem access to such information is less protected than ever. Serving intelligence officers are allowed to sell their skills to corporations. High-level intelligence work, once closely guarded, is farmed out to contractors, who leak information like a sieve.

The Obama White House has conducted more leak investigations than any previous administration, now including the leak of a cyber-warfare campaign against Iran by a top US army general, James Cartwright. We are selling our national security in an effort to save a buck – and we will continue to pay for it in other ways.

In 2010, Eamon Javers reported on CIA's controversial "moonlighting" policy, which allowed active intelligence officers to seek permission to work in the private sector on the side if they made full disclosure and it did not conflict with their duties. Generally, the same standard applies to all federal employees who are not political appointees.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on July 03, 2013, 06:46:59 PM
Criticism of Brock from the left:

http://news.yahoo.com/americas-cold-war-why-allies-side-snowden-070000642.html
Title: Roberts and the FISA court
Post by: bigdog on July 06, 2013, 10:18:30 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/05/did-you-know-john-roberts-is-also-chief-justice-of-the-nsas-surveillance-state/

https://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/truger/workingpapers/101NwULRev239(2007).pdf
Title: How OBL hid in Afpakia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2013, 09:11:42 PM
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2013/07/20137813412615531.html
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2013, 08:48:22 AM
The CIA's New Black Bag Is Digital
When the NSA can't break into your computer, these guys break into your house.
BY MATTHEW M. AID | JULY 17, 2013

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/16/the_cias_new_black_bag_is_digital_nsa_cooperation

During a coffee break at an intelligence conference held in The Netherlands a few years back, a senior Scandinavian counterterrorism official regaled me with a story. One of his service's surveillance teams was conducting routine monitoring of a senior militant leader when they suddenly noticed through their high-powered surveillance cameras two men breaking into the militant's apartment. The target was at Friday evening prayers at the local mosque. But rather than ransack the apartment and steal the computer equipment and other valuables while he was away -- as any right-minded burglar would normally have done -- one of the men pulled out a disk and loaded some programs onto the resident's laptop computer while the other man kept watch at the window. The whole operation took less than two minutes, then the two trespassers fled the way they came, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.

It did not take long for the official to determine that the two men were, in fact, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives conducting what is known in the U.S. intelligence community as either a "black bag job" or a "surreptitious entry" operation. Back in the Cold War, such a mission might have involved cracking safes, stealing code books, or photographing the settings on cipher machines. Today, this kind of break-in is known inside the CIA and National Security Agency as an "off-net operation," a clandestine human intelligence mission whose specific purpose is to surreptitiously gain access to the computer systems and email accounts of targets of high interest to America's spies. As we've learned in recent weeks, the National Security Agency's ability to electronically eavesdrop from afar is massive. But it is not infinite. There are times when the agency cannot gain access to the computers or gadgets they'd like to listen in on. And so they call in the CIA's black bag crew for help.

The CIA's clandestine service is now conducting these sorts of black bag operations on behalf of the NSA, but at a tempo not seen since the height of the Cold War. Moreover, these missions, as well as a series of parallel signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection operations conducted by the CIA's Office of Technical Collection, have proven to be instrumental in facilitating and improving the NSA's SIGINT collection efforts in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Over the past decade specially-trained CIA clandestine operators have mounted over one hundred extremely sensitive black bag jobs designed to penetrate foreign government and military communications and computer systems, as well as the computer systems of some of the world's largest foreign multinational corporations. Spyware software has been secretly planted in computer servers; secure telephone lines have been bugged; fiber optic cables, data switching centers and telephone exchanges have been tapped; and computer backup tapes and disks have been stolen or surreptitiously copied in these operations.

In other words, the CIA has become instrumental in setting up the shadowy surveillance dragnet that has now been thrown into public view. Sources within the U.S. intelligence community confirm that since 9/11, CIA clandestine operations have given the NSA access to a number of new and critically important targets around the world, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, as well as the Middle East, the Near East, and South Asia. (I'm not aware of any such operations here on U.S. soil.) In one particularly significant operation conducted a few years back in a strife-ridden South Asian nation, a team of CIA technical operations officers installed a sophisticated tap on a switching center servicing several fiber-optic cable trunk lines, which has allowed NSA to intercept in real time some of the most sensitive internal communications traffic by that country's general staff and top military commanders for the past several years. In another more recent case, CIA case officers broke into a home in Western Europe and surreptitiously loaded Agency-developed spyware into the personal computer of a man suspected of being a major recruiter for individuals wishing to fight with the militant group al-Nusra Front in Syria, allowing CIA operatives to read all of his email traffic and monitor his Skype calls on his computer.

The fact that the NSA and CIA now work so closely together is fascinating on a number of levels. But it's particularly remarkable accomplishment, given the fact that the two agencies until fairly recently hated each others' guts.

Ingenues and TBARs

As detailed in my history of the NSA, The Secret Sentry, the CIA and NSA had what could best be described as a contentious relationship during the Cold War era. Some NSA veterans still refer to their colleagues at the CIA as 'TBARs,' which stands for 'Those Bastards Across the River,' with the river in question being the Potomac. Perhaps reflecting their higher level of educational accomplishment, CIA officers have an even more lurid series of monikers for their NSA colleagues at Fort Meade, most of which cannot be repeated in polite company because of recurring references to fecal matter. One retired CIA official described his NSA counterparts as "a bunch of damn ingenues." Another CIA veteran perhaps put it best when he described the Cold War relationship amongst and between his agency and the NSA as "the best of enemies."
The historical antagonism between the two agencies started at the top. Allen W. Dulles, who was the director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, disliked NSA director General Ralph Canine so intensely that he deliberately kept the NSA in the dark about a number of the agency's high-profile SIGINT projects, like the celebrated Berlin Tunnel cable tapping operation in the mid-1950s. The late Richard M. Helms, who was director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973, told me over drinks at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington, D.C. only half jokingly that during his thirty-plus years in the U.S. intelligence community, his relations with the KGB were, in his words, "warmer and more collegial" than with the NSA. William E. Colby, who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1973-1976, had the same problem. Colby was so frustrated by his inability to assert any degree of control over the NSA that he told a congressional committee that "I think it is clear I do not have command authority over the [NSA]." And the animus between CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner (CIA director from 1977-1981) and his counterpart at the NSA, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, was so intense that they could only communicate through intermediaries.

But the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed the operational dynamic between these two agencies, perhaps forever. In the thirteen years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the NSA and CIA have largely, but not completely, moved past the Cold War animus. In addition, both agencies have become increasingly dependent on one another for the success of their respective intelligence operations, leading to what can best be described as an increasingly close symbiotic relationship between these two titans of the U.S. intelligence community.

While the increasingly intimate relationship between the NSA and CIA is not a secret, the specific nature and extent of the work that each agency does for the other is deemed to be extremely sensitive, especially since many of these operations are directed against friends and allies of the United States. For example, the Special Collection Service (SCS), the secretive joint CIA-NSA clandestine SIGINT organization based in Beltsville, Maryland, now operates more than 65 listening posts inside U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. While recent media reports have focused on the presence of SCS listening posts in certain Latin America capitals, intelligence sources confirm that most of the organization's resources have been focused over the past decade on the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. For example, virtually every U.S. embassy in the Middle East now hosts a SCS SIGINT station that monitors, twenty-four hours a day, the complete spectrum of electronic communications traffic within a one hundred mile radius of the embassy site. The biggest problem that the SCS currently faces is that it has no presence in some of the U.S. intelligence community's top targets, such as Iran and North Korea, because the U.S. government has no diplomatic relations with these countries.

At the same time, SIGINT coming from the NSA has become a crucial means whereby the CIA can not only validate the intelligence it gets from its oftentimes unreliable agents, but SIGINT has been, and remains the lynchpin underlying the success over the past nine years of the CIA's secret unmanned drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere around the world.

But the biggest changes have occurred in the CIA's human intelligence (HUMINT) collection efforts on behalf of NSA. Over the past decade, foreign government telecommunications and computer systems have become one of the most important targeting priorities of the CIA's National Clandestine Service (NCS), which since the spring of this year has been headed by one of the agency's veteran Africa and Middle East hands. The previous director, Michael J. Sulick, is widely credited with making HUMINT collection against foreign computer and telecommunications systems one of the service's top priority targets after he rose to the top of the NCS in September 2007.


Today, a cadre of several hundred CIA NCS case officers, known as Technical Operations Officers, have been recruited and trained to work exclusively on penetrating foreign communications and computer systems targets so that NSA can gain access to the information stored on or transmitted by these systems. Several dozen of these officers now work fulltime in several offices at NSA headquarters at Fort George G. Meade, something which would have been inconceivable prior to 9/11.

CIA operatives have also intensified their efforts to recruit IT specialists and computer systems operators employed by foreign government ministries, major military command headquarters staffs, big foreign multinational corporations, and important international non-governmental organizations.

Since 9/11, the NCS has also developed a variety of so-called "black boxes" which can quickly crack computer passwords, bypass commercially-available computer security software systems, and clone cellular telephones -- all without leaving a trace. To use one rudimentary example, computer users oftentimes forget to erase default accounts and passwords when installing a system, or incorrectly set protections on computer network servers or e-mail accounts. This is a vulnerability which operatives now routinely exploit.

For many countries in the world, especially in the developing world, CIA operatives can now relatively easily obtain telephone metadata records, such as details of all long distance or international telephone calls, through secret liaison arrangements with local security services and police agencies.

America's European allies are a different story. While the connections between the NSA and, for example, the British signals intelligence service GCHQ are well-documented, the CIA has a harder time obtaining personal information of British citizens. The same is true in Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, which have also been most reluctant to share this sort of data with the CIA. But the French intelligence and security services have continued to share this sort of data with the CIA, particularly in counterterrorism operations.

U.S. intelligence officials are generally comfortable with the new collaboration. Those I have spoken to over the past three weeks have only one major concern. The fear is that details of these operations, including the identities of the targets covered by these operations, currently reside in the four laptops reportedly held by Edward Snowden, who has spent the past three weeks in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow waiting for his fate to be decided. Officials at both the CIA and NSA know that the public disclosure of these operations would cause incalculable damage to U.S. intelligence operations abroad as well as massive embarrassment to the U.S. government. If anyone wonders why the U.S. government wants to get its hands on Edward Snowden and his computers so badly, this is an important reason why.
Title: Lady's catch and release
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 21, 2013, 08:17:58 AM
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/intelligence-and-world-affairs/2013/jul/20/new-questions-cia-programs-after-ladys-arrest-rele/
Title: ODNI Gen. Counsel speech
Post by: bigdog on July 21, 2013, 06:54:31 PM
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/07/odni-gc-bob-litt-speaking-at-brookings/
Title: ex-CIA officer on Italy kidnap/rendition case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 28, 2013, 02:48:26 PM
http://www.stripes.com/news/europe/ex-cia-officer-us-allowed-italy-kidnap-case-to-shield-others-1.232616
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on August 01, 2013, 05:02:42 AM
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/314843-obama-lawmakers-to-huddle-on-nsa-surveillance

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/senate-intelligence-committee-chair-reform-nsa-programs/2013/07/30/9b66d9f2-f93a-11e2-8e84-c56731a202fb_story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/us/nsa-surveillance.html?hp&_r=0
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 01, 2013, 06:34:29 AM
When Feinstein writes "Ultimately, this court determines if “probable cause” is sufficient to grant the warrant to collect the content of the call."  this sure sounds like the contents of the call HAVE been recorded, yes?  Or am I misunderstanding.

That said, though I remain in doubt, there seems to be some thought and substance in her piece.
Title: NSA lies! It IS collecting content!!!
Post by: bigdog on August 02, 2013, 10:26:08 AM
When Feinstein writes "Ultimately, this court determines if “probable cause” is sufficient to grant the warrant to collect the content of the call."  this sure sounds like the contents of the call HAVE been recorded, yes?  Or am I misunderstanding.

That said, though I remain in doubt, there seems to be some thought and substance in her piece.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/whistleblowers_08-01.html
Title: Getting XKeyscore Right
Post by: bigdog on August 04, 2013, 09:12:20 AM
https://medium.com/state-of-play/f49beeaf6a9c
Title: Not for the first time in the last five years
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2013, 09:16:13 AM

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/3/intel-community-worried-obama-administration-discl/

I'm sure it's of no use to the enemy in figuring out what we know if we mention that we know their plan includes surgically implanted bombs , , ,   :roll:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/08/senior-u-s-official-intercepted-al-qaeda-communications-indicate-planned-attack-big-strategically-significant/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2013, 06:42:16 AM
Yesterday it was reported that we found out about the big planned AQ hit that has led to 20+ of our embassies being closed by listening in on a giant conference call amongst AQ HQ in Afpakia and its various branches around much of the world, especially AQAP (Yemen).

How can this not be profoundly damaging to our ability to listen in to the Bad Guys next time?!?   How on earth can this be used to justify, as some are trying to do, recording and storing all phone calls of all Americans?!?

The mind boggles , , ,
Title: American blabbermouths hurt Israel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2013, 07:49:25 AM
second post

How American Leaks May Help Arm Israel's Enemies
by Yaakov Lappin
Special to IPT News
August 8, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4117/how-american-leaks-may-help-arm-israel-enemies


Israel has struck four targets in Syria this year, according to international media reports, hitting shipments of Iranian and Russian weapons that were– or were about to be – moved to Hizballah's possession in Lebanon.

The most recent reported attack occurred on July 5 in Latakia, allegedly targeting advanced Russian surface to sea missiles.

The chaos and carnage of the Syrian civil war is a conflict Israel would like to avoid, but Israeli leaders have stated that any attempts by Hizballah to exploit the situation to import advanced arms, such as guided missiles that can threaten Israeli population centers and strategically sensitive targets, are a red line Jerusalem will not accept.
Low signature strikes, if they occurred, are ways for Israel to take pinpoint action to protect its national security, without getting dragged into a wider conflict.
Officially, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied these strikes, apparently in order to avoid placing the Assad regime in a position where it feels it must retaliate.

Indeed, plausible deniability, and a wish to avoid opening a second front in the midst of a civil war, have allowed Assad to ignore the alleged strikes, with the exception of isolated border incidents and a threat to retaliate to future strikes.

Yet, some in the United States seem not to share Jerusalem's reported desire to keep the strikes low profile, and have gone on record to leak details of the incidents. Such leaks cannot be good for Israel, whether the sources intended to cause harm or not.

In a series of U.S. media reports, unnamed American sources have provided information on alleged Israel Air Force strikes in Syria. Most recently, sources described as "intelligence analysts" told the New York Times that the July 5 Latakia strike did not succeed in destroying all of the Russian missiles it targeted, that Assad ordered his army to set fire to the site to try and hide that fact, and that another attack will be needed to complete the mission.

Previously, sources described as American officials told the New York Times Israel carried out the Latakia strike.

In May, an anonymous American official said Israel targeted Iranian Fateh 110 missiles in Damascus air strikes.

These sorts of reports have caused puzzlement and confusion among Israeli observers. Who is behind these leaks, and what are their motivations?

The world of intelligence is murky and confusing, and it is difficult to draw clear conclusions.

Some observers have suggested that someone with high-level intelligence is concerned that the reported strikes may lead to an all-out Israeli-Syrian conflict.

The latest New York Times report effectively provided Assad with an early warning, and instructed him to expect a further strike, thereby sabotaging a potential mission.
These reports raise rather disturbing questions about the nature of the cooperation between the intelligence establishments of the two countries.  To be sure, Israeli officials adamantly maintain that overall defense cooperation with the U.S. has never been better. From missile defense exercises to joint air force drills, and in many other areas, the two militaries work closely together in a fruitful relationship, as the remainder of the Middle East faces anarchy and extremism.

While the big picture on cooperation is encouraging, a few pixels on the screen don't seem to be quite in line with the rest of the image.

Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, stated that "the mere fact that such leaks happen often indicates that the Pentagon leadership does not have Israel's interests at heart."

Inbar acknowledged the difficulties outside observers have in attributing motive for the leaks.

He listed several potential causes, beginning with the most apparent one: The wish to prevent future Israeli strikes.

That apparent leak could be part of a larger objection to the Israeli strikes among some quarters in the Pentagon.

It is possible that the Pentagon is split into two camps – one opposed to U.S. intervention in Syria, a position formulated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey and adopted by the White House – and another camp favoring intervention, a stance promoted by Secretary of State John Kerry.

The anti-intervention camp might be concerned that the alleged strikes risk sparking a larger-scale conflict, which could force American involvement.

But it is just as conceivable that the pro-intervention camp is behind the leaks, using them to embarrass those who argue that an American intervention in Syria would require many sorties, would be complex, and holds no guarantee of improving the situation.

By pointing to alleged Israeli strikes, the interventionists may be trying to show that taking action in Syria is not as difficult as the rival camp suggests.

Lastly, Inbar said, the reports might be little more than the product of a will by sources in the Pentagon to maintain a good relationship with the media.

"What is clear is that they do not come from elements friendly to Israel, because Israel's preferred modus operandi is low profile. [This is] intended to allow Assad to refrain from reacting," Inbar said.

A second security expert said he is reasonably certain that the leaks did not come directly from the Obama administration, and doubted that they resulted from an official Pentagon directive to share the information with the media.

"Coordination with the U.S. administration now is better than in the past," said Dan Scheuftan, director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa.
At the same time, he noted, U.S. intelligence has played risky games in the past to influence political decisions. He recounted the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which claimed that Iran froze its nuclear program, as a politicized assessment designed to dissuade former President George W. Bush from launching strikes on Iran.
"U.S. intelligence has played very dangerous games in the political field. I can't rule out someone in U.S. intelligence as a possibility," Scheuftan said. "There could be elements within American intelligence that are interested in damaging Israel, or promoting a certain policy,".

The leakers, whoever they are, could be creating real harm for Israel's overall policy of keeping advanced arms from reaching Iran's proxy terrorist group in Lebanon. That's a problem for American officials to address regardless of whether that harm is deliberate or inadvertent.

Next week, Dempsey arrives in Israel for talks with Israeli leaders. A recent article in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth proposed that among the burning issues of Iran and Syria, talks will also be held to "smooth over the issue of alleged leaks."

In light of the fact that cooperation with the U.S. is one of Israel's most critical strategic assets, perhaps Dempsey's visit will be an opportunity for both sides to deal with the alleged leaks constructively, while focusing on the many joint security challenges faced by both countries, and continuing the already superb cooperation that is in place.

Yaakov Lappin is the Jerusalem Post's military and national security affairs correspondent, and author of The Virtual Caliphate (Potomac Books), which proposes that jihadis on the internet have established a virtual Islamist state.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on August 09, 2013, 04:50:24 AM
Yesterday it was reported that we found out about the big planned AQ hit that has led to 20+ of our embassies being closed by listening in on a giant conference call amongst AQ HQ in Afpakia and its various branches around much of the world, especially AQAP (Yemen).

How can this not be profoundly damaging to our ability to listen in to the Bad Guys next time?!?   How on earth can this be used to justify, as some are trying to do, recording and storing all phone calls of all Americans?!?

The mind boggles , , ,


http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/08/a-hard-to-justify-leak/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 09, 2013, 08:59:39 AM
Exactly, though I would not let the reporters off the hook as easily as does this piece.
Title: Some warn against NSA changes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 11, 2013, 02:07:46 PM
Republicans Warn Against NSA Changes
By Janet Hook and Sarah Portlock
WSJ

Some senior Republicans in Congress on Sunday threw cold water on a cornerstone of  President Barack Obama’s plan to revamp the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs–his proposal to provide a new advocate for privacy concerns.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) raised questions about the proposal, which would add an advocate in the proceedings of the secret court that oversees the agency’s sweeping phone-data collection. He said he feared it would slow down antiterrorism efforts when time is of the essence.

Mr. McCaul, who dealt with these issues as a counterterrorism prosecutor, said changes like those Mr. Obama proposed would “slow down the efficacy and efficiency of our counterterrorism investigation.”

“I don’t think that’s the right way to go,” Mr. McCaul said, speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Also expressing concern about the proposal was Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.), a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee. He said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that it would be “very impractical” in cases where decisions have to be made quickly for terrorism investigations.

“We cannot afford to have this become a debating society,” said Mr. King. “We need decisions made quickly, yes or no, up or down, because lives are at stake.”

Those cautionary words from senior Republicans suggested the proposals Mr. Obama outlined at a Friday news conference may meet resistance on Capitol Hill. Some of the proposals, including changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, would require action by Congress, which has been deeply split on these issues.

Mr. Obama didn’t give many details of his proposals, and Congress is in recess until early September. Some civil libertarians said the president didn’t go far enough in addressing their concerns about privacy and government overreach.

At the foreign intelligence court, the government presents its case for collecting phone data to a judge, without other parties present. The court almost always approves the final government proposal.

While the Obama administration had defended the current court structure, administration officials said Friday that new measures were needed to restore public confidence in the court

Michael Hayden, a former director of the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush, said he believed that Mr. Obama’s proposal would not have to be as intrusive as critics were suggesting.

“He was not talking about getting public defender in there for Tony Soprano every time you want to go up on a wiretap with him,” Mr. Hayden said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” A privacy advocate with a more narrowly defined role “may be useful for transparency and it may be useful for confidence,” Mr. Hayden said.
Title: CIA files on Naom Chomsky
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2013, 07:43:30 AM


http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/13/after_multiple_denials_cia_admits_to_snooping_on_noam_chomsky

If he was going to North Vietnam during the war, we wouldn't we have files on him? Hell, wouldn't it be dereliction of duty not to?
Title: Consequences of Manning's treason
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 29, 2013, 06:33:02 AM
http://cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=08THEHAGUE397&q=nusog

2008

Courtesy of the traitor Bradley Manning, and Wikileaks.
Title: Goldberg on Snowden's leak of budget secrets
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2013, 05:51:51 AM
Also yesterday came the revelation that Edward Snowden & Co. have given the Washington Post the entire "black budget" of the United States of America. Normally, this would be seen as very bad news because it would mean that the Chinese, the Russians, and the rest of the Legion of Doom could learn crucial details about our clandestine security apparatus simply by reading American newspapers. The good news is that this probably isn't happening in this case. The bad news is that it isn't happening because the Russians and the Chinese almost surely got that data directly from Snowden already. And not just the Post's highlights.

This isn't a leak. A leak suggests that the main body of liquid is intact and only a little bit has poured out. This is a flood. This is an emptying. This is a spill. And if you think it's okay for this stuff to be out in the open, you basically believe the government shouldn't have secrets of any kind.

Last night my friend -- and the only man in Washington whose hair has gotten grayer than Obama's in the last five years -- Steve Hayes said that this was akin to a winning football team having its playbook fall into opponents' hands. I think this metaphor doesn't go far enough (and at this "news"letter if there's one thing we do it is stretch metaphors as far as they will go, like the gluteal tissue that makes up most of Nancy Pelosi's forehead). To me, it's more like Al Capone getting the budgets, deployments, personnel files, and health records of The Untouchables. Foreign spy agencies would have sacrificed blood and treasure for a few pages of this stuff; now the Russians and Chinese are bathing in the documents like a young Bill Clinton stumbling upon a trunk full of old Playboys.

Two points come to mind here. The Snowden-as-a-heroic-whistleblower storyline is now dead. Whatever limited truth there ever was to that spin, it's over. This has nothing to do with abuse of domestic surveillance and everything to do with harming the U.S.

Second, lots of people need to be fired. After Pearl Harbor, FDR wisely canned a bunch of generals for the simple reason that he needed fresh blood and accountability. This is the Pearl Harbor of "leaks," and heads should roll.
Title: WaTimes: Snowden treasure trove in enemy hands
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2013, 07:17:15 AM
Some might call this treason , , ,

NSA trove in foreign hands: 58,000 ‘highly classified’ documents, U.K. officials say
By Shaun Waterman
The Washington Times
Friday, August 30, 2013


British officials said Friday that the trove of documents taken by National Security Agency leaker Edward J. Snowden, which it seized earlier this week at Heathrow airport, contains more than 58,000 “highly classified UK intelligence documents,” which the government now assumes are in foreign hands.

Oliver Robbins, the deputy national security adviser for intelligence, security and resilience in the Cabinet Office, told a court in London that Mr. Snowden “indiscriminately appropriated material in bulk,” including personal information that would allow British intelligence staff, some serving overseas, to be identified.

SEE ALSO: NSA collected thousands of U.S. communications

The 58,000 documents were among 60 gigabytes of encrypted data seized from David Miranda during a nine hour detention under special terrorism powers Sunday.

Mr. Miranda is the boyfriend of Glen Greenwald, the journalist for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper who has been the conduit for most of Mr. Snowden’s leaks. He was bringing the data to Mr. Greenwald at their home in Brazil when he was detained while changing planes in London.

Friday’s court hearing was held to hear Mr. Miranda’s lawyers’ objections to the search of the material, but the judge ruled that the police could continue their efforts to decrypt the data.

The news, the first public comment by either the British or U.S. governments about the exact size of the trove that Mr. Snowden stole, suggests that his theft was of a much larger size than previously had been thought.

It is not known if the material recovered from Mr. Miranda represents the entirety of what Mr. Snowden took, which means his theft could even approach the scale of the cache that Bradley E. Manning passed to WikiLeaks — more than 750,000 classified documents — and at a much higher classification level.

Manning only had access to “secret” level documents, whereas those disclosed by Mr. Snowden have mostly been “top secret” or higher.

Britain has to assume the stolen data is now in the hands of foreign governments, since Mr. Snowden’s prior travel to Hong Kong and Russia, Mr. Robbins told the court, according to the Daily Telegraph.

He added that among other material taken from Mr. Miranda was a piece of paper with a password to one of the encrypted files written on it.

“The claimant and his associates have demonstrated very poor judgment in their security arrangements with respect to the material,” he said. This meant that it was a “real possibility” that “other, non-state actors,” might also have accessed it.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/30/snowden-trove-foreign-hands-includes-58000-highly-/#ixzz2deO4CFsL

Title: 1-5 of flagged applicants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 04, 2013, 09:10:18 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/2/cia-finds-1-5-job-applicants-hail-hamas-hezbollah-/
Title: Re: 1-5 of flagged applicants
Post by: G M on September 04, 2013, 10:10:19 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/2/cia-finds-1-5-job-applicants-hail-hamas-hezbollah-/

Thankfully they all got jobs in the Justice Dept. and State, because diversity!
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on September 13, 2013, 06:06:21 PM
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/429044/september-12-2013/philip-mudd

Odd interview with Colbert, yet informative.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 13, 2013, 08:49:40 PM
Indeed.  I thought he wanted to bitch slap Colbert at a few spots.  I respect that he did not flinch where others would have.  Too bad there wasn't time for a more extended conversation.
Title: POYH: FISA judge calls for disclosure of court's opinions
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2013, 10:25:10 AM
Judge Urges U.S. to Consider Releasing N.S.A. Data on Calls
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: September 13, 2013


A judge on the nation’s intelligence court directed the government on Friday to review for possible public release the court’s classified opinions on the National Security Agency’s practice of collecting logs of Americans’ phone calls.


Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV issued the opinion in a response to a motion filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, saying such a move would add to “an informed debate” about privacy and might even improve the reputation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on which he sits.

The ruling was the latest development to show the seismic impact of the disclosures by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, on the secrecy that has surrounded both the agency and the court. It came a day after the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., said in a speech that Mr. Snowden’s leak of secret documents had set off a “needed” debate.

Judge Saylor of Boston, one of the 11 federal judges who take turns sitting on the court operated under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, said in his ruling that the publication in June of a court order leaked by Mr. Snowden regarding the phone logs had prompted the government to release a series of related documents and “engendered considerable public interest and debate.”

Among the documents voluntarily made public by the Obama administration since then are two FISA court rulings from 2009 and 2011 that were highly critical of the N.S.A., which the judges said had not only violated the agency’s own rules and the law, but had repeatedly misled them.

Those disclosures ran counter to a longstanding assertion by the court’s critics that it acts as a rubber stamp for the N.S.A. and the F.B.I., since statistics show that it has rarely turned down a request for a government eavesdropping warrant.

Judge Saylor seemed to applaud the fuller picture of the court’s actions from the disclosures to date, saying of the possibility of the release of more declassified rulings that “publication would also assure citizens of the integrity of this court’s proceedings.”

The court was responding to the A.C.L.U.’s request for public release of rulings related to the N.S.A.’s collection of the so-called metadata of virtually all phone calls in the United States — phone numbers, time and duration of calls, but not their content. The collection takes place under a provision of the Patriot Act that allows the government to gather “business records” if they are relevant to a terrorism or foreign intelligence investigation.

Though the intelligence court has continued to approve orders to the telephone companies to turn over the call logs, members of Congress — including Representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, a Republican and an author of the Patriot Act, and Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee — have said the N.S.A.’s collection goes too far.

Alex Abdo, a staff lawyer with the A.C.L.U.’s national security project, said the ruling showed that the court “has recognized the importance of transparency to the ongoing public debate about the N.S.A.’s spying.” Mr. Abdo added, “For too long, the N.S.A.’s sweeping surveillance of Americans has been shrouded in unjustified secrecy.”

Before Mr. Snowden began his release of documents in June, intelligence officials insisted that any public discussion of N.S.A. programs or the secret court rulings governing them would pose a danger to national security. But the strong public and Congressional response to many of the disclosures has forced the spy agency to shift its stance, and President Obama has directed it to make public as much as possible about its operations and rules.

In response, Mr. Clapper’s office has created a new Web page to make public documents, statements by officials and other explanatory material.

On Thursday, in a talk to intelligence contractors, Mr. Clapper said he thought Mr. Snowden’s leaks had started a valuable discussion. “It’s clear that some of the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen,” he said, according to The Los Angeles Times. “If there’s a good side to this, maybe that’s it.”

But he denounced Mr. Snowden’s leaks, saying they had damaged national security. “Unfortunately, there is more to come,” he said, referring to the fact that news reports have covered only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of documents Mr. Snowden took.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on September 25, 2013, 02:47:05 PM
This comes to me as recommended reading:

http://www.kforcegov.com/Services/IS/Nightwatch.aspx
Title: CiC's favorite general has security clearance stripped
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 27, 2013, 08:47:15 AM
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/24/obamas_favorite_general_stripped_of_his_security_clearance
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 30, 2013, 07:37:51 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/two-marine-generals-fired-for-security-lapses-in-afghanistan/2013/09/30/b2ccb8a6-29fe-11e3-b139-029811dbb57f_story.html
Title: Worse leak than Snowden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 01, 2013, 02:13:00 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/us/qaeda-plot-leak-has-undermined-us-intelligence.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130930
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on October 02, 2013, 07:03:11 PM

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/david-headley/

This is long, but is worth it.

Summary
According to widespread rumors in the United States, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence had a hand in the Dec. 30, 2009, attack in Khost, Afghanistan, which killed several CIA agents. While luck played a definite role in the attack, the skill in preparing the double agent who detonated the suicide bomb used in the attack has lead some to see a state role. Such a role is unlikely, however, as Pakistan has little to gain by enraging the United States. Even so, the rumors alone will harm U.S.-Pakistani relations, perhaps giving the Taliban some breathing room.

Analysis
Speculation is rife in the United States about the possible role played by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, Pakistan’s foreign intelligence service, in the Dec. 30, 2009, suicide attack on Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan that killed multiple CIA agents. Much of this discussion traces back to a report citing unnamed U.S. and Afghan government sources as saying a chemical analysis of explosive residue suggesting the use of military-grade equipment points to ISI involvement in the incident.

This is a faulty basis to establish an ISI link, as the Pakistani Taliban have used military-grade explosives in numerous attacks against the Pakistani security establishment since late 2006. Still, rumors alone of ISI involvement will suffice to harm U.S.-Pakistani relations, which will serve the jihadists’ ends quite nicely.

To a large extent, chance aided the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in carrying out the attack. Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi’s arrival gave the group the opportunity to carry out an attack at a heavily fortified facility belonging to the world’s most powerful intelligence organization. That said, the preparation of the double agent for the attack showed definite skill. While it has shown a great degree of skill in pulling off attacks against major army, intelligence and other security installations in Pakistan, the TTP previously has not been seen as being capable of handling a foreign double agent for a complex operation outside Pakistan.

In this incident, the TTP managed to conceal al-Balawi’s true activities while in Pakistan. Admittedly, keeping close track of al-Balawi in Pakistan would have been a challenge to the CIA due to the agency’s fairly weak humint capabilities there, and because his jihadist hosts would have been extremely cautious about using communications devices that would show up on sigint monitoring. And while remaining below the radar while in jihadist country in the Pakistani northwest is one thing, circumventing all CIA countermeasures is quite another — and is something previously thought beyond the TTP’s known capabilities. Such sophistication rises to the level of the skills held by a national-level intelligence organization with tremendous resources and experience at this kind of tradecraft.

However, even this does not mean the ISI was involved in the attack.

The ISI falls under the control of the Pakistani army and the government, and the Pakistani state has no interest in carrying out actions against the United States, as this could seriously threaten Pakistani national interests. Also, it is clear that the ISI is at war with the TTP. For its part, the main Pakistani Taliban rebel group has specifically declared war on the ISI, leveling three key ISI facilities in the last eight months. It is therefore most unlikely this could have been an officially sanctioned Pakistani operation.

The possibility that jihadist sympathizers in the lower ranks of the Pakistani intelligence complex may have offered their services to the TTP cannot be ruled out, however. Given its history of dealing with Islamist nonstate proxies, the Pakistani intelligence apparatus is penetrated by the jihadists, which partially explains the ability of the TTP to mount a ferocious insurgency against the state.

Even though there is no clear smoking gun pointing at the ISI, rumors of its involvement alone will harm the already-fragile U.S.-Pakistani relationship. Concerns similar to those in the aftermath of the November 2008 Mumbai attack — that the situation in Pakistan has reached a point where the state no longer has control over its own security apparatus and now represents an intolerable threat to U.S. national security — will emerge again.

While the situation in Islamabad might not be dire, a U.S.-Pakistani and Indian-Pakistani breakdown is exactly what that the jihadists want so they can survive the U.S. and Pakistani offensives they currently face.

Title: AQ suspect held on Navy ship
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2013, 10:06:33 PM
U.S. Said to Hold Qaeda Suspect on Navy Ship

The accused operative for Al Qaeda seized by United States commandos in Libya over the weekend is being interrogated while in military custody on a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea, officials said. He is expected eventually to be sent to New York for criminal prosecution.
The fugitive, known as Abu Anas al-Libi, is seen as a potential intelligence gold mine, possessing perhaps two decades of information about Al Qaeda, from its early days under Osama bin Laden in Sudan to its more scattered elements today.
Abu Anas is being held aboard the U.S.S. San Antonio, a vessel brought in specifically for this mission, officials said.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/world/africa/a-terrorism-suspect-long-known-to-prosecutors.html?emc=edit_na_20131006

Title: CIA warned about Snowden in 2009
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 11, 2013, 06:26:22 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/us/cia-warning-on-snowden-in-09-said-to-slip-through-the-cracks.html?_r=1&pagewanted&
Title: Holy Sh!+
Post by: bigdog on October 17, 2013, 08:59:02 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-turkey-blows-israels-cover-for-iranian-spy-ring/2013/10/16/7d9c1eb2-3686-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2013, 10:52:17 AM
see my entry in the FUBAR thread for a different entry on the same thing.  At any rate, Holy Excrement indeed.   :cry: :x :x
Title: POTH interviews Snowden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2013, 07:17:43 PM


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took-no-secret-files-to-russia.html?emc=edit_na_20131017
Title: Merkel of Germany and Braille of Brazil want more privacy than US citizens
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 26, 2013, 05:58:40 AM
Woof All:

I'd like to toss out for conversation this matter of our listening in to the private phone calls of the leaders of allies such as Germany and neutral countries such as Brazil.

Thanks to the traitor Snowden, our abilities in this area are now known.  Understandably these leaders are upset, , , , perhaps because we do it better than everyone else and perhaps for the same reasons that we do not like it when the NSA is listening in on us.  Understandably their populations are upset too.

What to do?  What to say?

I gather Merkel is asking for the UN to declare a code of behavior or something  :roll:  I'm sure the Chinese will obey , , ,
Title: NSA: read in tandem
Post by: bigdog on October 28, 2013, 06:49:41 PM
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/28/were_really_screwed_now_nsas_best_friend_just_shivved_the_spies

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/obama-nsa-spying-foreign-leaders-report-98928.html#ixzz2j1SCxnem

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/obamas-in-the-dark-defense-98994.html
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on October 28, 2013, 07:09:32 PM
Obama doesn't know about the IRS.  Obama knew nothing of Benghazi.  Obama knows nothing of the health care website mess.  Obama knows nothing of many to lose their insurance or not being able to keep their plans.

Obama knows nothing of NSA spying on Allies. 

The circle to protect this guy (and Hillary) is never ending.

Once a liar - always a liar.  That is the problem.  Thanks to Bill Clinton it has turned into a disgusting art form.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on October 28, 2013, 08:38:36 PM
Does Obama know he's president ?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 29, 2013, 06:32:39 AM
Something that caught my attention was the reminder that Merkel's predecessor Schroeder was in bed with Putin and the Russians, both while in office and after.  Tapping his phone would have been a good thing.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on October 29, 2013, 06:56:08 AM
Something that caught my attention was the reminder that Merkel's predecessor Schroeder was in bed with Putin and the Russians, both while in office and after.  Tapping his phone would have been a good thing.

This is why all nations with the ability to do so do such things.
Title: Committee Open Hearing Potential FISA Changes HPSCI Chairman Mike Rogers Opening
Post by: bigdog on October 29, 2013, 11:38:11 AM
The Committee will come to order.

I’d like to welcome our first panel today:  Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander, and Deputy Director of the NSA Chris Inglis.

Following the first panel, we will move immediately into the second panel of non-government experts who are all very knowledgeable on FISA and privacy issues.
Today’s hearing will provide an open forum to discuss potential amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and possible changes to the way FISA applications are handled by the Department of Justice and the NSA.  I hope that all of our witnesses will give clear answers about how proposals under consideration in Congress would affect the NSA’s ability to stop terrorist attacks before they occur.  

As a starting point, we first need to consider why America collects foreign intelligence.  The United States began collecting foreign intelligence even before we were a nation, when George Washington sent Nathan Hale covertly into New York to try to understand what British plans were during the Revolutionary War.  

In 1929, the Secretary of State shut down the State Department's cryptanalytic office saying, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail."   The world was a dangerous place back then, with growing and aggressive military threats from Japan and Germany, both bent on world domination.  Those threats eventually dragged us into a world war that killed millions.   We didn’t have the luxury of turning off intelligence capabilities as threats were growing back then, and we can’t afford to do so today.

Today, we gather foreign intelligence to help understand the plans and intentions of our adversaries, such as North Korea and Iran.  We collect foreign intelligence to learn about terrorist plots before they happen, as well as to learn about rogue nations developing the most dangerous weapons.

Every nation collects foreign intelligence.  That is not unique to the United States.  What is unique to the United States is our level of oversight, our commitment to privacy protections, and our checks and balances on intelligence collection.  China does not ask a FISA court for a warrant to listen to a phone call on their state-owned and censored network.  The Russian Duma does not conduct oversight on the FSB.  But America has those checks; America has those balances.  That is why we should be proud of the manner in which America collects intelligence.

The world is more connected today than ever before. This allows terrorists and spies to hide in civilian populations all over the world.  They use the Internet and telephone networks of our enemies and our allies.  They are just as likely to be found in terrorist safe havens as in allied nations overseas.

We cannot protect only our homeland.  Americans live all over the world and our businesses set up shop all over the world.  We have embassies in more than 150 countries; we have military bases in dozens of countries to protect our interests and allies; we bring stability to chaotic areas; and we help secure the global economy.  That is why collecting foreign intelligence is so important.

In July during floor debate, I committed to working with other Members to bring increased transparency and additional privacy protections to NSA’s counterterrorism programs.  

Our challenge is to build confidence and transparency while keeping our intelligence services agile and effective against our adversaries.  

One change we are considering would require the Attorney General or his designee to make the reasonable, articulable suspicion (or “RAS”) determination that a particular phone number is related to a terrorist and may be used to search the bulk telephone records data.  This process would move the RAS determination outside of the NSA, and is similar to the way an FBI investigator works with an Assistant United States Attorney when trying to find the person responsible for a crime.

We are also looking at providing more transparency into FISA Court orders whenever possible.  Reforms to the statute could include requiring more court orders to be declassified or publicly released in redacted form.

Additional transparency into the process may also be helpful.  For example, we could put into statute the process and standards for how information incidentally collected about U.S. persons who are not the targets of our programs is handled and require more public reporting on the number of times that happens.  

The recent debate over NSA programs often misses the fact that the 215 and 702 collection programs are conducted wholly within the bounds of the law and are approved by the FISA Court.  More transparency can help share that outstanding track record with the American people.

Some proposals pending before Congress, however, would effectively gut the operational usefulness of programs that are necessary to protect America’s national security.
For example, ending bulk collection under the business records provision would take away a vital tool for the FBI to find connections between terrorists operating in the United States.  We can’t ask the FBI to find terrorists plotting an attack and then not provide them with the information they need.  If we didn’t have the bulk phone records collection back in 2009, we may not have known there was a plot to attack the New York Subway system until bombs went off on the subway platforms.  
In the words of the 9/11 Commission Report, before 2001, narrow-minded legal interpretations “blocked the arteries of information sharing” between the intelligence community and law enforcement.    We cannot go back to a pre-9/11 mindset and risk failing to “connect the dots” again.  

I look forward to having a frank discussion about your perspectives on potential changes to FISA and how those changes could impact our ability to disrupt terrorist plots before they happen.  

Before turning the floor over to our witnesses, I recognize the Ranking Member for any opening comments he would like to make.
Title: Europe's double standard
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2013, 08:05:22 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/world/europe/as-it-denounces-us-spying-europe-delays-privacy-protection-at-home.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131030
Title: The CIA's POV
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2013, 05:38:15 AM
Michael Hayden: American Intelligence and the 'High Noon' Scenario
The hardworking folks at the NSA surely must feel a little like Marshall Will Kane.
By Michael Hayden
Updated Oct. 30, 2013 7:27 p.m. ET

While I was at the CIA, I grew concerned over America's ability to keep secrets. I was so concerned that I asked the agency's civilian advisory board to address the question.

Could American espionage survive inside a broader political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of national life?

Their answer wasn't comforting. They weren't sure.

Then I was focused on domestic transparency: What level of openness with the American people would sustain their confidence in what we were doing? I had no thought of international transparency as some sort of prerequisite, but today we find ourselves dangerously close to that prospect.

Responding to the effects of Edward Snowden's serial exposures of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, President Obama admitted to Europeans last month that there were "questions in terms of whether we're tipping over into being too intrusive with respect to the . . . interactions of other governments." The president added that, "We are consulting with other countries in this process and finding out from them what are their areas of specific concern."

In other words, we are asking other countries what aspects of our espionage make them uncomfortable.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto claims to have secured a commitment from a personal conversation with President Obama that "corresponding sanctions" would be applied if press accounts proved true. And now the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel feels fully entitled to ask (and have answered) the Watergate question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

It is bad politics and bad policy for good friends to put their partners in politically impossible situations, and recent reports of aggressive American espionage have done just that.

It matters little that the reports may or may not be true or that foreign leaders may or may not have already suspected these activities. The issue now is that seemingly plausible accounts are in the public domain, and people are angry.

To be sure, there is some theater involved here. Public allegations of espionage require "victims" to be publicly outraged. But there also are legitimate concerns about privacy, and even theater can force reduced cooperation with the U.S. on a variety of issues.

And so the president is clearly committed to a "rebalancing." He has teed this up by reminding audiences that "just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it," and the coming report from his "outside experts" panel, due by year's end, will give him recommendations (and political cover) for making some moves.

Fair enough. I had my share of "political guidance" while at the NSA, too. It's not new.

But the administration needs to be careful not to overachieve.

Recall in 2008 how candidate Obama was a near-obsessive user of his BlackBerry BB.T -2.17% and once elected said that, "They're going to have to pry it out of my hands," much to the alarm of his security staff.

Eventually the president kept his BlackBerry, but his email list was confined to a small group of family and friends and the device itself got some security enhancements.

Picture the backdrop of this episode. The most powerful man in the most powerful country on earth was warned that his communications were vulnerable to intercept by multiple foreign intelligence services in his own national capital. No moral offense, no political pressures, no public posturing. In fact, no attempt was made to portray this as anything other than the way things are.

Things are still that way. States conduct espionage against one another. Including us.

Going forward we need to remember how U.S. intelligence suffered a similar crisis of conscience in the 1990s when the CIA's human-intelligence (humint) collectors were told to stand down and not talk to "bad" people, a deficit from which the agency had to recover after 9/11. We can create a similar effect now if we tell signals-intelligence (sigint) collectors in the NSA that they cannot listen to any "good" people.

There is another important concern. It has to do with Gary Cooper.

In the iconic last scene of the Western "High Noon," Marshall Will Kane (Cooper) is surrounded by townsfolk crowding one another to congratulate him for killing Frank Miller and his murderous henchmen. These are the same townsfolk who a few hours earlier had not only refused to help Kane, but actually accused him of causing Miller's vengeful descent on them.

I wonder how many folks at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. (and actually throughout this country's intelligence community), might want to stream the 1952 classic; they surely must feel a little like Will Kane.

American intelligence works to meet the needs and follows the lead of American policy makers. There is actually a formal framework for national intelligence priorities agreed upon regularly at the National Security Council level.

When policy makers validate a need to better understand, say, the level of corruption in a particular state or the intentions of a friendly but balky ally, what is it they think they are asking the intelligence community to do?

And when they read a responsive, incisive report, where do they think it came from?

There's a real danger here. The American signals-intelligence community is being battered at home from extreme left and extreme right, and it's being battered from abroad for just being extremely good.

Beyond receiving new policy guidance, I fear that community will now take new blows and be conveniently labeled by some as "excessive" or "unconstrained" or "out of control."

At the end of "High Noon," Gary Cooper throws his marshall's badge into the dust, stares his way through the crowd, joins Grace Kelly in a buckboard and drives off in disgust. Let's hope something similar doesn't happen with our intelligence professionals.

Gen. Hayden was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009.
Title: Woolsey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2013, 03:01:41 PM

By
R. James Woolsey
Oct. 31, 2013 7:11 p.m. ET

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, the nuclear-policy strategist Albert Wohlstetter wrote in these pages a fine essay titled "The Fax Will Make You Free." In the 1980s, as he noted, the CIA, working with the AFL-CIO and restive Eastern European labor unions, put fax machines to excellent use undermining Soviet rule. That particular technology is now ancient, but Wohlstetter's bigger point remains valid: Technological innovations that vastly expand the amount of information we can transfer to one another are fundamentally revolutionary, for good or ill.

Smartphones are the new faxes and, for many all over the globe, especially the young, their phone is their source of news, their grocery store, their means of talking with (and seeing) absent friends and family, their bank, their movie theater. It is at the core of their lives and their sense of personal freedom. If the United States government wanted to collect intelligence on Germany's leadership, it could not have picked a method more likely to stir wide outrage than tapping the personal phone of a politically popular democratic leader.

And in targeting Chancellor Angela Merkel, the U.S. picked someone who grew up dodging East Germany's Stasi secret police in order to talk honestly to friends. The U.S. has not denied that the monitoring occurred in the past and some media reports say it went on for a decade. If so, we have been sitting on a powder keg for years.

Some Europeans are now being candid about their own espionage, including against the U.S. Bernard Squarcini, the head of French intelligence until last year, recently told Le Figaro that the "French Intelligence Services know full well that all countries, whether or not they are allies in the fight against terrorism, spy on each other all the time."

Many of the recent blasts of allied indignation thus ring quite false, especially since it appears that much of the National Security Agency's collection involved basic information called metadata, such as the date sent and the sender and receiver addresses, not the message content itself. Chancellor Merkel's Germany, however, has not to the best of my knowledge perpetrated the kind or degree of intelligence collection against us that some other allies inside and outside Europe have.
Enlarge Image

kai pfaffenbach/Reuters

Some critics have waxed indignant over the possibility that the U.S. has collected intelligence on some 35 national leaders. But the intelligence business is not a competition to avoid collecting intelligence. In particular, we should be getting the lowdown on hostile regimes and the governments that deal with them. Keeping an eye on allies has always been part of the effort as well. Yet there is no doubt that the U.S. has taken a heavy blow regarding our part in this wild dance of spies—especially from the monitoring of Chancellor Merkel's phone.

The episode poses its greatest danger if it seriously damages America's ability to obtain badly needed allied intelligence and allied help in dealing with terrorism and terrorist-backing states. We are doubly at risk of losing that sort of cooperation because our allies are already wary of the U.S., having seen less American leadership in recent years on a number of important issues.

Syria is probably the most dramatic case of the U.S. not even leading from behind but rather stumbling along behind. Wavering American leadership has also led the Europeans to fear that their tough economic sanctions on Iran may be subjected to a pre-emptive weakening, now that the Obama administration is avidly pursuing talks with Tehran over its nuclear program. The Europeans also have not forgotten that in 2009 the Obama administration abandoned plans to install antiballistic-missile sites in the Czech Republic and Poland, to the deep concern of both nations and to Moscow's pure delight.

In addition to France's being a far better leader than the U.S. on Syria—they were ready to punish Bashar Assad for his chemical-weapons use, no need for a parliamentary vote of approval—the French also took charge in Mali earlier this year to combat Islamist rebels. Germany has long stood beside us in Afghanistan. In short, our allies over the past several years, almost always including Britain, have taken action that is in America's interest on more than one occasion.

But they have also rather frequently seen the U.S. make unilateral concessions to enemies and refuse to lead. And whereas those badly served by the ObamaCare website have received a presidential apology, those badly served by our weakness overseas have not. At our worst, we have suggested by our behavior that it is better to be an enemy of the United States (Assad) than a friend ( Hosni Mubarak ).

Because of this history, the U.S. must take steps to bolster a spirit of trust and cooperation with its allies. A restoration of American leadership would do much to help on that front, as it did during the Cold War, when the U.S. would show initiative and assumed, rightly, that its allies would follow. With America and its allies battling the global terror threat, no less sense of direction from Washington is needed.

But even in the absence of such leadership, the U.S. can take another step to build necessary bridges with its allies. America already is part of the decades-old "Five Eyes" pact with Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, agreeing to share intelligence and not to spy on each other. The U.S. should accede to recent requests from Germany and France to join the group.

Taking such a step would not be popular in some corners of the intelligence community. But if the U.S. is already going to stand down on intelligence efforts and military capability because of the costs imposed by sequestration, world-weariness, or other reasons, then we must stop and take stock of where intelligence now fits in the nation's interests. If President Obama is not going to lead in the way that successful leaders always have, the U.S. must figure out other means of enhancing the support of major allies. For these seven nations to agree not to spy on one another is, in these circumstances, a reasonable direction to take.

Chancellor Merkel should be able to use her phone with the confidence that at least the Americans are not among those listening in.

Amb. Woolsey is the chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a venture partner with Lux Capital. He is a former director of Central Intelligence.
Title: WSJ: Jenkins: How to live with spying
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2013, 08:18:17 AM
How to Live With Spying
'Five Eyes' shows that governments have the ability to restrain themselves.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Nov. 1, 2013 7:13 p.m. ET

Google, Facebook and Microsoft are in a near-panic about U.S. surveillance disclosures, especially with claims this week that government agencies were reading traffic among their far-flung data centers. Yet always dubious, and becoming more so, are suggestions by analysts and trade groups that tens of billions of dollars in U.S. business interests are at risk.


If web users were going flee the cloud over security fears, they would have done so already over Russian mafia, Chinese technology thieves and malignant hacktivists, who are out to do real harm. Users may not like or trust the National Security Agency's claim that it merely is hunting terrorists. But of all the people trolling through our data, the NSA would seem most benign.

The latest revelations do nothing to change this. Despite the furor, German Chancellor Angela Merkel would have known multiple intelligence agencies were interested in her phone calls—and she used her smartphone anyway. Why wouldn't Joe Shmoe ?

In a speech six years ago, then-CIA Deputy Director Donald Kerr delivered the unwelcome verdict: Privacy is not a realistic expectation much of the time on the Web. Our world is increasingly self-regulated by this fact. Recognizing as much is the beginning of wisdom.

Mr. Kerr added, "I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but also what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn't empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere."

The answer won't be, as some in Germany have proposed, to close off the "national" Internet and require data belonging to German users to be kept on German servers. This would only deliver a squalid, impoverished Internet that users would find unacceptable (ask those in Iran and China).

A new modus vivendi is taking shape and it probably begins with the "Five Eyes" Club, now widely known because of the Edward Snowden leaks. Five Eyes consists of the U.S, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—countries that claim (pretend) they don't spy on each other in order to maintain a trusting intelligence-sharing relationship.

Five Eyes has become the finest club in the world. Angela Merkel wants to join (though she might suggest France isn't quite ready). Five Eyes rewards governments precisely for recognizing, even as they go about their spying, the mutual benefit of restraint in pursuit of common interests.

Five Eyes almost certainly explains why Australia, after making conciliatory noises, last week abruptly refused to let Huawei, a Chinese contractor distrusted by U.S. intelligence, play a role in its national broadband rollout (a decision meant to encourage China to curb its own exploitative and reckless activities in the infosphere).

Five Eyes likely explains why Canada last month prohibited an Egyptian company, already part-owner of a Canadian wireless network, from acquiring a fiber backbone whose customers include government agencies.

Five Eyes is a model for governments balancing friendship and rivalry in view of a bigger picture. A telling episode, in retrospect, was Canada's little-noticed 2008 shootdown of a U.S. company's purchase of a Canadian firm that operates a high-resolution satellite in an unusual polar orbit.

Radarsat-2, as the satellite is known, is increasingly vital to observe human activity in a warming Arctic, whose resources are claimed by several countries, including the U.S. and Canada. Canada worried the U.S. would cut off its ability to observe U.S. warships in the event of a future sovereignty showdown, but its company also needed access to the U.S. space market to thrive. This dilemma the U.S. graciously helped to solve last year by waving through, with little fuss, the Canadian firm's acquisition of an important U.S. space contractor despite the countries' Arctic dispute.

In the coming world, it probably doesn't hurt that government secrets not only are unsafe from each other, but from their own people. It probably doesn't hurt either that spying is an overrated source of national advantage—otherwise East Germany today would be a superpower.

No doubt many would prefer the countryless world of the Internet to be protected by the kind of strict and enforceable laws that are possible within national boundaries. That's not in the cards anytime soon.

It may not be anybody's ideal solution, but the only solution on offer is the one illustrated by U.S.-Canada dealings over Radarsat-2—namely responsible countries restraining their own rivalries and cooperating in their common interest not to kill the golden goose of Web commerce, including the trust users have in their email and Facebook feeds.
Title: POTH Vaginas at Foggy Bottom bending over for Russians
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 17, 2013, 05:54:12 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/world/europe/a-russian-gps-using-us-soil-stirs-spy-fears.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131117&_r=0

 WASHINGTON — In the view of America’s spy services, the next potential threat from Russia may not come from a nefarious cyberweapon or secrets gleaned from the files of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor now in Moscow.

Instead, this menace may come in the form of a seemingly innocuous dome-topped antenna perched atop an electronics-packed building surrounded by a security fence somewhere in the United States.

In recent months, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been quietly waging a campaign to stop the State Department from allowing Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to build about half a dozen of these structures, known as monitor stations, on United States soil, several American officials said.  They fear that these structures could help Russia spy on the United States and improve the precision of Russian weaponry, the officials said. These monitor stations, the Russians contend, would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of Moscow’s version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers guided missiles to their targets and thirsty smartphone users to the nearest Starbucks.

“They don’t want to be reliant on the American system and believe that their systems, like GPS, will spawn other industries and applications,” said a former senior official in the State Department’s Office of Space and Advanced Technology. “They feel as though they are losing a technological edge to us in an important market. Look at everything GPS has done on things like your phone and the movement of planes and ships.”

The Russian effort is part of a larger global race by several countries — including China and European Union nations — to perfect their own global positioning systems and challenge the dominance of the American GPS.

For the State Department, permitting Russia to build the stations would help mend the Obama administration’s relationship with the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, now at a nadir because of Moscow’s granting asylum to Mr. Snowden and its backing of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.  (WHAT THE FCUK?!?!?!?!?)

But the C.I.A. and other American spy agencies, as well as the Pentagon, suspect that the monitor stations would give the Russians a foothold on American territory that would sharpen the accuracy of Moscow’s satellite-steered weapons. The stations, they believe, could also give the Russians an opening to snoop on the United States within its borders.  The squabble is serious enough that administration officials have delayed a final decision until the Russians provide more information and until the American agencies sort out their differences, State Department and White House officials said.

Russia’s efforts have also stirred concerns on Capitol Hill, where members of the intelligence and armed services committees view Moscow’s global positioning network — known as Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System — with deep suspicion and are demanding answers from the administration.

“I would like to understand why the United States would be interested in enabling a GPS competitor, like Russian Glonass, when the world’s reliance on GPS is a clear advantage to the United States on multiple levels,” said Representative Mike D. Rogers, Republican of Alabama, the chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee.

Mr. Rogers last week asked the Pentagon to provide an assessment of the proposal’s impact on national security. The request was made in a letter sent to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Secretary of State John Kerry and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.

The monitor stations have been a high priority of Mr. Putin for several years as a means to improve Glonass not only to benefit the Russian military and civilian sectors but also to compete globally with GPS.

Earlier this year, Russia positioned a station in Brazil, and agreements with Spain, Indonesia and Australia are expected soon, according to Russian news reports. The United States has stations around the world, but none in Russia.

================================================

 Russian and American negotiators last met on April 25 to weigh “general requirements for possible Glonass monitoring stations in U.S. territory and the scope of planned future discussions,” said a State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, who said no final decision had been made.

Ms. Harf and other administration officials declined to provide additional information. The C.I.A. declined to comment.

The Russian government offered few details about the program. In a statement, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, Yevgeniy Khorishko, said that the stations were deployed “only to ensure calibration and precision of signals for the Glonass system.” Mr. Khorishko referred all questions to Roscosmos, which did not respond to a request for comment last week.

Although the Cold War is long over, the Russians do not want to rely on the American GPS infrastructure because they remain suspicious of the United States’ military capabilities, security analysts say. That is why they have insisted on pressing ahead with their own system despite the high costs.

Accepting the dominance of GPS, Russians fear, would give the United States some serious strategic advantages militarily. In Russians’ worst fears, analysts said, Americans could potentially manipulate signals and send erroneous information to Russian armed forces.

Monitor stations are essential to maintaining the accuracy of a global positioning system, according to Bradford W. Parkinson, a professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, who was the original chief architect of GPS. As a satellite’s orbit slowly diverges from its earlier prediction, these small deviations are measured by the reference stations on the ground and sent to a central control station for updating, he said. That prediction is sent to the satellite every 12 hours for subsequent broadcast to users. Having monitor stations all around the earth yields improved accuracy over having them only in one hemisphere.

Washington and Moscow have been discussing for nearly a decade how and when to cooperate on civilian satellite-based navigation signals, particularly to ensure that the systems do not interfere with each other. Indeed, many smartphones and other consumer navigation systems sold in the United States today use data from both countries’ satellites.

In May 2012, Moscow requested that the United States allow the ground-monitoring stations on American soil. American technical and diplomatic officials have met several times to discuss the issue and have asked Russian officials for more information, said Ms. Harf, the State Department spokeswoman.  In the meantime, C.I.A. analysts reviewed the proposal and concluded in a classified report this fall that allowing the Russian monitor stations here would raise counterintelligence and other security issues.

The State Department does not think that is a strong argument, said an administration official. “It doesn’t see them as a threat.”
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 18, 2013, 05:03:03 AM
Obama has more room to  maneuver after the election.
Title: A New Model for Defense Intelligence
Post by: bigdog on November 22, 2013, 02:57:47 AM
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/11/20-new-model-defense-intelligence
Title: WSJ: NSA respects the law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 25, 2013, 08:32:51 AM
Continuing with our consideration of both sides of this issue

Snowden and His Fellow Fantasists
Declassified NSA documents disprove his claim that he could legally wiretap anyone.
By
L. Gordon Crovitz
Nov. 24, 2013 6:52 p.m. ET

Edward Snowden thought he was exposing the National Security Agency's lawless spying on Americans. But the more information emerges about how the NSA conducts surveillance, the clearer it becomes that this is an agency obsessed with complying with the complex rules limiting its authority. Contrary to the fantasies of Mr. Snowden and other critics, the NSA may be dangerously risk-averse.

Last week the NSA responded to demands for disclosure by declassifying a 2,000-page trove of documents, including reports to Congress and internal training materials. They portray an agency acting under the watchful eye of hundreds of lawyers and compliance officers.

These documents disprove one of Mr. Snowden's central claims: "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal email," he told the Guardian, a British newspaper.

Hardly. A 131-page PowerPoint deck, used to train NSA officers, details constitutional and regulatory limits on the agency. It emphasizes that warrants are required to access emails or calls involving Americans. One slide warns: "Under NO circumstances may the substantive content of communications be received."

A 52-page directive issued in 2011, "Legal Compliance and U.S. Persons Minimization Procedures," outlines how to avoid emails or phone calls involving Americans. Another training slide warns: "No matter how inconvenient the rules may seem, if we fail to adhere to them, the next set of rules will be far stricter."
Enlarge Image

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The NSA also released the legal arguments the Justice Department used in 2006 to justify collection of phone metadata—the telephone number of the calling and called parties and the date, time and duration of the call.

The legal brief explained that the collection of metadata solves "the following fundamental problem: Although investigators do not know exactly where the terrorists' communications are hiding in the billions of telephone calls flowing through the U.S. today, we do know that they are there, and if we archive the data now, we will be able to use it in a targeted way to find the terrorists tomorrow."

Metadata collection is about connecting the dots linking potential terrorist accomplices. The Clinton administration created barriers to the use of metadata, which the 9/11 Commission concluded let the terrorists avoid detection. Since then, metadata has helped stop dozens of plots, including an Islamist plan to blow up the New York Stock Exchange in 2008.

The Supreme Court this month refused to hear a legal challenge to the collection of phone logs. In 1979, the court held that there is no legitimate expectation of privacy in records of phone calls (as opposed to the calls themselves). The declassified brief from 2006 made clear that such metadata "would never even be seen by any human being unless a terrorist connection were first established," estimating that "0.000025% or one in four million" of the call records "actually would be seen by a trained analyst."

To get approval for a query to test connections among phone numbers, analysts must get approval from one of seven top NSA officials. Listening to the content of calls requires a warrant from a judge.

These privacy protections are poorly understood. Stanford security expert Amy Zegart, who conducted a recent opinion poll, reported on the Lawfare blog that "39% of respondents still erroneously believe (after consistently hearing otherwise from intelligence officials) that the NSA's bulk telephone 'metadata' program includes call content." The only cases so far of NSA officers intentionally violating the rules—other than Edward Snowden—were a dozen cases of agency staff spying on their love interests.

The disclosures by the NSA may begin to set the record straight, but the truth must overcome months of disinformation. Last week, veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward told Larry King he wished Mr. Snowden "had come to me instead of others, particularly the Guardian" with the documents he took. Mr. Woodward said he would have tried to "sort it out and present it in a coherent way." Instead, "people are confused about whether it's illegal, whether it's bad," Mr. Woodward said, adding, "I certainly wouldn't call him a hero."

This month, new FBI head James Comey told a congressional hearing that the NSA is "obsessed with compliance." Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, recently worried at a Georgetown Law conference that "some of the operators may be reluctant to go up the line and take full advantage of the legal authorities we have" due to the "controversies now swirling."

Before the Snowden leaks put the NSA on the defensive, the agency was making the case for more power to gather anonymous data to identify terrorists. That's the debate we should be having.
Title: AP reveals that missing American was CIA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2013, 06:45:40 AM
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/missing-american-iran-was-working-cia-0
Title: Re: AP reveals that missing American was CIA
Post by: G M on December 13, 2013, 07:16:34 AM
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/missing-american-iran-was-working-cia-0

Now he's really fcuked. Too bad they couldn't hide that info the same place as Obama's college transcripts and Ambassador Stevens' autopsy report.
Title: If you are looking for consistency from me on this, you will not find it
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2013, 08:59:15 AM
WSJ
Disarming Surveillance
Obama's NSA review panel has some dangerous proposals.
Dec. 16, 2013 7:21 p.m. ET

'Gentlemen do not read each others' mail." That was Secretary of State Henry Stimson's immortal logic for closing the Cipher Bureau in 1929 and depriving the U.S. of the capacity to read foreign diplomatic cables as world-wide threats grew. The danger now is that President Obama, Congress or both will shift to a comparably blinkered strategy on antiterror surveillance—and for no better reason than Stimson's.
***

Amid the deluge of Edward Snowden intelligence disclosures, Mr. Obama appointed a five-member panel to review the National Security Agency's methods and the balance between security and privacy. The panel recently sent a draft report to the White House, and a version is expected to be made public next month.

But the word on Capitol Hill is that the scope and radicalism of the recommendations stunned even this White House, not least because the task force was stacked with Obama loyalists. If the details are anything like the leaks, then the panel is advising the government to seriously degrade U.S. counterterror defenses and shut down several valuable surveillance assets in a dangerous world.

• Bulk metadata collection. One of the worst proposals would effectively cripple the NSA's ability to collect, store and analyze telephony records, or the time, duration and originating and terminating numbers for phone calls. This program was authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act and collects a vast amount of information, even if the database is only searched narrowly on the basis of specific facts as approved by judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC. The minimization procedures are strict enough that the NSA only used the 215 program to make 300 queries in 2012.


The panel would prohibit the NSA from collecting metadata and instead require telecom providers to retain their own records for the phone calls placed on their networks. The NSA would need to make Section 215 requests individually to each carrier.

The problem is that metadata is only useful if it is pooled, formatted and organized so it can be searched quickly and accurately. Intelligence is not an on-demand technology but an ongoing, painstaking process in preparation for questions that no one can know until U.S. spooks need immediate answers.

Say the CIA station chief in Yemen acquires a phone number and wants to know who the target was calling in the U.S. The FISC would still likely approve the query. But instead of keeping the data in one place under a collection-first policy, the NSA would need to turn to the telecom companies one by one, including foreign companies that operate inside the U.S.

The NSA would then need to aggregate the links to the original number from scratch, potentially missing the "hops" when a person of interest receiving a call dials someone else. This is a great way to overlook a terror cell inside the U.S.

Any potential risks to privacy are the same, so there's no extra protection against abuse. Personal information may be even less secure if not housed at the data farms NSA built specifically for that purpose. The delays and intentional inefficiencies, however, will make metadata far less effective in practice.

• Foreign-to-foreign intercepts. The panel attempts to quell the European uproar over purely foreign surveillance by the U.S. by suggesting some kind of agreed-upon code of conduct among allied intelligence agencies. The target here is the President's core constitutional power for warrantless overseas wiretapping, also authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Put aside the hypocrisy of the foreign leaders who have looser limits on domestic surveillance than the U.S. complaining about spying when they also spy on the U.S. The U.S. has good reasons to surveil even close allies whose interests are never perfectly in sync with ours. The European Union is now threatening to blow up the Swift antiterror finance program, while the 9/11 plot was hatched in Hamburg.

Any kind of agreement on universal sharing or international information norms that are meant to exempt countries from U.S. surveillance and scale back overseas collection makes the NSA more dependent on its European counterparts. Their mistake becomes our dirty bomb explosion. Any binding enforcement mechanisms short of a treaty approved by the Senate is unconstitutional, and in any case subjecting U.S. spycraft to foreign approval is preposterous for a nation serious about defending itself.

• A more adversarial FISC process. The FISC judges are not now operating as a judiciary but instead fill a quasi-legal management role over NSA. This dilutes accountability for the political branches, but the Obama panel wants to go further and appoint a public advocate whose job is to argue against the NSA as in a public lawsuit.

This roving ACLU corps would second-guess the agency and presumably urge the judges to reject or limit NSA requests. But as we have learned from the Snowden dossier and the documents the NSA has declassified in response, the FISC already sees its role less an a neutral arbiter and more as an opponent of the government. The court is now disclosing how many times it forces the NSA to charge its orders or procedures, as if that reveals anything of substance. Introducing another layer of opposition inevitably means fewer approvals and even less accountability.
***

Speaking of which, the Director of National Intelligence post currently filled by James Clapper was designed post-9/11 to integrate the intelligence silos and focus national security responsibilities in the White House. He is a Presidential appointee. But now a senior Administration official tells the New York Times NYT +0.43% without attribution that the panel report means "We're not leaving it to Jim Clapper anymore." If so, Mr. Clapper should be fired for not being up to the job.

Mr. Obama seems to view the NSA as some independent operation running on autopilot, but the programs that keep the country safe are his responsibility. In that sense his panel choices were a fiasco waiting to happen. Task force member Cass Sunstein is a noted economist but the Harvard professor is hardly an expert in technology or intelligence law. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone was a prominent critic of antiterror surveillance during the George W. Bush years.

The report lands at a bad political moment, with tea party Republicans and anti-antiterror Democrats smelling opportunity and sociopaths with stolen documents campaigning to harm U.S. national security. Federal Judge Richard Leon ruled Monday that phone metadata collection is unconstitutional, part of a larger post-Snowden legal assault.

Now Mr. Obama's own commission wants to introduce more obstacles to the surveillance that is America's main remaining advantage over terror networks. If Mr. Obama won't toss the report, grownups in Congress should do it for him.
Title: Congress to CIA: What have you been up to?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 18, 2013, 04:49:39 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/us/politics/senators-ask-to-see-internal-cia-review-of-interrogation-program.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131218&_r=0
Title: Snowden says NSA is mostly about industrial espionage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2013, 01:20:57 PM
http://benswann.com/nsa-spying-was-never-about-terrorism-it-is-about-economic-spying/

What do we make of this?

That everyone does it and best that we do it best, or , , , ?
Title: A LEO friend jokes FBI=Famous But Ineffective
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 23, 2013, 03:35:21 PM
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/fbi-copyrighted-interrogation-manual-unredacted-secrets
Title: more on NSA: the case for Snowden as a traitor
Post by: bigdog on December 30, 2013, 05:22:30 AM
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/194098-hayden-nsa-infinitely-weaker

http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/operations/194104-top-secret-nsa-hacking-teams-exposed
Title: Dual Iran-US citizen busted
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2014, 06:36:10 AM
reliability of site unknown:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/us-defense-contractor-arrested-after-caught-smuggling-us-fighter-jet-plans-to-iran/
Title: Obama's Speech today
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2014, 08:48:30 PM
Krauthammer gave it an "A-"  :-o
Title: From Russia, with intelligence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2014, 11:25:25 AM
http://20committee.com/2014/01/20/how-snowden-empowered-russian-intelligence/
Title: Re: From Russia, with intelligence
Post by: G M on January 20, 2014, 11:40:02 AM
http://20committee.com/2014/01/20/how-snowden-empowered-russian-intelligence/

So why is Buraq sitting on this?
Title: WSJ on the nominee to head the NSA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2014, 03:05:26 PM


http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579353173552039730?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories
Title: detectability of security breaches vel non
Post by: ccp on February 05, 2014, 05:55:11 PM
http://freebeacon.com/report-4-in-10-government-security-breaches-go-undetected/

Yet rep King asks who can show one shred of proof of NSA abuse.  Then I asked oh really?  How would any average person know?  How could any average person do anything about it?

Even the government doesn't even know when they are hacked.  So how the hell would we know?

And we have the FBI telling us the mafia is broken.  What a laugh.  Organized crime is bigger and more invisible then ever.

Until this country wakes up and realizes the terrorism is not just clowns with bombs (including you google facebook and the rest) then we are all screwed.
Title: Shocking development! Russians spying a la NSA!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2014, 05:57:48 AM
Feb. 7, 2014 6:37 p.m. ET


Edward Snowden, call your minder. Russia's secret services are intercepting telephone conversations of American diplomats and putting the juiciest bits on the Internet. Surely the best-known privacy advocate in Moscow will protest.

Meantime, the F-bomb heard 'round the world has added a spy thriller subplot to the geopolitical standoff over Ukraine. A recording of two senior U.S. officials discussing the latest twists in Kiev was posted online late this week and went viral. Whoever did this wanted to embarrass the U.S. and the democratic opposition in Kiev and provoke tensions with Europe. The operation has instead exposed a case of American leadership abroad and underscored how desperate Russia is to keep Ukraine a loyal, authoritarian satellite.



In a four-minute call on January 25, Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, and Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for Europe, talked through options for the "Maidan" movement, named after a square occupied by anti-government protestors in central Kiev. President Viktor Yanukovych, who brought on this trouble last year by dropping plans to integrate Ukraine with the EU, had just offered several opposition leaders government posts. At one point, discussing a mediation role for the U.N. and Europe, Ms. Nuland blurts out, "[Blank] the EU!"

Our first takeaway is that it's good to see American diplomats fully engaged in their jobs. Mr. Pyatt has been a trusted mediator for both sides. Ms. Nuland, an old Europe hand, has made repeated visits to Kiev to try to resolve the most serious European security crisis in years. And the U.S. is hardly a puppet master in control of events. Even as the American duo earnestly considered the Yanukovych deal, the Ukrainian opposition saw a trap and without hesitation rejected it.

As for Ms. Nuland's frustration with EU foot-dragging on Ukraine, who hasn't had the same thought? Moscow's independent radio station Ekho Moskvy reported from Kiev Friday on the large number of Ukrainians who shared her view and cheered her honesty. Many EU diplomats are also upset by the unwieldy 28-member bloc's inability to rise to the occasion in its backyard. Ms. Nuland apologized for her sailor's tongue, but it's laughable to call it a scandal, or even a gaffe.

The hacker fingerprints point straight to Moscow. The YouTube video was posted on Wednesday by a user identified as "Marionetki Maidana" (Puppets of the Maidan) with subtitles in Russian. The next day, a Kremlin official was one of the first to tweet a link to the video. The story then ran on the Kremlin's propaganda cable channel, Russia Today, and spread from there. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called the recording "a new low in Russian tradecraft," which shows she needs a longer memory. But clearly KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin won't give up Ukraine without a fight.

Here's an idea. Why doesn't Glenn Greenwald, who broadcast the Snowden trove of stolen NSA secrets, reunite with his old partner in Moscow to stage an intervention at the Kremlin. Or are lectures on the evils of phone surveillance and spying only for free and open societies?
Title: False flag operations
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 25, 2014, 05:41:12 AM
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on February 26, 2014, 11:23:41 AM
NSA watchdog: Snowden should have come to me
Politico
Darren Samuelsohn
25 February 2014

The National Security Agency’s top watchdog slammed Edward Snowden on Tuesday for failing to follow official protocol in relaying his concerns about wayward intelligence gathering and also faulted Congress for not vetting the details of post-9/11 surveillance programs.

“Snowden could have come to me,” George Ellard, the NSA’s inspector general, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Georgetown University Law Center.

Ellard, making his first public comments in seven years working for NSA, insisted that Snowden would have been given the same protections available to other employees who file approximately 1,000 complaints per year on the agency’s hotline system.

“We have surprising success in resolving the complaints that are brought to us,” he said.

In Snowden’s case, Ellard said a complaint would have prompted an independent assessment into the constitutionality of the law that allows for the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata. But that review, he added, would have also shown the NSA was within the scope of the law.

“Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” Ellard said.

And if Snowden wasn’t satisfied, Ellard said the NSA would have then allowed him to speak to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

”Given the reaction, I think somewhat feigned, of some members of that committee, he’d have found a welcoming audience,” Ellard said in a reference to outspoken NSA critics on the panel, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.).

“Whether in the end he’d have been satisfied, I don’t know,” Ellard added. “But allowing people who have taken an oath to protect the constitution, to protect these national security interest, simply to violate or break that oath, is unacceptable.”

The NSA inspector general is the latest high-ranking U.S. national security official to publicly condemn Snowden, the former contractor granted asylum last summer by Russia after stealing what the NSA estimates are upwards of 1.5 million classified documents and leaking them to select journalists.

While also criticizing Snowden, President Barack Obama has said the disclosures have prompted a necessary debate between protecting national security and safeguarding their privacy. Ellard said he too welcomed that debate, but argued that Snowden’s moves were “the wrong way to do it” because the stolen documents also gave America’s enemies a blueprint for how the country tries to safeguard against terrorist attacks.

“The losses…were not the result of some wacko bureaucrat wanting to classify everything and anything,” he said. “If I were to be able to speak more specifically about these particular documents I think you’d agree with me [that] yes, there’s absolutely good reason that they should be classified at the highest levels.”

Ellard praised Congress for conducing extensive oversight — he has four staffers assigned over the next year to review the legality of several programs in response to a query from the Senate Judiciary Committee — but he also complained that lawmakers hadn’t done their homework either.

Here, he cited a recently declassified opinion from the federal court that oversees NSA programs where Judge Claire Eagan highlighted the role that lawmakers could have played in attending top-secret briefings on the bulk collection program.

”Now that should have led to some sort of discussion,” Ellard said. “The fact that it did not is certainly not the blame of the intelligence community.”

David Cole, a Georgetown law professor speaking on the same panel as Ellard, pushed back at the NSA official’s explanation that Snowden could have followed the official channels to raise his concerns. That review, he said, wouldn’t have gotten him anywhere and the public debate would never have started.

“I think it was appropriate in telling the American public and no one else had done it,” Cole said. “George [Ellard] hadn’t done it despite his independent constitutional reviews. The courts hadn’t done it despite their independent reviews. The executive branch hadn’t done it. Congress hadn’t done it. Somebody has to do it.

Cole said there’s no dispute that Snowden’s moves were illegal, but he added, “There couldn’t have been a debate without a leak.”
Title: U.S. and Israel Said to Be Near Agreement on Release of Spy
Post by: bigdog on April 01, 2014, 08:43:50 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/world/middleeast/jonathan-pollard.html?hp&_r=1   :? :?
Title: Re: U.S. and Israel Said to Be Near Agreement on Release of Spy
Post by: G M on April 01, 2014, 02:25:25 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/world/middleeast/jonathan-pollard.html?hp&_r=1   :? :?

Could also be posted under the death of the rule of law. Lurch/Buraq want a peace deal at any cost, not that it will happen. Pollard deserves to rot in prison.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2014, 06:35:33 PM
If I got this right, Bret Baier Special Report reported today that Pollard OPPOSES the deal because the Israelis will have to release so many psycho killers.

Title: Amateurs are better than the CIA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 05, 2014, 06:22:25 PM
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=share&utm_medium=twitter
Title: The FBI Could Have Stopped the Boston Bombing
Post by: objectivist1 on April 15, 2014, 06:11:03 AM
The FBI Could Have Stopped the Boston Bombing

Posted By Robert Spencer On April 15, 2014

To order Robert Spencer’s just-released new book, Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In, Click Here.

With the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon jihad bombings approaching, the New York Times made yet another attempt to exonerate the Obama Administration of responsibility for one of its manifest failures, claiming that an inspector general’s report on the bombings was an “exoneration of the F.B.I.,” as it showed that “the Russian government declined to provide the F.B.I. with information about one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects that would most likely have led to more extensive scrutiny of him at least two years before the attack.”

See? The bombing was all the fault of that scoundrel Putin. It had nothing to do with the FBI, because of fecklessness and political correctness, failing to act properly on information the Russians gave them.

Full disclosure: I used to give FBI agents and other law enforcement and military personnel training on the teachings of Islam about jihad warfare against and subjugation of non-Muslims, so that they would understand the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy the United States as a free society, and be better equipped to counter them. I provided this training free of charge, out of a sense of patriotic duty, and it was well received: I received certificates of appreciation from the United States Central Command and the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group.

But as I explain in detail in my book Arab Winter Comes to America, all that ended on October 19, 2011, when Islamic supremacist advocacy groups, many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, demanded that FBI counter-terror trainers (including me) and training materials that referred to Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism be discarded, and agents educated by them be retrained. John Brennan, then the U.S. Homeland Security Advisor and now the director of the CIA, readily agreed in a response that was written on White House stationery – thereby emphasizing how seriously the Obama Administration took this demand.

Subsequently, as I detail in the book, politically correct willful ignorance then took hold in our intelligence and law enforcement agencies – to the extent that after the Boston Marathon bombing, then-FBI director Robert Mueller admitted that the bureau had not investigated the Islamic Society of Boston, where the Tsarnaev brothers attended mosque, and had not even visited it except as part of an “outreach” program – despite the fact that it was founded by Abdurrahman Alamoudi, who is currently in prison for financing al Qaeda, and was attended by convicted jihad terrorists such as Tarek Mehanna and Aafia Siddiqui.

Accordingly, the FBI was harshly criticized for not doing all it could to prevent the Boston bombing, and that criticism was bipartisan, coming not only from Texas Republican Representative Louie Gohmert, but from Massachusetts Democrat Representative William Keating and South Carolina RINO Senator Lindsey Graham. And the inspector general’s new report shows how justified that criticism was. According to the Times, the Russians told the feds that Tamerlan Tsarnaev “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer” and that he “had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

Those “underground groups” could in this context only have been a reference to jihad groups. And so that means that the Russians essentially told the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a jihadi. Why wasn’t that enough for the FBI to keep him under close surveillance? It has now become clear that Tsarnaev murdered three Jews – his former friends – on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the day that jihad came most bloodily to the United States. The victims’ friendship with Tsarnaev was known to many – why didn’t those murders, even if law enforcement officials couldn’t charge him with them at the time, lead the FBI to think it might be worth watching him?

The Times says that the FBI didn’t pursue watching him and his brother because they hadn’t “found anything substantive that ties them to a terrorist group.” The possibility that they could have pulled off a lone wolf jihad attack apparently didn’t occur to these intel experts. And because of the Obama/Brennan scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of information about Islam and jihad, agents probably had no idea of the deep roots or virulence of Islamic anti-Semitism, so they had no idea of the implications of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s close acquaintance with the 9/11/11 murder victims, despite the fact that the Russians had told them he was a “radical.”

The FBI clearly failed in this case and bears some responsibility for the Boston bombing, but ultimately the responsibility lies with Barack Obama and John Brennan, who made sure that agents would be abysmally ignorant of Islam and jihad when they scrubbed all mention of both from counterterror training — so how could the FBI properly evaluate what the Russians told them?

The FBI’s failure wasn’t the Russians’ fault. It was the fault of the Obama Administration’s politically correct unwillingness to face the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat. Meanwhile, the media stigmatizing of all resistance to jihad terror and Islamic supremacism as “Islamophobia” only abets this willful ignorance, and leaves us all less safe. The one lesson that is clear one year after the Boston Marathon jihad bombing is that, unless there is a massive change of thinking at the highest levels of government and media, there will be many more such bombings.
Title: Israel's new satellite
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 22, 2014, 05:26:25 PM
New Israeli Satellite Eyes Iran Nuke Program, Terrorist Arms Smuggling
by Yaakov Lappin
Special to IPT News
April 22, 2014
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4357/new-israeli-satellite-eyes-iran-nuke-program

 
An advanced satellite with radar sensors Israel launched into space earlier this month which is expected to enhance surveillance of the two greatest threats to Israeli and international security: Iran's nuclear program, and the extensive Iranian terrorist arms smuggling network.

The SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite, called Ofek (Horizon) 10, creates high definition, radar-generated images, that look as if they've been taken by an optical camera. As it circles the Earth every 90 minutes, it can hover over several targets, peering through all weather conditions to beam back data to Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate.

Once it becomes fully operational, it will assist Israeli efforts to catch any Iranian nuclear transgressions. This development comes as defense officials in Jerusalem continue to warily follow diplomatic negotiations between an Islamic Republic that has reached nuclear breakout status, and an international community that may, according to Israeli fears, lack the resolve to force Iran back from its nuclear advances.

The Ofek 10 spy satellite soared into orbit on board a Shavit (comet) rocket, produced by Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI). The latest launch, which was overseen by the Israeli Defense Ministry's Space Administration, means that Israeli intelligence can now fall back on several spy satellites to create one rolling evaluation of targets of interest, Amnon Harari, who heads the Space Administration, said this month.

Israel designed the satellite to be able to maneuver easily over multiple targets, meaning that Military Intelligence operators can direct the radars not only at nuclear sites in Iran, but also at ongoing Iranian efforts to smuggle powerful weapons, including missiles and long-range rockets, to terrorist proxies such as Hizballah in Lebanon and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

Israel's intelligence agencies divide their time between watching the Iranian nuclear program and working to disrupt the arms smuggling network, in a covert campaign that sees frequent, yet classified, successes.

The nuclear program and the arms-to-terrorists program are interlinked threats. The former, if completed, would enable Iran to threaten Israel and Sunni states with mass destruction, and the latter already enables pro-Iranian terror groups to do Tehran's regional bidding and sow radicalism and instability. If Iran went nuclear, its terrorist arms program could serve as a potential delivery mechanism for a dirty bomb that could be deployed anywhere in the world.

As a result, Israel is heavily investing in upgrading intelligence capabilities.

Ofer Doron, who heads the IAI's Mabat Division, which develops space systems, said the new satellite has "an incredible ability to take photographs, and it is very small." The Ofek 10 can provide very precise, high quality images under all conditions, he added.

Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon alluded to the satellite's future role against Iran's conventional and unconventional proliferation activities when he stated that it would enhance Israeli capabilities to deal with threats "near and far, at any time of the day, and in all types of weather."

"This is how we continue to consolidate our enormous qualitative and technological edge over our neighbors," Ya'alon said.

Although Israeli officials have decreased the number of public statements expressing concern over the Iranian nuclear program, the issue remains at the top of the national security ladder in the eyes of the military and government, and considerable resources are being invested quietly to cope with the program.

Those efforts include ongoing refinements to a military strike option in the event that Iran is caught making a secret effort to break out to the weaponization stage.
The Iranian arms network represents the largest known program of state sponsorship of terrorism. It reaches far beyond Gaza and Lebanon, and includes Shi'ite militias and pro-Iranian terror groups in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, the Far East, Afghanistan, and even Latin America, according to Israeli intelligence assessments.

Iran is also facilitating the arrival of thousands of Shi'ite foreign fighters into Syria, to fight on behalf of the Assad regime. Many of these militiamen may go on to form Quds Force cells when they return to their countries of origin, according to a report released in March by the Tel Aviv-based Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

Yaakov Lappin is the Jerusalem Post's military and national security affairs correspondent, and author of The Virtual Caliphate (Potomac Books), which proposes that jihadis on the internet have established a virtual Islamist state.
Title: POTH: SEcret CIA Arms Depot
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 05, 2014, 09:28:39 AM
Note some interesting references to ammo herein that may be relevant to civilian ammo shortage:
=================

Arms Cache Most Likely Kept in Texas by the C.I.A.

By CHARLIE SAVAGEMAY 4, 2014


WASHINGTON — In passing references scattered through once-classified documents and cryptic public comments by former intelligence officials, it is referred to as “Midwest Depot,” but the bland code name belies the role it has played in some of the C.I.A.’s most storied operations.

From the facility, located somewhere in the United States, the C.I.A. has stockpiled and distributed untraceable weapons linked to preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion and the arming of rebels and resistance fighters from Angola to Nicaragua to Afghanistan.

Yet despite hints that “Midwest” was not actually where it was located, the secrecy surrounding the C.I.A. armory has survived generations of investigations. In a 2007 essay on the 20th anniversary of the Iran-contra affair, for example, a congressional investigator noted that the facility where the C.I.A. had handled missiles bound for Iran remained classified even as other “incredible things were unveiled during the hearings.”

But three years ago, it became public that the C.I.A. had some kind of secret location at Camp Stanley, an Army weapons depot just north of San Antonio and the former Kelly Air Force Base, though its purpose was unclear. And now, a retired C.I.A. analyst, Allen Thomson, has assembled a mosaic of documentation suggesting that it is most likely the home of Midwest Depot.

In December, he quietly posted his research, which he has updated several times with additional clues, on the website of the Federation of American Scientists. In an email exchange, Mr. Thomson argued that the Midwest Depot’s history should be scrutinized.

“I have worried about the extent to which the U.S. has spread small arms around over the decades to various parties it supported,” he said. “Such weapons are pretty durable and, after the cause du jour passed, where did they go? To be a little dramatic about it, how many of those AK-47s and RPG-7s we see Islamists waving around today passed through the Midwest Depot on their way to freedom fighters in past decades?”

Spokesmen for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. declined to comment. A public affairs officer for Camp Stanley said its mission was to be a weapons storage and testing facility for the military.

There is no outward indication of what would be one of the C.I.A.’s three known facilities in the United States, along with its headquarters in Langley, Va., and Camp Peary, a military base near Williamsburg, Va., known by its code name, “The Farm,” that is believed to be used for training. Camp Stanley has a low-key gated entrance, and a few nondescript warehouses are visible from its perimeter fence. Rows of bunkers are nestled deeper into the base, according to satellite images.

The mayor of the nearby town of Boerne, Tex., Mike Schultz, said he knew nothing of any C.I.A. presence at Camp Stanley. Henry Cisneros, a former mayor of San Antonio who served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, also said he had never heard speculation about a C.I.A. role there.

The existence of a C.I.A. facility at Camp Stanley first surfaced in 2011 because of lawsuits brought by Kevin Shipp, a C.I.A. official who had lived with his family in a government-owned house there a decade earlier. His family grew severely ill from exposure to a toxin, possibly from mold in the house, though the base is environmentally contaminated. Their possessions were destroyed.

Mr. Shipp filed a lawsuit against the C.I.A., but the Justice Department invoked the state-secrets privilege to block it, warning against disclosing to a consultant his identity or any connection between his employer and the location. The New York Times identified Camp Stanley as the C.I.A. site in 2011 based on the court records from a related insurance lawsuit.

Mr. Shipp also wrote a memoir, but a C.I.A. pre-publication review board blacked out large parts about his family’s experiences. His son, Joel Shipp, noting that he signed no confidentiality agreement, said he was writing his own memoir and wanted to sell the movie rights. He said he still suffered health problems from his teenage years, confirming that the C.I.A. had sent his family to Camp Stanley, which he called “a secret base which had been used for illegal arms running and chemical weapons storage.”

The 2011 Times article caught the eye of Mr. Thomson, who worked for the C.I.A. from 1972 to 1985 and now lives in San Antonio. He searched through declassified documents and old articles, accumulating clues.

Several of the documents he found traced Midwest Depot’s role without identifying its location, including a 1967 C.I.A. memo linking it to paramilitary training of Cuban exiles before the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and a 1987 State Department memo showing that equipment bound for the Nicaraguan contras passed through it.

The Times separately identified a 1963 C.I.A. memo discussing 300 tons of C-4 plastic explosives that were available in the “Midwest Depot stocks.” There were no restrictions on its use “because the items have world-wide distribution and are consequently deniable.”

In a 2009 interview, a former C.I.A. logistics officer said AK-47 rifles sent to the Northern Alliance after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks came from the C.I.A.’s Midwest Depot stockpiles. Arms funneled to anti-Marxist fighters in the Angolan civil war in the 1970s did, too, another former C.I.A. official said this month, while emphasizing that he was never told its location.

But Mr. Thomson, who said he had not been read into classified information about Midwest Depot’s location when he worked at the C.I.A., identified a series of references in old news accounts, books and interviews placing a covert weapons depot near San Antonio.

And he found an explicit reference in a 1986 memo by Col. Oliver North, a chief figure in the Iran-contra affair. It said the C.I.A. would truck missiles bound for Iran from a military arsenal “to Midwest Depot, Texas,” for preparation, then fly them out of Kelly Air Force Base. Connecting Midwest Depot to yet another historical episode, it added that some missiles would go to “Afghan resistance” fighters battling the Soviets.

Camp Stanley has recently undergone a building boom of new warehouses. A March 2010 solicitation for environmental cleanup emphasized that workers needed security clearances. “The installation stores large quantities of arms and ammunition and has sensitive missions, thus access to the installation and security clearance requirements for long-term personnel are much more restrictive than most military installations,” it said.

Just last July, according to another document Mr. Thomson spotted, the Army sought to purchase two million rounds of ammunition of the caliber that fits AK-47 rifles, which American soldiers do not use. The delivery address: Camp Stanley.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on May 05, 2014, 09:44:16 AM
I doubt overt or covert ammo purchases by the USG is the cause of the now mostly resolved ammo shortage.
Title: Inspector Clouseau now working at White House
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2014, 07:05:57 AM


http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-mistakenly-identifies-cia-chief-in-afghanistan/2014/05/25/ac8e80cc-e444-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html
Title: Re: Inspector Clouseau now working at White House
Post by: G M on May 26, 2014, 07:21:22 AM


http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-mistakenly-identifies-cia-chief-in-afghanistan/2014/05/25/ac8e80cc-e444-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html

At least this administration is equally competent in everything it does.
Title: Euro reports show NSA's successes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 28, 2014, 06:35:17 AM


European Reports Show NSA's Successes
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
June 24, 2014
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4437/european-reports-show-nsa-successes

 
Few events in recent years have sparked the kind of global outrage that accompanied Edward Snowden's revelations, through documents stolen from the National Security Agency, that the organization had been spying on millions of private citizens around the world. Political leaders immediately demanded explanations. Pundits argued the wisdom and constitutionality of tracking private phone calls and e-mails. Government committees were organized, editorials scrawled, fury unleashed, investigations demanded. And all the while, President Obama and the NSA jointly insisted that the program had saved countless lives, preventing numerous terrorist attacks in America, Europe, and the entire Middle East-North Africa region.

Now the results of some of those investigations are in. The findings: Washington was right all along. NSA programs in Europe – and specifically its PRISM project – have now been confirmed to have stayed dozens of terror attacks across the continent, and helped America kill suspected terrorists abroad. Indeed, a report published last month by the Dutch agency responsible for overseeing Dutch intelligence states clearly that "thanks to PRISM, 26 attacks (in Europe, including one in the Netherlands), were neutralized."

Details have not been released.

And a report from Germany's Der Spiegel shows that US/German cooperation on the PRISM program prevented attacks on German soil, as well.

All this comes just as Europol has released its terrorism findings for 2013. According to that report, "the majority of EU Member States continue to consider religiously inspired terrorism as a major threat," as evidenced by "two attacks and several disrupted plots in 2013 and an increase in arrests for religiously inspired terrorism from 159 in 2012 to 216 in 2013." (Total terror-related arrests for 2013 was 535, 143 of which involved religiously inspired terrorists in France alone.) It is worth noting that the number of religious-inspired arrests in 2013 Europe-wide was nearly double the number in 2009.

Nonetheless, European criticism of PRISM has been vehement since the Guardian first published the stolen documents, which Snowden provided to blogger-cum-journalist Glenn Greenwald, then a freelancer for the British daily. German Chancellor Angela Merkel allegedly compared American intelligence to the Stasi. As recently as two weeks ago, Belgium threatened to sue the USA for spying.

Now it appears Europe's own intelligence agencies not only were aware of the program (despite their initial denials), but fully cooperated with it. A document from the Dutch Parliament, for instance, stated that the "1.8 million metadata records were collected by Dutch agencies AIVD and MIVD in their efforts to combat terrorism and foreign military operations."

Belgian officials – the same officials, in fact, who now feign shock and indignation – also admit that not only did they work with the NSA, but that the NSA provided them with information that allowed them to prevent three terror attacks. Without the NSA's help, they said, they never could have done it.

Similarly, France – the country that seems, based on Europol's records, to have benefitted most from its alliance with the PRISM program – played the "shocked and appalled" card when Snowden's revelations became public. And yet, the New York Times reported as early as last November: "the facts of the N.S.A. data collection in Europe have been known for months, which led two nonprofit groups that oppose the spying to describe it as 'astonishing' and 'cowardly' that the French government would portray itself as not knowing about the surveillance. It also became clear over the summer that France's espionage agency, the General Directorate for External Security, carried out data collection on French citizens without clear legal authority, suggesting that although the technology used by the United States may be more sophisticated, electronic eavesdropping as an antiterrorism and anticrime tool is broadly practiced."

Now it appears that Germany, the hub of the NSA's European operations, was a willing and integral part of the program as well. According to Der Spiegel, "Cooperation between Germany's foreign intelligence services, the BND, and America's NSA is deeper than previously believed. […] German intelligence agencies, for their part, consider their cooperation with the NSA to be indispensable – for counterterrorism efforts, for the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and for the battle against organized crime." Moreover, between 2012, and 2013, Der Spiegel reports, "some three million items of content data, or intercepted conversations and messages, were sent to the United States each month."

In addition, the BND itself seems to refute the accusation that the US spied on Germany – confirming all the statements the White House and NSA have made to that effect.

Der Spiegel's in-depth coverage also outlines the parameters of much of the surveillance, noting that 'most of the targets monitored jointly by the BND and NSA are in Africa and Afghanistan – or, in other words, precisely at the heart of some of the world's most dangerous Islamic terrorist organizations.

Does all this really matter?

Absolutely.

First and foremost, it reconfirms the serious threat of Islamic terrorism in Europe – one so dire that European intelligence agencies are willing to push the limits of their privacy laws in efforts to combat it. It demonstrates the extent to which international cooperation has allowed Western forces to kill terrorist leaders – and to do so with extraordinary accuracy. And it shows, finally, the powerful unity of Western intelligence forces in the battle against Islamic terrorism. It is a unity clearly needed (as recent events in Iraq make clear) when hundreds, possibly thousands of European nationals are joining the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Syria, and are likely to bring their extremism – and warfare knowledge – back home with them. So long as such cooperation can continue, we can remain safe. It is time to be honest about what is being done, and why it is needed. It is time to stop the theatrics of indignation, end these frivolous internal battles and get back to winning the war.

Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2014, 07:32:23 AM
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/08/11/Morell-Underestimating-ISIS-A-Policy-Failure-Not-an-Intelligence-Failure
Title: ISIL using material Snowden leaked to evade
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2014, 11:14:26 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/4/islamic-state-using-edward-snowden-leaks-to-evade-/
Title: OBL died, BO lied?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2014, 07:23:47 AM


http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/al-qaeda-wasn-t-run_804366.html?page=1
Title: Cuban spies influence policy decisions?
Post by: ccp on September 16, 2014, 08:40:12 PM
FBI: Cuban Intelligence Aggressively Recruiting Leftist American Academics as Spies, Influence Agents

BY: Bill Gertz     
September 5, 2014 5:00 am

Cuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published this week.

Cuban intelligence services “have perfected the work of placing agents, that includes aggressively targeting U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the [Cuban intelligence service],” the five-page unclassified FBI report says. It notes that the Cubans “devote a significant amount of resources to targeting and exploiting U.S. academia.”

“Academia has been and remains a key target of foreign intelligence services, including the [Cuban intelligence service],” the report concludes.

One recruitment method used by the Cubans is to appeal to American leftists’ ideology. “For instance, someone who is allied with communist or leftist ideology may assist the [Cuban intelligence service] because of his/her personal beliefs,” the FBI report, dated Sept. 2, said.

Others are offered lucrative business deals in Cuba in a future post-U.S. embargo environment, and are treated to extravagant, all-expense paid visits to the island.

Coercive tactics used by the Cubans include exploiting personal weaknesses and sexual entrapment, usually during visits to Cuba.

The Cubans “will actively exploit visitors to the island” and U.S. academics are targeted by a special department of the spy agency.

“This department is supported by all of the counterintelligence resources the government of Cuba can marshal on the island,” the report said. “Intelligence officers will come into contact with the academic travelers. They will stay in the same accommodations and participate in the activities arranged for the travelers. This clearly provides an opportunity to identify targets.”

In addition to collecting information and secrets, Cuban spies employ “influence operations,” the FBI said.

“The objective of these activities can range from portraying a specific image, usually positive, to attempting to sway policymakers into particular courses of action,” the report said.

Additionally, Cuban intelligence seeks to plant disinformation or propaganda through its influence agents, and can task recruits to actively disseminate the data. Once recruited, many of the agents are directed to entering fields that will provide greater information access in the future, mainly within the U.S. government and intelligence community.

The Cubans do not limit recruitments to “clandestine agents,” the report said. Other people who do not have access to secrets are co-opted as spies because of their political position or political views that can be exploited for supporting Cuban goals, either as open supporters or unwitting dupes.

“Some of these individuals may not be told openly that they are working for the [Cuban intelligence service], even though it may not be too hard for them to figure out,” the report said. “The relationship may openly appear to be a benign, mutually beneficial friendship.”

Chris Simmons, a retired spycatcher for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Cuban intelligence has long targeted U.S. academics. For example, Havana assigned six intelligence officers to assist Council on Foreign Relations Latin Affairs specialist Julia E. Sweig in writing a 2002 book on the Cuban revolution, he said.

“College campuses are seen as fertile grounds for the recruitment of the ‘next generation’ of spies,” Simmons said. “Cuba heavily targets the schools that train the best candidates for U.S. government jobs, like Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, and George Washington University.”

One goal of the Cubans is to recruit students prior to federal employment, a method that allows Havana to direct a recruited agent into targeted key spy targets, like Congress or the FBI, Simmons said.

“A preferred target are ‘study abroad’ programs in Cuba, as participating students are assessed as inherently sympathetic to the Cuban revolution,” Simmons said.

Cuban intelligence has recruited numerous spies in the past that became long-term penetration agents inside the U.S. government. According to the CI Centre, a think tank, there have been 25 Cuban spies uncovered in the United States since the 1960s, including former CIA officer Philip Agee to who defected and worked closely with both Cuban intelligence and the Soviet KGB starting in 1973.

One of the most notorious Cuban spy cases involved Ana Montes, a senior analyst who worked in the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence and policymaking communities.

Montes, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, pleaded guilty in 2002 to spying for Cuba for 17 years. She is serving a 25-year prison term.

Montes was recruited by Cuban intelligence in 1984 while a student at the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where she was a graduate student and had voiced her hatred of the then-Reagan administration policy of backing anti-communist rebels fighting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

She was recruited at SAIS by another Cuban spy, Marta Rita Velazquez, who worked for U.S. Agency for International Development and fled the country after Montes was arrested in 2001.

Two other notable Cuban spies were Walter Kendall Myers, a State Department Foreign Service contractor who worked for Cuban intelligence from 1979 to 2007, and his wife Gwen Myers. They were recruited after visiting Cuba. Walter Myers was a leftist who criticized “American imperialism” in a diary entry after visiting Cuba. He held a top-secret security clearance and in 2010 was sentenced to life in prison after a conviction for spying.

Cuba’s spy agencies “actively target academia to recruit agents and to support Cuban influence operations.”

“Unfortunately, part of what makes academic environments ideal for enhancing and sharing knowledge also can assist the efforts of foreign intelligence services to accomplish their objectives,” the report concludes. “This situation is unlikely to change, but awareness of the methods used to target academia can greatly assist in neutralizing the efforts of these foreign intelligence services.”

The FBI report was based largely on testimony from José Cohen, a former officer of the Cuban Intelligence Directorate, known by its Spanish acronym as DGI, who defected in 1994.

The targeting of American spies takes place at schools, colleges, universities, and research institutes. “Cuban intelligence services are known to actively target the U.S. academic world for the purposes of recruiting agents, in order to both obtain useful information and conduct influence activities,” the FBI said.

The academic world, because of its openness and need for networking, “offers a rich array of targets attractive to foreign intelligence services,” the report said, noting that U.S. government institutions draw on academia for personnel, both for entry level staffing and for consultation from established experts.

Cuban intelligence seeks leftists and others sympathetic to Cuba’s communist regime because it lacks funds needed to pay recruited agents, the report said.

The process includes targeting American and Cuban-American academics, recruiting them if possible and eventually converting them into Cuban intelligence agents.

Cuban front groups also are used to recruit spies in the United States, including a network of collaborators and agents in Cuba that make contact with counterparts in the United States.

Specific universities in Washington and New York that were not specified by the FBI are targets because they are close to Cuban intelligence posts in those cities.

An example of the recruitment effort was provided to the FBI by a “self-admitted Cuban intelligence” officer outlining how a spy is recruited at a U.S. university.

“The Cuban intelligence officers located at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York, New York, or the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., obtain a published work by a specific professor or student … from a university the [Cubans] are monitoring,” the report said.

A Cuban control agent in Havana studies the work and works together with a co-opted Cuban academic and together the pair analyzes published material and forms a plan of action that may include a personal letter to the targeted individual in the United States.

“The letter will suggest a ‘genuine’ interest in starting a friendship or contact regarding the topic of the article,” the report said. “The personal letter becomes a pretext for the Cuban intelligence officer stationed in the United States to use for initial contact with the targeted individual.”

A Cuba spy posing as a diplomat develops a relationship with the academic that can last months or years of assessing motivations, weaknesses, and current future and access to information.

In some cases, the Cubans use compromising video or audio and sexual entrapment to develop U.S. spies.

“Ultimately, when the time is right, the plan will be executed and the targeted individual will be approached and formally asked to help the government of Cuba,” the report said.

This entry was posted in National Security and tagged Cuba. Bookmark the permalink.
Title: Re: Cuban spies influence policy decisions?
Post by: DougMacG on September 17, 2014, 06:21:19 AM
"Cuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published this week."

What a bizarre story!  On one hand it seems too wild of an accusation to be true, and on the other it seems like a waste of their money to be bribing people to do what they are already highly motivated to do.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on September 17, 2014, 06:26:38 AM
Yes. I think a large number of our academics see the Castro brothers as too moderate.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on September 17, 2014, 07:24:09 AM
"it seems like a waste of their money to be bribing people to do what they are already highly motivated to do"

Yes that was my thought too. 

Title: Jordan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2014, 01:15:04 PM


http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/israel-espionage-mossad-internet/2014/09/22/id/596080/?Dkt_nbr=1645F-1&utm_source=Crooks_and_Liars&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=527&utm_campaign=widgetphase2
Title: WSJ: Replace Clapper with Gen. Flynn
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 30, 2014, 08:32:57 AM
Obama on Faulty Intelligence
The President blames the spooks for his own policy failure on ISIS.


President Obama rode to the White House in part by assailing George W. Bush for believing faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. So there is no small irony in his claim now that America's spooks missed the rise of the Islamic State. The difference is that U.S. intelligence did warn about the threat from ISIS. Mr. Obama chose not to listen.

Asked on CBS's "60 Minutes" Sunday if ISIS's march into Iraq was a "complete surprise," Mr. Obama replied, "Well I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria."

Mr. Clapper is the presidential appointee who coordinates U.S. intelligence messaging. Perhaps he does think his agencies misjudged ISIS. But we doubt he missed the Feb. 11, 2014 Senate testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time:

"Al-Qa`ida in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (IS1L): AQI/ISIL probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group's ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria."
Opinion Journal Video
Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on President Obama's "60 Minutes" interview with journalist Steve Kroft. Photo credit: Associated Press.

That was five months before the fall of Mosul and a couple of months after Mr. Obama had compared ISIS and various al Qaeda offshoots to the junior varsity.

If Mr. Obama didn't want to believe DIA, he could always have bought this newspaper. On Jan. 6 this year we wrote that "Syria's contagion is also spilling into Iraq with the revival of al Qaeda in neighboring Anbar province. . . . Much of eastern Syria is now controlled by the al-Nusrah front or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and they move with ease back and forth into Iraq. Men flying the flag of al Qaeda took over large parts of Ramadi and Fallujah last week, ousting the Iraq army."

This required no great prescience or deep sourcing. It was apparent to anyone paying attention to Middle Eastern events, or at least to anyone who was open to hearing news that conflicted with Mr. Obama's mantra that "the tide of war is receding" and that al Qaeda had been defeated.

The failure to confront ISIS sooner wasn't an intelligence failure. It was a failure by policy makers to act on events that were becoming so obvious that the Iraqis were asking for American help for months before Mosul fell. Mr. Obama declined to offer more than token assistance.

But if Mr. Obama truly believes this was an intelligence failure, we have a suggestion. Fire Mr. Clapper as director of national intelligence and replace him with Lt. Gen. Flynn, who retired from DIA earlier this year. The President clearly needs an intel chief who will tell him more than what he wants to hear.
Title: Iran's spy chief
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 15, 2014, 11:25:33 AM

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/10/14/the_dark_knight_rises_qassem_suleimani_iran_quds_force
Title: NSA's Alexander and some serious insider trading
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2014, 04:42:26 PM


On so many levels, the mind boggles , , ,

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/10/22/keith_alexander_stock_trades_potash_aluminum_russia_china?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=*Editors%20Picks&utm_campaign=2014_EditorsPicks22%2F10RS
Title: POTH: Getting close to terror, but not to stop it.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 10, 2014, 09:32:51 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/world/despite-cia-fears-thomas-mchale-port-authority-officer-kept-sources-with-ties-to-iran-attacks.html?emc=edit_th_20141109&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193

Getting Close to Terror, but Not to Stop It
Port Authority Officer Kept Sources With Ties to Iran Attacks
By JAMES RISEN and MATT APUZZONOV. 8, 2014


WASHINGTON — After a car bombing in southeastern Iran killed 11 Revolutionary Guard members in 2007, a C.I.A. officer noticed something surprising in the agency’s files: an intelligence report, filed ahead of the bombing, that had warned that something big was about to happen in Iran.

Though the report had provided few specifics, the C.I.A. officer realized it meant that the United States had known in advance that a Sunni terrorist group called Jundallah was planning an operation inside Shiite-dominated Iran, two former American officials familiar with the matter recalled. Just as surprising was the source of the report. It had originated in Newark, with a detective for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The Port Authority police are responsible for patrolling bridges and tunnels and issuing airport parking tickets. But the detective, a hard-charging and occasionally brusque former ironworker named Thomas McHale, was also a member of an F.B.I. counterterrorism task force. He had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and developed informants inside Jundallah’s leadership, who then came under the joint supervision of the F.B.I. and C.I.A.

Reading the report, the C.I.A. officer became increasingly concerned. Agency lawyers he consulted concluded that using Islamic militants to gather intelligence — and obtaining information about attacks ahead of time — could suggest tacit American support for terrorism. Without specific approval from the president, the lawyers said, that could represent an unauthorized covert action program. The C.I.A. ended its involvement with Mr. McHale’s informants.

Despite the C.I.A.’s concerns, American officials continued to obtain intelligence from inside Jundallah, first through the F.B.I., and then the Pentagon. Contacts with informants did not end when Jundallah’s attacks led to the deaths of Iranian civilians, or when the State Department designated it a terrorist organization. Senior Justice Department and F.B.I. lawyers at the time say they never reviewed the matter and were unaware of the C.I.A. concerns. And so the relationship persisted, even as American officials repeatedly denied any connection to the group.

The unusual origins and the long-running nature of the United States’s relationship with Jundallah are emblematic of the vast expansion of intelligence operations since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. With counterterrorism a national priority, new players — the F.B.I., the Pentagon, contractors and local task forces — have all entered the spy business. The result is a sometimes-muddled system in which agencies often operate independently and with little oversight.

“Every agency wants to be involved in counterterrorism and intelligence now,” said Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who sat on the House Intelligence Committee and said he did not recall being briefed on the Jundallah matter. “We have these Joint Terrorism Task Forces everywhere, and there’s so many of these antiterrorism thrusts in our bureaucracy. There’s so much more going on.”


The C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Pentagon and the office of the director of National Intelligence all declined to comment for this article. But more than half a dozen current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it, confirmed both American involvement with Jundallah and the way it evolved. Several current officials who discussed the operation played down its significance, attributing it to lapses in oversight, rather than a formal effort to ally with a terrorist group.

At the center of the operation was Mr. McHale. Those who know him paint a contradictory picture — someone whose skill in developing sources was highly regarded by the F.B.I. but who bristled at the restrictions of bureaucracy and whose dealings with Jundallah were conducted largely “off book.”

Mr. McHale, 53 and now retired from the Port Authority, refused to comment. A high-school graduate from Jersey City, Mr. McHale became a law enforcement celebrity after 9/11, helping to rescue survivors and recover victims at ground zero, and playing himself in Oliver Stone’s movie, “World Trade Center,” in which Nicolas Cage starred as a Port Authority police officer.

His work on Newark’s Joint Terrorism Task Force took him to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he helped capture leaders of Al Qaeda alongside F.B.I. and C.I.A. colleagues. He received the Port Authority’s Medal of Honor for bravery in 2006.

“If there’s a new Greatest Generation, then McHale would certainly define it,” The New York Post wrote in a 2011 profile.

But friends say he could be brash and opinionated, the kind of guy who, if he thought your email was stupid, would immediately say so — and copy your boss on the reply for good measure.


“Tommy is not without opinions, and he is generally happy to share them with his colleagues and bosses,” said Don Borelli, a retired F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisor who worked with Mr. McHale in Pakistan but was not involved in the Jundallah matter. “As you can imagine, this has ruffled some feathers, especially at the F.B.I. But when it hits the fan, Tommy is the guy you want on your team working the case.”

Mr. McHale was at home in the fast-paced culture that seemed particularly frenetic after Sept. 11, 2001, when decisions were made and executed on the fly in response to seemingly omnipresent terrorist threats. And after 9/11, information about the Middle East was at a premium. As it happened, Mr. McHale had a source, an informant who had been on the F.B.I. payroll since about 1996, officials said.

The informant lived in the New York area, according to three former officials, but had friends and family in Baluchistan, a sprawling region covering parts of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The informant introduced Mr. McHale to these overseas connections, which included members of the Rigi family, the namesake of a powerful Baluch tribe based in southeastern Iran.

The arrangement was promising enough that after 9/11 the informant became a joint F.B.I. and C.I.A. asset, meaning he was supervised by both agencies simultaneously, with Mr. McHale as the point person, officials said.


Southeastern Iran, where the Rigis are based, is the country’s poorest region, a sparse, lawless area where water is scarce and life expectancy is low. The Baluch people, who are mostly Sunni, have long faced oppression at the hands of the Shiite government. Security forces have demolished homes. Sunni leaders have been shot dead in the streets.

Against that backdrop, a charismatic young member of the Rigi family, Abdolmalek Rigi, founded Jundallah — the soldiers of God — to fight the Iranian government in 2003. Its leadership drew heavily from the Rigis. The United States would later estimate that Jundallah attracted 500 to 2,000 members, making it about the size of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.

But in its early years, the group received little attention in Washington. And Mr. McHale’s relationship with the group did not raise concerns, former officials say. In part, they say, that was because the United States did not yet consider Jundallah a terrorist organization and it had stated no intention to attack the West. But they say it was also because one of the government’s leading experts on Baluchistan, and the one most likely to spot the potential problem, was Mr. McHale himself.

Brazen Attacks

Over time, Jundallah grew more brazen. In 2005, its operatives ambushed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s motorcade, failing to kill him. The group was also blamed for a rapid series of attacks, including a massacre at a checkpoint in 2006. The following year, Jundallah carried out the car bombing on a bus full of Revolutionary Guard members.

The extent of the intelligence provided by Mr. McHale’s informant and his overseas network of contacts could not be determined. But Baluchistan serves as a hub for militant groups and smugglers who move drugs, weapons and kidnapping victims across the porous borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some Baluch fighters share ideological ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of 9/11, is an ethnic Baluch. Over the years, information from Mr. McHale’s sources filled huge intelligence files, three officials said.

It is not illegal for government agents to use criminals or terrorists as sources. Developing informants inside Al Qaeda has been a C.I.A. preoccupation since 9/11. But the goal has always been to use those informants to help dismantle Al Qaeda itself. In the case of Jundallah, the objective was to obtain information, former officials said, not to combat the group or stop its attacks.

Current and former officials say the American government never directed or approved any Jundallah operations. And they say there was never a case when the United States was told the timing and target of a terrorist attack yet took no action to prevent it.

Still, the risk of such arrangements is that atrocities committed by people working with the United States could be seen as sanctioned by the government. In Guatemala, for example, a military officer working with the C.I.A. ordered the killing of an American citizen in 1990. When that came to light, it became a major scandal that forced the C.I.A. to review its entire informant network.

The F.B.I., too, has a checkered history in this area. In one widely publicized case, F.B.I. agents in Boston used the mobster James (Whitey) Bulger as an informant, even as he and his gang committed murder. That scandal led the F.B.I. to rewrite its rules, which now require extensive record keeping and scrutiny of informants who commit crimes.

As an F.B.I. informant, Mr. McHale’s original United States-based source would have been subjected to that scrutiny. But requirements are less onerous for secondary sources, known as “subsources.” So officials acknowledged that there was little oversight of the people inside Jundallah whom Mr. McHale talked to and met abroad.

It is not clear which specific officials authorized the relationship with Jundallah to continue after C.I.A. lawyers raised concerns about it. Lawyers at the Justice Department and F.B.I. at the time say they were unaware of the relationship or the C.I.A. concerns.
Continue reading the main story


But though the government now says Mr. McHale worked as a single operator, there are indications that senior officials knew of and approved of the relationship he developed with Jundallah. For example, in 2008, senior F.B.I. officials in Washington approved a trip Mr. McHale made to Afghanistan, where he met with his network of informants. By rule, the C.I.A. would also have had to approve that trip.

Mr. McHale’s intelligence reports circulated widely throughout the intelligence community, former officials said. In 2009, the C.I.A.’s Iranian Operations Division gave Mr. McHale an award for his work, former officials said. The reason for his commendation is unknown. Dean Boyd, the C.I.A. spokesman, said the agency could not confirm having provided an award and declined to comment further.

By then, the State Department had begun considering whether to designate Jundallah as a terrorist organization. American officials denied repeated accusations by Iran that the United States and Israel were working with the group.

Iranian forces captured Abdolmalek Rigi in February 2010 and executed him that June. But Jundallah was undeterred. That July, two of its suicide bombers attacked the Grand Mosque in Zahedan, the provincial capital in southeastern Iran. Approximately 30 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Jundallah identified the bombers as Abdulbaset and Muhammad Rigi, relatives of their fallen leader.

President Obama condemned the carnage. “The United States stands with the families and loved ones of those killed and injured, and with the Iranian people, in the face of this injustice,” he said.

Keeping Ties After Terror

But the United States’s relationship with Jundallah’s leaders, through Mr. McHale and the F.B.I., did not change, even after the State Department formally designated Jundallah a terrorist organization in November 2010. As one of the government’s few experts on the region and the organization, Mr. McHale participated in the internal review that led to the decision, according to current and former officials. The designation did not prompt a review of Mr. McHale’s informants.

“Jundallah has engaged in numerous attacks resulting in the death and maiming of scores of Iranian civilians and government officials,” the State Department declared. “Jundallah uses a variety of terrorist tactics, including suicide bombings, ambushes, kidnappings and targeted assassinations.”

In late 2013, Mr. McHale requested approval to fly to Afghanistan to meet his contacts again, but the F.B.I. denied it. Exactly why — because of objections to the mission or because of governmentwide budget cuts that year — is not clear. By then, however, Mr. McHale’s brusque personality had caught up with him. He had developed a reputation for being difficult to manage, and F.B.I. managers in Newark complained that he did not keep adequate records of his intelligence operation. Friends said Mr. McHale found himself without support.

So instead, he arranged the trip through the Pentagon. Former officials say the F.B.I. did not try to stop him or object to the collaboration. It was his fifth trip to the region. Photos on his LinkedIn page documented the trip, showing Mr. McHale in Afghanistan alongside American Special Forces.

A few months after his return, the F.B.I. forced him off the Newark task force. Officials said recently that it was in part because of his unauthorized trip to Afghanistan.

Mr. McHale returned full-time to the Port Authority, but things had changed there, too. The controversy over Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge had led to management changes at the Port Authority, and friends said Mr. McHale lost some of his bureaucratic support. He became embroiled in a bitter fight with the agency, friends and colleagues say, and retired from the agency last spring.

Some federal officials blame Mr. McHale for what they describe as an operation that veered out of control. They said that if the United States and Jundallah had too close a relationship, Mr. McHale’s go-it-alone attitude was to blame.

But friends and former colleagues say this characterization of Mr. McHale as a rogue operator is unfair. They point out that the relationship persisted for more than a decade, and Mr. McHale’s actions were approved and applauded by several United States agencies over those years. “I’m not sure what to say about this case,” said Mr. Holt, who is retiring from Congress this year. “Everything is plausible in the freewheeling intelligence world.”

With Mr. McHale in retirement, the future of America’s involvement with the Rigis is unclear. Jundallah has fragmented. Its followers have joined other militant groups. But officials say that Mr. McHale’s original informant, the one who holds the key to a network of overseas informants, remains on the books as an F.B.I. informant.
Title: The Imitation Game
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2014, 12:56:06 PM
•   
 
Movie Review: ‘The Imitation Game’ Stars Benedict CumberbatchNOV. 27, 2014

Perhaps a hundred yards away, the bucolic landscaping comes to an end, with prefab-looking buildings crammed together and labeled things like “Hut 6” or “Hut 8.” Here, in drab rooms, about 9,000 mathematicians, linguists, cryptographers, clerks and classicists worked around the clock throughout the war to break German codes.

But for three decades after the war, who knew? Britain’s Official Secrets Act erased the history and silenced the participants. The estate, about an hour by train northwest of London, became a training school for teachers and then for postal workers. In 1991, there were plans to demolish it for a housing development.

But that was without reckoning with the growing understanding of what had happened here. Code breaking helped the Allies plan D-Day, turned the tide on the Russian front and helped foil U-boat attacks in the Atlantic. Churchill famously called the workers here geese who “laid the golden eggs and never cackled.” So when the Bletchley Park Trust was established and opened a museum here in 1993, the point was to show off some golden eggs, and perhaps even cackle a bit.

The museum was also tapping into interest in Alan Turing: the brilliant mathematician, master code breaker and irascible, persecuted genius of “The Imitation Game.” Turing and Bletchley Park have inspired another feature film (“Enigma”), a play (“Breaking the Code”), television series (“Codebreakers,” “The Bletchley Circle”) and a growing library of books, most notably the extraordinary 1983 biography by Andrew Hodges, “Alan Turing: The Enigma” (which provides very loose inspiration for the new movie).

Recently, interest in Turing has grown, spurred by recognition of his work, but also of his life: He was shamefully prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952 (and two years later committed suicide, an inquest concluded). Bletchley Park displays a signed copy of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s 2009 government apology. (Turing received a posthumous royal pardon in 2013.)

And while Bletchley Park has not had an easy time of it — in 2008, a hundred academics signed a letter to The Times of London, outraged by disrepair and neglect here — a recent visit showed it to be exceptionally vigorous. After receiving a $7.9 million government grant and raising $4.7 million from other sources, Bletchley Park completed the first stage of a planned renovation in June, restoring buildings and landscaping, creating a visitor center with an introductory exhibition and mounting new exhibitions in the “huts.”

Now, with “The Imitation Game” poised to increase attention further (though its account of Turing’s code breaking is startlingly jumbled), Bletchley Park has opened a yearlong exhibition about the making of the film as a lure for “set-jetters” eager to visit where parts were filmed.

The other exhibitions here strike a more sober and weighty note,  though with  some flaws: They are splintered among many buildings; there is no systematic narrative; older exhibitions mix with the new. The effect is a little like that of the mansion, where rooms were added in different eras and with different styles.

But, in the end, it doesn’t matter: There is more here than can be absorbed in a single visit. An exhibition about Turing presents a survey of his mathematical papers, along with personal artifacts (including his teddy bear, in front of which he might have practiced his mathematics lectures at Cambridge University).

Another exhibition sketches the daily life of this secluded wartime world, with its high concentrations of women, as well as eccentric geniuses like the classicist Alfred Dillwyn Knox (who had famously pieced together papyrus fragments found in an Egyptian cave). Ian Fleming also spent time here.

Displays of German coding machines show just how daunting a task the code breakers faced: Those machines contained rotating discs and a plug board that, on the German Navy’s Enigma, for example, allowed for about a billion million million possibilities — and settings were changed every day.

In the huts, sound and video installations evoke the frantic yet meticulous work that went on. Turing’s office, in Hut 8, looks as if he had just stepped out, his cryptic markings covering a blackboard. Desks throughout the complex, like his, are covered with pencils, pads, typewriters and reference volumes — state of the era’s cryptographic art. Nearby are higher-tech touch screens that guide us through some techniques that were used.

These exhibitions are likely to grow in importance over time, because they are so detailed and careful — good correctives for growing misconceptions. For example, the most common image now associated with Bletchley Park is of the Bombe, a magnificent machine whose clicking rotors are also often used in “The Imitation Game” as evidence of Turing’s genius. The Bombes were all dismantled after the war, but in 2007, a working model was recreated that now hypnotically draws visitors to a demonstration.

But however impressive, the Bombe is, so to speak, overblown. It is not, the exhibition reminds us, a computer. It does no calculations. It simply runs through possible Enigma settings. Polish cryptographers had built a simpler one before the war. The Bombe was necessary, but insufficient.

The real advances in computer technology occurred in a roomsize monstrosity with over 1,500 vacuum tubes, built by an engineer, Tommy Flowers, and known as the Colossus. It may have been the world’s first programmable electronic computer, and was used to break another notoriously complex code, one used by Hitler and the German high command. It, too, was demolished, but a working reconstruction is the centerpiece of the independently run National Museum of Computing,located here in space rented from Bletchley Park (and well worth visiting).

In many ways, too, the human decoding work was more impressive than the mechanical. Each day, the task was to determine the Enigma settings that were used. Possibilities had to be narrowed by statistical analysis and clever deductions before the Bombe could be used. And that was where Turing and his colleagues showed their brilliance.

A touch screen here gives a particularly elegant example. Every time a letter was encoded by an Enigma machine, the Enigma’s rotors would advance, changing the code settings for the following letter. So identical letters would rarely have identical codings, even within the same message. But the Enigma also had a crucial quirk: A letter could never be encoded as itself. (A W in code was never a W in the original.)

One day, a German dispatch seemed peculiar to Mavis Batey, one of Bletchley’s leading code breakers: It did not contain a single L. Batey guessed that it was a test message, that the operator, feeling lazy, sent it off by just hitting a single letter over and over. So this message was entirely composed of the one letter the coded text did not contain: L. This led her to the day’s Enigma setting. And that setting decoded other messages that led to the British Navy’s victory in the 1941 Battle of Matapan, in Italy.

Is there another example in history when a battle was won because of a single letter?

Bletchley Park is on Sherwood Drive, Bletchley, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England; 44-1908-640404, bletchleypark.org.uk.

A version of this review appears in print on November 29, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Turing’s Spirit Hovers at a Restored Estate. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Title: Saudi born citizen charged over plans to destroy aircraft carrier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2014, 07:47:26 AM


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/6/fbi-charges-saudi-born-naval-engineer-over-plans-s/
Title: CIA interrogations
Post by: prentice crawford on December 09, 2014, 06:36:28 PM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/truth-about-interrogation_819024.html Truth About Interrogation
The enhanced techniques work. #CIA interrogator comes forward.

                                 P.C.
Title: Shocking! The dems are fcuking liars!
Post by: G M on December 09, 2014, 08:01:13 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-once-urged-the-agency-to-do-anything-to-fight-al-qaeda/2014/12/05/ac418da2-7bda-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html
Title: Stratfor: Why Torture is Counterproductive
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2014, 03:25:23 PM


 Why Torture Is Counterproductive
Analysis
December 10, 2014 | 02:13 GMT Print Text Size
Torture is Counterproductive
Military police process incoming Taliban and al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray in Cuba in 2002. (Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy/U.S. Navy/Getty Images)
Summary

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government had very little intelligence on al Qaeda's plans and capabilities. There was a tremendous amount of fear that the strikes were only the first of many large-scale attacks to come, and reports even circulated that the group had nuclear weapons planted in U.S. cities. The public as well as government officials were in shock and caught off guard. In hindsight, it is easy to understand how extreme fear of the unknown compelled some elements of the intelligence community to embrace the idea that harsh interrogation measures were required to understand the urgent and nebulous threat the nation was facing.

Indeed, the sense of fear and panic was significant enough to cause personnel in some agencies to override the moral objections associated with extreme interrogation tactics, which is also to ignore the widely regarded fact that torture does not produce reliable intelligence. Yet, the Senate report released Dec. 9 makes it clear that, from a purely pragmatic point of view, the results of the United States' enhanced interrogation program were negligible, and as the final analysis shows, the morally objectionable means of this program were not justified by its paltry results.
Analysis

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report highlights and describes certain techniques in great detail — including the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation, slapping, shaking, water boarding and induced hypothermia — but does not reveal any techniques that were not already publicly known. The CIA began implementing these techniques, deemed torture by opponents and enhanced or harsh interrogation techniques by supporters, in 2002. The aim was to improve the chances of acquiring time-sensitive information from high value-targets that would be critical to national security. The thinking of the time was to employ more robust methods to uncover impending catastrophic attacks against U.S. citizens, the "ticking time bomb scenario" as it is commonly referred to.

In 2004, the revelations of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq at the hands of U.S. military personnel garnered widespread coverage by domestic and international media. Images of military police harassing and violating prisoners were circulated, sparking significant controversy over whether the U.S. government employed torture against its enemy combatants, a stark violation of human rights for many as well as an infringement of the Geneva Conventions. Though the media focused on the actions of the military police, rather than interrogators, the revelations quickly led to further inquiries and deep scrutiny over the interrogation practices conducted at the prison and across the intelligence community.
Conversation: Putting the CIA Interrogation Report Into Context

The scandal led the Defense Department to quickly tighten its policies on interrogations, while each military branch emphatically trained its personnel on operating in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. However, the CIA continued to use enhanced interrogation techniques, though only for a short period and on relatively few combatants. In January 2009, President Barrack Obama signed an executive order that restricted all U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct interrogations strictly in accordance with the methods described in the U.S. Army Field Manual 2-22.3, a publication that is readily available to the public.

Whether the enhanced interrogation techniques implemented by the CIA equate to torture still remains a hotly contested issue in the United States. It is true that all the methods detailed in the report are intended to inflict substantial emotional or physical pain on detainees. Aside from the serious ethical concerns surrounding the techniques detailed in the Senate report, the use of torture or any technique designed to inflict some measure of pain or duress upon a detainee makes for a poor, if not counterproductive, strategy in gaining actionable intelligence. The reasons for this include the inherent nature of the interrogation process as well as the inadvertent psychological consequences of torture or harsh techniques on the detainee.
Defining Interrogation

The sole objective of an intelligence-driven interrogation is to acquire actionable information through direct questioning or elicitation of a detainee. In this sense, actionable intelligence is any piece of information, by itself or as a factor in analysis, that military commanders or policymakers can use in making decisions. If an interrogator fails to obtain such information, the sole objective was not achieved, and the process was a failure. Likewise, if the intent of an interrogation was not to gain actionable intelligence, the interrogation becomes something entirely different.

Despite dramatic Hollywood portrayals of the intelligence-gathering process, interrogating a detainee is actually a very simple process. It can be looked at as an interview, though a major difference between an interrogation and an interview is that many subjects are unwilling to provide answers to pertinent questions at first. As a result, the first step in an interrogation is convincing the subject to cooperate. It is this critical phase, which the U.S. Army Field Manual 2-22.3 refers to as an "approach," that often receives the most attention from the public and, sometimes, even from the interrogator.

Setting aside legal and moral considerations, there is a wide variety of conflicting approaches that can be used to encourage a detainee to provide actionable intelligence. It should be noted that not all approaches are necessarily designed to evoke negative feelings in a detainee. In fact, the Field Manual 2-22.3 details several methods designed to do the opposite. The U.S. intelligence community mostly relies on approaches that generate positive feelings within the detainee, such as "emotional love" and "pride and ego up," in addition to incentive-based approaches. Outside of inflicting emotional or physical harm on a detainee, all approaches are simply conversations guided by the interrogator that would lead the detainee to willingly provide information of intelligence value. A prime example of an incentive-based approach convincing a detainee to talk is when the Detroit underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, cooperated with U.S. authorities after they brought in two of his family members from Nigeria.

These conversations can take time for an interrogator, however, and often span multiple sessions that are carried out over the course of days, weeks or even years. While the time devoted to garner actionable intelligence can be substantial, the interrogator's chance of successfully completing the objective is slim. The vast majority of detainees who are initially uncooperative will remain so, or at least never become cooperative in full. The necessary time to run approaches and the slim odds of success are critical barriers in an interrogation that seeks to discover imminent attacks against U.S. citizens. It is because of these obstacles — that is, to save time and force cooperation — that interrogators sought to employ enhanced interrogation techniques.
The Limits of Enhanced Interrogations

As a potential source of intelligence, interrogations are one of the least reliable and least timely methods employed by the various intelligence disciplines. While inflicting emotional or physical pain on a subject as an interrogation approach will likely elicit a quick response, those responses are not necessarily truthful or accurate, and thus the interrogation can still be a failure.

Whether looking for information on potential attacks or other, less perishable intelligence, an interrogator can gather actionable intelligence only if the subject is telling the truth and answers the questions to the best of his ability. Even if the subject is cooperating, the information he shares is not always accurate. By virtue of placing the detainee under extreme stress, torture can make it difficult for the detainee to accurately recall information from memory. Detainees may misremember details and will often fabricate information they think will end the interrogation.

All information of intelligence value, particularly any information about an impending attack, is time sensitive. For the vast majority of interrogations, the information acquired can only be as recent as the date when the subject was detained, and it begins losing value immediately. A detainee who has been in detention for years will not have intelligence on a pending attack — even information that is a few days old could very well be useless. The capture of an insurgent or terrorist leader could place any attack plans on hold, or the remaining leaders could redraw them, thus making the detainee's knowledge outdated and less valuable. For this reason, when compared to the numerous other means by which the intelligence community collects intelligence, an interrogation makes a poor source of intelligence when attempting to thwart attacks.

To understand why torture provides little benefit over approaches permissible under Field Manual 2-22.3, it is important to consider the perspective of the interrogator and the detainee.
The Process

Before entering the booth with a detainee, every interrogator is armed with a dossier on his subject and a list of collection requirements — broad, open-ended questions on an array of subjects that policymakers, military commanders or others in the intelligence community may have. Background information about the detainee can range from a complete lack of knowledge to an enormous collection of various intelligence reports that collectively proves the detainee's role within an enemy organization as well as the likely topics on which the detainee will have information. Regardless how much information an intelligence agency has on a detainee, there is always a high degree of uncertainty as to what the detainee actually knows.

Many detainees choose not to cooperate at first. They employ interrogation-resistance strategies of some fashion to avoid divulging pertinent information. These methods vary and are taught and shared by militants inside and out of detention facilities. Even before meeting their interrogator for the first time, most detainees are aware of what information they need to safeguard, often having an expectation of what questions they will be asked during the interrogation.

Sometimes it is obvious when a detainee chooses to remain uncooperative; the detainee may remain completely silent, respond to questions with inappropriate answers or attempt to take charge of the conversation. Even when they appear to be cooperating, the interrogator can never be entirely confident the detainee is responding to questions to the best of his ability or, more important, accurately sharing his information. Fortunately, interrogators are trained in numerous tactics to assess the truthfulness of a detainee's stories, but even when skillfully employed, such techniques do not provide guarantees, nor do they help build cooperation.

There are many reasons for a detainee to resist direct questioning. Whether such reasons are ideological in nature or based on fear of reprisals, a detainee must actively make the decision to provide his interrogator with accurate information. Without the desire, the detainee simply will not respond, regardless of any interrogation approach. Many advocates of enhanced interrogation techniques believe the detainee will choose to provide accurate information to stop the pain.
Establishing Rapport

In order to help an approach, an interrogator must build rapport with the subject. They must develop a relationship where credibility exists in both the interrogator and the detainee. It is only after doing this that an interrogator can accurately assess the truthfulness of a detainee's responses. Rapport helps the interrogator establish a baseline for the detainee and understand his typical behavior and mannerisms, developed through conversations discussing pertinent and non-pertinent matters. Likewise, building rapport helps bolster the credibility of the interrogator. It is particularly helpful when using incentive-based approaches and makes the interrogator's other planned approaches more effective. Using harsh techniques or torture complicates the rapport-building process, making it harder for an interrogator to discern between lies and truth.

Building rapport does not always mean the detainee will develop positive feelings toward the interrogator, and even some approved approaches require developing an uncordial relationship. However, placing the detainee under the stress of extreme emotional or physical pain will halt any relationship building as the detainee focuses on his pain. Because an interrogator is never quite certain of what a detainee knows, the detainee under duress or pain may be subjected to questions he may truthfully not know the answers to. In this situation, a detainee will be pushed to say anything necessary to stop the pain, including lies.

Even if the detainee actually has an answer that would satisfy his interrogator, he can still use resistance techniques. Resisting subjects often provide a detailed response that barely answers a given question. They also provide harmless nuggets of truth in hopes of persuading the interrogators of their full cooperation. Again, having prior intelligence on the detainee and building rapport is crucial to spotting these resistance techniques.

Not all inaccurate information provided by the detainee is necessarily a result of his being uncooperative. When being questioned under duress or pain, a detainee may simply lie to make up for a lack of knowledge. More common, however, is that all people have varying abilities to accurately recollect events, descriptions and conversations. Interrogators, particularly those tasked with gathering information on pending attacks, must strive to obtain the smallest details from the detainee. This can significantly challenge any person's memory, especially someone under extreme stress. Details of a story may become more difficult to remember, and if under extreme stress, the detainee may fabricate a critical detail, even when largely telling the truth, in order to satisfy the interrogator. 

While the need to uncover imminent terrorist attacks in the chaos directly after 9/11 was clear, several years of results have made it obvious that using enhanced interrogation techniques is not reliable. Other interrogation approaches, specifically those still permitted by FM 2-22.3, in concert with building a rapport with a detainee, yield far more reliable results. Additionally, using other intelligence-gathering methods under the human intelligence discipline, or methods from other disciplines such as signals intelligence, have proved more productive. The Senate Intelligence Committee's report only confirms this fact, acknowledging what the intelligence community already knows.

Read more: Why Torture Is Counterproductive | Stratfor
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Title: Stratfor in 2009: Torture and the US Intel failure
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2014, 03:27:53 PM
Second post:

 Torture and the U.S. Intelligence Failure
Geopolitical Weekly
April 20, 2009 | 17:47 GMT Print Text Size
Dissecting the Chinese Miracle

By George Friedman

The Obama administration published a series of memoranda on torture issued under the Bush administration. The memoranda, most of which dated from the period after 9/11, authorized measures including depriving prisoners of solid food, having them stand shackled and in uncomfortable positions, leaving them in cold cells with inadequate clothing, slapping their heads and/or abdomens, and telling them that their families might be harmed if they didn't cooperate with their interrogators.

On the scale of human cruelty, these actions do not rise anywhere near the top. At the same time, anyone who thinks that being placed without food in a freezing cell subject to random mild beatings — all while being told that your family might be joining you — isn't agonizing clearly lacks imagination. The treatment of detainees could have been worse. It was terrible nonetheless.
Torture and the Intelligence Gap

But torture is meant to be terrible, and we must judge the torturer in the context of his own desperation. In the wake of 9/11, anyone who wasn't terrified was not in touch with reality. We know several people who now are quite blasé about 9/11. Unfortunately for them, we knew them in the months after, and they were not nearly as composed then as they are now.

Sept. 11 was terrifying for one main reason: We had little idea about al Qaeda's capabilities. It was a very reasonable assumption that other al Qaeda cells were operating in the United States and that any day might bring follow-on attacks. (Especially given the group's reputation for one-two attacks.) We still remember our first flight after 9/11, looking at our fellow passengers, planning what we would do if one of them moved. Every time a passenger visited the lavatory, one could see the tensions soar.

And while Sept. 11 was frightening enough, there were ample fears that al Qaeda had secured a "suitcase bomb" and that a nuclear attack on a major U.S. city could come at any moment. For individuals, such an attack was simply another possibility. We remember staying at a hotel in Washington close to the White House and realizing that we were at ground zero — and imagining what the next moment might be like. For the government, however, the problem was having scraps of intelligence indicating that al Qaeda might have a nuclear weapon, but not having any way of telling whether those scraps had any value. The president and vice president accordingly were continually kept at different locations, and not for any frivolous reason.

This lack of intelligence led directly to the most extreme fears, which in turn led to extreme measures. Washington simply did not know very much about al Qaeda and its capabilities and intentions in the United States. A lack of knowledge forces people to think of worst-case scenarios. In the absence of intelligence to the contrary after 9/11, the only reasonable assumption was that al Qaeda was planning more — and perhaps worse — attacks.

Collecting intelligence rapidly became the highest national priority. Given the genuine and reasonable fears, no action in pursuit of intelligence was out of the question, so long as it promised quick answers. This led to the authorization of torture, among other things. Torture offered a rapid means to accumulate intelligence, or at least — given the time lag on other means — it was something that had to be tried.
Torture and the Moral Question

And this raises the moral question. The United States is a moral project: its Declaration of Independence and Constitution state that. The president takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. The Constitution does not speak to the question of torture of non-citizens, but it implies an abhorrence of rights violations (at least for citizens). But the Declaration of Independence contains the phrase, "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." This indicates that world opinion matters.

At the same time, the president is sworn to protect the Constitution. In practical terms, this means protecting the physical security of the United States "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Protecting the principles of the declaration and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation.

While this all makes for an interesting seminar in political philosophy, presidents — and others who have taken the same oath — do not have the luxury of the contemplative life. They must act on their oaths, and inaction is an action. Former U.S. President George W. Bush knew that he did not know the threat, and that in order to carry out his oath, he needed very rapidly to find out the threat. He could not know that torture would work, but he clearly did not feel that he had the right to avoid it.

Consider this example. Assume you knew that a certain individual knew the location of a nuclear device planted in an American city. The device would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, but the individual refused to divulge the information. Would anyone who had sworn the oath have the right not to torture the individual? Torture might or might not work, but either way, would it be moral to protect the individual's rights while allowing hundreds of thousands to die? It would seem that in this case, torture is a moral imperative; the rights of the one with the information cannot transcend the life of a city.
Torture in the Real World

But here is the problem: You would not find yourself in this situation. Knowing a bomb had been planted, knowing who knew that the bomb had been planted, and needing only to apply torture to extract this information is not how the real world works. Post-9/11, the United States knew much less about the extent of the threat from al Qaeda. This hypothetical sort of torture was not the issue.

Discrete information was not needed, but situational awareness. The United States did not know what it needed to know, it did not know who was of value and who wasn't, and it did not know how much time it had. Torture thus was not a precise solution to a specific problem: It became an intelligence-gathering technique. The nature of the problem the United States faced forced it into indiscriminate intelligence gathering. When you don't know what you need to know, you cast a wide net. And when torture is included in the mix, it is cast wide as well. In such a case, you know you will be following many false leads — and when you carry torture with you, you will be torturing people with little to tell you. Moreover, torture applied by anyone other than well-trained, experienced personnel (who are in exceptionally short supply) will only compound these problems, and make the practice less productive.

Defenders of torture frequently seem to believe that the person in custody is known to have valuable information, and that this information must be forced out of him. His possession of the information is proof of his guilt. The problem is that unless you have excellent intelligence to begin with, you will become engaged in developing baseline intelligence, and the person you are torturing may well know nothing at all. Torture thus becomes not only a waste of time and a violation of decency, it actually undermines good intelligence. After a while, scooping up suspects in a dragnet and trying to extract intelligence becomes a substitute for competent intelligence techniques — and can potentially blind the intelligence service. This is especially true as people will tell you what they think you want to hear to make torture stop.

Critics of torture, on the other hand, seem to assume the torture was brutality for the sake of brutality instead of a desperate attempt to get some clarity on what might well have been a catastrophic outcome. The critics also cannot know the extent to which the use of torture actually prevented follow-on attacks. They assume that to the extent that torture was useful, it was not essential; that there were other ways to find out what was needed. In the long run, they might have been correct. But neither they, nor anyone else, had the right to assume in late 2001 that there was a long run. One of the things that wasn't known was how much time there was.
The U.S. Intelligence Failure

The endless argument over torture, the posturing of both critics and defenders, misses the crucial point. The United States turned to torture because it has experienced a massive intelligence failure reaching back a decade. The U.S. intelligence community simply failed to gather sufficient information on al Qaeda's intentions, capability, organization and personnel. The use of torture was not part of a competent intelligence effort, but a response to a massive intelligence failure.

That failure was rooted in a range of miscalculations over time. There was the public belief that the end of the Cold War meant the United States didn't need a major intelligence effort, a point made by the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan. There were the intelligence people who regarded Afghanistan as old news. There was the Torricelli amendment that made recruiting people with ties to terrorist groups illegal without special approval. There were the Middle East experts who could not understand that al Qaeda was fundamentally different from anything seen before. The list of the guilty is endless, and ultimately includes the American people, who always seem to believe that the view of the world as a dangerous place is something made up by contractors and bureaucrats.

Bush was handed an impossible situation on Sept. 11, after just nine months in office. The country demanded protection, and given the intelligence shambles he inherited, he reacted about as well or badly as anyone else might have in the situation. He used the tools he had, and hoped they were good enough.

The problem with torture — as with other exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary situations. The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence interrogator's tool kit.

At a certain point, the emergency was over. U.S. intelligence had focused itself and had developed an increasingly coherent picture of al Qaeda, with the aid of allied Muslim intelligence agencies, and was able to start taking a toll on al Qaeda. The war had become routinized, and extraordinary measures were no longer essential. But the routinization of the extraordinary is the built-in danger of bureaucracy, and what began as a response to unprecedented dangers became part of the process. Bush had an opportunity to move beyond the emergency. He didn't.

If you know that an individual is loaded with information, torture can be a useful tool. But if you have so much intelligence that you already know enough to identify the individual is loaded with information, then you have come pretty close to winning the intelligence war. That's not when you use torture. That's when you simply point out to the prisoner that, "for you the war is over." You lay out all you already know and how much you know about him. That is as demoralizing as freezing in a cell — and helps your interrogators keep their balance.

U.S. President Barack Obama has handled this issue in the style to which we have become accustomed, and which is as practical a solution as possible. He has published the memos authorizing torture to make this entirely a Bush administration problem while refusing to prosecute anyone associated with torture, keeping the issue from becoming overly divisive. Good politics perhaps, but not something that deals with the fundamental question.

The fundamental question remains unanswered, and may remain unanswered. When a president takes an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," what are the limits on his obligation? We take the oath for granted. But it should be considered carefully by anyone entering this debate, particularly for presidents.

Read more: Torture and the U.S. Intelligence Failure | Stratfor
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Title: POTH: Panel- no penalty for CIA's search of/raid on Feinstein's computers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2014, 08:24:53 AM
WASHINGTON — A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials.

The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director.

While effectively rejecting the most significant conclusions of the inspector general’s report, the panel, appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency, is still expected to criticize agency missteps that contributed to the fight with Congress.  But its decision not to recommend anyone for disciplinary action is likely to anger members of the Intelligence Committee, who have accused the C.I.A. of trampling on the independence of Congress and interfering with its investigation of agency wrongdoing. The computer searches occurred late last year while the committee was finishing an excoriating report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

The computer search raised questions about the separation of powers and caused one of the most public rifts in years between the nation’s intelligence agencies and the Senate oversight panel, which conducts most of its business in secret. It led to an unusually heated and public rebuke by Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is the committee’s chairwoman.

Three C.I.A. technology officers and two lawyers had faced possible punishment. In their defense, some pointed to documents — including notes of a phone call with Mr. Brennan — that they said indicated that the director supported their actions, according to interviews with a half dozen current and former government officials and others briefed on the case.

The panel’s chairman is Evan Bayh, a Democratic former senator from Indiana who served on the Intelligence Committee. Its other outside member is Robert F. Bauer, who served as White House counsel during President Obama’s first term.

The panel’s specific conclusions are still being finalized, and it could be weeks before they present a report to the C.I.A. But officials said that the five agency employees had been informed that the panel would recommend that they not be disciplined.

The results of such investigations, known as accountability boards, are not normally released. But given the public nature of the dispute, it is expected that some of the conclusions will eventually become public.

“The process is ongoing,” said Dean Boyd, the C.I.A. spokesman. “We haven’t seen what it says, so it’s impossible to comment on it.”

When the controversy over the search erupted, Mr. Brennan offered a vigorous defense of his agency. He later apologized after the C.I.A.’s inspector general concluded that the agency had improperly monitored the committee’s activities. The inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers had read the emails of agency investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information.


Mr. Brennan has enraged senators by refusing to answer questions posed by the Intelligence Committee about who at the C.I.A. authorized the computer intrusion. Doing so, he said, could compromise the accountability board’s investigation.

“What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, said in an interview last week. “They haven’t answered those basic questions.”

The computer controversy erupted last December amid a dispute between the C.I.A. and committee Democrats and staff members over the conclusions of the torture report, which was released last week. As it does today, the C.I.A. disputed the report’s findings that brutal interrogation tactics yielded no crucial intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks. During a committee hearing, Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, revealed the existence of a previously unknown internal C.I.A. report that he said backed up the committee’s findings.

“If this is true,” Mr. Udall said, “this raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.”

By then, agency officials had already suspected that committee investigators had found the internal review, which was ordered in 2009 by Leon E. Panetta, then the C.I.A. director, and has come to be known as the “Panetta review.” Working for years from the basement of a C.I.A. facility in North Virginia, Senate investigators reviewed millions of digital files related to the interrogation program. But the Panetta review was not supposed to be one of them, and agency officials suspected that Senate investigators had somehow gained access to parts of the C.I.A.’s computer network they had been prohibited from searching.

C.I.A. officers searched their logs to see if they had inadvertently given the Panetta review to the Senate. When they determined they had not, officials brought the matter to Mr. Brennan, who authorized what he has called “a limited review” to figure out if Senate staff members had obtained the documents.

The inspector general’s report included details of a conversation last December, when Mr. Brennan called the home of one of the C.I.A. lawyers under investigation. According to two people with knowledge of the inspector general’s findings, the lawyer wrote a memorandum about the conversation that said Mr. Brennan told him he needed to get to the bottom of the matter.

Much of the dispute between the Senate and the C.I.A. revolves around what rules governed the computer system used by Senate investigators as they wrote their report. The C.I.A. made the documents available to the investigators and created a search function that allowed them to locate documents based on key words. The rules for accessing the network were established in a series of memos and letters, not one formal document.
Title: The flip side of this is rather obvious
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 03, 2015, 02:37:12 PM
F.B.I. Employees With Ties Abroad See Security Bias

The F.B.I. is subjecting hundreds of its employees who were born overseas or have relatives or friends there to an aggressive internal surveillance program that started after Sept. 11, 2001, to prevent foreign spies from coercing newly hired linguists but that has been greatly expanded since then.
The program has drawn criticism from F.B.I. linguists, agents and other personnel with foreign language and cultural skills, and with ties abroad. They complain they are being discriminated against by a secretive “risk-management” plan that the agency uses to guard against espionage. This limits their assignments and stalls their careers, according to several employees and their lawyers.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/fbi-employees-with-ties-abroad-see-security-bias.html?emc=edit_na_20150103

Title: I wonder what is behind this?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2015, 03:31:19 PM
Prosecutors Said to Recommend Charges Against Former Gen. David Petraeus

The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.

The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information.

Mr. Petraeus, a retired four star-general who served as commander of American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has said he never provided classified information to Ms. Broadwell, and has indicated to the Justice Department that he has no interest in a plea deal that would spare him an embarrassing trial.

READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/us/politics/prosecutors-said-to-recommend-charges-against-former-gen-david-petraeus.html?emc=edit_na_20150109

Title: The Missing Pages of the 911 Report
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2015, 12:06:01 PM
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/12/the-missing-pages-of-the-9-11-report.html

 :-o :-o :-o
Title: POTH: Condaleeza Rice testifies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2015, 06:58:02 PM
WASHINGTON — White House officials favor two primary tactics when they want to kill a news article, Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser, testified Thursday: They can essentially confirm the report by arguing that it is too important to national security to be published, or they can say that the reporter has it wrong.

Sitting across from a reporter and editor from The New York Times in early 2003, Ms. Rice said, she tried both.

Testifying in the leak trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer, Ms. Rice described how the White House successfully persuaded Times editors not to publish an article about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. James Risen, a Times reporter, ultimately revealed the program in his 2006 book, “State of War,” and said that the C.I.A. had botched the operation. Prosecutors used Ms. Rice’s testimony to bolster their case that the leak to Mr. Risen had harmed national security.

“This was very closely held,” Ms. Rice said. “It was one of the most closely held programs in my tenure as national security adviser.”

Ms. Rice’s account also threw a light on how the government pressures journalists to avoid publishing details about United States security affairs. It is a common practice that is seldom discussed.

Under President George W. Bush, the White House urged reporters to withhold accounts about many of the most contentious aspects in the war on terrorism: the existence of a secret prison in Thailand, the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation and detention program, warrantless wiretapping and government monitoring of financial transactions.

The Obama administration has persuaded reporters to delay publishing the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia, the name of a country in which a drone strike against an American citizen was being considered, the fact that a diplomat arrested in Pakistan was a C.I.A. officer and that an American businessman was working for the agency when he disappeared in Iran.

Mr. Sterling is charged with revealing classified information to Mr. Risen. Phone records and emails show that the two men were in contact, and the Justice Department argues that Mr. Sterling was a disgruntled employee who leaked the information to hurt the agency. His lawyers say the government did not investigate anyone else over the leak or review the phone records and emails of Mr. Sterling’s colleagues before focusing on him.

William Harlow, a former C.I.A. spokesman, testified Thursday that he was surprised when Mr. Risen first raised the subject of the Iranian operation in April 2003. Mr. Harlow testified that he did not know at the time that such an operation existed, and told Mr. Risen that only “a publication that didn’t have our best interests” would run such an article.

“I wanted to get his attention,” Mr. Harlow said.

Mr. Harlow summarized multiple phone conversations with Mr. Risen in memos that would form the foundation of the leak investigation.


The Iranian operation involved a former Russian nuclear scientist who, while working for the C.I.A., provided Tehran with schematics that were intentionally flawed. Mr. Risen’s book suggests that the program was mismanaged, that the Iranians quickly discovered the flaws and that they could have easily worked around them. The government disputes that conclusion.

According to notes of the White House meeting, George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director at the time, told Mr. Risen and his editor, Jill Abramson, that the program was not mismanaged and that Iran had not discovered the design flaw. The C.I.A. prepared talking points for Ms. Rice that said that revealing the program would not only jeopardize the former Russian scientist — who had become an American citizen — but “conceivably contribute to the deaths of millions of innocent victims” in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack. Ms. Rice said she urged The Times to destroy any documents or notes about the program.

The Times ultimately did not run the article. Ms. Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, said recently that she regretted not pushing to publish it. Told about Ms. Rice’s testimony, Ms. Abramson said in an email on Thursday that the trial “seems anticlimactic and pointless.”

Mr. Risen declined to comment. The Justice Department decided against putting him on the witness stand at trial, leaving prosecutors with a largely circumstantial case. But prosecutors have said that Mr. Sterling is the only one who could have leaked the information.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on February 01, 2015, 05:33:32 PM
Ever wonder about the timing of these reports let alone their veracity?

http://news.yahoo.com/cia-israel-plotted-senior-hezbollah-commanders-killing-report-080125587.html
Title: WSJ: The Lie that "Bush Lied"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2015, 12:08:47 PM


The Dangerous Lie That ‘Bush Lied’
Some journalists still peddle this canard as if it were fact. This is defamatory and could end up hurting the country.
By Laurence H. Silberman
Feb. 8, 2015 6:25 p.m. ET
WSJ

In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”

I found this shocking. I took a leave of absence from the bench in 2004-05 to serve as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction—a bipartisan body, sometimes referred to as the Robb-Silberman Commission. It was directed in 2004 to evaluate the intelligence community’s determination that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—I am, therefore, keenly aware of both the intelligence provided to President Bush and his reliance on that intelligence as his primary casus belli. It is astonishing to see the “Bush lied” allegation evolve from antiwar slogan to journalistic fact.

The intelligence community’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject.

Recall that the head of the intelligence community, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet, famously told the president that the proposition that Iraq possessed WMD was “a slam dunk.” Our WMD commission carefully examined the interrelationships between the Bush administration and the intelligence community and found no indication that anyone in the administration sought to pressure the intelligence community into its findings. As our commission reported, presidential daily briefs from the CIA dating back to the Clinton administration were, if anything, more alarmist about Iraq’s WMD than the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

Saddam had manifested sharp hostility toward America, including firing at U.S. planes patrolling the no-fly zone set up by the armistice agreement ending the first Iraq war. Saddam had also attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush —a car-bombing plot was foiled—during Mr. Bush’s visit to Kuwait in 1993. But President George W. Bush based his decision to go to war on information about Saddam’s WMD. Accordingly, when Secretary of State Colin Powell formally presented the U.S. case to the United Nations, Mr. Powell relied entirely on that aspect of the threat from Iraq.

Our WMD commission ultimately determined that the intelligence community was “dead wrong” about Saddam’s weapons. But as I recall, no one in Washington political circles offered significant disagreement with the intelligence community before the invasion. The National Intelligence Estimate was persuasive—to the president, to Congress and to the media.

Granted, there were those who disagreed with waging war against Saddam even if he did possess WMD. Some in Congress joined Brent Scowcroft, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former national security adviser, in publicly doubting the wisdom of invading Iraq. It is worth noting, however, that when Saddam was captured and interrogated, he told his interrogators that he had intended to seek revenge on Kuwait for its cooperation with the U.S. by invading again at a propitious time. This leads me to speculate that if the Bush administration had not gone to war in 2003 and Saddam had remained in power, the U.S. might have felt compelled to do so once Iraq again invaded Kuwait.

In any event, it is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam.

I recently wrote to Ron Fournier protesting his accusation. His response, in an email, was to reiterate that “an objective reading of the events leads to only one conclusion: the administration . . . misinterpreted, distorted and in some cases lied about intelligence.” Although Mr. Fournier referred to “evidence” supporting his view, he did not cite any—and I do not believe there is any.

He did say correctly that “intelligence is never dispositive; it requires analysis and judgment, with the final call and responsibility resting with the president.” It is thus certainly possible to criticize President Bush for having believed what the CIA told him, although it seems to me that any president would have credited such confident assertions by the intelligence community. But to accuse the president of lying us into war must be seen as not only false, but as dangerously defamatory.

The charge is dangerous because it can take on the air of historical fact—with potentially dire consequences. I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been “stabbed in the back” by politicians.

Sometime in the future, perhaps long after most of us are gone, an American president may need to rely publicly on intelligence reports to support military action. It would be tragic if, at such a critical moment, the president’s credibility were undermined by memories of a false charge peddled by the likes of Ron Fournier.

Mr. Silberman, a senior federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
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Title: How America was misled on AQ's demise
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2015, 06:05:32 AM
How America Was Misled on al Qaeda’s Demise
The White House portrait of a crumbling terror group is contradicted by documents seized in the bin Laden raid.
By
Stephen F. Hayes And
Thomas Joscelyn
March 5, 2015 7:13 p.m. ET
WSJ

In the early-morning hours of May 2, 2011, a small team of American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the high white walls of a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The team’s mission, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, had two primary objectives: capture or kill Osama bin Laden and gather as much intelligence as possible about the al Qaeda leader and his network. A bullet to bin Laden’s head accomplished the first; the quick work of the Sensitive Site Exploitation team accomplished the second.

It was quite a haul: 10 hard drives, nearly 100 thumb drives and a dozen cellphones. There were DVDs, audio and video tapes, data cards, reams of handwritten materials, newspapers and magazines. At a Pentagon briefing days after the raid, a senior military intelligence official described it as “the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”

The United States had gotten its hands on al Qaeda’s playbook—its recent history, its current operations, its future plans. An interagency team led by the Central Intelligence Agency got the first look at the cache. They performed a hasty scrub—a “triage”—on a small sliver of the document collection, looking for actionable intelligence. According to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the team produced more than 400 separate reports based on information in the documents.

But it is what happened next that is truly stunning: nothing. The analysis of the materials—the “document exploitation,” in the parlance of intelligence professionals—came to an abrupt stop. According to five senior U.S. intelligence officials, the documents sat largely untouched for months—perhaps as long as a year.

In spring 2012, a year after the raid that killed bin Laden and six months before the 2012 presidential election, the Obama administration launched a concerted campaign to persuade the American people that the long war with al Qaeda was ending. In a speech commemorating the anniversary of the raid, John Brennan , Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and later his CIA director, predicted the imminent demise of al Qaeda. The next day, on May 1, 2012, Mr. Obama made a bold claim: “The goal that I set—to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild—is now within our reach.”

The White House provided 17 handpicked documents to the Combatting Terror Center at the West Point military academy, where a team of analysts reached the conclusion the Obama administration wanted. Bin Laden, they found, had been isolated and relatively powerless, a sad and lonely man sitting atop a crumbling terror network.

It was a reassuring portrayal. It was also wrong. And those responsible for winning the war—as opposed to an election—couldn’t afford to engage in such dangerous self-delusion.

“The leadership down at Central Command wanted to know what were we learning from these documents,” says Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the transcript of an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier for a coming Fox News Reporting special. “We were still facing a growing al Qaeda threat. And it was not just Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq. But we saw it growing in Yemen. We clearly saw it growing still in East Africa.” The threat “wasn’t going away,” he adds, “and we wanted to know: What can we learn from these documents?”

After a pitched bureaucratic battle, a small team of analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency and Centcom was given time-limited, read-only access to the documents. The DIA team began producing analyses reflecting what they were seeing in the documents.

At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.”

This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them.

Even this limited glimpse into the broader set of documents revealed the problems with the administration’s claims about al Qaeda. Bin Laden had clear control of al Qaeda and was intimately involved in day-to-day management. More important, given the dramatic growth of the terror threat in the years since, the documents showed that bin Laden had expansion plans. Lt. Gen. Flynn says bin Laden was giving direction to “members of the wider al Qaeda leadership team, if you will, that went all the way to places like West Africa where we see a problem today with Boko Haram and [al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], all the way back into the things that were going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Bin Laden advised them on everything from specific operations in Europe to the types of crops his minions should plant in East Africa.

To date, the public has seen only two dozen of the 1.5 million documents captured in Abbottabad. “It’s a thimble-full,” says Derek Harvey, a senior intelligence official who helped lead the DIA analysis of the bin Laden collection.

And while it is impossible to paint a complete picture of al Qaeda based on the small set of documents available to the public, documents we are able to read, including those released last week in a Brooklyn terror trial, reveal stunning new details.

According to one letter, dated July 2010, the brother of Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s current prime minister, sought to strike a peace deal with the jihadists. Bin Laden was informed that Shahbaz Sharif, who was then the chief minister of Punjab, wanted to cut a deal with the Pakistani Taliban, whose leadership was close to bin Laden. The government “was ready to reestablish normal relations as long as [the Pakistani Taliban] do not conduct operations in Punjab,” according to the letter from Atiyah Abd al Rahman, one of bin Laden’s top deputies. Attacks elsewhere in Pakistan were apparently acceptable under the terms of the alleged proposal. Al Qaeda intended to guide the Pakistani Taliban throughout the negotiations. The same letter reveals how al Qaeda and its allies used the threat of terrorist attacks as a negotiating tactic in its talks with the Pakistani military.

The letter also shows that Pakistani intelligence was willing to negotiate with al Qaeda. Al Qaeda “leaked” word to the press that “big, earth shaking operations” were planned in Pakistan, the letter says, but bin Laden’s men and their allies would back off if the Pakistani army eased up on its offensive against the jihadists in the north: “In the aftermath” of the al Qaeda leak, “the intelligence people . . . started reaching out to us through some of the Pakistani ‘jihadist’ groups, the ones they approve of.” One of the Pakistani intelligence service’s emissaries was Fazl-ur-Rahman Khalil, a longtime bin Laden ally who leads the Harakat-ul-Mujahideen. Khalil was an early booster of bin Laden’s war against the West, having signed the al Qaeda master’s infamous 1998 fatwa declaring jihad “against the Jews and the Crusaders.” Another government intermediary was Hamid Gul, the one-time head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Al Qaeda’s network in Iran is also described in bin Laden’s letters. The Iranian regime held some senior al Qaeda leaders, eventually releasing them. This led to disagreements between the two sides. But the mullahs have also allowed al Qaeda to use Iranian soil as a key transit hub, shuttling fighters and cash to and from South Asia. One letter recounts a plan, devised by Yunis al Mauritani, one of bin Laden’s senior lieutenants, to relocate to Iran. Once there, Mauritani would dispatch terrorists to take part in operations around the world.

Mauritani was tasked by bin Laden with planning Mumbai-style shootings in Europe in 2010. The plot was fortunately thwarted. But all of the terrorists selected to take part transited Iran, according to court proceedings in Germany, taking advantage of the Iranian regime’s agreement with al Qaeda.

During the Arab uprisings in 2011, Obama administration officials argued that al Qaeda had been “sidelined” by the peaceful protests. Just weeks before he was killed, however, bin Laden’s men dispatched operatives to Libya and elsewhere to take advantage of the upheaval. “There has been an active Jihadist Islamic renaissance under way in Eastern Libya (Benghazi, Derna, Bayda and that area) for some time, just waiting for this kind of opportunity,” Atiyah Abd al Rahman wrote in early April 2011. Rahman thought there was much “good” in the so-called Arab Spring. And bin Laden believed that the upheaval presented al Qaeda with “unprecedented opportunities” to spread its radical ideology.

The fight over the bin Laden documents continues. Mr. Harvey, the senior DIA official, believes that the documents should be declassified and released to the public as soon as possible, after taking precautions to avoid compromising sources or methods. Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, inserted language in the 2014 intelligence authorization bill requiring just that.

Making the documents public is long overdue. The information in them is directly relevant to many of the challenges we face today—from a nuclear deal with an Iranian regime that supports al Qaeda to the rise of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; from confidence-building measures meant to please the Afghan Taliban to the trustworthiness of senior Pakistani officials.

Choosing ignorance shouldn’t be an option.

Mr. Hayes is a senior writer for the Weekly Standard. Mr. Joscelyn is senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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Title: CIA reorganizing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2015, 06:37:52 PM
Second post

POTH

LANGLEY, Va. — John O. Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is planning to reassign thousands of undercover spies and intelligence analysts into new departments as part of a restructuring of the 67-year-old agency, a move he said would make it more successful against modern threats and crises.

Drawing from disparate sources — from the Pentagon to corporate America — Mr. Brennan’s plan would partly abandon the agency’s current structure that keeps spies and analysts separate as they target specific regions or countries. Instead, C.I.A. officers will be assigned to 10 new mission centers focused on terrorism, weapons proliferation, the Middle East and other areas with responsibility for espionage operations, intelligence analysis and covert actions.

During a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Brennan gave few specifics about how a new structure would make the C.I.A. better at spying in an era of continued terrorism, cyberspying and tumult across the Middle East. But he said the current structure of having undercover spies and analysts cloistered separately — with little interaction and answering to different bosses — was anachronistic given the myriad global issues the agency faces.

“I’ve never seen a time when we have been confronted with such an array of very challenging, complex and serious threats to our national security, and issues that we have to grapple with,” he said.

One model for the new divisions is the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, an amalgam of undercover spies and analysts charged with hunting, and often killing, militant suspects across the globe. Once a small, occasionally neglected office in the C.I.A., the Counterterrorism Center has grown into a behemoth with thousands of officers since the Sept. 11 attacks as the C.I.A. has taken charge of a number of secret wars overseas.

But Mr. Brennan also cited another model for his new plan: the American military. He said that the Defense Department’s structure of having a single military commander in charge of all operations in a particular region — the way a four-star commander runs United States Central Command — was an efficient structure that led to better accountability.

Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior C.I.A. analyst, said that the reorganization “is not going to go down smoothly” at the agency, especially among clandestine spies who have long been able to withhold information from analysts, such as the identity of their foreign agents. “The clandestine service is very, very guarded about giving too much information about sources to the analysts,” he said.

But Mr. Lowenthal, who said he had not been briefed about the reorganization and was basing his understanding of Mr. Brennan’s plan on news accounts, said that the new mission centers could help avoid a debacle like the intelligence assessments before the Iraq war, when analysts trusted information from sources they knew little about, and who were later discredited.

During his two years as C.I.A. director, Mr. Brennan has become known for working long days but also for being loath to delegate decisions to lower levels of C.I.A. bureaucracy. During the briefing on Wednesday, he showed flashes of frustration that, under the C.I.A.’s current structure, there is not one single person in charge of — and to hold accountable for — a number of pressing issues.
Continue reading the main story
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He avoided citing any specific examples of how the C.I.A.’s current structure was hampering operations, and often used management jargon while describing his vision for the agency.

He spoke of wanting to “wring efficiencies” out of the system and trying to identify “seams” in the agency’s current structure that hinder the C.I.A. from adequately addressing complex problems. The C.I.A. needed to modernize even if the current system was not “broken,” he said, citing how Kodak failed to anticipate the advent of digital cameras.

Mr. Brennan said he was also adding a new directorate at the agency responsible for all of the C.I.A.’s digital operations — from cyberespionage to data warehousing and analysis.

Mr. Brennan discussed his plans with reporters on the condition that nothing be made public until he met with C.I.A. employees to discuss the new structure. That meeting was Friday.

While adding the new digital directorate, Mr. Brennan chose not to scuttle the C.I.A.’s four traditional directorates sitting at the top of the bureaucracy — those in charge of clandestine operations, intelligence analysis, science and technology research, and personnel support.

The C.I.A.’s clandestine service, the cadre of undercover spies known for decades as the Directorate of Operations and in recent years renamed the National Clandestine Service, will get its original name back under Mr. Brennan’s plan.

Amy Zegart, an intelligence expert at Stanford, said that the C.I.A. risked being drawn further into the daily churn of events rather than focusing on “over-the-horizon threats” at a time when the C.I.A. has already come under criticism for paying little attention to long-term trends.

For his part, Mr. Brennan said this was the very thing he was trying to avoid — reacting to the world’s crises and not giving policy makers sufficient warning before they happened.

“I don’t want to just be part of an agency that reports on the world’s fires, and the collapse of various countries and systems,” he said.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 11, 2015, 08:42:12 AM
Leak Investigation Could Reveal U.S.-Israeli Covert Operation

A leak investigation targeting retired Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright has stalled due to fears that a prosecution could reveal classified information about joint U.S.-Israeli efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. Investigators suspect that Cartwright leaked details of the operation, which used the computer worm Stuxnet to destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, to New York Times reporter David Sanger. However, prosecution could force the government to confirm details of the operation in open court, potentially putting it at odds with the Israeli government, if Israeli officials were opposed to having their role revealed. U.S. officials also fear that it could undermine negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program at a sensitive time.
Title: ISIS Releases Video Promising Another 9-11...
Post by: objectivist1 on April 11, 2015, 08:33:03 PM
And the U.S. Government Pretends Not to Notice.  It's "just a small bunch of extremists," after all.

http://pamelageller.com/2015/04/new-islamic-state-isis-video-calls-for-attacks-on-the-american-homeland-promises-another-911.html/

Title: English only
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 15, 2015, 06:07:50 PM
Why We Can’t Just Read English Newspapers to Understand Terrorism

And how Big Data can help.

    By Kalev Leetaru
    April 15, 2015
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Why We Can’t Just Read English Newspapers to Understand Terrorism

A few weeks ago, the White House convened the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), a three-day event intended to “discuss concrete steps” that the United States and its allies can take to mitigate violent extremism around the globe. Yet, the sobering reality is that despite 75 years of monitoring the world’s media and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on global monitoring over just the last few years, much of the U.S. government’s understanding of patterns of violent extremism comes from reading Western English-language newspapers. Meanwhile, its intelligence agencies hoover up extremist communications, but find their archives of little use: it’s hard not to shake one’s head upon reading that analysts assigned to the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba complained that “most of [the intercepted communications] is in Arabic or Farsi, so I can’t make much of it.”

How can Washington hope to counter violent extremism when the analysts assigned to monitor extremist communications can’t even understand a word of what they are reading?

Helping to kick off the CVE summit was a presentation by William Braniff offering an overview of global terrorism trends from a dataset known as the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The GTD dataset, created by the University of Maryland, is supported by the U.S. Department of Defense and is widely cited in government reports and the news media, from the New York Times to the Washington Post to CNN. Yet, while GTD is heavily utilized as a definitive source of information on global terrorism, it is actually based nearly exclusively on English-language news sources.

When the Los Angeles Times is cited among the primary source material on an Islamic State kidnapping in al-Bab, Syria, and the Chicago Tribune is listed as a primary source for a grenade attack on a market in Rajuri, India, one must question the comprehensiveness of GTD’s data. In fact, according to GTD, of the top 10 countries with the most terrorist attacks in 2013 (their most recent reporting year), just one features English as its primary language (Nigeria) and just two more (India and the Philippines) feature English among their official languages. Collectively, these three English-speaking countries comprise just 17 percent of attacks and 16 percent of fatalities due to terrorism in 2013 in the top 10 countries. It’s difficult to understand GTD’s emphasis on English-language Western outlets in the place of native language local media outlets in the countries where 83 percent of terrorist attacks allegedly take place.

Yet, GTD is far from alone: this focus on Western English-language sources pervades Washington’s efforts to monitor and understand the world. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity-funded HealthMap project missed the earliest warnings of the Ebola outbreak because the original warnings were in a French television broadcast, rather than English-language Western social media feeds. DARPA’s flagship $125 million Worldwide Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (W-ICEWS) program is based almost exclusively on English news outlets with a small amount of human translated material, and has achieved an accuracy level of less than 25 percent. The small amount of translated material that W-ICEWS does incorporate is drawn primarily from the U.S. Open Source Center, which is responsible for monitoring and translating global news and social media.

Yet, even as CIA Director John Brennan announces his intentions to expand the agency, the Open Source Center still draws nearly half its material from English-language outlets, relies primarily on European news agencies for coverage of Africa, and has little coverage of Latin America. In fact, it monitors considerably more news from Russia than from the entire continent of Latin America and the countries of Spain and Portugal combined. Its coverage of languages from regions at elevated risks of terrorism is particularly poor: The Open Source Center’s total monitoring volume of Bengali (the official language of Bangladesh, which the 2014 Global Terrorism Index places at high risk of terrorism) averaged just a single translated article per week for over 20 years.

    There will never be sufficient human translators to monitor the combined output of all the world’s media in all the world’s languages each day.

There will never be sufficient human translators to monitor the combined output of all the world’s media in all the world’s languages each day. This is where machine translation, as imperfect as it may be, offers tremendous opportunity. While machine translation is still highly error-prone, it is capable of infinite scaling, processing the entirety of all global accessible media in real time. Indeed, the same week as the president’s CVE summit, the GDELT Project announced one of the world’s largest deployments of streaming machine translation, translating into English the entirety of global news that it monitors in 65 languages, representing 98.4 percent of its daily non-English monitoring volume. Within 15 minutes of monitoring a breaking news report anywhere in the world, GDELT has translated it and processed it to identify events, counts, quotes, people, organizations, locations, themes, emotions, relevant imagery, video, and embedded social media posts. Leveraging the effectively unlimited capacity of Google Cloud, I built the entire system in under two and a half months as a “nights and weekends” project.

The ability to reach across 65 languages, coupled with a high-resolution local media inventory of the world, means that — unlike the Pentagon’s efforts — GDELT is able to operate across the world’s languages in real time, rather than being limited to a small cadre of Western English-language outlets to understand unfolding events in a remote corner of the world. For some languages like Russian and Estonian, GDELT uses translation models contributed by some of the leaders in the field and achieves accuracy on par or surpassing that of Google Translate on the material it monitors. For other languages, especially those with few available computerized linguistic resources like Swahili, it is still able to robustly recognize locations, major person and organization names, themes, and key event types, but is often less able to discern slight nuance and sarcasm, though its dictionaries are designed to grow daily as it learns from open datasets like Wikipedia’s multilingual information. Machine translation cannot yet compete with the accuracy of expert human translation, but even at its worse, GDELT can flag an article as discussing a large violent protest in a specific city, along with the major ethnic, religious, social, and political groups and leaders mentioned, allowing it to be forwarded to a human analyst for further review. After all, the error of machine translation can be fixed in post-processing, but it isn’t possible to fix or filter what hasn’t been monitored and flagged in the first place.

Moreover, as the accuracy of machine translation continues to rapidly improve, and tools and training datasets become available for an ever-increasing number of languages, GDELT’s algorithms will regularly upgraded. The goal of GDELT’s mass translation initiative is to demonstrate the feasibility of mass translation of global information in real time and to offer a living test-bed that can leverage new technologies and approaches for mass translation.

The map below illustrates why it is so critical to look across languages. All global news coverage monitored by GDELT from Feb. 19 through March 1 was scanned for mentions of geographic locations in Yemen. Locations mentioned in English-language news coverage are colored in blue, while locations mentioned in the 65 other languages recognized by GDELT are colored in red. Larger dots indicate greater volume of coverage mentioning that location. English coverage of Yemen largely focuses on several small clusters of locations around major cities, which is a common artifact of English coverage of the non-Western world, while the media of other languages (especially Arabic) discuss a much broader range of locations across the country. Understanding the current situation in Yemen beyond events in Sanaa or Aden clearly requires turning to local press.
Figure 1 - Locations mentioned in global news coverage of Yemen 2/19/2015 – 3/1/2015 (Blue = English news media, Red = Non-English news media)

Figure 1 – Locations mentioned in global news coverage of Yemen 2/19/2015 – 3/1/2015. (Blue = English news media, Red = Non-English news media.)

Moreover, the emotional and thematic contextualization of ongoing events in the local press can yield critical insights: in the case of Russia, while Western governments paint Moscow as the aggressor in Ukraine, a recent poll suggests 81 percent of the population have a negative view of the United States, the highest of the post-Soviet era, while Vladimir Putin’s approval rating sits at 86 percent. Much of this support is due to careful stage managing of the domestic media environment, requiring an understanding of the Russian psyche to fully understand the root underpinnings of Putin’s increasing popularity — even as sanctions devastate his country’s economy.

Similarly, much of the recent conversation on countering extremism has focused on the “root causes” of how individuals become radicalized or join extremist groups. In a much-maligned February interview with MSNBC (which led to the #JobsForISIS hashtag on Twitter), the State Department’s Marie Harf cited “a lack of opportunity for jobs” as the key root cause for radicalization, a position which the president himself expounded upon at length in his own speech later that week. As Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel editor and CNN commentator Peter Bergen has noted, however, many of the extremists gracing international front pages, from Osama bin Laden to Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab, Mohamed Atta to “Jihadi John,” have come from relatively wealthy and privileged backgrounds, not abject poverty. Yet even Bergen acknowledges that the foot soldiers of the Islamic State often come from far more modest backgrounds, and as the Washington Post’s Adam Taylor writes, even a middle class upbringing does not always equate to perceptions of infinite opportunity.

The truth is that there is no single “root cause” of extremism. Much as there is no single view on gun control or abortion in the United States, we must accept a far more fragmented and nuanced understanding of world views. Some may indeed join the Islamic State due to a perceived lack of opportunity, while others may join out of religious beliefs. Acknowledging that there is a continuum of rationales allows for the development of multiple tailored responses that transcend the over-simplicity of political soundbites and more precisely target cultural-specific narratives.

    Given the enormous complexity of the world’s cultures, how can the U.S. government even begin to interact with the views and beliefs associated with elevated levels or risk of extremism?

Given the enormous complexity of the world’s cultures, how can the U.S. government even begin to interact with the views and beliefs associated with elevated levels or risk of extremism? In our chapter of a report on megacities published last spring and prefaced by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Charles Ehlschlaeger and I noted that linguistic and cultural barriers form the primary obstacles towards understanding the developing world that is “often characterized by complex tribal, ethnic, linguistic, religious, familial, and societal affiliations and interconnections” that are “foreign” to most Western analysts. In short, merely being able to read the language of an extremist group does not automatically provide the necessary insight to understand the underlying world views of that group.

Last fall, in collaboration with Timothy Perkins and Chris Rewerts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published in the journal D-Lib, we demonstrated that it was possible to use large-scale data mining to construct a socio-cultural index over a region of particular interest to CVE: Africa and the Middle East. More than 21 billion words of academic literature on Africa and the Middle East, the entirety of JSTOR, all unclassified/declassified reports from the U.S. Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), and the Internet Archive’s 1.6 billion archived PDFs were computer-processed to identify all mentions of social, religious, and ethnic groups; locations; major themes; and citations. The index can be used to map the geographic footprint of topics, list the thematic grievances most associated with conflict between ethnic groups in a particular area, and even as a “find an expert” system to identify the most frequently cited researchers specializing in particular issues. For example, mapping all locations associated with food or water security produces the map below, which in the prototype interface allows an analyst to zoom into an area of interest and instantly access the combined scholarly and governmental output regarding that area.
Figure 2 - Map of locations mentioned in academic and U.S. Government articles on food and water security 1950-2014.

Figure 2 – Map of locations mentioned in academic and U.S. Government articles on food and water security 1950-2014.

Similarly, more than 110,000 human rights reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, and related organizations were processed using the same system to generate a related index of the world’s human rights reports. Instead of keyword queries on the open web, this interface makes it possible to intelligently map relationships and patterns between specific groups, driving forces, human rights abuses, and geography. When combined with the academic literature index above, and the GDELT news index, it is possible to track in near real time the spread of extremism ideologies, beliefs, and actions, and the undercurrents that drive and support them.
Figure 3 – Map of locations mentioned in Amnesty International Reports, Press Materials, Urgent Actions, Event, and “Other” documents published 1960-2014.

Figure 3 – Map of locations mentioned in Amnesty International Reports, Press Materials, Urgent Actions, Event, and “Other” documents published 1960-2014.

The digital era has made us exceptionally good at collecting the world’s information, but in doing so, we’ve emphasized archiving over analysis. Sometimes we have to put down the computer to better see the world, but when it comes to countering global extremism, big data offers the tantalizing ability to augment our human focus on the English language with the ability to listen to the whole world at once, transcending language barriers and reaching deeply into the reactions and emotional resonance of global events to add context and understanding.

If I can build machine translation for 65 languages in just two and a half months — and build an index over half a century and tens of billions of words of cultural knowledge in just half a year — what could the U.S. government achieve if it spent $125 million on listening to the world, rather than reading American newspapers?

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 15, 2015, 07:52:34 PM
second post:

A knowledgeable friend comments on this article:

Apart from arabic, they need to understand urdu and related languages.  Much of the terrorism has a Pakistani angle.
Something else to note, when someone speaks in English it's for the western audience. They say reasonable things in English because most of the hardliners don't understand a word of it, while the west laps it up. Their real thoughts are in urdu.  Even if someone understands urdu, unless they are native speakers and have lived there for a decade, a Rosetta stone major wouldn't have a clue. Cultural understanding and background is key, for that there are no books.
Title: Fascinating new details on the killing of Bin Laden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 11, 2015, 11:12:59 AM
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden
Title: Re: Fascinating new details on the killing of Bin Laden
Post by: G M on May 11, 2015, 11:49:33 AM
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

I wouldn't take any of that as gospel.
Title: WSJ: Some of Bin Ladens' papers released
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2015, 08:33:40 AM
y
Damian Paletta
Updated May 20, 2015 11:02 a.m. ET
4 COMMENTS

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration on Wednesday released details on more than 400 letters, books, news articles, research reports and even software manuals it seized during the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden at his secret compound in Pakistan, offering a fresh view into the interests and correspondence of the former head of al Qaeda.

The declassified material, which the Office of the Director of National Intelligence labeled “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf,” shows a number of interests—ranging from a Noam Chomsky book on “thought control” to how-to books on terrorist attacks.
Related

    What Osama Bin Laden Was Reading in Abbottabad
    “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf” Website from the Office of Director of National Intelligence
    White House Denies Report That Pakistan Helped in Bin Laden Hit
    U.S. Forces Kill Osama bin Laden

It included, for example, a 2001 document from the U.S. military on “instruction on aircraft piracy and destruction of derelict airborne objects” and numerous records about how to obtain a U.S. passport. The compound also contained numerous world maps.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said “it is in the interest of the American public for citizens, academics, journalists, and historians to have the opportunity to read and understand bin Laden’s documents.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the records, said analysts were still reviewing more information seized during the raid and that “hundreds more” records could be declassified in the future.

The intelligence agency declassified the names of 39 English-language books seized at bin Laden’s compound. These included books about the Central Intelligence Agency; Christianity and Islam in Spain from 756 until 1031; and Bob Woodward’s 2010 book, “Obama’s Wars.”

In addition to the books, the documents seized at bin Laden’s compound included 35 items published by other extremist groups, most of which came from Khalifah Publications.

The documents also included numerous items related to France. These included a list of French shopping companies and a 2009 document called “Nuclear France Abroad.”

But perhaps the most intelligence-rich items collected in the raid were the numerous letters that the U.S. government is now declassifying and has likely scrutinized for years to try to track down terrorists.

One letter discusses terror operations in Somalia and mentions an effort to kill the president of Uganda. “Please talk to the Somali brothers about reducing the harm to Muslims at Bakarah Market [in Mogadishu] as result of attacking the headquarters of the African forces,” the 2010 letter reads, according to a translation by the U.S. government.

The 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act required the U.S. government to review documents obtained during the raid on the compound and determine what records could be released.

Another Bin Laden letter remarked on the “revolutions” that took place during the 2010 and 2011 Arab Spring. The revolutions seemed to catch al Qaeda leaders by surprise, but they quickly debated how to take advantage of the volatility.

“These are gigantic events that will eventually engulf most of the Muslim world, will free the Muslim land from American hegemony, and is troubling America whose secretary of state declared that they are worried about the armed Muslims controlling the Muslim region.”

In that letter, he described Egypt as “the most important country, and the fall of its regime will lead into the fall of the rest of the region’s tyrants.”

“All of this indicates that the Western countries are weak and their international role is regressing,” the letter says.

Write to Damian Paletta at damian.paletta@wsj.com
Title: Rumor about Kerry's accident
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2015, 11:16:44 AM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/06/04/theres-a-wild-rumor-about-john-kerrys-bike-accident/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%206-4-15%20FINAL
Title: The Chinese Hack of Federal Employee Files
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2015, 11:53:17 AM
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/why-did-china-hack-federal-employees-data/395096/
Title: Re: The Chinese Hack of Federal Employee Files
Post by: G M on June 07, 2015, 07:02:18 PM
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/why-did-china-hack-federal-employees-data/395096/

China has decided that there are no consequences for these actions.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2015, 10:40:27 PM
No, President Obama has decided that there are no consequences for these actions.   :cry: :cry: :cry:


http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/anglephile/
Title: President Clinton accused by CIA Director George Tenet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2015, 03:47:28 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/12/clinton-admin-bankrupted-cia-ahead-911-ex-director/
Title: Most transparent administration ever!
Post by: G M on July 16, 2015, 06:45:40 PM
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/senator-seal-team-6-at-risk-after-opm-hack/

Exposed.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2015, 02:12:29 AM
 :x :x :x
Title: Hillary's classified intel emails look likely to have caused major damage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2015, 03:08:05 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/30/hillary-clinton-emails-us-intelligence-preparing-m/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on August 11, 2015, 06:22:18 PM
Kerry's email hacked
http://twitchy.com/2015/08/11/john-kerry-claims-his-computer-has-been-hacked-chinese-are-very-likely-reading-his-email/

But I'm sure all of our private information, financial, health, census, etc., that they hold in all their departments is safe and secure...
Title: How TEchnology is changing the future of espionage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2015, 11:50:36 AM
    In 2003, the CIA abducted Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr off the streets of Milan. He was suspected of recruiting foreign jihadist fighters and then facilitating their way to Iraq. With Hassan shipped off to Egypt for interrogation, the operation at first appeared to be a success. What happened over the following months and years demonstrated how technology may be the undoing, if not the end, of covert operations.

    Twenty-three CIA officers were convicted, in absentia, by the Italian courts of kidnapping Nasr. The operation’s CIA involvement was brought to light when the Italian government traced the activity of cell phones belonging to CIA personnel, ironically using a version of Analyst Notebook, which America had provided to the Italian government as part of a post-9/11 counterterrorism package. Using this software, they found the metadata from the CIA operatives’ cell phones showed that they were at the location of Hassan’s kidnapping at the same time he went missing.

    Since the Edward Snowden affair, metadata has become a household word, as has awareness of how powerful this data can be in the wrong hands. When you consider the proliferation of biometric scanners in airports and even on city streets, the difficulties involved in inserting clandestine operatives for covert operations become even more profound. Conducting long-term analysis of big data may be the final blow to the traditional tradecraft we are all familiar with from spy novels and movies.

    Cover-identity documents, disguises, and counter-surveillance routes may very well go the way of the dodo, but will this leave America’s intelligence professionals dead in the water without a purpose in life? Or will technology itself facilitate the birth of a new form of intelligence gathering?

    Traditional tradecraft
    In the military, we often refer to the trade secrets we use to conduct operations as ‘tactics, techniques, and procedures.’ Spies use the term ‘sources and methods.’ The ‘methods’ category primarily refers to tradecraft. While supposedly a deeply held secret, many methods of clandestine tradecraft are widely known and featured in films, books, and television shows. Take for example the counter-surveillance route that a spy walks to try to identify enemy counterintelligence agents following him around. Consider the ‘dead drop,’ in which a secret message is hidden away somewhere for the spy’s handler to pick up later that day. Of course, tradecraft gets much more sophisticated than this, but these are examples of basic methods spies use to slip below the radar and go unnoticed.

    Former Mossad officer Michael Ross comments on the subject that, “Traditional tradecraft will never be obsolete. Spies will still need to learn cover, detect surveillance, cross borders, recruit sources, conduct clandestine meetings, communicate covertly, engage in direct-action operations and all the myriad of activities that have been relevant to the profession for centuries.”

    The spies who use tradecraft are usually those engaged in HUMINT, or human intelligence. That is, the art and science of recruiting sources who have access and placement that allows them to gather information the spy wishes to obtain. HUMINT is considered by many to be the bread and butter of intelligence gathering, although it has given way over the years to SIGINT, or signals intelligence, which eliminates the human factor and gives wrist-wringing bureaucrats more quantifiable metrics.

    Human beings are messy and unpredictable, but technology gives us something to measure, which in turn gives policymakers a false sense of security. Of course, SIGINT is only as good as the human beings who interpret it. As a member of the Special Operations Task Force in Iraq, this author recalls numerous examples where Rangers and Special Forces teams were ordered to conduct direct-action raids on the same targets multiple times because someone in the operations center was convinced a terrorist was living there based on SIGINT. Of course, every soldier on the ground knew it wasn’t true as we hit the same target night after night.

    Biometrics
    One element of tradecraft is utilizing a cover, something we are all familiar with from watching actors like George Clooney in movies like “Syriania.” The clandestine operative assumes a false identity with a fake passport, which helps him infiltrate a foreign country. Michael Ross made extensive use of cover during his time with Mossad, living with a deep-cover identity for seven years while he “lived, worked, and travelled without detection and was able to conduct all manner of clandestine activity and direct-action operations securely.”

    However, with the advent of biometric technology such as fingerprint scanners, widely used in airports and customs control points around the world, spies may need to adjust their tradecraft or develop entirely new techniques. One Army Special Operations soldier asked his superiors years ago about what would happen if he was placed under a false identity, passed through customs in Germany where his fingerprints were scanned, and then, 10 years later, went back to Germany on vacation with his family.

    Customs officers would read his fingerprints again but see that they are now associated with a completely different name. Now the German authorities know that he was lying to them 10 years ago, or that he is lying to them now. They also now know that he is, or was, a clandestine operative. One shutters to think of what would happen if this same situation were to arise for one of our personnel in Russia, China, or Iran. Because of the proliferation of biometric technology, our highly trained spies may become single-use operatives. Once their biometrics are collected abroad, they can never be used for clandestine work again.

    Ross advises, “One way biometrics can be overcome: Don’t go against the tide, swim with it. So long as countries are not sharing biometric information, one identity per country is one interim solution.” Which works, just as long as adversarial countries are not sharing biometric data with one another.

    Former CIA Case Officer Jeff Butler (seen in the foreground, featured image) points out that the proliferation of biometrics has likely impacted how the CIA is able to place people in foreign countries using cover, but there are always workarounds as “intelligence agencies simply face greater hurdles in overcoming, or avoiding, biometrics. As a hypothetical, why fly into Frankfurt if it has all the newest biometric gear when you can fly into Split, Croatia, or Ljubljana, Slovenia, and drive to Frankfurt? We are still a ways off from widespread biometric tracking, so workarounds are available. As biometric tracking becomes more widespread, different workarounds will be required.”

    But what if the prospective spy had their biometric data collected on a vacation to Thailand they took prior to joining the military or the CIA? What if someone in the Thai government had been selling their country’s biometric data on Americans to a third country, such as Iran or China?

    Because of public (government) and private (corporate) partnerships, which are not always visible and are sometimes deliberately secret, one can never be sure of who has access to what information. Those security cameras inside your local deli in New York City may very well pipe into an NYPD database, all without you knowing about it. As biometric technology is introduced in every airport and even in city streets, our intelligence officers will have to continue to innovate to overcome these challenges.

    Social media
    On that note, how hard will it be for intelligence services to recruit spies who have zero social media presence? The CIA will have a tough time finding a 30-year-old recruit who has never traveled abroad (where his biometics may have been gathered) and who has never posted his or her pictures on social media. Ross points out that intelligence services are well aware of the problem, but that there are mitigation measures:

    “An under-30 recruit will likely have some form of social media profile, but that will also be examined as part of his or her recruitment as well as an indicator as to his or her level of discretion and maturity. There’s nothing wrong with a social media profile, but it will have to be minimized. Don’t underestimate the capability of modern intelligence services to manipulate the data through their partnerships within the private sector. If the NSA had Google, Facebook, et. al. on board for data collection, what’s to say the CIA couldn’t have someone’s social media profile altered, if not completely erased?”

    SOFREP writer and intelligence analyst Coriolanus remarked that everyone in the intelligence community knows that not having a Facebook profile is a huge indicator of nefarious activity, especially when taken together with another indicator that the person may be a spy. Former CIA Case Officer Lindsay Moran commented on the topic of a spy not having a social media presence: “It doesn’t make sense when, and if, that recruit is employed as a spy to completely drop off social media,” as that could create a signature, or as Coriolanus says, it would indicate ‘derog’ or derogatory behavior, which is used to establish a pattern of life.

    [​IMG]
    As a CIA case officer, Lindsay Moran spent years working as a spy in Eastern Europe.

    Moran continues by saying that social media cuts both ways, against as well as in a favor of, the intelligence officer. “Social networks do a lot of a case officer’s work for him or her. So much of a potential target’s personal information that used to take months, or even years of rapport, development, and elicitation to uncover, is often right there out in the open.” Interestingly, this also highlights a heightened importance of OSINT—open-source intelligence—in today’s era of espionage. In the information age, there is more information/intelligence (note that the Chinese, for example, do not differentiate between these two words) than ever before. “How much bang for our buck are we actually getting in traditional covert HUMINT collection?” Moran asks. “The future of espionage might also be collection via OSINT.”

    Metadata
    Another tool for intelligence services is metadata. Rather than simply look at the actual contents of phone conversations, text messages, and emails, metadata is the underlying technical information used to make those transactions possible and contains information about how, when, and where you communicate from. This type of information can be analyzed and used by intelligence professionals in many different ways. The cell phone itself is essentially a sensor, one that doesn’t need to be placed by covert operatives, but rather one we all voluntarily carry in our pockets.

    For instance, one can examine what times someone places calls on their cell phone, and from this, they can develop an idea of an individual’s circadian rhythms. This alone will quickly allow an intelligence analyst to narrow down what time zone this person is living in.

    Much of this data falls under the category of lawful collection in Western countries. Other nations are likely to be even less restrictive on their counterintelligence operatives who are hunting for our spies. It was no coincidence that after the Boston bombing, cell phone towers were shut down, but only so much as to prevent people in the area of the blast from making phone calls; they could still send text messages. This measure forced people into using a communication medium that could be lawfully intercepted and tracked by law enforcement without having to acquire a warrant.

    How can this affect our spies? Another aspect of tradecraft is running surveillance detection routes (SDRs) to spot counterintelligence agents and allow our spies to meet with their assets in a clandestine manner. Obviously, this becomes highly problematic when foreign governments are tracking metadata emitted by our cell phones. “Surveillance detection routes are a funny thing, and are supposed to be designed for figuring out if you have surveillance on you. You would never do one with a cell phone on you, or iPod, or iPad, for the sole reason they can be tracked,” Butler explains. “That means don’t use them in operations, don’t ever do ops on an attributable phone, regularly scan vehicles/rooms for bugs, and generally avoid repetition in operations. For example, don’t use the same meeting site twice. Good ole’ fashioned tradecraft still applies, even to avoid technological pitfalls.”

    This places a heavy burden on the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. These are the technical experts charged with keeping the CIA’s case officers informed and equipped to avoid technological counterintelligence methods they may encounter in the field.

    However, there can be issues with “going dark.” If the country you are operating in is always monitoring your metadata, but at key moments you abandon your phone, that in itself is a signature, and you could become very interesting to counterintelligence agents. Michael Ross speaks to his experience with Mossad: “If you are too high profile, or your signature is that noticeable—even in its absence—you’re doing it wrong. It’s bad tradecraft to suddenly disappear. Things can be changed gradually: Commercial companies reorganize, merge with other entities, and sometimes move to a new location. People move from one position to another or emerge in a new profession. It’s all about making it look routine and maintaining the appearance of normalcy.”

    The birth of a new form of espionage?
    There will always be counters and workarounds. Technology can always be defeated with greater technology. Biometric sensors can be spoofed if intelligence agencies are able to gain access to the programming that its software operates on and start changing around the ones and zeroes in the code. False social media “personas” can be developed over long periods of time. Metadata can also be spoofed to provide spies with “tailored access” to the areas that they need to penetrate. Of course, all of this would be expensive and time consuming.

    In the future, robots may do most of the spying for us. Just as the cellular phone is a sensor used to collect intelligence, increasingly more and more “smart” devices are on the commercial market, which includes various types of sensors. It could be our kitchen appliances spying on us tomorrow, and that isn’t an exaggeration. Not only will these robots surround us and gather information about us, but they will also work in concert. The data derived from all of these devices can be aggregated; they will work together in a gestalt that will map out our entire lives.

    The proliferation of technology may give rise to a new form of intelligence gathering, a new type of ‘int.’ The spy of the future may be a high-speed cable repairman whose function is to emplace technology near the person or people we need to collect information from.

    In the past, human intelligence gatherers would directly recruit assets who had access and placement that our spies coveted. In the future, biometrics, metadata, and other more novel technologies may make the recruitment of assets difficult, if not impossible, using old-school tradecraft. Instead, our spies may infiltrate near would-be assets to place devices that would allow them to listen in. They may recruit assets, often unwitting, who would than electronically bug the real asset we want information from.

    For example, an American intelligence officer could replace a janitor’s broom with an identical broom loaded with a concealed device. The next time the broom is is used by the janitor in a sensitive facility, the device inside would electronically ‘slurp’ up data, and then transmit it to the intelligence officer who would be nearby to download it onto his smartphone. This sort of technological intelligence-gathering-by-proxy may become much more commonplace in the coming years due to the pressure placed on traditional tradecraft from the technological measures discussed above.

    Bioengineered spies
    Perhaps sometime in the not-so-distant future, nations will engineer operatives from birth for the purpose of espionage. While it may sound outlandish at the moment, we are already on the cusp of several paradigm-changing technologies likely to alter the way we live even more dramatically than the invention of the Internet and telecommunications technologies. These technologies will also impact how we fight and how we spy on each other.

    In the coming decades, biometric scanners, statistical analysis of big data, are likely to make it much more difficult to place spies under a cover and have them conduct covert activities. A spy can change a lot of things about him or herself for purposes of deception, but not his DNA, and DNA scanners may be one of the key technologies mentioned above.

    Will states and non-state actors one day engineer human beings to be spies from the time they are in the womb? In this manner, their entire life would be their cover, with no actual deception aside from the intent of the spy. When this subject was mentioned, Lindsay Moran joked, “Like the Russians do it?”

    However, human beings are not interchangeable parts in a mechanical machine. Moran explained that the qualities needed in a spy can’t really be grown in a laboratory. “That sounds like a viable option, but you cannot really know who is going to be predisposed for the career and craft. It draws upon such a unique combination of personality traits and skills, such as extraversion, street smarts, curiosity, and even a certain amount of empathy.”

    “This is a very outside-the-box approach,” Ross explained. “But to me, it seems to delve too far into the realm of science fiction. There’s really no way of knowing if someone has the aptitude to be a good spy from birth. With all the training in the world, you either have the innate ability to operate in the field or you don’t. My former service [Mossad] expends a lot of effort into that weeding-out process.”

    From experimentation in gene doping to advanced technologies like the TALOs project, the next 50 years will be interesting to say the least. How much of our science fiction becomes science fact during that time is a question likely to keep more than a few of our intelligence professionals up at night.


    Read more: http://sofrep.com/40315/technology-changing-future-espionage/#ixzz3imhEq0HG

Title: The NSA and Ma Bell real good buddies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2015, 06:01:47 PM
Did Pravda on the Hudson really need to reveal that the NSA is listening in to everyone at the UN?  :-P :x
===================================================================

The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.


These National Security Agency documents shed new light on the agency’s relationship through the years with American telecommunications companies. They show how the agency’s partnership with AT&T has been particularly important, enabling it to conduct surveillance, under several different legal rules, of international and foreign-to-foreign Internet communications that passed through network hubs on American soil.
OPEN Document

The N.S.A.’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.

One document reminds N.S.A. officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting, “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”

The documents, provided by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, were jointly reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. The N.S.A., AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings from the files. “We don’t comment on matters of national security,” an AT&T spokesman said.

It is not clear if the programs still operate in the same way today. Since the Snowden revelations set off a global debate over surveillance two years ago, some Silicon Valley technology companies have expressed anger at what they characterize as N.S.A. intrusions and have rolled out new encryption to thwart them. The telecommunications companies have been quieter, though Verizon unsuccessfully challenged a court order for bulk phone records in 2014.

At the same time, the government has been fighting in court to keep the identities of its telecom partners hidden. In a recent case, a group of AT&T customers claimed that the N.S.A.’s tapping of the Internet violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches. This year, a federal judge dismissed key portions of the lawsuit after the Obama administration argued that public discussion of its telecom surveillance efforts would reveal state secrets, damaging national security.

The N.S.A. documents do not identify AT&T or other companies by name. Instead, they refer to corporate partnerships run by the agency’s Special Source Operations division using code names. The division is responsible for more than 80 percent of the information the N.S.A. collects, one document states.

Fairview is one of its oldest programs. It began in 1985, the year after antitrust regulators broke up the Ma Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance division became AT&T Communications. An analysis of the Fairview documents by The Times and ProPublica reveals a constellation of evidence that points to AT&T as that program’s partner. Several former intelligence officials confirmed that finding.

A Fairview fiber-optic cable, damaged in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, was repaired on the same date as a Japanese-American cable operated by AT&T. Fairview documents use technical jargon specific to AT&T. And in 2012, the Fairview program carried out the court order for surveillance on the Internet line, which AT&T provides, serving the United Nations headquarters. (N.S.A. spying on United Nations diplomats has previously been reported, but not the court order or AT&T’s involvement. In October 2013, the United States told the United Nations that it would not monitor its communications.)

The documents also show that another program, code-named Stormbrew, has included Verizon and the former MCI, which Verizon purchased in 2006. One describes a Stormbrew cable landing that is identifiable as one that Verizon operates. Another names a contact person whose LinkedIn profile says he is a longtime Verizon employee with a top-secret clearance.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, AT&T and MCI were instrumental in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping programs, according to a draft report by the N.S.A.’s inspector general. The report, disclosed by Mr. Snowden and previously published by The Guardian, does not identify the companies by name but describes their market share in numbers that correspond to those two businesses, according to Federal Communications Commission reports.

AT&T began turning over emails and phone calls “within days” after the warrantless surveillance began in October 2001, the report indicated. By contrast, the other company did not start until February 2002, the draft report said.

In September 2003, according to the previously undisclosed N.S.A. documents, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the N.S.A. said amounted to a “ ‘live’ presence on the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, the Fairview program forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records — which include who contacted whom and other details, but not what they said — and was “forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system” at the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. Stormbrew was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic separate from the post-9/11 program.

In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal agency newsletter. This revelation is striking because after Mr. Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.


That year, one slide presentation shows, the N.S.A. spent $188.9 million on the Fairview program, twice the amount spent on Stormbrew, its second-largest corporate program.

After The Times disclosed the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005, plaintiffs began trying to sue AT&T and the N.S.A. In a 2006 lawsuit, a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein claimed that three years earlier, he had seen a secret room in a company building in San Francisco where the N.S.A. had installed equipment.


Mr. Klein claimed that AT&T was providing the N.S.A. with access to Internet traffic that AT&T transmits for other telecom companies. Such cooperative arrangements, known in the industry as “peering,” mean that communications from customers of other companies could end up on AT&T’s network.

After Congress passed a 2008 law legalizing the Bush program and immunizing the telecom companies for their cooperation with it, that lawsuit was thrown out. But the newly disclosed documents show that AT&T has provided access to peering traffic from other companies’ networks.

AT&T’s “corporate relationships provide unique accesses to other telecoms and I.S.P.s,” or Internet service providers, one 2013 N.S.A. document states.

Because of the way the Internet works, intercepting a targeted person’s email requires copying pieces of many other people’s emails, too, and sifting through those pieces. Plaintiffs have been trying without success to get courts to address whether copying and sifting pieces of all those emails violates the Fourth Amendment.

Many privacy advocates have suspected that AT&T was giving the N.S.A. a copy of all Internet data to sift for itself. But one 2012 presentation says the spy agency does not “typically” have “direct access” to telecoms’ hubs. Instead, the telecoms have done the sifting and forwarded messages the government believes it may legally collect.

“Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to N.S.A.,” according to the presentation. This system sometimes leads to “delays” when the government sends new instructions, it added.

The companies’ sorting of data has allowed the N.S.A. to bring different surveillance powers to bear. Targeting someone on American soil requires a court order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When a foreigner abroad is communicating with an American, that law permits the government to target that foreigner without a warrant. When foreigners are messaging other foreigners,  that law does not apply and the government can collect such emails in bulk without targeting anyone.

AT&T’s provision of foreign-to-foreign traffic has been particularly important to the N.S.A. because large amounts of the world’s Internet communications travel across American cables. AT&T provided access to the contents of transiting email traffic for years before Verizon began doing so in March 2013, the documents show. They say AT&T gave the N.S.A. access to “massive amounts of data,” and by 2013 the program was processing 60 million foreign-to-foreign emails a day.

Because domestic wiretapping laws do not cover foreign-to-foreign emails, the companies have provided them voluntarily, not in response to court orders, intelligence officials said. But it is not clear whether that remains the case after the post-Snowden upheavals.

“We do not voluntarily provide information to any investigating authorities other than if a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence,” Brad Burns, an AT&T spokesman, said. He declined to elaborate.
Correction: August 15, 2015

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the number of emails the National Security Agency has gotten access to with the cooperation of AT&T. As the article correctly noted, it is in the billions, not trillions.
Title: Wikileaks a Russian intel operation?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2015, 07:38:57 AM
Moving BBG's post to here:

I'm quite conflicted about Snowden et al. On the one hand the material Snowden released confirmed many of my surveillance state fears and certainly demonstrated those fears are far from unfounded. On the other, various friends with counterintelligence pedigrees are quite convinced Snowden was run by the Russians. This piece supports that suspicion, albeit by inference rather than hard fact.

What petard gave hoist to whom seems pretty clear; who lit the fuse, however, appears to veer deep into spook territory.

http://20committee.com/2015/08/31/wikileaks-is-a-front-for-russian-intelligence/
Title: WSJ: The Bin Laden Papers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2015, 08:19:06 AM


    220
    59

    Opinion
    Review & Outlook

The Bin Laden Papers
Release the captured files on al Qaeda’s secret deals with Iran.
A translated copy of an application to join Osama bin Laden's terrorist network is photographed in Washington, Wednesday, May 20, 2015. ENLARGE
A translated copy of an application to join Osama bin Laden's terrorist network is photographed in Washington, Wednesday, May 20, 2015. Photo: Associated Press
Sept. 14, 2015 7:21 p.m. ET
79 COMMENTS

Unlike so many terrorists, Osama Bin Laden didn’t take all of his secrets to the grave. The Navy SEALs who hunted him down also brought back from his Abbottabad hideout many files on al Qaeda’s plans as well as its cooperation with Iran. The question is why the public hasn’t been allowed to see them.

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Dick Cheney quoted former Defense Intelligence Agency Gen. Michael Flynn saying there are “letters about Iran’s role, influence and acknowledgment of enabling al Qaeda operatives to pass through Iran as long as al Qaeda did its dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The former DIA director has also said Congress should seek all bin Laden documents related to Iran because they are “very telling.”

Here’s an example from one file that has been released. In a memo to bin Laden, an al Qaeda operative talks about another who is ready to travel:

“The destination, in principle, is Iran, and he has with him 6 to 8 brothers that he chose. I told him we are waiting for final complete confirmation from you to move, and agree on this destination (Iran). His plan is: stay around three months in Iran to train the brothers there then start moving them and distributing them in the world for their missions and specialties.”

More than a decade ago the 9/11 Commission reported that though there was no evidence Tehran knew about al Qaeda’s attack on the American homeland, “there is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.”

The State and Treasury Departments did highlight some of the Iran-al Qaeda link when they were trying to keep the sanctions pressure on Iran. Here’s a sample of public statements:

July 28, 2011. Treasury sanctions six al Qaeda operatives working in Iran. “By exposing Iran’s secret deal with al-Qa’ida allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen, “we are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism.”

December 22, 2011: State announces a $10 million reward for Yasin al-Suri, who “under an agreement between al-Qa’ida the Iranian Government” moves “money and al Qa’ida recruits” through Iran.

February 6, 2012: Treasury designates the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security” for its support to terrorist groups, including al-Qa’ida.”

May 30, 2013: State releases its country reports on terrorism. “Iran,” it says, “remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida (AQ) members it continued to detain, and refused to publicly identify those senior members in its custody.” It also allowed AQ members to operate a “core facilitation pipeline through Iranian territory.”

February 6, 2014: Treasury confirms that Yasin al-Suri “has resumed leadership of al-Qa’ida’s Iran-based network after being temporarily detained there in late 2011.”

You get the picture.

Yet earlier this summer the State Department’s latest country report on terrorism said Iran had “previously” allowed al Qaeda “to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran,” implying this was a thing of the past. Less than a month later, President Obama announced the Iran nuclear deal.

With his deal now moving ahead, the least the President could do is release the other bin Laden files dealing with Iran. And if the President doesn’t release the documents, Congress ought to demand them.
Title: Clinton White House suppressed intel on Iranian Terrorism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2015, 05:50:16 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/5/bill-clinton-white-house-suppressed-evidence-of-ir/
Title: Stratfor: Reshaping the Moder Intel Community
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2015, 12:03:17 PM
second post

 Reshaping the Modern Intelligence Community
Geopolitical Weekly
October 6, 2015 | 08:00 GMT Print
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By Philip Bobbitt

Nearly seven months ago, CIA Director John Brennan publicly unveiled his plan to significantly rethink the organization of his agency and how it would conduct its business. In my previous columns, I have tried to link strategy, law and history; now it occurs to me that this linkage lies at the heart of the proposed CIA reforms.

The CIA was created in 1947, nearly six years after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The chief reason given for its formation was to prevent another surprise attack against the United States, and for 60 years it succeeded. And yet, on Sept. 11, 2001 — a date that might also be said to "live in infamy" — another surprise attack hit the United States, resulting in a greater loss of life than the attack at Pearl Harbor. Despite an annual budget totaling twice the defense outlays of Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Libya combined — and roughly equal to the entire British defense budget — the U.S. intelligence community was unable to thwart or even give sufficient warning of the attack.

Nevertheless, the failure to prevent the atrocities of 9/11 was not the most significant intelligence failure of the new millennium. In October 2002, the National Intelligence Council produced a National Intelligence Estimate that said Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. (The National Intelligence Estimate is the U.S. intelligence community's most authoritative intelligence assessment, drawn from all community sources and representing the conclusions of the community as a whole.) But according to the subsequent work of the Iraq Survey Group, this assessment was almost entirely premature. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate also said that Iraq's biological weapons capability had grown more advanced than it had been before the Gulf War, and that Baghdad possessed mobile biological weapons labs. This, too, was wrong. The report further concluded that Iraq had resumed its production of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, sarin and VX, and had accumulated stockpiles of these weapons amounting to between 100 and 500 metric tons. These claims were also wrong. Finally, the intelligence estimate said that Iraq had obtained unmanned aerial vehicles intended for the delivery of biological weapons, also an erroneous conclusion.

In short, the intelligence community's assessments of Iraq were riddled with errors, and its reputation has yet to fully recover. The role the intelligence community played in persuading the public of the necessity of going to war has done historic damage to the country's trust in subsequent claims for intervention, and indeed, to the credibility of executive action more generally. The Robb-Silberman Commission charged with investigating the community's claims regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction concluded:

    "While the intelligence services of the U.K., France Germany, and Russia also thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction [in 2002], in the end it was the United States secretary of state that put American credibility on the line, making this one of the most public — and most damaging — intelligence failures in recent American history."

The Dangers of Structural Division

At first glance, the intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraqi WMDs appear to have little in common. The 9/11 Commission Report criticized the intelligence community for failing to share information among agencies, concluding that the lack of communication materially contributed to the wider failure to "connect the dots" — that is, to anticipate the attack and thwart it. "With each agency holding one or two pieces of the puzzle, none could see the whole picture." The Iraq WMD failure presented a different problem. It wasn't so much that analysts were unaware of what their counterparts in other agencies were thinking; it was rather that, with some exceptions, all of the analysts were thinking the same thing. Information that was inconsistent with the widely held thesis was discarded or, tellingly, reclassified as the result of Iraqi deception. Put simply, analysts enthusiastically connected dots that had little to do with one another or that might be better described as inkblots into a false picture.

But what the two fiascos did have in common was the fundamental structure of problem solving that existed within the CIA and throughout the intelligence community as a whole. This structure was the consequence of a particular way of understanding the collection and use of intelligence: Analysts treated these activities as a kind of proto-social science that they conducted from a detached, disinterested, scientific point of view. That understanding was then manifested in bureaucratic organization.

As with most organizations, this problem-solving structure could partly be explained by history. Figures from the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services were incorporated into the newly formed Directorate of Operations, bringing with them covert action; the bureaucratic empire building of J. Edgar Hoover kept the CIA on a tight leash whenever the FBI's interest were implicated; and so on. But the history itself could also be explained by the ideas it represented, for that's what history often is: Institutions and individuals working out the ideas they come to take for granted. In the intelligence community, these ideas came in the form of several antinomies:

    The division between the public and private sectors.
    The separation between the domestic and the international.
    The different rules we apply to law enforcement and intelligence operations.
    The different reliance we place on secret and open sources.
    The distinction between intelligence collection and analysis.
    The different roles of the intelligence producer and consumer.

And although these antinomies enabled the U.S. intelligence services to successfully navigate the challenges of the Cold War, they also directly led to the failures of 9/11 and Iraq.
A New Organization for a New Threat

While some critics have described the reforms announced in March as mere bureaucratic reshuffling, they are in fact an effort to overcome the difficulties imposed by these antinomies as we confront a new international reality.

The key reform is the creation of "mission centers," each led by an assistant director, that are not linked to any particular directorate. These centers will be organized around regions, such as Africa or East Asia, and functions or threats, like counterterrorism or WMD. Indeed, it is telling that the current National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is the model for the new mission centers, because global market state terror is a phenomenon that most challenges the six contradicting sets of ideas listed above. Market state terrorists outsource their activities, merging the private and public spheres; they operate across borders, unconfined by any particular territory, blurring the lines between the domestic and the international; they commit crimes to further their political goals, often depending on criminal activity for their operations; their groups are difficult to penetrate but advertise themselves relentlessly in the media, including social media; the threat they pose requires close collaboration between intelligence producers and consumers who confront it, because typical intelligence customers can't be relied upon to ask for information in such novel and unpredictable circumstances; and they cannot be defeated if analysts are unaware of the sources of their information and if collectors are not constrained to information that is useful to analysts.

The Directorate of Intelligence (which will be renamed the Directorate of Analysis) and the National Clandestine Service (which will revert to its old name, the Directorate for Operations) will mainly function as talent pools, recruiting and training personnel to be deployed in the mission centers. Each center will have a team of analysts and operators working side by side and responsibility for espionage, analysis and covert action within its assigned mission area.

The most important objective of the reorganization is not simply to enhance collaboration or to achieve greater structural coherence. It is to create accountability through the assistant directors. Currently, there is no single person the CIA director can call upon to summarize threats, future trends and current operations in any particular area outside the NCTC and counterintelligence.

Critics' main objections to the reform will be that the CIA is forsaking the very structures that made it successful, and there is much truth to this concern. By keeping intelligence analysis separate from collection, the United States has enhanced the professionalization of both. By keeping intelligence consumers separate from producers, we have reduced — if not entirely removed — the politicization that can corrupt both. By relying on the government to find and maintain secrets while leaving publicly available information to the academics and journalists, we have attempted to protect U.S. journalists from being arrested overseas and to prevent CIA analysts from infiltrating university journals.

In future columns, I will say more about the uses of intelligence by statesmen. For now, I simply leave you with this: These reforms are essential to a preclusive strategy for the United States
Title: Judicial Watch release CIA internal condemnation of Baraq's intel leaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2015, 11:28:50 AM
http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-obtains-previously-classified-cia-inspector-general-report-strongly-condemning-agency-handling-of-briefings-and-interviews-with-the-entertainment-industry/
Title: 2015 Terrorism Index
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 18, 2015, 10:48:59 AM
A little light reading:

http://economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-Global-Terrorism-Index-Report.pdf
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on November 18, 2015, 10:56:35 AM
The above should be under climate change since liberals are claiming terrorism is due to "climate change".
Title: Stratfor: One view on the Pollard Affair
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2015, 02:58:24 PM
 Broken Trust: The Pollard Affair
Analysis
November 20, 2015 | 09:01 GMT Print
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(Stratfor)
Analysis

By Fred Burton

Editor's Note: The following piece is part of an occasional series in which Fred Burton, our vice president of intelligence, reflects on his storied experience as a counterterrorism agent for the U.S. State Department. We republish this piece in light of the Nov. 20 release of Jonathan Pollard from a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina.

For anyone who spent time in the intelligence business, the morning news has a way of dredging up old memories. Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard will go free on parole today, having spent 30 years in prison. Some say his release is an overtly political move by the United States to appease Israel following the Iran deal.

I myself have mixed feelings about Pollard's release. Maybe 30 years is long enough to bring the former U.S. Naval Intelligence analyst to justice. But I still vividly recall what a powerful sense of betrayal the entire intelligence community felt when he was caught and convicted in 1987. As special agents and analysts at the intelligence services, every day we handled sensitive, classified information. Most of us took that responsibility extremely seriously, daily devoting our lives and livelihoods to the defense of U.S. national security and to the protection of state secrets. But Jonathan Pollard broke that trust.

While spying for the Israelis in 1984 and 1985, Pollard delivered Mossad, Israel's spy agency, more than 800 classified documents — suitcases full at a time — and 1,500 daily intelligence summary wrap-up messages. After he was discovered, a deep fog of anger settled over the U.S. intelligence community. We felt betrayed, not only (or even primarily) by Pollard but by Israel — and specifically, by the Israeli intelligence service.   

At the time, U.S. and Israeli intelligence cooperated closely. We frequently shared information with our Israeli counterparts through informal channels, wherein representatives from U.S. agencies would meet with Israeli intelligence, defense and police officials to communicate intelligence priorities or possible security threats. And we often aided and supported Israeli intelligence at their request. For example, in the course of debriefing hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, we would routinely ask questions on behalf of the Israelis about their missing pilot Lt. Col. Ron Arad. In short, we in the national security business believed our friendship with Israel was far deeper than the veneer of diplomatic niceties. 

We were wrong. According to the now-declassified CIA damage assessment of the entire Pollard affair, the Israeli government recruited the naval intelligence analyst primarily to uncover and to pass along information the United States had gathered on Arab, Pakistani and Soviet nuclear and military programs. Rather than go through the established liaison channels, Mossad recruited Pollard and went behind our backs to commit espionage that, at least to my knowledge and to that of all my colleagues, we would have been open to sharing with them anyway.

The discovery of the Pollard affair came as a stunning blow, deeply disrupting the trust between U.S. intelligence agencies and Mossad. Afterward, the liaison channels that our agencies had come to rely upon broke down; we no longer knew whether we could trust the information Mossad had been passing along. Afterward, members of the Diplomatic Security Service, like myself, were still often tasked with the protection of high-ranking Israeli dignitaries such as Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin when they stepped, as they often did, onto U.S. soil. And we continued to maintain some intelligence exchanges that required us to pay frequent visits to the Israeli Embassy on Washington D.C.'s International Drive. But in the back of all of our minds, during every visit and meeting, was Pollard.   

In retrospect, one of the more fascinating aspects of Pollard's espionage was the person the Israelis assigned to handle Pollard's case: Rafi Eitan, a true legend of the Mossad. Eitan had been part of a team of Mossad agents that captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Ares, Argentina, in 1960, bringing him back to Israel for justice. Anyone who has ever been involved in the intelligence community would have wanted to be part of that illustrious team.

The fact that Mossad put one of their most famous and valuable agents, a hero of Israel, on the Pollard case speaks volumes. Pollard must have been one of their most important sources of human intelligence, if not their most important. That means they must have considered access to U.S. secrets one of their biggest intelligence priorities — and one that they feared would have the most blowback if uncovered.

The Pollard affair is a grim reminder that spying is a tough and dirty business, even among countries that consider themselves friends and allies. The handshakes and smiles that take place in diplomatic circles are a facade, beneath which every government and its intelligence agencies operate in an intensely suspicious and dangerous atmosphere.

In 2013, the Jerusalem Post reported that Pollard's wife, Esther, wrote about a meeting with Rafi Eitan years after Pollard's conviction and arrest. During his meeting with Esther, Eitan reportedly said his only regret about the whole incident was that he did not "finish the job" before leaving the United States. When asked what he meant, Esther wrote that Eitan replied: "If I had been at the [Israeli] embassy when Pollard came to seek asylum, I would have put a bullet through his head." Then, he went on, "there would have been no Pollard affair."
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on November 20, 2015, 04:06:56 PM
Pollard deserved a bullet.
Title: Pentagon expands inquiry into distortion of Middle East analyses
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 22, 2015, 10:12:11 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/us/politics/military-reviews-us-response-to-isis-rise.html?emc=edit_th_20151122&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
Title: Re: Pentagon expands inquiry into distortion of Middle East analyses
Post by: G M on November 22, 2015, 12:43:42 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/us/politics/military-reviews-us-response-to-isis-rise.html?emc=edit_th_20151122&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0

Obama lied, Europe died.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 22, 2015, 03:58:04 PM
 :evil:
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2015, 06:09:03 PM
Bringing the discussion on Meta Data from the Sen. Ted Cruz thread over to here:

Pat commented it does not matter anymore, the Feds have new ways of getting the data.

My response:  So why then the fuss over this by the NSA et al?  What are they up to?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on November 29, 2015, 07:27:11 PM
Pat commented it does not matter anymore, the Feds have new ways of getting the data.

No.  They have other ways of getting other data.  This gives them a cross check when other intelligence is acquired, such as gaining access to a terror connection overseas and seeing what contacts it has madein the US.  Why would we not want to do that.  As asked on the other thread, what privacy have I gotten back at midnight tonight when this expires?  Nothing of note.

See the Chair of the Senate Intelligence 'testimony'.  (Fox News Sunday today)  As far as I know, his only dog in the fight is to gain intelligence and prevent attacks.  And he has clearance that we don't have.  So does Rubio who is a member of that same committee.

By the way, having intelligence updates for the six years coming into the Presidency is better preparation for the Presidency than not having it.  Giving choice committee assignments to your best people isn't always a bad thing.
Title: Re: Intel Matters - 2016 Presidential on NSA Metadata
Post by: DougMacG on December 06, 2015, 12:57:03 PM
 "you need the haystack to find the needle."

My understanding of where the candidates stand on the so-called NSA metadata issue:

Erring on the side of 'security', as front runner Trump put it:
Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christy, Lindsey Graham

Erring on the side of 'privacy':
Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Bernie Sanders.

Rand Paul wants a "smaller haystack".  

The data only adds security if you use it and also aggressively use all the other tools available to track potential terror attacks.

I argue that:  
1)  We received essentially none of our lost privacy back through the ending of this program.
2)  Chasing down records via lawyers and courts means it is not immediately available to those we wish were tracking terror leads.
3)  Storing the same information at the phone companies still leaves a similar risk of a hack or misuse.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on December 06, 2015, 12:59:57 PM
Rather than a massive NSA dragnet, you could actually do aggressive police work and target bad guys and their networks. Like the ton of uncollected evidence left at the berdoo jihadi lair.

Not mutually exclusive choices, IMHO.  Give them the tools and do the hard work.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 06, 2015, 02:55:16 PM
Why didn't the NSA prevent the Berdoo jihad ? What attacks has the NSA prevented?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on December 06, 2015, 07:27:23 PM
No.  Security was either asleep at the wheel, understaffed or too tied up in rules and political correctness to discover and stop these two people.
On the second question, I don't have security clearance and the prevented ones wouldn't be as  as the successful ones.

Mistakes in the rear view mirror are valuable to look at.  The need is to stop the future ones.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 06, 2015, 11:29:31 PM
No.  Security was either asleep at the wheel, understaffed or too tied up in rules and political correctness to discover and stop these two people.
On the second question, I don't have security clearance and the prevented ones wouldn't be as  as the successful ones.

Mistakes in the rear view mirror are valuable to look at.  The need is to stop the future ones.

Doug, not too long ago I would have agreed with you. But having seen the systemic corruption of the federal government, they have lost my trust.

If Obama had any counterterrorism wins, he would have fed it to his lapdog press.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2015, 08:00:42 AM
The French have FAR more surveillance state powers than we do.  Ditto gun control.  What good did it do them?

Frankly, Rand Paul's point about the smaller haystack makes sense to me.  In one example of many, the Russians pointed out the Tsarnov (sp?) brothers to us, yet nothing was done.  Already we have far more cases for the feds to keep track of than the people necessary.  So what is the point of adding to the haystack at the cost of enabling an Orwellian state.  Do you really want this stuff lying around for a President Hillary?

There numerous real world things to do e.g.:

*moratorium on visas and immigration for dangerous countries;
*CCW in all states;
*monitoring the 150,000 Arab Muslims here on student visas.  We don't really know where they are;
*Keep track of whether people have left by the time their visas expire;
*Serious discussion about the no-visa countries-- this is a difficult question deserving of thoughtful analysis;
*etc etc
Title: HUMINT
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2016, 05:39:57 PM
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Human-Intelligence.pdf
Title: The CIA in history, fiction, and memory
Post by: bigdog on August 31, 2016, 12:33:38 PM
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/04/landscapes-of-secrecy-the-cia-in-history-fiction-and-memory-2/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on August 31, 2016, 12:48:44 PM
Big dog,
At first I saw an article by John Bolton and now another link to a schedule comes up.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on September 13, 2016, 04:25:32 AM
That link works for me, ccp. Sorry.
Title: FBI, CIA directors speak at summit
Post by: bigdog on September 13, 2016, 04:25:57 AM
https://www.c-span.org/video/?414931-1/fbi-cia-directors-speak-intelligence-national-security-summit
Title: Some interesting tidbits from the Iraq War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2016, 08:50:37 AM
https://www.clarionproject.org/news/pentagon-spends-500-million-fake-al-qaeda-videos

Title: What does your daddy do?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 11, 2016, 07:59:00 AM
http://counterjihad.com/should-family-affiliations-with-foreign-islamist-movements-prevent-a-security-clearance
Title: The Cipher Brief
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2016, 09:48:56 PM
Recommended to me by a serious person:

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dead-drop
Title: NSA says Russians hacked our election; will Congress investigate?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2016, 04:45:17 PM
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/will-congress-investigate-russian-interference-2016-campaign
Title: President George Washington and Intel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2016, 05:12:22 PM
http://www.hoover.org/research/eyes-ears-and-daggers

yes, Ears, And Daggers
by Thomas H. Henriksen
via Defining Ideas (Hoover Institution)
Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Editor’s note: The following essay is an excerpt from the new Hoover Press book Eyes, Ears, and Daggers:  Special Operations Forces and the CIA in America’s Ongoing Struggle against Terrorism.

Each war tells us something about the way the next war will be fought.

—Herodotus

One of the things we have seen since 9/11 is an extraordinary coming together, particularly the CIA and the military, in working together and fusing intelligence and operations in a way that just, I think, is unique in anybody’s history.

—Robert Gates 

When Nathan Hale stood on the scaffold in 1776 and uttered his immortal regret that he had only one life to give for his country, he came to embody a timeless patriot. In retrospect, Hale was also a progenitor of the soldier-spy fusion that has become so noteworthy in the early twenty-first-century conflict with jihadi terrorism. Days before his execution, the young military officer had volunteered to dress in civilian clothes, go behind enemy lines, and scout out the Red Coats’ plans at the start of the American Revolution. His fellow officers shrank from the mission out of fear of dying from an ignominious execution by hanging, rather than an ennobling death on the battlefield. The British caught and hanged the twenty-one-year-old captain from the Seventh Connecticut regiment for spying.

Captain Hale’s secret mission is significant for its present-day relevance as well as its patriotism. His intelligence gathering inside British-occupied New York City blurred the lines separating soldier and spy. It was an early version of “sheep dipping,” the contemporary practice of informal reidentification in which soldiers become spies. More than two centuries after the Yale-educated schoolteacher’s death, America’s counterterrorism campaign underwent a similar obscuring over the roles between elite warriors and intelligence officials in the antiterrorism battle. This military-intelligence overlap was not fore­ordained. Quite the contrary, the two communities—military and intelligence—were often at odds throughout their histories. Their contemporary blending, indeed, might just be a temporary realignment. A return to their traditional rivalry is not out of the question.

Both the Special Operations Forces (SOF) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are of relatively recent formation. Their antecedents, nonetheless, stretch back further than the immediate post–World War II era, which marked the creation of both entities. Irregular armed forces have been a part of America’s military traditions from as early as the Revolutionary War up to the current battle against violent Islamist extremism in the Middle East, Africa, and other parts of the world. Spying enjoys a less-rich tradition in America’s past, although it, too, underwent a quantum leap during the Cold War.

Both communities—special warriors and intelligence officers—have served as the nation’s eyes, ears, and daggers, often in close cooperation, but occasionally at cross-purposes, as this account traces and analyzes. Yet in bureaucratic tug-of-wars, neither the Special Operations Forces nor the Central Intelligence Agency has been each other’s main antagonist. Rather, they have clashed with their closest competitor. For SOF, this has meant turf battles with the regular military forces. For the CIA, it has meant bureaucratic tussles chiefly with the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), not the Pentagon. The SOF-CIA partnership grew to become a highly effective weapon against jihadi terrorists bent on murdering or converting other populations to their twisted version of Islam. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, in fact, heralded a new era for the two secretive security arms of the U.S. government, an era that is the subject of this anatomy.

The attack on the Twin Towers shelved America’s Cold War thinking about security. By adopting an intelligence-driven, targeted counterstrike weapon against terrorists, the United States went from a Cold War Goliath to a lithe and nimble bearer of a deadly sling, thanks in no small measure to the SOF and CIA contribution. Much of the reorientation developed from the close SOF-CIA linkage, as is well known to both communities. The purpose of this narrative is to sketch very briefly the warrior-spy connection before and then more fully after the formation of the Special Operations Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency. Even a “wave-top” skimming of this complex interaction suggests that their history is notable for instances of cooperating, competing, circumventing, and even cutting each other out of the action. By revisiting and appreciating their respective histories prior to their partnering to combat Islamist terrorism, the author hopes to provide a clearer understanding of their interaction and offer lessons for the future.

Spying, Binoculars, and Telegraph Cables

Students of America’s cloak-and-dagger operations have a nodding acquaintance with espionage that dates to the country’s war of independence from Britain. Nathan Hale’s behind-the-lines spying inaugurated the fledgling nation’s quest for intelligence about its powerful foe. In another league from Hale’s snooping was a renowned spymaster, string-pulling his agents for information. George Washington not only stood first in the hearts of his countrymen but also ranked first among the Founding Fathers in his fascination with and reliance on espionage. Young Washington learned firsthand the importance of intelligence during the French and Indian War (1754–63), when he served under British general Edward Braddock, whose defeat and death at Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) stemmed, in part, from ignorance about his enemy’s forces.

When Washington assumed command of the Continental army, he resolved to obtain intelligence about his British opponent by every means. Spies were dispatched to learn British movements and designs. Worried about English spies and American sympathizers with the Crown, he took measures to prevent them from conveying information to the British about the Continental army’s maneuvers and activities. The Continental Congress also grasped the importance of foreign intelligence. It established the Committee of Secret Correspondence, which one contemporary historian characterized as “the distant ancestor of today’s CIA.” 2 The group corresponded with American well-wishers who lived in Europe so as to gain intelligence about the European governments’ predisposition toward the American Revolution. General Washington was naturally far more interested in military information.

So while Nathan Hale won enduring fame, Washington commanded a constellation of spies who proved much more successful than the young Connecticut officer. This eyes-and-ears network also performed counterespionage, detecting the treason of Benedict Arnold—the infamous American turncoat who switched to George III’s side. General Washington also utilized agents to spread bogus information about his army’s strength and intentions. He even deceived British generals about his strategy until the trap was sprung, leading to the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown and the American defeat of Great Britain.

As the first president of the new Republic, George Washington retained his interest in things clandestine. His secret service fund, a line item in the nation’s budget, grew to nearly 12 percent, or about $1 million, by his third year in office. President Washington disbursed these monies for bribing foreign officials and even ransoming sailors held by the Barbary pirates. These predators operated out of North African city-states and preyed on American merchant ships. Despite the contemporary view of late-eighteenth-century gentility, Congress understood the necessity of covert measures; it cut the nation’s first commander-in-chief considerable slack in espionage endeavors. Congress merely required the president to certify the amounts expended but permitted him to conceal the purpose and recipients. These and related operations foreshadowed those practiced after the Central Intelligence Act of 1949.3

George Washington’s role as spymaster notwithstanding, his successors did not follow his pioneering role. If anything, they allowed the U.S. intelligence capacity to atrophy with dire consequences. America’s dismal intelligence service contributed to the lack of adequate defense for the White House, which the British burned during the War of 1812. President James Madison barely escaped the capital in advance of Britain’s capture and torching of his residence. Behind their Atlantic moat, Americans seemed oblivious to the importance of intelligence about their potential adversaries. Even during the Mexican War (1846–48), the commanding officer, General Zachary Taylor, obtained his knowledge of the Mexican army through his binoculars. His deputy, Winfield Scott, did gain approval from President James Polk to set up the Mexican Spy Company, which relied on the outlaw Manuel Dominguez and his bandit followers to hand over military intelligence about Mexican defenses. It was not the last time that U.S. presidents and their military officers paid off less-than-savory agents to spy.

The Civil War (1861–65) marked a period of mostly amateurish spying by both sides. In fact, Northern and Southern military officers and civilian officials regularly scoured each other’s newspapers to glean information about their foes. Then, as now, the press’s war coverage revealed actionable intelligence. Journalists published details on the troop strength, location, and destination of military units. This breach of security concerned both sides. Washington and Richmond tried to shut down the newspapers. Political leaders did hire spies to collect information on their enemies. Field commanders likewise set up their own intelligence operations to do reconnaissance on their adversaries and to limit knowledge of their respective forces. The history of Union and Confederate espionage, with its passions and bumbling, is ably told by Alan Axelrod in The War between the Spies. But as Axelrod acknowledged, the spies were amateurs, “usually ordinary soldiers and civilians who, on one or more occasions, did some spying.” 4 His account overflowed with assassins, conspirators, and secret service forerunners—all part of present-day intelligence and covert operations.

After the Civil War, investments in spies, espionage, and covert operators dwindled through the end of the nineteenth century. Some noteworthy departments were established, however. The Secret Service came into existence in 1865, first as an agency to investigate forgeries in the new paper currency that had appeared three years earlier. After the Secret Service uncovered a plot in 1894 to assassinate President Glover Cleveland, it assumed the mission of safeguarding the president, the vice president, and their families, as well as the integrity of the American currency. Its dual missions became permanent after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.

In the course of the 1880s, both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army established intelligence departments. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) collected information about foreign navies that might be useful in time of war. Likewise, the Military Intelligence Division, staffed initially by one officer, gathered material on foreign armies of possible use to the War Department and the Army. For the U.S. Navy, the ONI played a pivotal role in the extraordinary naval expansion at the dawn of the twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the Navy (well before his presidency), capitalized on ONI reports to push for a giant shipbuilding program that saw the Navy’s blue-water fleet mushroom in capital ships.5 As president, Roosevelt was not averse to using underhanded measures to accomplish his goals abroad.

Covert action, in fact, played a hand in the White House’s acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone. Unmistakable U.S. sympathy for the Panamanian insurrectionists encouraged them to revolt against their Colombian rulers in 1903. Next, Washington ran interference for the rebels. The Colombian commander of the offshore fleet was bribed to sail away without shelling the Panamanians. The U.S. Navy also blocked Colombia’s ships from landing reinforcements to reestablish its rule. The United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama in 1904, leased the ten-mile strip on each side of the proposed waterway, and resumed construction of the transoceanic canal, which was completed in 1914.

During World War I, U.S. intelligence efforts foiled Germany’s operations to influence American public opinion against Great Britain. German agents tried to shift U.S. sentiment toward Germany and away from Britain. Along with planting pro-German articles in American newspapers, the Kaiser’s agents blew up two large munitions factories in New Jersey. Despite Berlin’s sabotage and media manipulations, which often backfired against Germany, Washington lacked a specialized espionage department. As a defense, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Secret Service to investigate German businessmen paying subsidies to German-American organizations. The U.S. Justice Department, moreover, linked the German embassy with subversive actions.6

The Army and Navy beefed up their military intelligence proficiency during the war. Each branch employed more than a thousand personnel by the armistice signing in 1918. A prominent innovation during the war was the first signals intelligence office, whose focus was on preventing domestic subversion. The signals intelligence specialists deciphered encrypted messages and handed over evidence to the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI. All the fledgling counterespionage departments were very busy because of the large number of German immigrants living within the United States.

Once at war against Imperial Germany and its allies in 1917, the Wilson administration engaged in a covert operation with Britain to persuade Russia to remain in the war after its February Revolution, which overthrew the tsar in early 1917. Washington spent modest sums of money to place pro-war newspaper articles in the Russian press. London took an even more extravagant approach by wining and dining Russian government officials. Still, Washington’s modest contribution to persuading the Russian Provisional Government to stay in the fight against the Central Powers came to naught. By mid-1917, the Russian army collapsed as a fighting force after repeated defeats at the hands of the German forces and their Austro-Hungarian allies. Moscow’s contribution to the Allied cause ended when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks tossed out the provisional government in the October Revolution. Soviet Russia’s new rulers soon broke ranks with the Allies and concluded a separate peace with Berlin in order to concentrate on consolidating their power amid the ensuing civil war, which engulfed much of the country. The capitalist West had no sway with Communist Russia. After Lenin settled for a harsh peace with the Central Powers, the Allies slugged it out with Germany, now freed from the two-front war.

As expected, the end of the war brought a hasty return to business as usual for the United States. It made severe reductions in the nation’s military and intelligence capabilities. The federal government quickly slashed funding for intelligence as well as demobilized its armed forces. Unlike other major powers, America still lacked a specialized foreign espionage organization at the close of the war. The war had recorded a temporary boost in manpower and effectiveness of army and naval intelligence, but peace scuttled that progress. Nor were the 1920s and early 1930s the propitious environments for setting up overseas spy operations. President Wilson subscribed to a brave new world of open diplomacy openly arrived at, departing from what the old powers of Europe did behind closed doors. Moreover, America looked inward as isolationist sentiments took hold among political elites and ordinary people alike. American naiveté about the outside world came into sharp relief when Henry L. Stimson (Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state and Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war) averred that “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” 

That said, the United States did score an intelligence coup during the first year of the incoming Warren Harding administration. At the Washington Conference on the Limitations of Armaments in 1921, Americans decrypted Japanese telegraph cables from Tokyo. Knowledge of Japan’s real diplomatic bargaining position enabled Washington to stand firm on Japanese demands to exceed the 10:6 naval ratio of capital ships with the United States.8 The U.S. position prevailed. The Japanese, whose real threshold was revealed in the decoded message, accepted the lower ratio. American intelligence breakthroughs, however, were all too rare in the interwar period, as the attack on Pearl Harbor attested. But they were not unprecedented once the Pacific war started. The American proficiency in cracking the wartime Japanese codes enabled Washington to learn of Tokyo’s plans for the conquest of Midway Island. The astounding U.S. naval victory over the Imperial fleet was, in part, made possible by foreknowledge of Japan’s strategy. America’s signals intelligence came of age during the Pacific war.

Protected by two vast oceans, the United States progressed through the first 170 years of its history without a meaningful national intelligence enterprise. The American embrace of the Marquess of Queensberry rules for collecting intelligence lingered into the twentieth century before the gloves finally came off. It was World War II and the Cold War aftermath that revolutionized American attitudes.9 Before considering the extraordinary transformation that the 1941–45 war brought to American intelligence resources, however, it is appropriate to shift attention to the other pillar of the contemporary SOF-CIA alignment—the irregular warfare tradition.

Irregular Warfare as an American Tradition

Unlike spying, America’s irregular warfare tradition enjoys a deeper cultural heritage. Its lineage stretches back to at least the French and Indian War, when regular soldiers embraced the tactics of Native American warriors. Rather than following the parade-ground drills of troops marching into battle, the Native American tribesmen resorted to ambushes, small-unit attacks, and firing from behind trees to catch their adversaries off guard. Both French and American soldiers observed, adopted, and put into practice this hit-and-run warfare.

When the American Revolution broke out, the colonists relied on different tactics. George Washington fought a largely con­ventional conflict along European lines. But as every schoolchild knows, other American forces fired from behind cover as they fell back when confronted with superior Red Coat formations. Some legendary local commanders emerged. Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” disrupted British control of the Carolinas with surprise attacks and unexpected maneuvers. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys kept the Red Coats off balance with hit-and-run assaults in New England. These unconventional leaders waged an insurgency against an army of occupation that demanded loyalty to the Crown and payment to George III’s treasury.

Decades later, the American Civil War witnessed a host of irregular warfare practitioners on both sides of the four-year conflict. These fighters operated behind the lines of the conventional infantry and cavalry forces. The renegades raided, disrupted governance, and tied down disproportionate numbers of regular forces who strove to kill or capture their tormentors. John Mosby and his Mosby’s Rangers, as well as Nathan Bedford Forrest and his raiders, carved out bloody reputations as effective tacticians of guerrilla warfare in the cause of the Confederate States. From the Union’s regular army came such scorched-earth commanders as Philip Sheridan, who pillaged and burned the Shenandoah Valley, and William Tecumseh Sherman, who laid waste to the Deep South in his infamous March to the Sea.

After the Civil War, the U.S. Army turned its attention back toward the untamed forests and plains in the West to secure a continental passage to California. Irregular-fighting tactics played a prominent role in the westward conquest of the American continent until near the end of the nineteenth century. Conflicts raged against the indigenous inhabitants as land-seeking settlers streamed from the Eastern Seaboard to the interior plains. Most engagements were small-unit actions in which the U.S. Army borrowed American Indian tactics of stealth, surprise, and ambush. Not all the engagements ended in a U.S. victory. General George Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, a loss born of hubris, poor planning, and tactical errors, has served as a cautionary lesson for students of war ever since 1876.

The conclusion of the so-called Indian Wars marked the eclipse of the irregular-fighting capacity among U.S. military forces for nearly a quarter of a century. The American traditions of frontier warfare and inherent Yankee ingenuity, however, are traits that must not be dismissed without brief reference. These frontier soldiers possessed the qualities of stealth, surprise, and self-reliance that later generations of Special Operations Forces would draw on and incorporate into the present-day antiterrorism campaign and counterinsurgency operations.

Not until the Spanish-American War would U.S. ground forces wage a modern-day counterinsurgency against guerrillas. The Philippine War (1899–1902) found the United States on the receiving end of an insurgency fought by a determined band of Filipinos for the right of independence against colonial-type rule from Washington. Ultimately, the United States prevailed in its counterinsurgency campaign by a mixture of innovative techniques and military competency.10 Afterward, the U.S. military occupied Haiti in an operation that turned into an early version of nation building on the impoverished island. The Marine Corps soon found itself embroiled in a string of small conflicts in Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. Marines wrote of their experiences in the “Banana Wars” in a series of articles, which were distilled into their encyclopedic Small Wars Manual in 1940, a classic handbook for security operations in underdeveloped lands.

The lessons learned from the Philippines and Caribbean interventions were overshadowed by the mammoth conventional world wars of the twentieth century. World War I’s trench warfare swept away the lingering familiarity with irregular fighting. Counterinsurgency proficiency no longer seemed relevant with the introduction of biplanes, tanks, and massed infantry charges across no-man’s-lands in the teeth of machine gun fire. The toll in lives was so steep that the war did seem to be a harbinger of lasting peace. After all, the war had been fought to end wars. Immediately following World War I, the United States demobilized its land forces and looked inward to the Roaring Twenties and then the Great Depression. In a short time, though, hypernationalism, rampant militarism, and wicked ideologies stalked the European and Asian landscapes, drawing America into a second world conflagration. This time, however, the events during World War II prompted some American leaders to turn to irregular warfare tactics.
Title: Washington's spies
Post by: bigdog on December 05, 2016, 09:37:41 AM
https://www.amazon.com/Washingtons-Spies-Story-Americas-First/dp/0553383299
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 05, 2016, 07:22:43 PM
A phenomenal true story!

The TV series on this is actually quite good.
Title: NSA’s best are leaving
Post by: bigdog on December 08, 2016, 09:29:14 AM
https://www.cyberscoop.com/nsa-morale-down-keith-alexander-mike-rogers/

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2016, 09:50:48 AM
That is quite a pay disparity; a dynamic similar to what SF operators can make still fighting the fight as contractors.

I would presume the Nat. Sec. Advisor (another NSA acronym, this could get confusing!) and former NSA head Flynn is well apprised of this issue.  It seems quite plausible to assume he will have President Trump's ear on this.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on December 08, 2016, 12:18:07 PM
Small note: Flynn was DIA.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2016, 03:33:25 PM
Yes you are quite correct-- thank you for the catch Big Dog!
Title: Bolton wonders if hacks were a false flag operation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2016, 08:52:25 PM
http://thehill.com/homenews/309897-bolton-questions-if-russian-hacks-were-false-flag#.WE4omYPtuIY.facebook
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on December 12, 2016, 04:24:34 AM
But, “if you think the Russians did this, then why did they leave fingerprints?” that led the CIA to its conclusion, Bolton questioned.

This point has been raised before.  Anyone as sophisticated as the Russians who could do this, one might logically think, might also be able to cover their tracks.
I brought this point up earlier (obviously my good friend John reads my posts) that there are other entities that would have wanted to influence the election with one sided release of, and not let us forget, truthful information on one political side.

The Right should with EVERY breath be sure to include that the information from whomever was all true.
Re focus the point the Dems and Billiary have themselves to blame for their corruption - not the messenger.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2016, 09:37:40 AM
The DNC (and RNC) servers are, like Hillary's server, private servers.  May we assume the US govt servers dedicated to state secrets and intel are more secure?  I sure hope so!!!

Yet our enemies have regularly penetrated our governments systems-- witness e.g. the seizure of the highly personal records of literally millions of federal employees by , , , well, do we even know?  (Yet somehow the Russians left tracks getting into the easier to crack private servers of the DNC)  Sen. McCain today is wondering if we even know whether our military satellites are secure.  There is good reason to wonder if our infrastructure has been penetrated, and sits awaiting highly disruptive commands at our enemies' convenience.

But we only worry when the Dems claim to have been hurt in an election because the Truth about their action was revealed?
Title: Help please: CIA doubting Iran's nuke program
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2016, 09:42:13 AM
Second post:

IIRC during the Bush 43 years when President Bush was trying to build an alliance to pressure Iran to stop its nuke program the CIA unexpectedly and oddly came out with a study purporting to find that Iran had dropped its nuke program.  Bush's effort to build collective sanctions was lastingly damaged , , , but then it came out that the CIA study was wrong and may have been acting politically with the odd findings of its study.

Could someone please help me find this?

It could be very useful now in PE Trump's challenge of the CIA's purported finding of Russian favoritism.
Title: I don't know if these help
Post by: ccp on December 12, 2016, 10:06:40 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/world/middleeast/us-agencies-see-no-move-by-iran-to-build-a-bomb.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-20/cia-s-nuclear-bomb-sting-said-to-spur-review-in-iran-arms-case

reports of CIA claiming  Iran stopped nuclear bomb acquisition in 2003 and later we hear that the deal stops them from doing it.  And we also hear about stutnik .  FRankly we hear a lot of shit.  Who really knows?


http://armscontrolcenter.org/the-real-facts-on-the-iran-nuclear-negotiations/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2016, 10:40:11 AM
The first of those is quite on point and the second contains fascinating info that I did not know.  The third link is not directly on point but a good summary of the case for the Agreement.  Thank you very much.
Title: Make American Intel Great Again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2016, 11:23:39 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442928/donald-trump-intelligence-agencies-reorganization?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-12-09&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Bolton-If you think the Russians did this, then why did they leave fingerprints?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2016, 11:56:46 AM
Third post

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/john-bolton-russia-hack-a-false-flag-232490
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2016, 12:25:44 PM
Fourth post:

A FB post of mine responding to a friend indignant about "Russian meddling in our election" and the apparent lack for concern about this on the Trump side:

 A few questions:

a) As Bolton asks "If you think the Russians did this, then why did they leave fingerprints?" In other words, there remains the false flag question

b) The Russians and Chinese and the Iranians and the North Koreans and the teenage boy who hacked the CIA director do it to penetrate our infrastructure, steal our trade secrets, steal our military secrets, and so forth -- so why has Obama done jack shit about this? Isn't this even more important?

c) The NY Times revealed illegally hacked/stolen tax records/financials from Trump and this was understood to be part of the game.

Assuming for the sake of the argument, that this was the Russians hacking into the DNC's private server, were we to close our eyes? Again, the alleged interference was the dissemination of true information concerning Democratic skullduggery. What would your response be if the NY Times received and published the hacked info?

Given our history of Radio Free Europe etc and our meddling in numerous elections around the world (including the Israeli elections by Obama and commentary by Hillary on the Russian "elections" btw), what is the nature of our argument viz the Russians? Is it an assertion of raw power on our part? Or is it something else? If so, what is the nature of our argument with the Russians. Imagine yourself to be the American Secretary of State having a meeting with Putin. Exactly what is it that you tell him?

Does your argument mean that we were wrong to have had Radio Free Europe?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on December 12, 2016, 01:02:31 PM
Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 12, 2016, 01:20:48 PM
Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.



I don't think you are reading this correctly.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on December 12, 2016, 01:24:42 PM
Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.



I don't think you are reading this correctly.


OK. Good. Thanks, GM. I'll go back to the several threads where this is being discussed.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on December 12, 2016, 03:55:19 PM
Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

I've been out of town, just catching up on this today.

I oppose Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election (for the record).  i'm not aware that is what happened.  Still looking for facts.  

I also opposed Obama administration and US inference in the Israeli elections.  I oppose the illegal Saudi and Qatar and other foreign entities buying influence here with the losing campaign.

Much of the mainstream discussion of this story does not match the actual report, and the actual report was not definitive,  got another part of it wrong, RNC hacked, and the CIA confirmation was not fully confirmed by the CIA.  See quotes below.  

I'm seeing a lot of hypocrisy on the other side.   For example, where was their objection to the Israeli interference and where was the outrage when Russia hacked our White House?  Who called for an investigation in October 2014??  Hope to not commit hypocrisy on this of my own; if there is credible reason to investigate further, do so.

There were at least 4 sources to the Hillary emails.  Wikileaks was one.  Also the FBI, the (kerry) State Department and Hillary herself.  Didn't she promise that we would see all her work related product long before now?  Wasn't it court ordered, or promised under oath to a committee of Congress?

THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE THE CRIMINALITY OR ACT OF WAR OF RUSSIA (or whoever hacked) AND/OR WIKILEAKS.  Nor does our lax and incompetent security excuse their crimes.  Investigate and prosecute.

Wikileaks has said with certainty Russia was not the source. They have been as reliable as the other sources mentioned.  The CIA is not linking the hack directly with certainty to the Kremlin either, that we know.  

I cringed in the campaign when Donald Trump seem to encourage Russian hacking even though I recall it was hedged in parsing.  He was wrong to do that and I oppose it.  Yet we know our enemies and rivals spy and hack, with best results on unsecured networks.  Better that this information came out early and often than to have it held back, bought, sold, and used as blackmail against a new administration, IMHO.  Had Hillary released her emails, there was nothing to leak.  Had Debbie Wasserman Schultz not assisted and steered the nomination to Hillary, there was nothing to leak.  Had Hillary's closest associates kept their work product and confidential communications on secure government servers, there was nothing to leak.  And how is it that John Podesta still has a job?  Unbelievable that she stood silently by him and no one called for his resignation. 

I can't see a reason why Putin or Russia would prefer Trump over Hillary, so the underlying motive of that theory makes no sense to me.  The motive to de-legitimize the election outcome is all around us, whether it was driving this or not.  

As the internet gets less and less secure, we should note that our outgoing administration gave up control of aspects of the internet to the self described "global multistakeholder community" who mostly can't tell friend from foe from a US point of view, or care.  I would put fixing security flaws of the internet on a higher priority than ceding authority.

Though I oppose enemies around the globe committing espionage here, the communications hacked and leaked include material we were already promised and entitled to.  These people who committed and tried to hide criminal activities were exposed.  What is the competing argument that we should never have seen the behind the scenes corruption that took place?  Punish the hackers but expose the corruption.

The report of this is a leak of its own.  

Is this the original story that started the stir?  Was there any new information in it?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.aa8849eb591c

A NY Times story that followed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/11/us/politics/cia-judgment-intelligence-russia-hacking-evidence.html?_r=0

From the reporting:  "...said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators."  (A "senior US official" includes some unreliable people, like a guy who told me I could keep my healthcare...)

"it was an analysis of what many believe is overwhelming circumstantial evidence — evidence that others feel does not support firm judgments ..."  (The conclusion might be true  and it might be false.)

"The dispute cuts to core realities of intelligence analysis. Judgments are often made in a fog of uncertainty, are sometimes based on putting together shards of a mosaic that do not reveal a full picture, and can always be affected by human biases." (in other words, no definitive facts.)

As Bolton said, finding their fingerprints on it could be a contrary indicator.

The argument made by those wanting the Electors briefed on this (not Bigdog) is that this election was hacked, which to me implies a vote counting exploitation, which is not alleged in the reports.   What happened instead was that truths were wrongfully revealed to the voters that were intended to be concealed.  

It was our lack of knowledge of key facts, like cheating on debate questions, that was creating election interference before it was exposed, IMHO.  Does that excuse enemy hacking and illegal leaking?  No.  Not even the leaking of this alleged CIA briefing.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2016, 04:30:38 PM
Big Dog:

Said without snark or sarcasm-- you are smart, well-educated man who has rubbed elbows with major players. 

Thought experiment:  You are the US Ambassador to Russia and you have a meeting with Putin or Lavarov (sp?  the foreign minister guy)  You believe the idea that the Russians hacked both DNC and RNC, and assume that there was the political/moral equivalent of the DNC/Podesta emails in the RNC emails and that the Russians chose to put their thumb on the scales in favor of Trump.

What do you say in that meeting?
Title: The Democrats' Nauseating Putin Hypocrisy
Post by: G M on December 12, 2016, 06:38:01 PM
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2016/12/11/the-democrats-nauseating-putin-hypocrisy/?singlepage=true

The Democrats' Nauseating Putin Hypocrisy
By Roger L Simon December 11, 2016


The degree to which the Democrats have changed their tune on Vladimir Putin almost on a proverbial dime is either black comic or nauseating or both, depending on how you want to look at it. Whatever it is, it is a extremely obvious example of how party politics is conducted in our era (possibly always).

If your side does it, it's diplomatic genius bound to yield peace in our time. If the other side does the exact same thing, it's a horrendous mistake bordering on treason likely to cause a national calamity, if not global Armageddon.

If there were any decent, even semi-even-handed political science departments left in our country (okay, maybe there are one or two), what we might call the Democrats' "Great Putin Flip Flop" would be a textbook case for classroom discussion.

Let's start at the beginning, March 2009, but a few weeks after the first inauguration of Barack Obama, when a smiling Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov the red "reset" button, signaling the arrival of a supposed era of peace between the two countries.  The new administration was greeted with hosannas for their great symbolism from their loyal claque at the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, et al., who were oblivious, needless to say, that the word "peregruzka" printed in Cyrillic on the button, thought to mean "reset" in Russian by the linguistic geniuses in our State Department, was actually the word for "overload."
Sponsored

No wonder Lavrov has such a quizzical look on his face in the all the photos. (Imagine what the reaction of the press would have been had Trump's putative secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, done something similar. Media lynch mob?) Much more important, however,  was the extreme ignorance of the Russian character, from the Czars through Lenin and Stalin and on into the present, evinced by such a naive, almost childish, "reset." Throughout the East, of which Russia has always been a signal part despite intermittent yearnings for the West, a powerful leader has always been the center of national and tribal life.  Silly, symbolic gestures like “reset” buttons are seen as weakness, not compromises or attempts at global comity. They are something to exploit.

Obama, Russia, the Election, and a Visitor From Mars

Barack Obama, however, went on undeterred. The U.S. president, in South Korea in March 2012 for a nuclear security summit, was caught on open mic with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev confidentially informing the Russian president, as if Medvedev would be so stupid as not to know, that  "after my election, I will have more flexibility." Obama wanted that news conveyed to Medvedev's boss Putin so the true Russian president would give Obama some "space." Only Barack clearly didn't realize Vladmir was a capo di tutti capi and would behave like one -- not, say, a Republican senator from a swing state who could be swayed with a "chummy presidential phone call."

We all know how it turned out.  Putin read Obama well. Within a couple of years Russia had retaken the Crimea, destabilized Ukraine, and, making matters so bad that even the namby-pamby John Kerry has admitted it was a mistake, Obama's red line on Assad's use of chemical weapons had been crossed with our president doing absolutely nothing about it, allegedly in order not to offend dear Vlad, who was making him "promises."  The Russian air force was reputedly going to help us extinguish ISIS  -- or what Obama for reasons unknown insists on calling ISIL -- but ended up somehow misfiring and hitting our quasi-allies in the field, helping rend them at this point virtually non-existent, while Assad is now marching into Aleppo and has Syria, forever a Russian client, practically all to his despotic self again.

And then there's the little matter of Iran, also a client of Russia when Putin wants it to be, financing as much mayhem as it can from Iraq to Yemen and beyond (they are believed to have camps in Venezuela), arming the terrorist thugs of Hezbollah, all with unbelievable sums of money donated by Obama for an inexplicable and unwelcome nuclear deal hardly a single American understands and about which Vladimir Putin knows far more than any member of the U.S. Congress (which never had a chance to vote on it anyway).

Has any American president done more for Russia for less reason?  (At least FDR united with Stalin to defeat Hitler.)

Obviously not, although the same media claque (aka court eunuchs) aren't even mentioning this as they all go into a full-tilt attempt, with CIA help, to malign Donald Trump as the next American president selected (but not apparently elected) by the hackers of the Russian Republic.


Bolton: DNC Hack May Have Been a 'False Flag' Operation

Do I believe Trump actually was the Russians' preference? That would be mighty optimistic on their part. How could they do better than Obama, considering the last eight years?  And why not just as well elect a weakened Hillary? My guess is, if (big if) they were the instigators of the hacking of the embarrassingly cyber-incompetent DNC  (what is wrong with these people -- it's 2016), they were equal-opportunity hackers, anxious to create confusion and finger-pointing (they succeed with that), rather than specific results that would be hard to control.

This would be consistent with Russian/Soviet behavior over generations.  For those who have not read it, one of the best places to understand this is Disinformation, a remarkable book by sometime PJ Media contributor Ion Pacepa, one of the highest-ranking defectors from the East.  (He once ran Romanian intelligence under Ceausescu.) Mandatory reading on a similar topic is Whittaker Chambers' extraordinary memoir Witness, with its stories of the Soviet infiltration of our government way back to the 1920s.

The question we should all be asking about the CIA's sudden revelation of online tampering with our election by the Russians is how come it took our intelligence agencies so long to figure this out?  That's assuming it's all not a "false flag" operation, as John Bolton is alleging. (I wouldn't bet against him.)  Nevertheless, why are we so permeable to anyone and everyone? Why did John Podesta fall for a phishing scheme most fourteen-year olds would have avoided? What's wrong with our cyber-defenses? Didn't we invent the Internet? Al Gore, where are you?

Well, we know.

But let me ask one last question whose answer should be evident to any sentient being not a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. Who do you think would better understand and deal with Vladimir Putin -- Barack Obama or Donald Trump?

Yes, the KGB  and its successors know the difference between a community organizer and a CEO.  Don't we all?
Title: The great Russia-hacked-the-election con
Post by: G M on December 12, 2016, 06:46:24 PM
Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

Do you have any evidence to back up the assertion, Bigdog?


December 11, 2016
The great Russia-hacked-the-election con
By Thomas Lifson

Most of the American media are “reporting” that President Obama ordered an investigation of “Russian hacking of our election,” and that the intelligence community “confirms” that it happened. Yet there is not yet any evidence that Russia hacked the election or was responsible for the DNC email hacks. None.

When self-interested people and their media allies proclaim something is true, and form a chorus that drowns out any other views, I always suspect a con. It is so easy for the Left, since it controls education and the media, to sell any tale it wishes, from global warming to Michelle Obama as a glamorous fashion icon. Most people will simply fall in line because it is too much trouble and risky to dispute what is regarded as a received truth by the power elite.

Glenn Greenwald debunks the media rush to proclaim fact-free conclusions as if they were certainties.

    THE WASHINGTON POST late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: The key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.

    These unnamed sources told the Post that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.” The anonymous officials also claim that “intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails” from both the DNC and John Podesta’s email account. Critically, none of the actual evidence for these claims is disclosed; indeed, the CIA’s “secret assessment” itself remains concealed.

    A second leak from last night, this one given to the New York Times, cites other anonymous officials as asserting that “the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.” But that NYT story says that “it is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.”

Why it’s just as settled as the science that told us we wouldn’t be seeing any more snow, right about 2016 or so.  The Post did manage to allow that there might be a teeny-weeny bit of doubt about entirely unimportant details, though:

    Deep down in its article, the Post notes — rather critically — that “there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.” Most importantly, the Post adds that “intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.”

Where is the skepticism? The Russian hacking scenario is an excuse for the Democrats to explain away their loss without blaming themselves or their candidate, and it serves to delegitimize the next president – a bad thing for the country.

My own suspicion is that an insider at the DNC leaked the emails. There is as much evidence for the public to see supporting that assertion as there is for the claim that the Russians did it.

Hat tip: Clarice Feldman

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/12/the_great_russiahackedtheelection_con_.html
Title: Dubious donations (gangster government edition)
Post by: G M on December 12, 2016, 06:59:28 PM
*Anyone remember the good old days, when anyone who protested Obama getting donations from overseas was raaaaaaaacist? It's only a scandal when dems lose elections.*


http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/dubious-donations-gangster-government-edition.php

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Scott Johnson in 2012 Presidential Election, Obama Administration Scandals
Dubious donations (gangster government edition)

We have published a series of posts on Obama’s “dubious donations” — i.e., the Obama campaign’s invitation of fraudulent and illegal giving through the disabling of basic credit card/debit card verification devices. I wrote about the Obama campaign fundraising operation in the October 2008 New York Post column “Dubious donations.” The Post subhead observed: “Bam’s Web site invites fraud.”

The Washington Post reported on the matter two days later in the story “Obama accepting untraceable donations,” by Matthew Mosk. Mosk quoted Obama campaign officials on their practices. According to them, everything was copacetic.

It having worked so well the first time around, and it having aroused so little interest among the mainstream media, Obama is doing it again. So we have reported in the series of posts beginning with “Dubious donations (2012 edition).” There is a story here, but you’d never know it if you get your news from the mainstream media.

In his Washington Examiner column today, also posted here at NRO, Michael Barone picks up where we left off:

    It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card.

    That doesn’t sound very important. But it’s evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish.

    AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s the software that checks whether the name of the cardholder matches his or her address.

    If a campaign doesn’t use AVS, it can wind up accepting contributions from phony names or accepting contributions from foreigners, both of which are illegal.

    The 2008 Obama campaign pocketed money from “John Galt, 1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch CO 99999” and $174,000 from a woman in Missouri who told reporters she had given nothing and had never been billed. Presumably she would have noticed an extra charge of $174,000.

Barone continues:

    The Obama campaign is evidently happy to pocket the money. After all, this is the president who, according to political scientist Brendan Doherty, has appeared at more fundraisers in three and a half years than his six predecessors did in 35 years.

    Obama has been to at least two fundraisers just in my apartment building. I often see police and Secret Service blocking traffic for a block around Washington’s posh Jefferson Hotel at 16th and M streets.

    Obama talks a good game on transparency and openness, but he’s ready to flout the law by avoiding AVS and to break his high-minded campaign promises.

    In the 2008 campaign cycle, he promised to take public financing for the general election. He broke that promise when it became apparent he could raise far more money on his own.

    During much of this cycle, he’s been criticizing Republican super-PACs as a perversion of the political process. But when he saw that Republicans might be able to raise as much money as Democrats, he broke that promise too and authorized Cabinet members to appear at fundraisers for the super-PAC headed by his former deputy press secretary.

    Democrats outraised Republicans in 2004 and 2008. Evidently Obama considers it grossly unfair that they might not do so this year. That’s not how things work in Chicago.

Barone being Barone, he assimilates Obama’s dubious donations to a larger theme. The theme is that of Obama’s Chicago-style politics. Barone himself dubbed it “Gangster Government” in a May 2009 column that I can’t find online at the moment.

He concludes today’s column with a return to the dubious donations: “Other campaigns have not disabled their AVS systems. But then their candidates are not from Chicago. Obama likes to talk about the need for civility. He just doesn’t like to practice it.”

UPDATE: Reader Jeryl Bier of Speak With Authority forwards the link to the May 2009 Examiner column in which Barone first identified the Obama administration’s practice of “Gangster Government.”
Title: Everyone I don't like...
Post by: G M on December 12, 2016, 07:21:34 PM
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/everyone-i-dont-like-is-a-russian.jpg)

https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/everyone-i-dont-like-is-a-russian.jpg

Title: If Putin wanted to influence...
Post by: G M on December 12, 2016, 09:25:32 PM
(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/putininfluence.jpg)

https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/putininfluence.jpg

Title: Reuters: ODNI isn’t completely buying CIA take on Russia hacking motives, either
Post by: G M on December 13, 2016, 07:21:27 AM
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/13/reuters-odni-isnt-completely-buying-cia-take-on-russia-hacking-motives-either/

Reuters: ODNI isn’t completely buying CIA take on Russia hacking motives, either
POSTED AT 8:01 AM ON DECEMBER 13, 2016 BY ED MORRISSEY

Share on Facebook 57 57 SHARES
Hacking occurred? Check. Russians involved? Check. An operation by the Russian government to elect Donald Trump? Er … not so fast. After leaks that the CIA believes that the Russians deliberately set out to crown Trump set off days of angry demands and accusations, Reuters reports that the highest levels of the intelligence structure don’t share that view. Instead, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence appears to side with the FBI — that the CIA hasn’t produced evidence of motive for the hacks:

The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA’s analysis of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named. …

The CIA conclusion was a “judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked,” one of the three officials said on Monday.

“(It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment,” the official added.
Reince Priebus emphatically denies that Republicans got hacked at all. As RNC chair, one would assume he’d know if it happened, but as Donald Trump’s new chief of staff, he’d certainly have some interest in denying it now, too. Senator John McCain alluded to that when insisting on a Senate investigation, saying that just “because Mr. Priebus says that doesn’t mean it’s true.” True, but considering that this appears to be the entire fulcrum of the CIA’s analysis, perhaps that should be the first point either corroborated or debunked in the upcoming hearings.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense anyway. First off, as Gabriel Malor points out, the hacks in question started well before anyone thought Trump would win the nomination, let alone the general election:

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
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 Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor
An issue here is the DNC hacks started before Trump won the primary. One of them LONG before.
12:41 PM - 12 Dec 2016
  133 133 Retweets   116 116 likes
18h
 Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor
An issue here is the DNC hacks started before Trump won the primary. One of them LONG before. pic.twitter.com/L2GD99YCmL
 Follow
 Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor
That image is from the independent report DNC commissioned about the hacks.
12:41 PM - 12 Dec 2016
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To believe that the entire exercise was designed to elect Trump, one would have to see evidence that Russians were hacking Trump’s Republican rivals in the primaries. No such attacks have ever been noted, although some of them would certainly prefer that explanation than the reality of how they lost to Trump. Several of them attacked Trump for his attitude toward Putin, so if these candidates saw hacking attempts from Russia coming at them, it seems almost unbelievable that they would have remained quiet about it. A DNC hack would be a really indirect way of electing any Republican, let alone Trump.

Perhaps one can express this in the negative — that the Russians wanted to keep Hillary Clinton from getting elected rather than wanting to boost Trump. But does that make any sense? Hillary was going to keep Barack Obama’s foreign policy largely in place, under which Putin and Russia had managed to do pretty much what they wanted in the Middle East and in eastern Europe. Perhaps Trump’s foreign-policy comments made him more attractive, but those didn’t start coming out until well after the Russians began penetrating the DNC in summer 2015. Hillary was the Secretary of State that offered up the “reset button” to Sergei Lavrov, and Obama was promising Dmitry Medvedev “more flexibility” after the 2012 election while Hillary was still at Foggy Bottom. Hillary was the architect of Obama’s incoherent “Arab Spring” response, which opened the door to Russian military adventurism in Syria and an overt military alliance with Iran. Hillary and the Obama administration barely even mentioned Russia as a threat until Trump gained traction in the primaries.

Let’s also remember what was going on at State under Hillary’s management. Russians took control of a significant portion of American uranium in the Uranium One deal, approved on Hillary’s watch while her husband Bill took in $500,000 from the Russian bankers involved. That was also accompanied by over two million dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation. Putin seemed to find the Clintons pretty easy partners, as long as he could launder cash to them through speeches and the foundation.

Finally, if Putin really wanted to torpedo Hillary Clinton, they had one sure and direct way of accomplishing it: the secret e-mail server. If the DNC and (allegedly) the RNC got penetrated by Russian intelligence in order to manipulate American elections and governance, does anyone have any doubt at all that Meemaw’s home-spun e-mail server (Now Wiped With Cloths!) remained inviolate? Once Hillary and her lawyers deleted over 32,000 e-mails that were supposedly “personal,” the FSB or whichever agency was involved could have leaked those all day long. They could have begun leaking them in 2014, when Hillary clearly was putting the band back together for a White House run and the existence of the server wasn’t yet publicly known. Do we really believe that the Russians penetrated non-governmental systems like the DNC, RNC (allegedly), and the Center for American Progress but totally missed the Secretary of State’s unprotected communications over four years? Come on, man.

The Wall Street Journal isn’t convinced by the CIA’s logic, or their track record:

Somewhere in the Kremlin Vladimir Putin must be laughing. The Russian strongman almost certainly sought to undermine public confidence in American democracy this year, and as the Obama Administration leaves town it is playing into his hands.

That’s the real story behind the weekend reports that U.S. intelligence services have concluded that Russia intervened to assist Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The stories are attributed to “senior administration” officials who won’t go on the record but assert murky details that are impossible to verify without seeing the evidence. …

If the CIA really does have “high confidence” about Mr. Putin’s motives, this would also be the first time in recent history. These are the same seers who missed the Russian invasion of Crimea, missed the incursion into southern Ukraine, and missed Mr. Putin’s foray into Syria. The intelligence community also claimed “high confidence” in 2008 for its judgment that Iran had suspended its nuclear-weapons program. That judgment conveniently shut down any further Bush Administration action against Iran. But a year later, in the Obama Administration, our highly confident spooks disclosed Iran’s secret Fordo underground facility.
Hopefully the Congressional investigations to come will shed much more light on the hacks. If the Russians used the hacks to fuel Wikileaks and attempt to manipulate voters, we have to respond to that and make sure it doesn’t happen in the future. But the evidence for that conclusion had better be based on more evidence than what we’re seeing so far — evidence so weak that even the ODNI isn’t buying it from their own CIA.
Title: More Intelligence Officials Are Disputing CIA’s Claims About Russian Hacking
Post by: G M on December 13, 2016, 07:50:05 AM
More Intelligence Officials Are Disputing CIA’s Claims About Russian Hacking

CHUCK ROSS
Reporter
10:30 PM 12/12/2016

The CIA’s assessment that Russian hackers intervened during the presidential election specifically to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton relies on a “thin reed” of evidence, an official with the U.S. intelligence community says.

The official, who is with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), is one of three sources who told Reuters that the CIA’s assessment, which was reported over the weekend, is flawed.

The DNI sources told Reuters that the intelligence community does not quibble with the CIA’s conclusion that Russia engaged in a major cyber attack operation against the U.S. But they say that there is not enough evidence to say that the attacks were specifically designed to help elect Trump president rather than to merely insert chaos into the election.

“ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can’t prove intent,” one of the three officials told Reuters. “Of course they can’t, absent agents in on the decision-making in Moscow.”

Federal authorities have said for months that they believe Russia is behind cyber attacks that have largely been directed at Democrats and the Clinton campaign. Many of the hacked documents, including those from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, were provided to and published by WikiLeaks.

The CIA arrived at its conclusion “based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked,” one of the officials told Reuters.

“(It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment,” the official added.

The DNI officials aren’t the first to question the CIA determination.

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that an FBI counterintelligence official disagreed with the CIA’s conclusions during a briefing with Republican and Democratic members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence last week.

Despite the FBI’s refusal to accept the CIA theory, Podesta issued a statement on Monday calling on DNI director James Clapper to provide an intelligence briefing to a group of Electoral College electors before their Dec. 19 vote for president.

“We now know that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American,” wrote Podesta.

The move was sparked by a letter sent by 10 electors, led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, calling on Clapper to provide the briefing.



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/12/more-intelligence-officials-are-disputing-cias-claims-about-russian-hacking/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2016, 09:35:27 AM
A post I made on my FB page this morning:

 Arlan Sanford

Thanks for the update. As you work on it, this may help: I am NOT "supporting the Russians in this"!!!

As best as I can tell what is in play here is that someone got access to John Podesta's personal email and thus those of his associates on the campaign through a basic phishing scam and that someone got into the DNC computer through some idiot that had a password of , , , drumroll , , , "password".

Do I have this right?

Was this the Russians?

FBI Director Comey formally stated that there was a "high degree of probability" (or some words to that effect) that foreign state actors had accessed Hillary's emails (including presumably the 30,000 that she illegally destroyed after they had been subpoenaed) AND THAT THEY HAD DONE SO WITHOUT LEAVING ANY TRACKS.

And so now we are to believe that, as Ambassador Bolton has pointed out, the Russians did what an anonymous source in the CIA is alleging but decided to leave tracks?!? I am a VERY low tech person, but this leaves considerable room for doubt, yes?

I am also pointing out that far more serious cyber invasions have been going on for quite some time, apparently with near zero response from the US (Obama) The North Koreans devastated an American Hollywood Studio (Sony?). The Chinese (IIRC) seized several million records of people who had applied for security clearances. There are many more examples, but these three come to mind.

That Obama has not bestirred himself on behalf of our nation until his preferred successor lost leaves me disgusted, but I confess, not surprised.

Hillary (yep-- here she comes :-D ) conducted our nation's diplomatic correspondence on her private server (with the back up system literally in a bathroom closet somewhere in Colorado!!!) in a CRIMINAL conspiracy with a corrupt "pay to play" scheme for personal enrichment at its core to evade our government's laws regarding keeping records of its employees' acts and the related FOIA laws.

(Not to mention her hiring Debbie Wasserman Schulz after she lost her gig at DNC for cheating and dirty tricking Bernie Sanders!)

It takes a truly psychopathic level of chutzpah for this woman to now attempt to besmirch the results of the election-- and even today I hear that the same John Podesta is trying for an electoral coup via the electoral college!!!.

I am hoping for much better from Trump-- precisely because our cyber security is as important as it appear to be exposed-- but Podesta getting phished and the DNC having "password" as its password are not really examples of this, are they now?.

His selection of Gen. Mike Flynn for National Security Advisor seems quite promising in this regard in that he was the head of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) , , , until his discontents with Obama's weakness came to a head. Having been head of the DIA would seem to be an ideal background for rectifying the incredible vulnerability of our systems (private sector, public sector, military)

Also, I see that Trump met yesterday with Carly Fiorina, who would be a very good pick for improving our cyber security. This would be the second time that she has been called upon to do this.

Indeed the first time she did this was one of the reasons I actually donated to her campaign early in the primaries-- so yes I have been following the cyber-security issue for quite some time now see e.g. on my forum:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1586.0
Please note that the thread began in 2008, so I quite a bit less than impressed at the situational ethics of Hillary (and Obama) in this regard.

Anyway, just a few things for you to consider as you compose your response.
Title: WSJ: An Electoral College Coup
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2016, 09:41:36 AM
An Electoral College Coup
The Clinton campaign now suggests the election was rigged.
Dec. 12, 2016 7:49 p.m. ET

Only a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton’s campaign was denouncing Donald Trump as un-American for saying the election might be “rigged.” We criticized Mr. Trump at the time. But now that Mrs. Clinton has lost, her campaign is claiming the election really was rigged, albeit for Mr. Trump by Russian meddling, and it wants the Electoral College to stage what amounts to a coup.

That’s the only way to interpret the extraordinary statement Monday by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta endorsing a special intelligence briefing for electors a week before they cast their ballots for President on Dec. 19. He released the statement hours after 10 members of the Electoral College sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seeking information on foreign interference in the election to judge if Mr. Trump “is fit to serve.” One of those electors is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.

“The bipartisan electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed,” Mr. Podesta said. “We now know that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American.”

What should really distress Americans is that the losers are trying to overturn the election results based on little more than anonymous leaks and innuendo. Whatever Russia’s hacking motives, there is no evidence that the emails it turned up were decisive to the election result. Mr. Podesta is citing a CIA judgment that Americans have never seen and whose findings are vaguely public only because one or more unidentified officials chose to relate them to a few reporters last week.

Much of the press is reporting these as the gospel truth, though it isn’t clear that the CIA’s judgment is even shared across the intelligence community. The FBI doesn’t share the CIA’s confidence about Russia’s hacking motive, and our sources say the evidence is thin for the CIA’s conclusion.

Yet Mr. Podesta’s demand is that those same unidentified leakers now give a secret briefing to the 538 electors, most of whom lack any experience in judging the nuances of intelligence. Those electors are then supposed to decide based on information Americans won’t have seen whether they should invalidate the results of an election in which more than 128 million voted. Even Vladimir Putin at his most devious couldn’t have imagined his cyber-spooks would provoke this much anti-democratic nonsense.

This effort is all the more pernicious because it poisons with partisanship the serious issue of foreign intelligence hacking, not least by the Russians. Foreign cyber-attacks have proliferated during the Obama years, but the President has never held any national government accountable. Even when officials fingered the Russians this summer for the hacks on the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Obama did nothing but wag a finger.

Yet now, at the end of his term, he has ordered a secret report on the election-related hacking to be on his desk before he leaves office on Jan. 20. Then the news of this report coincidentally leaks, along with the CIA’s new conclusion about Russia’s motive, a mere 11 days before the Electoral College votes. Did those leakers—probably including CIA Director and Obama confidant John Brennan—act with White House assent?

This political farce is compounded by a press corps that spent Monday demanding that GOP leaders in Congress say if they too support investigations into the Russian hacking. Never mind that the Senate and House intelligence committees, both led by Republicans, have been looking into the election-related hacking for months, often with far too little cooperation from the Obama Administration.

Then the press reports as major news the non-story that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has endorsed an intelligence probe that has long been underway. Talk about fake news.

The entire spectacle looks more like a Democratic attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election than it does serious concern about cyber-spying. Democrats must figure they can’t lose. They know the Electoral College isn’t likely to throw the election to Hillary Clinton, but the headlines can help undermine public support for Mr. Trump’s Presidency even before he takes office. And these folks blame Donald Trump for violating democratic “norms.”
 
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on December 13, 2016, 10:26:13 AM
"Only a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton’s campaign was denouncing Donald Trump as un-American for saying the election might be “rigged.”

As was every single jurnolister and the entire MSM and Obama.

"This political farce is compounded by a press corps that spent Monday demanding that GOP leaders in Congress say if they too support investigations into the Russian hacking"

and of course they find Lindsey Graham and John McCain merrily obliging and I see McConnell now doing so but for him at least,  I expect he is doing this more for show then for real.

"The entire spectacle looks more like a Democratic attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election than it does serious concern about cyber-spying. Democrats must figure they can’t lose. They know the Electoral College isn’t likely to throw the election to Hillary Clinton, but the headlines can help undermine public support for Mr. Trump’s Presidency even before he takes office. And these folks blame Donald Trump for violating democratic “norms.”

I would also specify that the Democrat attempt includes not only the eternal suspects such as Charley Schumer and Nancy Pelosi , but the same jurnolist and MSM and Obama frantically doing everything to de legitimize Trump. 

And now the soon to be ex CIC going off on racism , slavery, colonialism saying he could care less about what was in the emails because what is important only the Russia released them.

I predict he will be the biggest mouth ex Pres in history .  The LEFT will go to him day and night asking for the ON'es critiques of Trump.



Title: If Russia dug into US politics, its Obama's fault, not Trump's
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2016, 01:50:59 PM
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/310140-if-russian-claws-dug-into-us-politics-obama-not-trump
Title: A major piece by the NY Times (POTH) on the Russian Hack
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2016, 02:02:08 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?emc=edit_ta_20161213&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.

By ERIC LIPTON, DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANEDEC. 13, 2016


WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks.

Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.


“I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the F.B.I.

It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones.
What is phishing?

Phishing uses an innocent-looking email to entice unwary recipients to click on a deceptive link, giving hackers access to their information or a network. In “spear-phishing,” the email is tailored to fool a specific person.

An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack.

The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.

The low-key approach of the F.B.I. meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later.

Even Mr. Podesta, a savvy Washington insider who had written a 2014 report on cyberprivacy for President Obama, did not truly understand the gravity of the hacking.
Photo
Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, incorrectly legitimized a phishing email sent to the personal account of John D. Podesta, the campaign chairman.

By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times. Mr. Trump gleefully cited many of the purloined emails on the campaign trail.

The fallout included the resignations of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the D.N.C., and most of her top party aides. Leading Democrats were sidelined at the height of the campaign, silenced by revelations of embarrassing emails or consumed by the scramble to deal with the hacking. Though little-noticed by the public, confidential documents taken by the Russian hackers from the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, turned up in congressional races in a dozen states, tainting some of them with accusations of scandal.
Photo
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a reception last week at the Kremlin in Moscow. Credit Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

In recent days, a skeptical president-elect, the nation’s intelligence agencies and the two major parties have become embroiled in an extraordinary public dispute over what evidence exists that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia moved beyond mere espionage to deliberately try to subvert American democracy and pick the winner of the presidential election.

Many of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides believe that the Russian assault had a profound impact on the election, while conceding that other factors — from Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate, to her private email server, to the public statements of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, about her handling of classified information — were also important.

While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.
Graphic
Following the Links From Russian Hackers to the U.S. Election

The Central Intelligence Agency concluded that the Russian government deployed computer hackers to help elect Donald J. Trump.
OPEN Graphic

“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command said at a postelection conference. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

For the people whose emails were stolen, this new form of political sabotage has left a trail of shock and professional damage. Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a key Clinton supporter, recalls walking into the busy Clinton transition offices, humiliated to see her face on television screens as pundits discussed a leaked email in which she had called Mrs. Clinton’s instincts “suboptimal.”

“It was just a sucker punch to the gut every day,” Ms. Tanden said. “It was the worst professional experience of my life.”

The United States, too, has carried out cyberattacks, and in decades past the C.I.A. tried to subvert foreign elections. But the Russian attack is increasingly understood across the political spectrum as an ominous historic landmark — with one notable exception: Mr. Trump has rejected the findings of the intelligence agencies he will soon oversee as “ridiculous,” insisting that the hacker may be American, or Chinese, but that “they have no idea.”

Mr. Trump cited the reported disagreements between the agencies about whether Mr. Putin intended to help elect him. On Tuesday, a Russian government spokesman echoed Mr. Trump’s scorn.

“This tale of ‘hacks’ resembles a banal brawl between American security officials over spheres of influence,” Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, wrote on Facebook.

Over the weekend, four prominent senators, two Republicans and two Democrats, joined forces to pledge an investigation while pointedly ignoring Mr. Trump’s skeptical claims.

“Democrats and Republicans must work together, and across the jurisdictional lines of the Congress, to examine these recent incidents thoroughly and devise comprehensive solutions to deter and defend against further cyberattacks,” said Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed.

“This cannot become a partisan issue,” they said. “The stakes are too high for our country.”
A Target for Break-Ins

============================
Recent Comments
Dave 2 minutes ago

As someone who does some work in computer security, I couldn't help but laugh at this.1. The DNC and the Clinton campaign were done in with...
Michael S 9 minutes ago

The hacking of Hillary Clinton's, Podesta's and the DNC's email only had an impact as their emails did not bear scrutiny. To that extent the...
a guy named Joe 10 minutes ago

And here I was thinking that WE had the best and the brightest in all facets of warfare - be it military, cyber, or intelligence.Turns out...

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Photo
The break-in at the D.N.C. 44 years ago involved burglars who planted listening devices and jimmied this filing cabinet. In 2016, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

Sitting in the basement of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, below a wall-size 2012 portrait of a smiling Barack Obama, is a 1960s-era filing cabinet missing the handle on the bottom drawer. Only a framed newspaper story hanging on the wall hints at the importance of this aged piece of office furniture.

“GOP Security Aide Among 5 Arrested in Bugging Affair,” reads the headline from the front page of The Washington Post on June 19, 1972, with the bylines of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Andrew Brown, 37, the technology director at the D.N.C., was born after that famous break-in. But as he began to plan for this year’s election cycle, he was well aware that the D.N.C. could become a break-in target again.

There were aspirations to ensure that the D.N.C. was well protected against cyberintruders — and then there was the reality, Mr. Brown and his bosses at the organization acknowledged: The D.N.C. was a nonprofit group, dependent on donations, with a fraction of the security budget that a corporation its size would have.

“There was never enough money to do everything we needed to do,” Mr. Brown said.

The D.N.C. had a standard email spam-filtering service, intended to block phishing attacks and malware created to resemble legitimate email. But when Russian hackers started in on the D.N.C., the committee did not have the most advanced systems in place to track suspicious traffic, internal D.N.C. memos show.

Mr. Tamene, who reports to Mr. Brown and fielded the call from the F.B.I. agent, was not a full-time D.N.C. employee; he works for a Chicago-based contracting firm called The MIS Department. He was left to figure out, largely on his own, how to respond — and even whether the man who had called in to the D.N.C. switchboard was really an F.B.I. agent.

“The F.B.I. thinks the D.N.C. has at least one compromised computer on its network and the F.B.I. wanted to know if the D.N.C. is aware, and if so, what the D.N.C. is doing about it,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo about his contacts with the F.B.I. He added that “the Special Agent told me to look for a specific type of malware dubbed ‘Dukes’ by the U.S. intelligence community and in cybersecurity circles.”

Part of the problem was that Special Agent Hawkins did not show up in person at the D.N.C. Nor could he email anyone there, as that risked alerting the hackers that the F.B.I. knew they were in the system.
Photo
An internal memo by Yared Tamene, a tech-support contractor at the D.N.C., expressed uncertainty about the identity of Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the F.B.I., who called to inform him of the breach.

Mr. Tamene’s initial scan of the D.N.C. system — using his less-than-optimal tools and incomplete targeting information from the F.B.I. — found nothing. So when Special Agent Hawkins called repeatedly in October, leaving voice mail messages for Mr. Tamene, urging him to call back, “I did not return his calls, as I had nothing to report,” Mr. Tamene explained in his memo.

In November, Special Agent Hawkins called with more ominous news. A D.N.C. computer was “calling home, where home meant Russia,” Mr. Tamene’s memo says, referring to software sending information to Moscow. “SA Hawkins added that the F.B.I. thinks that this calling home behavior could be the result of a state-sponsored attack.”

Mr. Brown knew that Mr. Tamene, who declined to comment, was fielding calls from the F.B.I. But he was tied up on a different problem: evidence suggesting that the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mrs. Clinton’s main Democratic opponent, had improperly gained access to her campaign data.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz, then the D.N.C.’s chairwoman, and Amy Dacey, then its chief executive, said in interviews that neither of them was notified about the early reports that the committee’s system had likely been compromised.

Shawn Henry, who once led the F.B.I.’s cyber division and is now president of CrowdStrike Services, the cybersecurity firm retained by the D.N.C. in April, said he was baffled that the F.B.I. did not call a more senior official at the D.N.C. or send an agent in person to the party headquarters to try to force a more vigorous response.

“We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana,” Mr. Henry said. “We are talking about an office that is half a mile from the F.B.I. office that is getting the notification.”

“This is not a mom-and-pop delicatessen or a local library. This a critical piece of the U.S. infrastructure because it relates to our electoral process, our elected officials, our legislative process, our executive process,” he added. “To me it is a high-level, serious issue, and if after a couple of months you don’t see any results, somebody ought to raise that to a higher level.”

The F.B.I. declined to comment on the agency’s handling of the hack. “The F.B.I. takes very seriously any compromise of public and private sector systems,” it said in a statement, adding that agents “will continue to share information” to help targets “safeguard their systems against the actions of persistent cybercriminals.”

By March, Mr. Tamene and his team had met at least twice in person with the F.B.I. and concluded that Agent Hawkins was really a federal employee. But then the situation took a dire turn.

A second team of Russian-affiliated hackers began to target the D.N.C. and other players in the political world, particularly Democrats. Billy Rinehart, a former D.N.C. regional field director who was then working for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, got an odd email warning from Google.

“Someone just used your password to try to sign into your Google account,” the March 22 email said, adding that the sign-in attempt had occurred in Ukraine. “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.”

Mr. Rinehart was in Hawaii at the time. He remembers checking his email at 4 a.m. for messages from East Coast associates. Without thinking much about the notification, he clicked on the “change password” button and half asleep, as best he can remember, he typed in a new password.
Photo
A screenshot of the phishing email that Billy Rinehart clicked on, unknowingly giving Russian hackers access to his account. The New York Times has redacted Mr. Rinehart’s email address.

What he did not know until months later is that he had just given the Russian hackers access to his email account.

Hundreds of similar phishing emails were being sent to American political targets, including an identical email sent on March 19 to Mr. Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign. Given how many emails Mr. Podesta received through this personal email account, several aides also had access to it, and one of them noticed the warning email, sending it to a computer technician to make sure it was legitimate before anyone clicked on the “change password” button.

“This is a legitimate email,” Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, replied to another of Mr. Podesta’s aides, who had noticed the alert. “John needs to change his password immediately.”

With another click, a decade of emails that Mr. Podesta maintained in his Gmail account — a total of about 60,000 — were unlocked for the Russian hackers. Mr. Delavan, in an interview, said that his bad advice was a result of a typo: He knew this was a phishing attack, as the campaign was getting dozens of them. He said he had meant to type that it was an “illegitimate” email, an error that he said has plagued him ever since.
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Mr. Podesta, center, with Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, in Brooklyn the day after the election. Hackers gained access to tens of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

During this second wave, the hackers also gained access to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then, through a virtual private network connection, to the main computer network of the D.N.C.

The F.B.I. observed this surge of activity as well, again reaching out to Mr. Tamene to warn him. Yet Mr. Tamene still saw no reason to be alarmed: He found copies of the phishing emails in the D.N.C.’s spam filter. But he had no reason, he said, to believe that the computer systems had been infiltrated.

One bit of progress had finally been made by the middle of April: The D.N.C., seven months after it had first been warned, finally installed a “robust set of monitoring tools,” Mr. Tamene’s internal memo says.
Honing Stealthy Tactics
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The headquarters of the Russian F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., in Moscow. Credit Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

The United States had two decades of warning that Russia’s intelligence agencies were trying to break into America’s most sensitive computer networks. But the Russians have always managed to stay a step ahead.

Their first major attack was detected on Oct. 7, 1996, when a computer operator at the Colorado School of Mines discovered some nighttime computer activity he could not explain. The school had a major contract with the Navy, and the operator warned his contacts there. But as happened two decades later at the D.N.C., at first “everyone was unable to connect the dots,” said Thomas Rid, a scholar at King’s College in London who has studied the attack.

Investigators gave it a name — Moonlight Maze — and spent two years, often working day and night, tracing how it hopped from the Navy to the Department of Energy to the Air Force and NASA. In the end, they concluded that the total number of files stolen, if printed and stacked, would be taller than the Washington Monument.

Whole weapons designs were flowing out the door, and it was a first taste of what was to come: an escalating campaign of cyberattacks around the world.

But for years, the Russians stayed largely out of the headlines, thanks to the Chinese — who took bigger risks, and often got caught. They stole the designs for the F-35 fighter jet, corporate secrets for rolling steel, even the blueprints for gas pipelines that supply much of the United States. And during the 2008 presidential election cycle, Chinese intelligence hacked into the campaigns of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, making off with internal position papers and communications. But they didn’t publish any of it.

The Russians had not gone away, of course. “They were just a lot more stealthy,” said Kevin Mandia, a former Air Force intelligence officer who spent most of his days fighting off Russian cyberattacks before founding Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm that is now a division of FireEye — and the company the Clinton campaign brought in to secure its own systems.

The Russians were also quicker to turn their attacks to political purposes. A 2007 cyberattack on Estonia, a former Soviet republic that had joined NATO, sent a message that Russia could paralyze the country without invading it. The next year cyber was used during Russia’s war with Georgia.

But American officials did not imagine that the Russians would dare try those techniques inside the United States. They were largely focused on preventing what former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned was an approaching “cyber Pearl Harbor” — a shutdown of the power grid or cellphone networks.

But in 2014 and 2015, a Russian hacking group began systematically targeting the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Each time, they eventually met with some form of success,” Michael Sulmeyer, a former cyberexpert for the secretary of defense, and Ben Buchanan, now both of the Harvard Cyber Security Project, wrote recently in a soon-to-be published paper for the Carnegie Endowment.

The Russians grew stealthier and stealthier, tricking government computers into sending out data while disguising the electronic “command and control” messages that set off alarms for anyone looking for malicious actions. The State Department was so crippled that it repeatedly closed its systems to throw out the intruders. At one point, officials traveling to Vienna with Secretary of State John Kerry for the Iran nuclear negotiations had to set up commercial Gmail accounts just to communicate with one another and with reporters traveling with them.
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Mr. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions. There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria.

“We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official said, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.”

So the Russians escalated again — breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to publish or broadcast what they found, known as “doxing” in the cyberworld.

It was a brazen change in tactics, moving the Russians from espionage to influence operations. In February 2014, they broadcast an intercepted phone call between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state who handles Russian affairs and has a contentious relationship with Mr. Putin, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine. Ms. Nuland was heard describing a little-known American effort to broker a deal in Ukraine, then in political turmoil.

They were not the only ones on whom the Russians used the steal-and-leak strategy. The Open Society Foundation, run by George Soros, was a major target, and when its documents were released, some turned out to have been altered to make it appear as if the foundation was financing Russian opposition members.

Last year, the attacks became more aggressive. Russia hacked a major French television station, frying critical hardware. Around Christmas, it attacked part of the power grid in Ukraine, dropping a portion of the country into darkness, killing backup generators and taking control of generators. In retrospect, it was a warning shot.

The attacks “were not fully integrated military operations,” Mr. Sulmeyer said. But they showed an increasing boldness.
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear
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Supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump at a “thank you” rally last week in Des Moines. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

The day before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April, Ms. Dacey, the D.N.C.’s chief executive, was preparing for a night of parties when she got an urgent phone call.

With the new monitoring system in place, Mr. Tamene had examined administrative logs of the D.N.C.’s computer system and found something very suspicious: An unauthorized person, with administrator-level security status, had gained access to the D.N.C.’s computers.

“Not sure it is related to what the F.B.I. has been noticing,” said one internal D.N.C. email sent on April 29. “The D.N.C. may have been hacked in a serious way this week, with password theft, etc.”

No one knew just how bad the breach was — but it was clear that a lot more than a single filing cabinet worth of materials might have been taken. A secret committee was immediately created, including Ms. Dacey, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Mr. Brown and Michael Sussmann, a former cybercrimes prosecutor at the Department of Justice who now works at Perkins Coie, the Washington law firm that handles D.N.C. political matters.

“Three most important questions,” Mr. Sussmann wrote to his clients the night the break-in was confirmed. “1) What data was accessed? 2) How was it done? 3) How do we stop it?”

Mr. Sussmann instructed his clients not to use D.N.C. email because they had just one opportunity to lock the hackers out — an effort that could be foiled if the hackers knew that the D.N.C. was on to them.

“You only get one chance to raise the drawbridge,” Mr. Sussmann said. “If the adversaries know you are aware of their presence, they will take steps to burrow in, or erase the logs that show they were present.”
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Michael Sussmann, a Washington lawyer and former cybercrime prosecutor at the Justice Department, received an email in late April confirming that the D.N.C.’s computer system had been compromised.

The D.N.C. immediately hired CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to scan its computers, identify the intruders and build a new computer and telephone system from scratch. Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia, Mr. Sussmann said.

The work that such companies do is a computer version of old-fashioned crime scene investigation, with fingerprints, bullet casings and DNA swabs replaced by an electronic trail that can be just as incriminating. And just as police detectives learn to identify the telltale methods of a veteran burglar, so CrowdStrike investigators recognized the distinctive handiwork of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

Those are CrowdStrike’s nicknames for the two Russian hacking groups that the firm found at work inside the D.N.C. network. Cozy Bear — the group also known as the Dukes or A.P.T. 29, for “advanced persistent threat” — may or may not be associated with the F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., but it is widely believed to be a Russian government operation. It made its first appearance in 2014, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

It was Cozy Bear, CrowdStrike concluded, that first penetrated the D.N.C. in the summer of 2015, by sending spear-phishing emails to a long list of American government agencies, Washington nonprofits and government contractors. Whenever someone clicked on a phishing message, the Russians would enter the network, “exfiltrate” documents of interest and stockpile them for intelligence purposes.

“Once they got into the D.N.C., they found the data valuable and decided to continue the operation,” said Mr. Alperovitch, who was born in Russia and moved to the United States as a teenager.

Only in March 2016 did Fancy Bear show up — first penetrating the computers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then jumping to the D.N.C., investigators believe. Fancy Bear, sometimes called A.P.T. 28 and believed to be directed by the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, is an older outfit, tracked by Western investigators for nearly a decade. It was Fancy Bear that got hold of Mr. Podesta’s email.

Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker is known, is more art than science. It is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty. But over time, by accumulating a reference library of hacking techniques and targets, it is possible to spot repeat offenders. Fancy Bear, for instance, has gone after military and political targets in Ukraine and Georgia, and at NATO installations.

That largely rules out cybercriminals and most countries, Mr. Alperovitch said. “There’s no plausible actor that has an interest in all those victims other than Russia,” he said. Another clue: The Russian hacking groups tended to be active during working hours in the Moscow time zone.

To their astonishment, Mr. Alperovitch said, CrowdStrike experts found signs that the two Russian hacking groups had not coordinated their attacks. Fancy Bear, apparently not knowing that Cozy Bear had been rummaging in D.N.C. files for months, took many of the same documents.

In the six weeks after CrowdStrike’s arrival, in total secrecy, the computer system at the D.N.C. was replaced. For a weekend, email and phones were shut off; employees were told it was a system upgrade. All laptops were turned in and the hard drives wiped clean, with the uninfected information on them imaged to new drives.

Though D.N.C. officials had learned that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had been infected, too, they did not notify their sister organization, which was in the same building, because they were afraid that it would leak.

All of this work took place as the bitter contest for the Democratic nomination continued to play out between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, and it was already causing a major distraction for Ms. Wasserman Schultz and the D.N.C.’s chief executive.

“This was not a bump in the road — bumps in the road happen all the time,” she said in an interview. “Two different Russian spy agencies had hacked into our network and stolen our property. And we did not yet know what they had taken. But we knew they had very broad access to our network. There was a tremendous amount of uncertainty. And it was chilling.”

The D.N.C. executives and their lawyer had their first formal meeting with senior F.B.I. officials in mid-June, nine months after the bureau’s first call to the tech-support contractor. Among the early requests at that meeting, according to participants: that the federal government make a quick “attribution” formally blaming actors with ties to Russian government for the attack to make clear that it was not routine hacking but foreign espionage.

“You have a presidential election underway here and you know that the Russians have hacked into the D.N.C.,” Mr. Sussmann said, recalling the message to the F.B.I. “We need to tell the American public that. And soon.”
The Media’s Role
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Supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign protested at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

In mid-June, on Mr. Sussmann’s advice, D.N.C. leaders decided to take a bold step. Concerned that word of the hacking might leak, they decided to go public in The Washington Post with the news that the committee had been attacked. That way, they figured, they could get ahead of the story, win a little sympathy from voters for being victimized by Russian hackers and refocus on the campaign.

But the very next day, a new, deeply unsettling shock awaited them. Someone calling himself Guccifer 2.0 appeared on the web, claiming to be the D.N.C. hacker — and he posted a confidential committee document detailing Mr. Trump’s record and half a dozen other documents to prove his bona fides.

“And it’s just a tiny part of all docs I downloaded from the Democrats networks,” he wrote. Then something more ominous: “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks. They will publish them soon.”

It was bad enough that Russian hackers had been spying inside the committee’s network for months. Now the public release of documents had turned a conventional espionage operation into something far more menacing: political sabotage, an unpredictable, uncontrollable menace for Democratic campaigns.

Guccifer 2.0 borrowed the moniker of an earlier hacker, a Romanian who called himself Guccifer and was jailed for breaking into the personal computers of former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other notables. This new attacker seemed intent on showing that the D.N.C.’s cyberexperts at CrowdStrike were wrong to blame Russia. Guccifer 2.0 called himself a “lone hacker” and mocked CrowdStrike for calling the attackers “sophisticated.”

But online investigators quickly undercut his story. On a whim, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a writer for Motherboard, the tech and culture site of Vice, tried to contact Guccifer 2.0 by direct message on Twitter.

“Surprisingly, he answered right away,” Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai said. But whoever was on the other end seemed to be mocking him. “I asked him why he did it, and he said he wanted to expose the Illuminati. He called himself a Gucci lover. And he said he was Romanian.”

That gave Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai an idea. Using Google Translate, he sent the purported hacker some questions in Romanian. The answers came back in Romanian. But when he was offline, Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai checked with a couple of native speakers, who told him Guccifer 2.0 had apparently been using Google Translate as well — and was clearly not the Romanian he claimed to be.

Cyberresearchers found other clues pointing to Russia. Microsoft Word documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 had been edited by someone calling himself, in Russian, Felix Edmundovich — an obvious nom de guerre honoring the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. Bad links in the texts were marked by warnings in Russian, generated by what was clearly a Russian-language version of Word.

When Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai managed to engage Guccifer 2.0 over a period of weeks, he found that his interlocutor’s tone and manner changed. “At first he was careless and colloquial. Weeks later, he was curt and more calculating,” he said. “It seemed like a group of people, and a very sloppy attempt to cover up.”

Computer experts drew the same conclusion about DCLeaks.com, a site that sprang up in June, claiming to be the work of “hacktivists” but posting more stolen documents. It, too, seemed to be a clumsy front for the same Russians who had stolen the documents. Notably, the website was registered in April, suggesting that the Russian hacking team planned well in advance to make public what it stole.

In addition to what Guccifer 2.0 published on his site, he provided material directly on request to some bloggers and publications. The steady flow of Guccifer 2.0 documents constantly undercut Democratic messaging efforts. On July 6, 12 days before the Republican National Convention began in Cleveland, Guccifer released the D.N.C.’s battle plan and budget for countering it. For Republican operatives, it was insider gold.

Then WikiLeaks, a far more established outlet, began to publish the hacked material — just as Guccifer 2.0 had promised. On July 22, three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped out 44,053 D.N.C. emails with 17,761 attachments. Some of the messages made clear that some D.N.C. officials favored Mrs. Clinton over her progressive challenger, Mr. Sanders.

That was no shock; Mr. Sanders, after all, had been an independent socialist, not a Democrat, during his long career in Congress, while Mrs. Clinton had been one of the party’s stars for decades. But the emails, some of them crude or insulting, infuriated Sanders delegates as they arrived in Philadelphia. Ms. Wasserman Schultz resigned under pressure on the eve of the convention where she had planned to preside.

Mr. Trump, by now the Republican nominee, expressed delight at the continuing jolts to his opponent, and he began to use Twitter and his stump speeches to highlight the WikiLeaks releases. On July 25, he sent out a lighthearted tweet: “The new joke in town,” he wrote, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous D.N.C. e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

But WikiLeaks was far from finished. On Oct. 7, a month before the election, the site began the serial publication of thousands of private emails to and from Mr. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager.

The same day, the United States formally accused the Russian government of being behind the hackings, in a joint statement by the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, and Mr. Trump suffered his worst blow to date, with the release of a recording in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women.

The Podesta emails were nowhere near as sensational as the Trump video. But, released by WikiLeaks day after day over the last month of the campaign, they provided material for countless news reports. They disclosed the contents of Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to large banks, which she had refused to release. They exposed tensions inside the campaign, including disagreements over donations to the Clinton Foundation that staff members thought might look bad for the candidate and Ms. Tanden’s complaint that Mrs. Clinton’s instincts were “suboptimal.”

“I was just mortified,” Ms. Tanden said in an interview. Her emails were released on the eve of one of the presidential debates, she recalled. “I put my hands over my head and said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’” Though she had regularly appeared on television to support Mrs. Clinton, she canceled her appearances because all the questions were about what she had said in the emails.

Ms. Tanden, like other Democrats whose messages became public, said it was obvious to her that WikiLeaks was trying its best to damage the Clinton campaign. “If you care about transparency, you put all the emails out at once,” she said. “But they wanted to hurt her. So they put them out 1,800 to 3,000 a day.”

The Trump campaign knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans. Days before the Podesta email release began, Roger Stone, a Republican operative working with the Trump campaign, sent out an excited tweet about what was coming.

But in an interview, Mr. Stone said he had no role in the leaks; he had just heard from an American with ties to WikiLeaks that damning emails were coming.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and editor, has resisted the conclusion that his site became a pass-through for Russian hackers working for Mr. Putin’s government or that he was deliberately trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. But the evidence on both counts appears compelling.

In a series of email exchanges, Mr. Assange refused to say anything about WikiLeaks’ source for the hacked material. He denied that he had made his animus toward Mrs. Clinton clear in public statements (“False. But what is this? Junior high?”) or that the site had timed the releases for maximum negative effect on her campaign. “WikiLeaks makes its decisions based on newsworthiness, including for its recent epic scoops,” he wrote.

Mr. Assange disputed the conclusion of the Oct. 7 statement from the intelligence agencies that the leaks were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

“This is false,” he wrote. “As the disclosing party we know that this was not the intent. Publishers publishing newsworthy information during an election is part of a free election.”
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Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and editor, disputed intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the email leaks were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” Credit Steffi Loos/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But asked whether he believed the leaks were one reason for Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Assange seemed happy to take credit. “Americans extensively engaged with our publications,” he wrote. “According to Facebook statistics WikiLeaks was the most referenced political topic during October.”

Though Mr. Assange did not say so, WikiLeaks’ best defense may be the conduct of the mainstream American media. Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.

Mr. Putin, a student of martial arts, had turned two institutions at the core of American democracy — political campaigns and independent media — to his own ends. The media’s appetite for the hacked material, and its focus on the gossipy content instead of the Russian source, disturbed some of those whose personal emails were being reposted across the web.

“What was really surprising to me?” Ms. Tanden said. “I could not believe that reporters were covering it.”
Devising a Government Response
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The D.N.C. headquarters in Washington. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

Inside the White House, as Mr. Obama’s advisers debated their response, their conversation turned to North Korea.

In late 2014, hackers working for Kim Jong-un, the North’s young and unpredictable leader, had carried out a well-planned attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment intended to stop the Christmastime release of a comedy about a C.I.A. plot to kill Mr. Kim.

In that case, embarrassing emails had also been released. But the real damage was done to Sony’s own systems: More than 70 percent of its computers melted down when a particularly virulent form of malware was released. Within weeks, intelligence agencies traced the attack back to the North and its leadership. Mr. Obama called North Korea out in public, and issued some not-very-effective sanctions. The Chinese even cooperated, briefly cutting off the North’s internet connections.

As the first Situation Room meetings on the Russian hacking began in July, “it was clear that Russia was going to be a much more complicated case,” said one participant. The Russians clearly had a more sophisticated understanding of American politics, and they were masters of “kompromat,” their term for compromising information.

But a formal “attribution report” still had not been forwarded to the president.

“It took forever,” one senior administration official said, complaining about the pace at which the intelligence assessments moved through the system.

In August a group that called itself the “Shadow Brokers” published a set of software tools that looked like what the N.S.A. uses to break into foreign computer networks and install “implants,” malware that can be used for surveillance or attack. The code came from the Tailored Access Operations unit of the N.S.A., a secretive group that mastered the arts of surveillance and cyberwar.

The assumption — still unproved — was that the code was put out in the open by the Russians as a warning: Retaliate for the D.N.C., and there are a lot more secrets, from the hackings of the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon, that might be spilled as well. One senior official compared it to the scene in “The Godfather” where the head of a favorite horse is left in a bed, as a warning.

The N.S.A. said nothing. But by late August, Admiral Rogers, its director, was pressing for a more muscular response to the Russians. In his role as director of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, he proposed a series of potential counter-cyberstrikes.
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Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, pressed for a more muscular response to the Russians. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

While officials will not discuss them in detail, the possible counterstrikes reportedly included operations that would turn the tables on Mr. Putin, exposing his financial links to Russia’s oligarchs, and punching holes in the Russian internet to allow dissidents to get their message out. Pentagon officials judged the measures too unsubtle and ordered up their own set of options.

But in the end, none of those were formally presented to the president.

In a series of “deputies meetings” run by Avril Haines, the deputy national security adviser and a former deputy director of the C.I.A., several officials warned that an overreaction by the administration would play into Mr. Putin’s hands.

“If we went to Defcon 4,” one frequent participant in Ms. Haines’s meetings said, using a phrase from the Cold War days of warnings of war, “we would be saying to the public that we didn’t have confidence in the integrity of our voting system.”

Even something seemingly straightforward — using the president’s executive powers, bolstered after the Sony incident, to place economic and travel sanctions on cyberattackers — seemed too risky.

“No one was all that eager to impose costs before Election Day,” said another participant in the classified meeting. “Any retaliatory measures were seen through the prism of what would happen on Election Day.”

Instead, when Mr. Obama’s national security team reconvened after summer vacation, the focus turned to a crash effort to secure the nation’s voting machines and voter-registration rolls from hacking. The scenario they discussed most frequently — one that turned out not to be an issue — was a narrow vote in favor of Mrs. Clinton, followed by a declaration by Mr. Trump that the vote was “rigged” and more leaks intended to undercut her legitimacy.

Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the D.N.C., became increasingly frustrated as the clock continued to run down on the presidential election — and still there was no broad public condemnation by the White House, or Republican Party leaders, of the attack as an act of foreign espionage.

Ms. Brazile even reached out to Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, urging him twice in private conversations and in a letter to join her in condemning the attacks — an offer he declined to take up.

“We just kept hearing the government would respond, the government would respond,” she said. “Once upon a time, if a foreign government interfered with our election we would respond as a nation, not as a political party.”

But Mr. Obama did decide that he would deliver a warning to Mr. Putin in person at a Group of 20 summit meeting in Hangzhou, China, the last time they would be in the same place while Mr. Obama was still in office. When the two men met for a tense pull-aside, in which White House officials — who were not present for the one-on-one meeting — say Mr. Obama explicitly warned Mr. Putin of a strong American response if there was continued effort to influence the election or manipulate the vote.

Later that day, Mr. Obama made a rare reference to America’s own offensive cybercapacity, which he has almost never talked about. “Frankly, both offensively and defensively, we have more capacity,” he told reporters.

But when it came time to make a public assertion of Russia’s role in early October, it was made in a written statement from the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland security. It was far less dramatic than the president’s appearance in the press room two years before to directly accuse the North Koreans of attacking Sony.

The reference in the statement to hackings on “political organizations,” officials now say, encompassed a hacking on data stored by the Republicans as well. Two senior officials say the forensic evidence was accompanied by “human and technical” sources in Russia, which appears to mean that the United States’ implants or taps in Russian computer and phone networks helped confirm the country’s role.

But that may not be known for decades, until the secrets are declassified.

A week later Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was sent out to transmit a public warning to Mr. Putin: The United States will retaliate “at the time of our choosing. And under the circumstances that have the greatest impact.”

Later, after Mr. Biden said he was not concerned that Russia could “fundamentally alter the election,” he was asked whether the American public would know if the message to Mr. Putin had been sent.

“Hope not,” Mr. Biden responded.

Some of his former colleagues think that was the wrong answer. An American counterstrike, said Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama, has “got to be overt. It needs to be seen.”

A covert response would significantly limit the deterrence effect, he added. “If you can’t see it, it’s not going to deter the Chinese and North Koreans and Iranians and others.”

The Obama administration says it still has more than 30 days to do exactly that.
The Next Target
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President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. walked back toward the White House after delivering remarks about the election results last month. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

As the year draws to a close, it now seems possible that there will be multiple investigations of the Russian hacking — the intelligence review Mr. Obama has ordered completed by Jan. 20, the day he leaves office, and one or more congressional inquiries. They will wrestle with, among other things, Mr. Putin’s motive.

Did he seek to mar the brand of American democracy, to forestall anti-Russian activism for both Russians and their neighbors? Or to weaken the next American president, since presumably Mr. Putin had no reason to doubt American forecasts that Mrs. Clinton would win easily? Or was it, as the C.I.A. concluded last month, a deliberate attempt to elect Mr. Trump?

In fact, the Russian hack-and-dox scheme accomplished all three goals.

What seems clear is that Russian hacking, given its success, is not going to stop. Two weeks ago, the German intelligence chief, Bruno Kahl, warned that Russia might target elections in Germany next year. “The perpetrators have an interest to delegitimize the democratic process as such,” Mr. Kahl said. Now, he added, “Europe is in the focus of these attempts of disturbance, and Germany to a particularly great extent.”

But Russia’s cyberczars have by no means forgotten the American target. On the day after the presidential election, the cybersecurity company Volexity reported five new waves of phishing emails, evidently from Cozy Bear, aimed at think tanks and nonprofits in the United States.

One of them purported to be from Harvard University, attaching a fake paper. Its title: “Why American Elections Are Flawed.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on December 13, 2016, 06:30:33 PM
What seems clear is that Russian hacking, given its success, is not going to stop. Two weeks ago, the German intelligence chief, Bruno Kahl, warned that Russia might target elections in Germany next year. “The perpetrators have an interest to delegitimize the democratic process as such,” Mr. Kahl said. Now, he added, “Europe is in the focus of these attempts of disturbance, and Germany to a particularly great extent.”


**What if they were able to get a Chancellor of Germany elected that would import masses of muslims that would rape and pillage the German people? I know, it's a crazy thought, but what if ??**
Title: Former Army Intel Officer: CIA Director John Brennan Is Playing Political Games
Post by: G M on December 13, 2016, 07:11:24 PM
Former Army Intel Officer: CIA Director John Brennan Is Playing Political Games

Jonah Bennett
National Security/Politics Reporter
8:03 PM 12/12/2016


Retired Army intelligence officer Tony Shaffer alleged Monday that CIA Director John Brennan is playing political games via a secret CIA assessment stating Russia interfered with the election to support GOP President-elect Donald Trump.

Speaking to WMAL radio Monday, Shaffer claimed that the secret CIA assessment, obtained by The Washington Post and described in an article last Friday, is a product of Brennan’s loyalty to President Barack Obama, The Washington Examiner reports.

“This is purely political, and I believe that John Brennan is a political animal,” Shaffer said. He added he has been talking with former CIA officials about the report. “Everything they are telling me is Brennan is doing this out of loyalty to President Obama.”

“It’s about undermining Trump, that’s what it is,” Shaffer said. “It’s called information operations, information warfare, and that’s what I believe is going on.”

In an interview Sunday, former CIA Director Michael Morell also backed the secret CIA assessment of Kremlin-backed interference in the election, claiming the Russian plot was the “political equivalent to 9/11.”  The Russians weren’t just involved in the Democratic National Committee hack and the breach of former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, but have been much more broadly involved in trying to influence the outcome of the election, according to Morell.     

In August, Morell endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president and stated that “Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.”

While the FBI has stated the CIA’s assessment could be true, there isn’t enough evidence — at least to satisfy the FBI, which generally has stricter standards, as it’s often involved in gathering evidence later leading to criminal prosecution. A U.S. official told USA Today, however, that there have been some differences in ascribing weight to various motives.

Some sources told NPR that the CIA may not want to share sources or methods used in coming to the conclusions it has, which may be another reason for the disagreements.

Since the picture is still murky, three Senate committees have been tasked with getting to the bottom of foreign meddling claims in a bipartisan manner.

The Obama administration, too, has requested a review of influence attempts. This review must be completed by Jan. 20, before Trump takes over the White House.

Follow Jonah Bennett on Twitter

Send tips to jonah@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/12/former-army-intel-officer-cia-director-john-brennan-is-playing-political-games/
Title: Take this seriously!
Post by: G M on December 13, 2016, 07:16:36 PM
http://libertyhangout.org/2016/12/breaking-cia-confirms-russian-government-killed-harambe/

BREAKING: CIA Confirms Russian Government Killed Harambe
December 12, 2016 Justin Moldow 3 Comments donald trump, Harambe, Russia, Vladimir Putin

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in killing Harambe the gorilla, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden and others, including Harambe’s own caretaker, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost the nearby Columbus Zoo and Aquarium’s profits.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one zoo over the other,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Columbus Zoo’s revenues.

The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Cecil the Lion had teeth of mass destruction. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make Columbus Zoo Great Again,’ ” the statement read.

Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence community’s findings about Russia.

“I don’t believe they interfered” in the killing of Harambe, he told Time magazine this week. The killing, he said, “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on December 13, 2016, 08:57:38 PM
"The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in killing Harambe the gorilla, according to officials briefed on the matter."

I don't know about this conspiracy theory but one thing is obviously indisputable.

The white zookeepers would never have shot Harumbe if he was white or / and if the child that had fallen into the pit was black.

Just another example of white privilege.   :wink:

Title: Russia's fiendish secret plan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2016, 09:14:27 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443000/russia-election-hack-plan-revealed-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-only-pawns-kremlin?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-12-13&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Shades of the Cold War: How the DNC fabricated a Russian hacker conspiracy to
Post by: G M on December 14, 2016, 07:27:27 AM
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/25/shades_of_the_cold_war_how_the_dnc_fabricated_a_russian_hacker_conspiracy_to_deflect_blame_for_its_email_scandal/

Monday, Jul 25, 2016 03:14 PM PDT

 Shades of the Cold War: How the DNC fabricated a Russian hacker conspiracy to deflect blame for its email scandal
Leaked revelations of the DNC's latest misconduct bear a disturbing resemblance to Cold War red-baiting
Patrick Lawrence

   

Topics: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC 2016, DNC email hack, Donald Trump, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Working Ahead News, Elections News, Politics News
Shades of the Cold War: How the DNC fabricated a Russian hacker conspiracy to deflect blame for its email scandal
Hillary Clinton; Vladimir Putin (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Kirill Kudryavtsev)

Now wait a minute, all you upper-case “D” Democrats. A flood light suddenly shines on your party apparatus, revealing its grossly corrupt machinations to fix the primary process and sink the Sanders campaign, and within a day you are on about the evil Russians having hacked into your computers to sabotage our elections — on behalf of Donald Trump, no less?

Is this a joke? Are you kidding? Is nothing beneath your dignity? Is this how lowly you rate the intelligence of American voters? My answers to these, in order: yes, but the kind one cannot laugh at; no, we’re not kidding; no, we will do anything, and yes, we have no regard whatsoever for Americans so long as we can connive them out of their votes every four years.

Clowns. Subversives. Do you know who you remind me of? I will tell you: Nixon, in his famously red-baiting campaign — a disgusting episode — against the right-thinking Helen Gahagan Douglas during his first run for the Senate, in 1950. Your political tricks are as transparent and anti-democratic as his, it is perfectly fair to say.

I confess to a heated reaction to events since last Friday among the Democrats, specifically in the Democratic National Committee. I should briefly explain these for the benefit of readers who have better things to do than watch the ever more insulting farce foisted upon us as legitimate political procedure.

The Sanders people have long charged that the DNC has had its fingers on the scale, as one of them put it the other day, in favor of Hillary Clinton’s nomination. The prints were everywhere — many those of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has repeatedly been accused of anti-Sanders bias. Schultz, do not forget, co-chaired Clinton’s 2008 campaign against Barack Obama. That would be enough to disqualify her as the DNC’s chair in any society that takes ethics seriously, but it is not enough in our great country. Chairwoman she has been for the past five years.

Last Friday WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 DNC email messages providing abundant proof that Sanders and his staff were right all along. The worst of these, involving senior DNC officers, proposed Nixon-esque smears having to do with everything from ineptitude within the Sanders campaign to Sanders as a Jew in name only and an atheist by conviction.

Wasserman fell from grace on Monday. Other than this, Democrats from President Obama to Clinton and numerous others atop the party’s power structure have had nothing to say, as in nothing, about this unforgivable breach.They have, rather, been full of praise for Wasserman Schultz. Brad Marshall, the D.N.C.’s chief financial officer, now tries to deny that his Jew-baiting remark referred to Sanders. Good luck, Brad: Bernie is the only Jew in the room.

The caker came on Sunday, when Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and (covering all bases) CNN’s “State of the Union” to assert that the D.N.C.’s mail was hacked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” He knows this — knows it in a matter of 24 hours — because “experts” — experts he will never name — have told him so.

Here is Mook on the CNN program. Listen carefully:

    What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.

Is that what disturbs you, Robby? Interesting. Unsubstantiated hocus-pocus, not the implications of these events for the integrity of Democratic nominations and the American political process? The latter is the more pressing topic, Robby. You are far too long on anonymous experts for my taste, Robby. And what kind of expert, now that I think of it, is able to report to you as to the intentions of Russian hackers — assuming for a sec that this concocted narrative has substance?

Making lemonade out of a lemon, the Clinton campaign now goes for a twofer. Watch as it advances the Russians-did-it thesis on the basis of nothing, then shoots the messenger, then associates Trump with its own mess — and, finally, gets to ignore the nature of its transgression (which any paying-attention person must consider grave).

Preposterous, readers. Join me, please, in having absolutely none of it. There is no “Russian actor” at the bottom of this swamp, to put my position bluntly. You will never, ever be offered persuasive evidence otherwise.

Reluctantly, I credit the Clinton campaign and the DNC with reading American paranoia well enough such that they may make this junk stick. In a clear sign the entire crowd-control machine is up and running, The New York Times had a long, unprofessional piece about Russian culprits in its Monday editions. It followed Mook’s lead faithfully: not one properly supported fact, not one identified “expert,” and more conditional verbs than you’ve had hot dinners — everything cast as “could,” “might,” “appears,” “would,” “seems,” “may.” Nothing, once again, as to the very serious implications of this affair for the American political process.


Now comes the law. The FBI just announced that it will investigate — no, not the DNC’s fraudulent practices (which surely breach statutes), but “those who pose a threat in cyberspace.” The House Intelligence Committee simultaneously promised to do (and leave undone) the same. This was announced, please note, by the ranking Democrat on the Republican-controlled committee.

Bearing many memories of the Cold War’s psychological warp — and if you are too young to remember, count your blessings — it is the invocation of the Russians that sends me over the edge. My bones grow weary at the thought of living through a 21st century variant. Halifax, anyone?

Here we come to a weird reversal of roles.

We must take the last few days’ events as a signal of what Clinton’s policy toward Russia will look like should she prevail in November. I warned in this space after the NATO summit in Warsaw earlier this month that Cold War II had just begun. Turning her party’s latest disgrace into an occasion for another round of Russophobia is mere preface, but in it you can read her commitment to the new crusade.

Trump, to make this work, must be blamed for his willingness to negotiate with Moscow. This is now among his sins. Got that? Anyone who says he will talk to the Russians has transgressed the American code. Does this not make Trump the Helen Gahagan Douglas of the piece? Does this not make Hillary Clinton more than a touch Nixonian?

I am developing nitrogen bends from watching the American political spectacle. One can hardly tell up from down. Which way for a breath of air?

Patrick Lawrence is Salon’s foreign affairs columnist. A longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, he is also an essayist, critic and editor. His most recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (Yale, 2013). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is patricklawrence.us.
Title: Look what the Pravdas forgot to mention about Mike Morrell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2016, 11:53:25 AM
TEL AVIV – Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, is generating headlines for claiming that alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election amounts to “the political equivalent of 9/11.”

Morell further suggested that the U.S. should respond in a significant way to the alleged Russian actions and he has given interviews supporting reports that the CIA believes Russia tried to influence the election in favor of President-elect Donald Trump.

Absent from the news media coverage of Morell’s statements is that he is known for his leading role in helping to craft the infamously misleading talking points used by Obama administration officials to blame the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks on a YouTube video.

The news media also failed to mention that Morell, who abruptly resigned from the CIA in June 2013, took a job that year at the Beacon Global Strategies firm, where he still works as senior counselor.

Beacon was founded by Phillippe Reines, who served as Communications Adviser to Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state. From 2009-2013, Reines also served in Clinton’s State Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Communications.  Reines is the managing director of Beacon.

In an interview on Sunday with the Cipher Brief, Morell commented on reports in the Washington Post and New York Times claiming Moscow interfered in the presidential election to help Trump win – a contention the President-elect called “ridiculous” in an interview on Sunday.

“It is an attack on our very democracy,” Morell said. “It’s an attack on who we are as a people. A foreign government messing around in our elections is, I think, an existential threat to our way of life. To me, and this is to me not an overstatement, this is the political equivalent of 9/11. It is huge and the fact that it hasn’t gotten more attention from the Obama administration, Congress, and the mainstream media, is just shocking to me.”

Morell further asserted that the U.S. most respond overtly to the attack:

He stated:

The third implication is we need to respond to the Russian attack. We need to deter the Russians and anyone else who is watching this—and you can bet your bottom dollar that the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iranians are all watching. We need to deter all of those folks from even thinking about doing something like this in the future.

I think that our response needs to have two key pieces to it. One is it’s got to be overt. It needs to be seen. A covert response would significantly limit the deterrence effect. If you can’t see it, it’s not going to deter the Chinese and North Koreans and Iranians and others, so it’s got to be seen.

The second is that it’s got to be significant from Putin’s perspective. He has to feel some pain, he has to pay a price here or, again, there will be no deterrence, and it has to be seen by the rest of the world as being significant to Mr. Putin so that it can be a deterrent.

The interview with Morell was widely cited by the news media.

“Former Acting CIA Director Calls Russian Interference In Election ‘The Political Equivalent Of 9/11,’” reads a Huffington Post headline.

Business Insider ran a piece similarly titled, “Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell: Russian meddling in US election ‘is the political equivalent of 9/11.’”

“Ex-CIA Director: Obama Should Retaliate To Russian Election Hacks Now,” blasted a Forbes.com headline.

Morell’s quotes were cited by USA Today, the Independent and scores of other publications.

Morell also appeared Monday on “CBS This Morning,” where he supported a CBS News report citing intelligence sources saying the CIA has high confidence that the Russians attempted to influence the presidential election in favor of Trump.

“The C.I.A. doesn’t come to a high-confidence judgment just based on circumstantial evidence. So I think they’ve got more here,” Morell told the news network. “I think they’ve got sources who are actually telling them what the intent was.”

The breathless news media coverage of Morell’s recent remarks, reviewed by this reporter, fails to mention Morell’s employment at the firm tied to Hillary Clinton.

The coverage of Morell’s remarks also fails to take note of his central role in crafting misleading talking points on the Benghazi attacks.

The talking points were used by United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, when she appeared on five morning television programs to discuss the White House response to the Benghazi attacks. In nearly identical statements, she asserted that the attacks were a spontaneous protest in response to a “hateful video.”

Morell addressed his role in editing the talking points during Benghazi testimony on April 4, 2014.

The Guardian reported:

In his testimony, Morell said he was deeply troubled by allegations made by lawmakers and some in the media “that I inappropriately altered and influenced CIA’s classified analysis and its unclassified talking points about what happened in Benghazi, Libya in September 2012 and that I covered up those actions.”

“These allegations accuse me of taking these actions for the political benefit of President Obama and then secretary of state Clinton. These allegations are false,” Morell said.

He said he and the agency could have done a better job, but he dismissed suggestions that the CIA “cooked the books” in the assessment of the attack.

In a briefing to senators following the attacks, Morell claimed that references to terrorism and al-Qaeda were removed from the Benghazi talking points to “prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Morell’s assertions were contradicted by a 46-page House Republican report from April 2013 finding the talking points were edited to protect the State Department’s reputation.

“Contrary to administration rhetoric, the talking points were not edited to protect classified information,” states the “Interim Progress Report for the Members of the House Republican Conference on the Events Surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012 Terrorist Attacks in Benghazi.”

“Evidence rebuts administration claims that the talking points were modified to protect classified information or to protect an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” the report states, charging the talking points were “deliberately” edited to “protect the State Department.”

States the report: “To protect the State Department, the administration deliberately removed references to al-Qaeda-linked groups and previous attacks in Benghazi in the talking points used by [United Nations] Ambassador [Susan] Rice, thereby perpetuating the deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a demonstration caused by a YouTube video.”

Morell resigned from the CIA amid the controversy surrounding the Benghazi attacks, saying he was stepping down to spend more time with his family.

Morell, who was considered a favorite to lead the CIA and spent 33 years with the agency, acknowledged in his resignation statement that the reason for his leaving the agency may seem somewhat difficult to believe, but “when I say that it is time for my family, nothing could be more real than that.”

“I am passionate about two things in this world – the agency and my family,” Morell said in the statement. “And while I have given everything I have to the Central Intelligence Agency and its vital mission for a third of a century, it is now time for me to give everything I have to my family.”

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Title: I double dare ya!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2016, 01:28:38 PM
http://theantimedia.org/cia-russia-hacking-bluff-called/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on December 14, 2016, 01:46:20 PM
WE have heard the Left rail on "McCarthyism" for decades as though suspicion of Russia was just a paranoid delusion though history has proven there were indeed spies throughout the US at that time.

As though Russia hasn't been spying on us forever, since the days of the Csars.

Now just suddenly, because it bothers THEM and their party we are forced to endure this.
Title: McCarthy/NRO: Of Course Russia Meddles in Our Elections
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2016, 07:02:58 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443034/russia-election-hacking-charge-vladimir-putin-influence-american-elections
Title: it gets even worse
Post by: ccp on December 14, 2016, 07:35:38 PM
http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/intelligence-agencies-refuse-brief/2016/12/14/id/764027/
Title: The DNC Hack
Post by: G M on December 15, 2016, 07:25:13 AM
http://weaponsman.com/?p=37499


Cyber: the DNC Hack
   

The DNC maintains a creepily-lighted shrine with their locked Watergate file cabinet and their unsecured, formerly internet-connected server. Not the same thing, genius.

There’s been a lot of noise about the Russians and the DNC hack — mostly, it’s Democrats and the press (but we repeat ourselves) trying to delegitimize the incoming administration, and mostly, it’s been conducted through the F-6 sources of press reports with anonymous sole sources, like the Washington Post report that the Post and its political fellow travelers call “the CIA report,” while actually it’s a sole anonymous source telling the Post what the CIA supposedly said. (The Post, you may remember, used a [probably nonexistent] sole anonymous source, without plausible access to tell the story of “Jessica Lynch, Amazon woman.” The author of that piece, Dana Priest, has never admitted fabricating the story but never produced a source, either, leading to the inescapable conclusion that Priest fabricated the story. She has never been held accountable).

An interesting dynamic happened in 2015. The FBI warned both parties that they were under attack. According to then-RNC head Reince Priebus on Meet The Democratic Press, the RNC then invited the FBI to work with its own geeks to secure the RNC servers, and the Republicans were not hacked.

According to the Times, the Democrats dumped the FBI call to a low-ranking, unskilled contractor — then they left him on his own to handle it. They left their server unsecure. Result, compromise.

    When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.

    His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

    Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks.

OK, so what did he do, like a good DC Millennial? You got it, he googled, and then resumed slacking off.

    His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion.

No, serious slacking off.

    By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.

“Like, how do I, like, know you’re a like real FBI agent, doooood? Thats what I tell girls in bars myself.”  Again, this loser is supposedly their cyber-D contractor. You know how to find out if somebody’s really from FBI? Ask for a meeting at the Field Office. Hey, even if you’re a plush-bottomed cyber Weeble unwilling to leave your Aeron chair, you can ask them to send you something from fbi.gov, and then check the headers to see if the address is forged. (If you don’t know how to forge a header and how to spot a forged header, you have no business within grenade range of a mail server).

From there, the Times story collapses into, mostly, the same unsourced stuff in the Post stories. If these guys make something up and repeat it to each other, they call that “corroboration.” That’s not how intelligence works.

It does come back to the tale of the incompetent Tamene and his incompetent 30-something supervisor, Andrew Brown. Tamene ran some over the counter tools — the DNC was not running an IDS, Intrusion Detection System — and thereafter decided that the FBI guy was a phony, lacking Tamene’s great wealth of knowledge, and wrote a couple of CYA memos, and quit taking calls.

    Mr. Tamene’s initial scan of the D.N.C. system — using his less-than-optimal tools and incomplete targeting information from the F.B.I. — found nothing. So when Special Agent Hawkins called repeatedly in October, leaving voice mail messages for Mr. Tamene, urging him to call back, “I did not return his calls, as I had nothing to report,” Mr. Tamene explained in his memo.

    In November, Special Agent Hawkins called with more ominous news. A D.N.C. computer was “calling home, where home meant Russia,” Mr. Tamene’s memo says, referring to software sending information to Moscow. “SA Hawkins added that the F.B.I. thinks that this calling home behavior could be the result of a state-sponsored attack.”

There are some Democrats quoted by name, generally about the bad feelz that resulted when their misconduct, lying, or biting the hands that fed them got aired in public.

    For the people whose emails were stolen, this new form of political sabotage has left a trail of shock and professional damage. Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a key Clinton supporter, recalls walking into the busy Clinton transition offices, humiliated to see her face on television screens as punditsdiscussed a leaked email in which she had called Mrs. Clinton’s instincts “suboptimal.”

    “It was just a sucker punch to the gut every day,” Ms. Tanden said. “It was the worst professional experience of my life.”

Well, you should probably either work for people you can say positive things about, or take care to stifle your impulses to criticize your lords and masters. Because anything put in writing is at the mercy of anyone who finds it. And anything put on an unsecured server — and from Hawkins’s phone call, the DNC knew they were unsecure, and they kept writing the sort of two-faced stuff they’re now angry about seeing in print.

Bear in mind that no fewer than five New York Times reporters were exposed in Wikileaks, coordinating their stories with the DNC or the Clinton campaign; and one non-Times hack, Glenn Thrush of Politico, who repeatedly gave Democrats the chance to shape his reporting, was hired as a Times hack as of this week. That’s what they’re looking for — partisan subservience. They seem to believe they have a right to collude, lie and slant their stories, and the people who exposed them (even if they’re Russians) are the only villains. Had the US lost the Cold War, every one of those would be licking the boots of their masters in the Soviet Ministry of Propaganda. If they didn’t aim higher than boots. (Hell, those who were old enough to be around pre-1991 probably spent the 70s and 80s doing it already).
Update

A British associate of Julian Assange says that it was not a hack, it was two separate insider leaks. Reported at ZeroHedge:

    Update: David Swanson interviewed [Briton Craig] Murray today, and obtained  additional information. Specifically, Murray told Swanson that: (1) there were twoAmerican leakers … one for the emails of the Democratic National Committee and one for the emails of top Clinton aide John Podesta; (2) Murray met one of those leakers; and (3) both leakers are American insiders with the NSA and/or the DNC, with no known connections to Russia.

The US Intelligence services consider Assange to be under Russian control, so it’s anybody’s guess whether Murray’s statement is a Russian smokescreen, or absolute truth, and whether or not the leaker(s) exist. The effort to find them itself has risks — an organization can be rendered ineffective completely by a mole hunt. Where does security consciousness end, and paranoia begin? And don’t even paranoids have real enemies.

For your consideration: Russian cyber operators are laughing their asses off at the USA right now — whether or not they had anything to do with the hack, it’s a win for them.
Title: Drain the Intelligence Swamp!
Post by: G M on December 15, 2016, 07:51:47 AM
Drain the Intelligence Swamp!
By G. Murphy Donovan

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on Public Television shortly before the presidential election for an extended interview with Charlie Rose. Mister Rose, like many of his peers these days, swings between hard news at dusk and bimbo chat at dawn. Indeed, Charlie is the very model of a Beltway double-dipper, a celebrity groupie who feeds at public and commercial troughs, PBS and CBS.

On any given day, Rose might be seen giggling with celebrities in the morning and then lofting softballs to political touts in the evening. The Council on Foreign Relations was the venue for the recent Clapper show. “Impartial, non-profit” think tanks are often used to provide the appropriate gravitas to administration spin. The Clapper performance, just before the November election, seemed to be of a piece with several other Intelligence officials who campaigned against Donald Trump.

And the Clapper interview, like many administration dog-and-pony shows, was not about transparency or openness or even information per se. In another day, any public chat with an Intelligence official might have been relegated to the desinformatsiya file. Today, Intelligence officials like Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan play other, and some might say sinister, if not partisan roles.

Whether the subject is Islamism, Vladimir Putin, or fake news; the name of the game at the moment is overtly political. Call it spin control.       

Clapper’s appearance on Public Television was a subtle version of partisan Intelligence spin. Michael Morell, former acting director of CIA and Michael Hayden, former director of NSA have been on the anti-Trump stump since the 2016 campaign began. Recall that Hayden (aka Elmer Fudd) presided over the worst warning failure in American history and that Morell was a principal in the Benghazi fiasco.

Clapper suggests that the world of Intelligence is binary, a world of secrets and mysteries.  Secrets are the knowable unknowns and mysteries are the secrets that might never be known, or at least not until disaster strikes. The Saudi kamikaze air force takes a bow here.

Alas, the “wilderness” of mirrors has other dimensions that Clapper didn’t mention. The third dimension of Intelligence “knowns” is those that are engineered for budget or policy reasons. The Putin bogeyman or the Russian phantasm might be examples.

The fourth dimension of Intelligence is things that are known, yet so toxic that they are minimized, ignored, or dismissed. The Shia and Sunni Islamist threats are the premier examples of fourth dimension threats where books are regularly cooked to a fare-thee-well.

A fifth dimension is public relations, facts or fictions that might be spun to some institutional or regime advantage. Leon Trotsky, and later Goebbels, would have called the “fifth” dimension of Intelligence indoctrination or propaganda. If “fake news” is a problem in America, the US Intelligence Community could be its poster child.

Intelligence is a perennial lamb to the policy lion; indeed the Executive Branch is shepherd to the 16-agency Intelligence flock. The institutional product of Intelligence today is not objective or impartial truth so much as a version of reality helpful to politicians.

Truth in analysis, especially, is an avatar of truth in politics and journalism. Candor is inversely proportionate to the discomfort or pain truth might inflict. Bad news is never good news in politics.

Policy does not relish contradictions, either. If a spook or analyst raises too many problems, he becomes the problem. The tragic case of FBI agent/analyst John O’Neill is instructive. State Department knives made short work of O’Neill (see Barbara Bodine) and any aggressive pursuit of the USS Cole malefactors. Ironically, O’Neill subsequently died at ground zero during the Saudi 9/11 suicide attack.

Yemen is still burning. Libya and Benghazi are just echoes of the Aden Harbor fiasco, humiliations when inept cookie pushers called the shots.

Clapper also failed to tell Charlie Rose that Intelligence is both defense and offense. Collection and analysis are defensive functions. Espionage and propaganda are offensive functions. Of the four, three are immoral if not illegal; if not at home, then somewhere.

Intelligence officers, operational or analytical, are accomplished liars. It’s what they do. It’s what they get paid to do. Jim Clapper, John Brennan, Michael Morell, and Michael Hayden are no exceptions.

And propaganda, in all countries, has domestic and foreign consumers. When Jim Clapper talks to CPB about “speaking truth to power,” truth and power have very narrow definitions. Truth is usually whatever confirms that which a policymaker already believes. Power is a politician with enough juice to give an agent or analyst another line of work.

Some spooks never get to come in from the cold.

Indeed, to understand any public pronouncements from the refractive world of Intelligence, the listener must know a little about the speaker and a lot about what isn’t said.

James Clapper is an example, known to select apostles simply as “JC.” Clapper comes from the nerd cloister in the Intelligence Community. He has a technology and collection background.  Unlike, John Brennan at CIA, Clapper probably cares little about operations, espionage, or analysis. Worldview matters nonetheless.

John Brennan

Small wonder then that the DNI believes that the “cyber” threat ranks number one among Intelligence concerns. Moscow ranks second in the threat pantheon, followed by a litany of what JC likes to call “nefarious characters;” the Chinese, North Koreans, and a host undifferentiated culprits like terrorists, extremists, and criminals. The “environment” is also big on the nefarious list according to Clapper. The DNI is happy to indict the Russians and climate; but words like Islam, Mohammed, Muslim, Islamist, or Islamofascism seldom cross his lips.

To be fair, Intelligence is largely an echo of all things politically correct. Religious cults that chop off heads, abuse women, or molest children in the name of a “great” religion might transcend deplorable. However, when such heinous crimes are admitted in the name of Islam, Mohamed becomes an unmentionable.  It’s a little like discussing Hitler without mentioning Germans or discussing Quisling without mentioning Norwegians.

In any case, if the kinetic threat is to be ignored, it helps to have default or surrogate threats, especially if you’re justifying a deficit DOD budget. Vladimir Putin takes a bow here.

Of all the things that 16 intelligence agencies do, threat analysis is probably the shabbiest product. Indeed, intelligence “analysis” is a deductive, not an inductive process. Analysis seldom begins with a blank slate. The drill begins with existing policy and all the embedded assumptions that politics brings to the table. To be a successful intelligence or national security analyst today, two assumptions are etched in stone.

Russians are bad. Muslims are good.

Simplistic as it sounds, any analysis that contradicts these team Obama bedrock policy maxims today is a dead letter. Putin and the Kremlin are the tar and feathers of modern American politics for both sides of the political aisle. A casual observer only has to look at Russophobic smear tactics in the 2016 presidential campaign to appreciate these phenomena. In contrast, at least five barbaric Muslim small wars proceeded apace during the campaign season with hardly a policy tweet or a ripple above the fold.

Indeed, Clapper endorses “long war” speculations, administration euphemisms for jihad that suggest that terror and Muslim small wars will be a permanent feature of American futures.   

There is some comfort to be had with Jim Clapper compared to Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, and John Brennan. Recall that Brennan was the CIA chef who originally cooked the Islamic books while at the White House.   

Mike Hayden presided over 9/11, the worst Intelligence failure in American history.  He was promoted after the Saudi attack on 9/11. And recall that Morell was the ephemeral CIA director who presided over the Libya/Benghazi fiasco. Brennan now runs CIA. Hayden and Morell are prominent media front-runners for the political left and “Clinton Inc.”

If Intelligence meddling in American elections and politics is a fact, it’s a Washington, not a Moscow fact.

The tone for any administration is set at the top. The president-elect needs to send an unambiguous message to the righteous Right and the radical Left midst the national security elites, the same message that he so successfully communicated to voters. The name of the game is change, especially, one might suggest, for Intelligence and military policy and praxis.

It seems that General Mike Flynn will be on the "A" team, as national security advisor. Flynn is the kind of veteran who could make a difference in the Intelligence, military, and national security arenas.

Mister Trump doesn't need legislation or even a "100 days" to reorient the focus and direction of abysmal foreign/military/Intelligence policy vectors. He just needs to build a new and candid national security crew, a new leadership culture.

Trump supporters should welcome the so-called “bi-partisan” investigation of Kremlin meddling in US elections. In the process, such an inquiry might vet any CIA as well as FSB tampering. Indeed, taxpayers would surely appreciate an airing of all those black operations that underwrite failed regime changes and “humanitarian” intervention fiascos.

Withal, a lynch mob of senators led by extremist wing nuts like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Chuck Schumer, is hardly impartial. All three were toxic critics of Trump the candidate as they are now hostile to Trump the president-elect.

Regime change and election tampering now seem to be a domestic conspiracies.

If you threw a rock from the Mall in Washington in any direction, that stone couldn’t fly for thirty miles without hitting a liberal bureaucrat. The federal work force is not Trump country. The District of Columbia and Maryland/Virginia bedroom communities voted monolithically for the Clinton left. Beltway apparatchiks, including the Intelligence Community and contractors, are the “crooked” establishment that Trump ran against.

Any inquiry led by Trump haters in the Senate or the IC has little to do with Putin and everything to do with discrediting the “wisdom of crowds,” the 2016 presidential election, the Electoral College, and Donald Trump.

So let the Intelligence Community bloodlettings begin anyway. Truth and sunshine are the best antiseptics, sure to provoke lethal blowback and more than a measure of poetic justice. Trump is a street fighter who relishes a good donnybrook.

The unofficial signal for change on any captain's halyard is a flag with a broom. The message is crystal clear.

All hands on deck for a "clean sweep!"

G. Murphy Donovan was the former Director of Research and Russian (nee Soviet) studies at USAF Intelligence when James Clapper was the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/drain_the_intelligence_swamp_.html
Title: CIA tells NBC Putin personally involved
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2016, 02:02:09 AM
Yes it is NBC, but worth the reading in order to see what the CIA's play is:


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-officials-putin-personally-involved-u-s-election-hack-n696146
Title: RNC foiled Russki hackers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2016, 02:06:10 AM
Second post

http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/republican-national-committee-security-foiled-russian-hackers-1481850043#i-6AE2F0D4-8676-4135-AEF8-16673B99CDA7
Title: The Nation: Why are the Media taking the CIA's claims at face value?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2016, 04:52:11 PM
https://www.thenation.com/article/why-are-the-media-taking-the-cias-hacking-claims-at-face-value/
Title: WSJ: The Fable of Edward Snowden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2017, 11:18:53 AM
The Fable of Edward Snowden
As he seeks a pardon, the NSA thief has told multiple lies about what he stole and his dealings with Russian intelligence.
0:00 / 0:00
Opinion Journal Video: Investigative Journalist Edward Jay Epstein on why the American spy doesn’t deserve a presidential pardon. Photo: Reuters
By Edward Jay Epstein
Updated Dec. 30, 2016 10:21 p.m. ET
827 COMMENTS

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.

Mr. Snowden’s theft of America’s most closely guarded communication secrets occurred in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed against him by federal prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr. Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work, emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for epilepsy.

This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had stolen from the NSA.

This was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my investigation over the past three years, nearly every element of the narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie, “Snowden,” is demonstrably false.

This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where he arranged to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, and Glenn Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian. Both journalists were longtime critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr. Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months.

To provide them with scoops discrediting NSA operations, Mr. Snowden culled several thousand documents out of his huge cache of stolen material, including two explosive documents he asked them to use in their initial stories. One was the now-famous secret order from America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court requiring Verizon to turn over to the NSA its billing records for its phone users in the U.S. The other was an NSA slide presentation detailing its ability to intercept communications of non-American users of the internet via a joint program with the FBI code-named Prism.

These documents were published in 2013 on June 5 and 6, followed by a video in which he identified himself as the leaker and a whistleblower.

At the heart of Mr. Snowden’s narrative was his claim that while he may have incidentally “touched” other data in his search of NSA files, he took only documents that exposed the malfeasance of the NSA and gave all of them to journalists.

Yet even as Mr. Snowden’s narrative was taking hold in the public realm, a secret damage assessment done by the NSA and Pentagon told a very different story. According to a unanimous report declassified on Dec. 22 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the investigation showed that Mr. Snowden had “removed” (not merely touched) 1.5 million documents. That huge number was based on, among other evidence, electronic logs that recorded the selection, copying and moving of documents.

The number of purloined documents is more than what NSA officials were willing to say in 2013 about the removal of data, possibly because the House committee had the benefit of the Pentagon’s more-extensive investigation. But even just taking into account the material that Mr. Snowden handed over to journalists, the December House report concluded that he compromised “secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states.” These were, the report said, “merely the tip of the iceberg.”

The Pentagon’s investigation during 2013 and 2014 employed hundreds of military-intelligence officers, working around the clock, to review all 1.5 million documents. Most had nothing to do with domestic surveillance or whistle blowing. They were mainly military secrets, as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014.

It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was most telling. Mr. Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a reference to documents containing the NSA’s most-important sources and methods. Since the agency was created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.

Yet it was precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to steal. In an interview in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on June 15, 2013, he said he sought to work on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA, even at a cut in pay, because it gave him access to secret lists of computers that the NSA was tapping into around the world.

He evidently succeeded. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair, Richard Ledgett, the NSA executive who headed the damage-assessment team, described one lengthy document taken by Mr. Snowden that, if it fell into the wrong hands, would provide a “road map” to what targets abroad the NSA was, and was not, covering. It contained the requests made by the 17 U.S. services in the so-called Intelligence Community for NSA interceptions abroad.

On June 23, less than two weeks after Mr. Snowden released the video that helped present his narrative, he left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow, where he received protection by the Russian government. In much of the media coverage that followed, the ultimate destination of these stolen secrets was fogged over—if not totally obscured from the public—by the unverified claims that Mr. Snowden was spoon feeding to handpicked journalists.

In his narrative, Mr. Snowden always claims that he was a conscientious “whistleblower” who turned over all the stolen NSA material to journalists in Hong Kong. He has insisted he had no intention of defecting to Russia but was on his way to Latin America when he was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government in an attempt to demonize him.

For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled” and “chose to keep me in Russia.” According to Mr. Snowden, the U.S. government accomplished this entrapment by suspending his passport while he was in midair after he departed Hong Kong on June 23, thus forcing him into the hands of President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

None of this is true. The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowden’s passport while he was still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow on June 23. The “Consul General-Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden’s passport was revoked June 22,” according to the State Department’s senior watch officer, as reported by ABC news on June 23, 2013.

Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the government’s pursuit of him, since the criminal complaint against him, which was filed June 14, had been headline news in Hong Kong. That the U.S. acted against him while he was still in Hong Kong is of great importance to the timeline because it points to the direct involvement of Aeroflot, an airline which the Russian government effectively controls. Aeroflot bypassed its normal procedures to allow Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow flight—even though he had neither a valid passport nor a Russian visa, as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.

By falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane departed Hong Kong—instead of before he left—Mr. Snowden hoped to conceal this extraordinary waiver. The Russian government further revealed its helping hand, judging by a report in Russia’s Izvestia newspaper when, on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a security team in a “special operation.”

Nor was it any kind of accident. Vladimir Putin personally authorized this assistance after Mr. Snowden met with Russian officials in Hong Kong, as Mr. Putin admitted in a televised press conference on Sept. 2, 2013.

To provide a smokescreen for Mr. Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong, WikiLeaks (an organization that the Obama administration asserted to be a tool of Russian intelligence after the hacking of Democratic Party leaders’ email in 2016) booked a dozen or more diversionary flight reservations to other destinations for Mr. Snowden.

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange also dispatched Sarah Harrison, his deputy at WikiLeaks, to fly to Hong Kong to pay Mr. Snowden’s expenses and escort him to Moscow. In short, Mr. Snowden’s arrival in Moscow was neither accidental nor the work of the U.S. government.

Mr. Snowden’s own narrative asserts that he came to Russia not only empty-handed but without access to any of the stolen material. He wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that he had destroyed all of it before arriving in Moscow—the very data that he went to such lengths to steal a few weeks earlier in Hawaii.

As it turns out, this claim is also untrue. It is belied by two Kremlin insiders who were in a position to know what Mr. Snowden actually brought with him to Moscow. One of them, Frants Klintsevich, was the first deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of the Duma (Russia’s parliament) at the time of Mr. Snowden’s defection. “Let’s be frank,” Mr. Klintsevich said in a taped interview with NPR in June 2016, “Mr. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do.”

The other insider was Anatoly Kucherena, a well-connected Moscow lawyer and Mr. Putin’s friend. Mr. Kucherena served as the intermediary between Mr. Snowden and Russian authorities. On Sept. 23, 2013, Mr. Kucherena gave a long interview to Sophie Shevardnadze, a journalist for Russia Today television.

When Ms. Shevardnadze directly asked him if Mr. Snowden had given all the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong, Mr. Kucherena said Mr. Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong. “So he [Mr. Snowden] does have some materials that haven’t been made public yet?” Ms. Shevardnadze asked. “Certainly,” Mr. Kucherena answered.

This disclosure filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. It explained why NSA documents that Mr. Snowden had copied, but had not given to the journalists in Hong Kong—such as the embarrassing revelation about the NSA targeting the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—continued to surface after Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow, along with NSA documents released via WikiLeaks.

As this was a critical discrepancy in Mr. Snowden’s narrative, I went to Moscow in October 2015 to see Mr. Kucherena. During our conversation, Mr. Kucherena confirmed that his interview with Ms. Shevardnadze was accurate, and that Mr. Snowden had brought secret material with him to Moscow.

Mr. Snowden’s narrative also includes the assertion that he was neither debriefed by nor even met with any Russian government official after he arrived in Moscow. This part of the narrative runs counter to findings of U.S. intelligence. According to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, Mr. Snowden, since he arrived in Moscow, “has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.” This finding is consistent with Russian debriefing practices, as described by the ex-KGB officers with whom I spoke in Moscow

Mr. Snowden also publicly claimed in Moscow in December 2013 to have secrets in his head, including “access to every target, every active operation. Full lists of them.” Could Mr. Snowden’s Russian hosts ignore such an opportunity after Mr. Putin had authorized his exfiltration to Moscow? Mr. Snowden, with no exit options, was in the palm of their hands. Under such circumstances, as Mr. Klintsevich pointed out in his June NPR interview: “If there’s a possibility to get information, they [the Russian intelligence services] will get it.”

The transfer of state secrets from Mr. Snowden to Russia did not occur in a vacuum. The intelligence war did not end with the termination of the Cold War; it shifted to cyberspace. Even if Russia could not match the NSA’s state-of-the-art sensors, computers and productive partnerships with the cipher services of Britain, Israel, Germany and other allies, it could nullify the U.S. agency’s edge by obtaining its sources and methods from even a single contractor with access to Level 3 documents.

Russian intelligence uses a single umbrella term to cover anyone who delivers it secret intelligence. Whether a person acted out of idealistic motives, sold information for money or remained clueless of the role he or she played in the transfer of secrets—the provider of secret data is considered an “espionage source.” By any measure, it is a job description that fits Mr. Snowden.

Mr. Epstein’s book, “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft,” will be published by Knopf in January.
Title: CATO: US meddling in foreign elections
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2017, 11:27:19 AM
https://www.cato.org/blog/hypocrisy-election-interference?utm_content=buffer42543&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Title: Why did NBC get intel before Trump?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2017, 10:01:29 AM
http://www.speroforum.com/a/TKASWPDQOL49/79727-Trump-calls-out-White-House-stonewall-on-intelligence-leak-to-NBC?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SNULSAXHOK41&utm_content=TKASWPDQOL49&utm_source=news&utm_term=Trump+calls+out+White+House+stonewall+on+intelligence+leak+to+NBC#.WHPPv3rcC-A
Title: Brennan
Post by: ccp on January 17, 2017, 09:47:49 AM
http://ijr.com/opinion/2016/12/262666-cia-director-john-brennan-politicized-intelligence-undermine-president-elect-trump/


He voted for Communist candidate in 1980:
https://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2016/09/21/cia-brennan-voted-for-communist/1/

https://spectator.org/john-brennan-the-insubordinate-spook/

Driector of CIA emails hacked:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-brennan-emails_us_56280454e4b08589ef4aaf01

Brennan , "we don't steal secrets"
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/brennan-joking-when-he-says-cia-spies-doesn-t-steal-n529426
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on January 17, 2017, 10:34:36 AM
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/national-interest/100431-trump-vs-spooks-sabotaging-his-own-presidency
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2017, 12:17:48 PM
BD:

In quoting Mike Morell it would have been appropriate to mention his role in the Benghazi talking points, and in the vigor of his advocacy for Hillary for President, etc.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on January 17, 2017, 12:48:00 PM
BD:

In quoting Mike Morell it would have been appropriate to mention his role in the Benghazi talking points, and in the vigor of his advocacy for Hillary for President, etc.


And his book: http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/michael-morell/the-great-war-of-our-time/9781455585663/
Title: WSJ: A recipe to improve President Trump's intel diet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2017, 07:05:58 PM

By Michael Allen
Jan. 31, 2017 7:24 p.m. ET
16 COMMENTS

Don’t believe the hype: Trying to reform the intelligence community is not akin to attacking it. Americans should welcome the news that the Trump administration is considering reforms to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an important but beleaguered agency in need of direction. Mr. Trump’s director-designate, Dan Coats, would be much better off leading an organization with a clear mandate—and the strong backing of the intelligence consumer in chief.

After the Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947, its director became the nominal head of the “intelligence community,” a confederation of intelligence offices lodged in different departments and agencies. Yet most intelligence agencies saw the CIA’s role as only symbolic. The CIA director was not empowered in law to have real influence over other giant intelligence organs like the National Security Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Then came Sept. 11. The chief failings that preceded the attack—the inability to fuse CIA intelligence collected abroad with FBI information gathered at home, as well as delays in placing suspected terrorists on watch lists—were addressed by the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center in 2004. But the same year, the 9/11 Commission recommended creating the director of national intelligence, and Congress hastily followed that advice.

The 9/11 Commission posited that the CIA couldn’t coordinate the intelligence community because it was too busy with its core missions of covert action and human intelligence. The 9/11 Commission hoped a director of national intelligence would be a true leader, empowered to set budgets, move money and personnel to meet new threats, and lead joint intelligence centers.

But the director of national intelligence had only slightly more power over the other 16 intelligence agencies than the CIA previously had. Meanwhile, Congress mandated that the DNI be housed independently—depriving it of a natural power base. As the myth of a strong quarterback flourished, Congress, the Bush administration and even the Iraq Intelligence Commission saddled the new agency with dozens of stubborn problems to solve. For example, it was tasked with improving an antiquated security-clearance process and fixing intelligence analysis after Iraq. Successive directors of national intelligence sought to bolster their staff to cope with a daunting agenda.

There is a profound mismatch between the responsibilities given to the agency and the actual authorities in law. The DNI has become a mere coordinator of bureaucratic positions, required to seek permission and maintaining only indirect control over funding.

Despite the hurdles, the agency has achieved some success. The DNI has provided strategic direction to the intelligence community’s disparate agencies to confront shared challenges that individual agencies are unwilling or unable to tackle alone. Think cost-saving on common information technology or policies to facilitate information sharing. In 2008, the DNI led the effort to modernize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Faced with sharply declining budgets in recent years, the office mitigated automatic cuts to personnel, research and development, and cyber capabilities. The DNI prioritized balancing the preservation of current capabilities against future investments.

Although there has never been a president quite like Mr. Trump, it’s normal for a new president to seek intelligence-community reforms. One of George W. Bush’s first acts in office was to order two competing reviews of the management of intelligence. They followed dozens of similar reports ordered by other presidents. Now it’s time for another review: The U.S. has been operating under the current system for over 12 years, and criticism has rarely gone beyond the conventional wisdom of “bloated bureaucracy.”

The coming review should be guided by what has happened since 9/11. Did the U.S. truly create an all-powerful “spymaster” equipped to remake the intelligence for a new era and new enemies? The Trump administration should consider the enormous to-do list foisted upon the director of national intelligence and ask how he could make decisive progress.

The U.S. is dealing with worsening national-security threats, a democratization of dangerous technologies, and serious cyber attacks. Worse, the intelligence community has been accused of politicizing intelligence gathering. Mr. Trump should complete a swift, top-down review of the intelligence community. Once finished, the president can set clear priorities for Mr. Coats and offer unwavering support as he pursues his agenda.

Mr. Allen, a former congressional and White House national-security staffer, is managing director of Beacon Global Strategies and author of “Blinking Red: Crisis and Compromise in American Intelligence after 9/11” (Potomac, 2013).
Title: Morris: Trump vs. our Intel Agencies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2017, 07:09:29 PM
second post:

Haven't listened to this yet , , ,

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/videos/donald-trump-intelligence-agencies-scandals/
Title: Shadow War between CIA and President Trump?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2017, 09:48:08 PM
Let's use this thread for this subject:

I do not know the author or his motivations-- it may well be a piece of complete disintel-- but a very disconcerting piece nonetheless:

http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-trump-administration-mike-flynn-russian-embassy/
Title: Ben Rhodes conspiracy to take down Mike Flynn to save Iran deal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2017, 12:40:02 AM

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/former-obama-officials-loyalists-waged-campaign-oust-flynn/


Caroline Glick comments

The less you know the better you sleep.

Then again, there is an upside of the Flynn resignation.

The upside is that it gives President Trump the opportunity to clean out the stables in the intel community as part of a criminal probe into the leakers responsible for divulging highly classified information to the reporters that smeared Flynn.
If Trump seizes this opportunity, and replaces Flynn with someone else who is equally willing to fight, then this sad, miserable tale will have been worth it. 
Title: 18 USC Section 798
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2017, 09:31:36 PM
From a post I made on Facebook:

==========================================

a) Agreed they can listen BUT serious privacy legal protection attaches to the other party to the conversation (when an American citizen?)-- in this case General Flynn,

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PROTECTION IN THE ERA OF THE MODERN SURVEILLANCE STATE!!!

Apparently in its waning days, Obama (and Ben Rhodes?) modified the rules so that the intel could be shared with over one dozen other countries before the privacy protection attached. In other words, the privacy protection provided by the law is made a joke simply by asking one of these other governments to see that the info breaking the privacy of individual came out.

The , , , ahem , , , "Resistance", and other useful idiots of the Deep State howl about the dangers of Trump fascism as the Deep State uses the tools of the Orwellian State.

b) But much more directly, it appears that people privy to the highest levels of our SIGINT (i.e. the CIA and its brethren), who are  obligated by the strictest of security clearance laws, etc. have committed serious felonies by divulging this SIGINT to their toadies in the pravdas.

Read this with care:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798

Remember too that the President's phone calls with the Mexican President and the Australian PM were leaked as well.

Seems to me a fair case can be made that the Deep State is using the technological capabilities of the Surveillance State and by so doing are "going rogue"-- apparently in an attempt to bring down the Commander in Chief.

Title: Col. Mustard in the library: Sources and Methods
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2017, 10:09:29 PM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/02/16/general-flynn-and-colonel-mustard-lets-piece-together-clues-about-the-leak/


General Flynn and Colonel Mustard: Let's Piece Together Clues About the Leak
By Charlie Martin February 16, 2017
chat 246 comments
Checkpoint Charlie sign from Wikipedia

The most recent big scandal is LTG Michael Flynn's resignation from the position of national security advisor -- and just as an aside, I've heard at least three media people claim he'd resigned as director of the NSA, and no, being NSA isn't the same as being DIRNSA. The Trump administration promptly complained about the leaks, to the mass amusement of the usual suspects.

But -- is that amusement justified? Or is this more interesting than the usual suspects believe? Let's give it a look.

There's a phrase that comes up over and over when talking about classification of intelligence information: "sources and methods." In fact, it comes up so often that it's become one of those buzzword cliches that runs past -- sourzeznmethdz -- without people really hearing or thinking about it. So, just for once, let's think about it.

Obviously, it breaks down into sources and methods: sources are where the information comes from, and methods are how we illicitly obtained the information. (Strictly it isn't always illicit, since we derive useful intelligence from newspapers, but it's also not interesting to know the CIA reads Russian newspapers.)
Sponsored

Now, we have a big scandal that is based on leaked reports of phone calls between LTG Flynn and the Russian ambassador, which apparently came from intercepts of the phone calls. But let's look at this through the "sources and methods" lens for a minute: we have an overt leak that our intelligence services have intercepted communications of the Russian ambassador (a source) by "wire tapping" or something similar their phone calls (a method). What's more, the other party to the call was LTG Michael Flynn. Technically, Flynn in this case is a United States Person ("U.S. Person") under 50 USC 1801. Here's the definition:

    (i)“United States person” means a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence (as defined in section 1101(a)(20) of title 8), ... .

Here's a link to all of 50 US Code Subchapter I, which contains the whole section on FISA courts. I won't go through the whole thing, but the gist is that there must be a FISA Court order to allow an intercept of a U.S. Person's communications; if a U.S. Person's communications are intercepted by accident, by law the U.S. Person's communications must be "minimized" in such a way that information identifying the U.S. Person isn't stored or disseminated except under some special conditions.

It looks like that rule was, shall we say, applied less than diligently here with these leaks.

But let's go back to "sources and methods" -- what we have here is "communications intelligence," COMINT. This isn't super sensitive -- as a friend pointed out, it's not like it's a big secret the U.S. is listening to the Russians -- but it still meets the qualifications to be something like CONFIDENTIAL and special compartmented intelligence: CONFIDENTIAL//SI. (You can read more details, if you're interested, in my pieces on Hillary's Air Gap Problem, on how It's Not Classified because It's Marked; It's Marked because It's Classified, and on L'Affaire Snowden and Computer Security.)

But the point for now is simply that this stuff must be classified at least CONFIDENTIAL//SI, which puts it under the Espionage Act; revealing it without authorization is a violation of 18 USC 793 (and some other sections. Again, the link is to the containing chapter). This is the same chapter that would have been used to indict Hillary Clinton if she hadn't had friends in high places.

Finally, let's ask the question that should be on every critical thinker's mind at all times: Cui bono? Who benefits? Add to that: who could have been involved?

Probably not the Trump people (plus they wouldn't have known to have access to it). Not the Russians. Decisions involving this kind of material are made in the executive branch (CIA, FBI, NSA are all in the executive branch). What's more, very few people are going to have need to know on this stuff, even if it's only CONFIDENTIAL: we don't want to let the Russians know exactly what conversations we've actually intercepted.

The final piece of the puzzle here is that we know these calls were intercepted before the inauguration. Which means they were authorized during the Obama administration.
Sponsored

So now, like Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe in the library, pieces have come together: this has to have been authorized under the Obama administration, by someone pretty high up (or else they wouldn't have access to the compartmented information), and leaked by someone pretty high up, also, almost certainly, either a civil service permanent employee held over from the Obama administration or a political appointee very high in the intelligence community. One who was pretty confident they also have friends in high places.

Why? It seems it must have been to make trouble for the incoming Trump administration.

This is going to get a lot more interesting.
Title: Flynn transcripts do not show wrong doing.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2017, 10:29:39 PM
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/15/515437291/intelligence-official-transcripts-of-flynns-calls-dont-show-criminal-wrongdoing?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
Title: Caveat lector
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2017, 04:29:41 PM
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/02/reports-national-guard-fake-memo-ploy-smoke-leaker/
Title: Judicial Watch: The Insider Threat
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2017, 08:55:47 PM
Hillary Clinton, The “Insider Threat”

 You don’t have to take my word for it that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s sloppy email practices were an egregious breech of national security.  An expert in the Department of Defense thought so as well.

This week we released a U.S. Department of the Army OpSec (Operational Security) PowerPoint  presentation that depicts Clinton as an example of “insider threats. ” The presentation, produced as part of a lecture on cybersecurity, also includes General David Petraeus, terrorist Nidal Hassan, Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, Edward Snowden, and Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis.
 
We obtained the documents in response to a January 11, 2017, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking the PowerPoint presentation on operational security delivered to soldiers at Fort Leonard Wood (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Defense (No. 1:17-cv-00060)). We sued after the Department of Defense failed to respond to our August 22, 2016, FOIA request (the lawsuit is now over, since we got what we wanted).

The presentation warns against “Critical Information Compromises” involving material such as the “itineraries of … senior executive service (SES)” and “very important persons (VIPs),” any of which can result in “Attack, Kidnapping, Publicity.” It also cites “unsecure email” as an error that can lead to an enemy being able to “Kill, Counter, Clone.” Judicial Watch’s investigations into Clinton’s email practices while she was secretary of state repeatedly  produced examples of Clinton aide Huma Abedin sharing the schedule and travel plans of Clinton on an unsecure email system.
 
The operational security brief was reportedly leaked, and then posted on the Facebook page “U.S. Army W.T.F! moments.” Administrators of the Facebook page said a picture came from a service member stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

Clinton and Petraeus are cited as examples of “Careless or disgruntled employees.” Former Secretary Clinton conducted official government business using a non-state.gov email account, which was hosted on a server in her home in Chappaqua, New York. JW’s extensive FOIA litigation pried loose Clinton email records, which proved she sent and received classified information on an unsecure server while serving as secretary of state.

Gen. Petraeus is a retired four-star general and the former director of the CIA who pled guilty in federal court to a charge of unauthorized removal of classified information. At the time, Petraeus was having an affair with his biographer to whom he provided classified information while serving as Director of the CIA.  (I see he is up for potential appointment to President Trump’s National Security Advisor post.  For obvious reasons, this would seem to be a big mistake.)

No wonder it took a lawsuit to extract this damning Pentagon analysis, which recognizes Hillary Clinton as an “insider threat” to national security. The Trump Justice Department should take note and proceed with an appropriate investigation.
Title: NRO: Why was FBI investigating Flynn?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2017, 10:04:49 PM
A serious, detailed discussion of the law as pertains to the FBI's actions with regard to Flynn:

 
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445045/general-michael-flynn-national-security-adviser-fbi-investigation-phone-call-russian-ambassador
Title: Good to see Aaron Klein back in top form w Obama intel legacy
Post by: ccp on February 20, 2017, 05:48:54 PM
Obama legacy outrage:

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/02/20/klein-obama-admin-politicized-intel/
Title: I'm leaving the CIA because of Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2017, 10:04:33 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-didnt-think-id-ever-leave-the-cia-but-because-of-trump-i-quit/2017/02/20/fd7aac3e-f456-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.119ffcf4e257
Title: Re: I'm leaving the CIA because of Trump
Post by: DougMacG on February 22, 2017, 05:58:00 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-didnt-think-id-ever-leave-the-cia-but-because-of-trump-i-quit/2017/02/20/fd7aac3e-f456-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.119ffcf4e257

Is he one of the leakers or did he merely forget to condemn his nine colleagues who committed espionage felonies in order to sabotage the new president and his new staff?

 Good Riddance, deep state.  Clean house, drain the swamp.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on February 22, 2017, 07:32:10 AM
"Is he one of the leakers or did he merely forget to condemn his nine colleagues who committed espionage felonies in order to sabotage the new president and his new staff?"

Good question.

If he is a leaker he needs to
"forfeit any pension or other benefits coming to him"
and
" go to jail"
" felony on his record"

Title: Mukasey: Democracy can't function without secrecy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2017, 10:57:56 PM

By Michael B. Mukasey
Feb. 20, 2017 7:03 p.m. ET
320 COMMENTS

The promiscuous release of classified information that preceded and accompanied the resignation of Mike Flynn as national security adviser makes it almost quaint to recall a time when the World War II slogan “loose lips sink ships” was taken seriously.

Much has happened to erode standards regarding national secrets. Oddly, those standards seem to have remained intact when it comes to giving sensitive information secretly to an adversary of the United States. The list runs from Benedict Arnold, whose frustrated ambition led him to offer defense plans to the British during the Revolution; to Julius Rosenberg, whose ideology drove him to provide details of atomic-bomb design to the Soviet Union; to Robert Hanssen,Aldrich Ames and John Walker, who betrayed their country for money and disclosed information that cost the lives of American spies. Whether or not their actions met the legal definition of treason (and only Arnold’s did), they generally are regarded as traitors.

Yet when secrets are released to the public under some claim of principle, outrage is muted to say the least. Sometimes, as with the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, the potential damage might have been overstated and the secrecy unwarranted. But in other cases the damage was comparable to the injury inflicted by outright espionage.

Take the New York Times’s disclosure in 2006 that after 9/11 the U.S. government had been monitoring international funds transfers through the Swift system, used by banks world-wide. By tracking cash flows to terrorists, the program had helped frustrate numerous plots and catch their organizers. Its disclosure by the Times was a serious blow to counterterrorism efforts. Although this monitoring program was entirely lawful, the newspaper and its reporters justified the exposure with two assertions: that the public had a right to know about it, and the account was “above all else an interesting yarn,” as one of the reporters put it.

“The right to know” is a trope so often repeated, it may come as a surprise that the Constitution mentions no such right. That omission is hardly surprising given the circumstances in which the Constitution was drafted in 1787—with doors and windows closed even in the stifling summer heat to prevent deliberations from being overheard, and with the delegates sworn to secrecy. Although the Constitution directs the chambers of Congress to keep and publish a journal of their proceedings, it excepts from the publication requirement “such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy.”

The choice to disclose matters that public officials have determined should remain secret is often a singularly antidemocratic act. Public officials are elected—or appointed by those elected—to pursue policies for which they answer to the voters at large. Those who disclose national secrets assert a right to override these democratic outcomes.

There are also criminal statutes that bear on such disclosures. Debate over high-profile missteps—David Petraeus and Hillary Clinton come to mind—has made those laws familiar. They range from the misdemeanor of putting classified information in a nonsecure location, to felony statutes carrying penalties up to 10 years for disclosing classified information about communications activities of the United States, such as surveillance of foreign diplomats.

Some violations of the law are hard to deter, given the asserted motive. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and Edward Snowden claim their systematic disclosures served a higher interest by promoting a necessary debate about the propriety of government conduct and secrecy.

The most recent leaks of confidential information, however, seem to come from decidedly different motives. Consider Mr. Flynn’s situation. It has been disclosed that U.S. intelligence agencies taped conversations last year between Mr. Flynn and the Russian ambassador. After Mr. Flynn falsely denied to the vice president and the FBI that he had discussed sanctions with the ambassador, Sally Yates, then acting attorney general, warned the White House that Mr. Flynn was opening himself up to Russian blackmail. Making all of this public seems designed principally to damage Mr. Flynn.

The propriety of his having been questioned at all by the FBI is open to serious doubt. Some suggest that a discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador might have violated the Logan Act, which bars unauthorized negotiation with any foreign government in a dispute with the U.S.

The Logan Act was passed in 1799 and has never successfully prosecuted, but even a technical violation here is doubtful. When the conversations in question took place, even if some were before the election, Mr. Flynn was consulting with Donald Trump on what national security policies he would follow. The U.S. government provides funds to the nominees of both parties for transition planning. Since such conversations are financed by the government, it’s hardly plausible to claim they are conducted without authority from the government.

Leaks like the ones about Mr. Flynn—not to mention of conversations between President Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia—have an obvious source: a small group within the bureaucracy who have no higher cause to which they can appeal. They ought to be identifiable easily enough. Using a grand jury to investigate and prosecute one or two such people could have a salutary effect. That might bring us closer to a time when “loose lips sink ships” had some purchase.

Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and a U.S. district judge (1988-2006). 
Title: Judge Napolitano - deep state
Post by: ccp on February 23, 2017, 07:50:31 AM
Every time I read about government intelligence gathering being a threat to us I ask what about the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Microsofts, the Googles, and Apples that gather every thing they can about us?  Who is protecting us from them ?  Answer - no one.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/02/23/andrew-napolitano-chickens-have-come-home-to-roost.html
Title: POTH sees Trump and raises him
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 01, 2017, 06:14:40 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/us/politics/obama-trump-russia-election-hacking.html?emc=edit_na_20170301&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0


Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, ADAM GOLDMAN and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTMARCH 1, 2017


WASHINGTON — In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.

Then and now, Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.

At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.

It also reflected the suspicion among many in the Obama White House that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia on election email hacks — a suspicion that American officials say has not been confirmed. Former senior Obama administration officials said that none of the efforts were directed by Mr. Obama.


Sean Spicer, the Trump White House spokesman, said, “The only new piece of information that has come to light is that political appointees in the Obama administration have sought to create a false narrative to make an excuse for their own defeat in the election.” He added, “There continues to be no there, there.”

As Inauguration Day approached, Obama White House officials grew convinced that the intelligence was damning and that they needed to ensure that as many people as possible inside government could see it, even if people without security clearances could not. Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators — including the Senate Intelligence Committee, which in early January announced an inquiry into Russian efforts to influence the election.

At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.

There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress. In one instance, the State Department sent a cache of documents marked “secret” to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland days before the Jan. 20 inauguration. The documents, detailing Russian efforts to intervene in elections worldwide, were sent in response to a request from Mr. Cardin, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

“This situation was serious, as is evident by President Obama’s call for a review — and as is evident by the United States response,” said Eric Schultz, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “When the intelligence community does that type of comprehensive review, it is standard practice that a significant amount of information would be compiled and documented.”

The opposite happened with the most sensitive intelligence, including the names of sources and the identities of foreigners who were regularly monitored. Officials tightened the already small number of people who could access that information. They knew the information could not be kept from the new president or his top advisers, but wanted to narrow the number of people who might see the information, officials said.

More than a half-dozen current and former officials described various aspects of the effort to preserve and distribute the intelligence, and some said they were speaking to draw attention to the material and ensure proper investigation by Congress. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified information, nearly all of which remains secret, making an independent public assessment of the competing Obama and Trump administration claims impossible.

The F.B.I. is conducting a wide-ranging counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election, and is examining alleged links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government.

Separately, the House and Senate intelligence committees are conducting their own investigations, though they must rely on information collected by the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies.

At his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, former Senator Dan Coats, Mr. Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “I think it’s our responsibility to provide you access to all that you need.”


Some Obama White House officials had little faith that a Trump administration would make good on such pledges, and the efforts to preserve the intelligence continued until the administration’s final hours. This was partly because intelligence was still being collected and analyzed, but it also reflected the sentiment among many administration officials that they had not recognized the scale of the Russian campaign until it was too late.

The warning signs had been building throughout the summer, but were far from clear. As WikiLeaks was pushing out emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee through online publication, American intelligence began picking up conversations in which Russian officials were discussing contacts with Trump associates, and European allies were starting to pass along information about people close to Mr. Trump meeting with Russians in the Netherlands, Britain and other countries.

But what was going on in the meetings was unclear to the officials, and the intercepted communications did little to clarify matters — the Russians, it appeared, were arguing about how far to go in interfering in the presidential election. What intensified the alarm at the Obama White House was a campaign of cyberattacks on state electoral systems in September, which led the administration to deliver a public accusation against the Russians in October.

But it wasn’t until after the election, and after more intelligence had come in, that the administration began to grasp the scope of the suspected tampering and concluded that one goal of the campaign was to help tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor. In early December, Mr. Obama ordered the intelligence community to conduct a full assessment of the Russian campaign.

In the weeks before the assessment was released in January, the intelligence community combed through databases for an array of communications and other information — some of which was months old by then — and began producing reports that showed there were contacts during the campaign between Trump associates and Russian officials.


The nature of the contacts remains unknown. Several of Mr. Trump’s associates have done business in Russia, and it is unclear if any of the contacts were related to business dealings.

The New York Times, citing four current and former officials, reported last month that American authorities had obtained information of repeated contacts between Mr. Trump’s associates and senior Russian intelligence officials. The White House has dismissed the story as false.

Since the Feb. 14 article appeared, more than a half-dozen officials have confirmed contacts of various kinds between Russians and Trump associates. The label “intelligence official” is not always cleanly applied in Russia, where ex-spies, oligarchs and government officials often report back to the intelligence services and elsewhere in the Kremlin.

Steven L. Hall, the former head of Russia operations at the C.I.A., said that Mr. Putin was surrounded by a cast of characters, and that it was “fair to say that a good number of them come from an intelligence or security background. Once an intel guy, always an intel guy in Russia.”

The concerns about the contacts were cemented by a series of phone calls between Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, and Michael T. Flynn, who had been poised to become Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. The calls began on Dec. 29, shortly after Mr. Kislyak was summoned to the State Department and informed that, in retaliation for Russian election meddling, the United States was expelling 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives and imposing other sanctions. Mr. Kislyak was irate and threatened a forceful Russia response, according to people familiar with the exchange.

But a day later, Mr. Putin said his government would not retaliate, prompting a Twitter post from Mr. Trump praising the Russian president — and puzzling Obama White House officials.

On Jan. 2, administration officials learned that Mr. Kislyak — after leaving the State Department meeting — called Mr. Flynn, and that the two talked multiple times in the 36 hours that followed. American intelligence agencies routinely wiretap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls showed that Mr. Flynn urged the Russians not to respond, saying relations would improve once Mr. Trump was in office, according to multiple current and former officials.

Beyond leaving a trail for investigators, the Obama administration also wanted to help European allies combat a threat that had caught the United States off guard. American intelligence agencies made it clear in the declassified version of the intelligence assessment released in January that they believed Russia intended to use its attacks on the United States as a template for more meddling. “We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned,” the report said, “to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies.”

Follow Matthew Rosenberg on Twitter @AllMattNYT, Michael S. Schmidt at @nytmike, and Adam Goldman at @adamgoldmanNYT

Matt Apuzzo and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and in the Morning Briefing newsletter.
Continue reading the main story
Title: WaPo: Then Sen. Sessions met with Russian ambassador
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 01, 2017, 06:43:13 PM
This is going to set off a big stink!  :x

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-spoke-twice-with-russian-ambassador-during-trumps-presidential-campaign-justice-officials-say/2017/03/01/77205eda-feac-11e6-99b4-9e613afeb09f_story.html?utm_term=.561a6a3809eb

Buried down in the article is this:

"Justice officials said Sessions met with Kislyak on Sept. 8 in his capacity as a member of the armed services panel rather than in his role as a Trump campaign surrogate.

“He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee,” Flores said.

"She added that Sessions last year had more than 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, including the British, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Indian, Chinese, Canadian, Australian and German ambassadors, in addition to Kislyak."
Title: Ditch the Device
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 02, 2017, 07:52:25 AM
If true, this is HUUUGELY embarrassing!  Bigly!!!!

http://theseattletribune.com/trumps-unsecured-android-device-believed-to-be-source-of-recent-white-house-leaks/
Title: President Tump and CIA Pompeo save CIA officer from Italian prison
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 04, 2017, 03:36:47 PM
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/03/source-ex-cia-officer-who-faced-extradition-freed-after-intervention-from-trump-administration.html
Title: FISA Court
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 05, 2017, 08:44:23 AM
Hat tip to Big Dog for this one:

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/10/16/fisa-judge-denies-surveillance-court-offers-rubber-stamp
Title: If true, most certainly worth keeping in mind
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2017, 01:10:01 AM
Per Bretbart

Binney stated of the NSA:
If they weren’t behind it, they certainly had the data. Now the difference here is that FBI and CIA have direct access inside the NSA databases. So, they may be able to go directly in there and see that material there. And NSA doesn’t monitor that. They don’t even monitor their own people going into databases.
So, they don’t monitor what CIA and FBI do. And there’s no oversight or attempted oversight by any of the committees or even the FISA court. So, any way you look at it, ultimately the NSA is responsible because they are doing the collection on everybody inside the United States. Phone calls. Emails. All of that stuff.


http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=95689436

Title: WSJ: Judge Bork was right on FISA Courts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2017, 03:40:42 AM
 By William McGurn
March 6, 2017 7:42 p.m. ET
45 COMMENTS

Robert Bork saw it all coming.

Not, of course, today’s clash of recriminations, between a sitting Republican president who’s accused his Democratic predecessor of having tapped his phones even as the other side accuses this same Republican’s campaign team of having colluded with Moscow to steal the November election. For all his wisdom, the late judge and onetime Supreme Court nominee could not have predicted this.

What Bork did appreciate, and more keenly than almost anyone else at the time, is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act at the root of this mess—i.e., whether or not there were such warrants on Donald Trump or his associates—was not a reform but an abuse. He outlined his objections in a prescient op-ed for this newspaper on March 9, 1978, shortly before the Senate passed the bill. In particular, he argued, the courts set up by this law would work to obscure the responsibility the “reform” was meant to ensure:
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––

“When an attorney general must decide for himself, without shield of a warrant, whether to authorize surveillance, and must accept the consequences if things go wrong, there is likely to be more care taken. The statute, however, has the effect of immunizing everyone, and sooner or later that fact will be taken advantage of.” In other words, if administration officials could not hide behind court approvals, they would think long and hard about their surveillance decisions.

Thirty-nine years later, on the biggest story of the day, no one is even clear about exactly what happened. We don’t, for example, know whether there was a FISA warrant for Mr. Trump or any members of his campaign team. Notwithstanding all the innuendo, we also don’t have any evidence the Trump team collaborated with the Russians to influence the election.

Each side is demanding hearings. But in today’s Washington, neither is likely to get a satisfactory accounting. In the midst of all the shouting, it’s worth taking a step back and reviewing the present crisis in light of Bork’s warnings back when this law was passed.

Like so much else America would have been better off without—the Education Department, federal subsidies for ethanol, the idea that there are limits to growth—FISA and the courts it created are a legacy of Jimmy Carter. The legislation, introduced by Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1977, was a byproduct of the Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses and the general anti-Nixon fever. The animating idea was to clip a president’s wings by introducing judges into the surveillance equation.

Bork characterized it as “moralistic overreaction.” Not only would these courts infringe on a president’s surveillance authority—which for nearly two centuries had been deemed part of a president’s national-security powers as commander in chief—judges lacked the skills and experience “to make the sophisticated judgments required.” If they responded by deferring to those who do, Bork noted, they would raise other questions about what their oversight really amounted to.

Bork further argued that “the law would almost certainly increase unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information simply by greatly widening the circle of people with access to it.” How timely that seems today. Just ask Mike Flynn, the national security adviser who saw classified parts of his private conversations with the Russian ambassador leaked.

On the left there is great distrust of the FISA courts, which grew after 9/11 and the Bush administration. But the preferred progressive “solutions” are generally things that would make the process even more cumbersome. Some, for example, hope to introduce into the FISA process an advocate to challenge the government as it makes its case.

Once again, the Bork approach is more promising. As he pointed out, the intelligence abuses that led to FISA “were uncovered through existing processes of investigation.” This process contributed to President Nixon’s resignation. And if he hadn’t resigned, he would have been impeached.

Andrew McCarthy, a former U.S. attorney who has written three pieces for National Review on the latest in the Trump wiretap charges, argues, with Bork, that the Constitution’s primary solution for government failure and overreach is political accountability to the American people. Progressives are not nearly as enthusiastic, partly because the modern left prefers the unelected to the elected, and partly because they don’t really trust the people.

It would be nice to think we’ll eventually get clear answers from whatever investigations emerge. In the meantime, we could do worse than return to Bork’s original concerns about a system that establishes “a group of judges who must operate largely in the dark and create rules known only to themselves.”

Surely it says something about where we are today that the ideal reform—to abolish the FISA courts altogether—is unlikely because presidents and lawmakers of both parties are unwilling to challenge an arrangement that fuzzes up accountability even as they complain about it.
Title: Hayden
Post by: ccp on March 07, 2017, 03:52:11 AM
http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-hayden-trump-media-non-fact-based-world-view-2017-3

Sure Hayden.  Who conveniently ignores bias in the MSM or the likes of Salon, BuzzFeed , Huffington Post and the rest.

Title: The narrative collapses; NSA spies everyone all the time.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2017, 04:34:32 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445522/russian-election-hacking-fbi-not-investigating-trump-campaign?utm_campaign=trueanthem

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-06/top-nsa-whistleblower-intelligence-agencies-did-spy-trump
Title: Hayden
Post by: ccp on March 07, 2017, 05:21:54 AM
"A lot of smoke" regarding Trump russia connection.  And he sites the totally unreliable Roger Stone as an example!  I have posted about Roger Stone before and nothing he says can be believed or even backed up.

Yet this partisan Hayden seems to Not see smoke with regards to Trumps claims

Hayden is not an honorable man period

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-cia-director-on-trumps-possible-ties-to-russia-theres-a-lot-of-smoke-212505508.html
Title: Wikileaks anally rapes CIA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2017, 08:48:35 PM
Breitbart frequently is irresponsible, but there seem to be many citations in this particular article:

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/03/07/cia-can-spy-virtually-device-even-switched-off/
Title: WSJ: Wikileaks New Damage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2017, 09:56:06 AM

Updated March 7, 2017 7:49 p.m. ET
179 COMMENTS

Tuesday’s WikiLeaks dump of a major chunk of what it claims is the CIA’s “hacking arsenal” ought to be an eye-opener for anyone still laboring under the delusion that WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange or former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden are not out to weaken the United States. This leak of CIA documents appears to disclose for America’s enemies a key advantage against the asymmetric threats of this new century: better technology that provides better intelligence.

WikiLeaks says the 8,761 documents and files were ripped off “from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence” in Virginia. It further says these documents were “circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors”—and that one of them shared the info with WikiLeaks. So far former government officials quoted in news reports say the leaked information looks genuine, and the WikiLeaks press release promised more to come.

Much of this WikiLeaks dump deals with ways the CIA has found to get into electronic devices such as iPhones and Android phones. These methods include—as Edward Snowden clarified in a tweet—end runs around the encryption of such popular apps as Signal or WhatsApp without having to crack the apps themselves.

The leaks also expose other areas of CIA interest such as an agency effort to hack into the control panels of cars and trucks. Another tool exposed by the leaks turned Samsung Smart TVs into microphones that could then relay conversations back to the CIA even when the owner believed the set was off.

The losses from this exposure are incalculable. These tools represent millions of dollars of investment and man-hours. Many will now be rendered moot as terrorists or foreign agents abandon traceable habits. Merely because America’s enemies are barbaric—think al Qaeda or Islamic State—does not mean they are stupid. One reason it took so long to hunt down Osama bin Laden is because he took pains to establish a sophisticated communications system to evade U.S. intelligence tracking.

The costs will also include the time and effort U.S. intelligence agencies will now have to expend investigating how the information was lost. This includes retracing any missed computer hacks and trying to find out who stole and released the secrets.

Some on the political left and right want to treat Messrs. Snowden and Assange as heroes of transparency and privacy. But there is no evidence that U.S. spooks are engaging in illegal spying on Americans. The CIA’s spying tools are for targeting suspected terrorists and foreign agents. As for WikiLeaks, note how it never seems to disclose Chinese or Russian secrets. The country they loathe and want to bring low is America.
Title: The CIA, Amazon, and the Cloud
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2017, 01:21:31 PM
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2496237/cloud-computing/steven-j--vaughan-nichols--the-cia-and-the-cloud.html
Title: Ex-CIA Officer's Case Shows How to Get Things Done in D.C.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2017, 02:26:48 PM
Ex-CIA Officer's Case Shows How to Get Things Done in D.C.
IPT News
March 16, 2017
http://www.investigativeproject.org/5853/ex-cia-officer-case-shows-how-to-get-things-done
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on March 19, 2017, 11:46:33 AM
Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.



https://theintercept.com/2017/03/16/key-democratic-officials-now-warning-base-not-to-expect-evidence-of-trumprussia-collusion/

Key Democratic Officials Now Warning Base Not to Expect Evidence of Trump/Russia Collusion

Glenn Greenwald
March 16 2017, 8:41 a.m.
FROM MSNBC POLITICS shows to town hall meetings across the country, the overarching issue for the Democratic Party’s base since Trump’s victory has been Russia, often suffocating attention for other issues. This fixation has persisted even though it has no chance to sink the Trump presidency unless it is proven that high levels of the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Kremlin to manipulate the outcome of the U.S. election — a claim for which absolutely no evidence has thus far been presented.

The principal problem for Democrats is that so many media figures and online charlatans are personally benefiting from feeding the base increasingly unhinged, fact-free conspiracies — just as right-wing media polemicists did after both Bill Clinton and Obama were elected — that there are now millions of partisan soldiers absolutely convinced of a Trump/Russia conspiracy for which, at least as of now, there is no evidence. And they are all waiting for the day, which they regard as inevitable and imminent, when this theory will be proven and Trump will be removed.


Key Democratic officials are clearly worried about the expectations that have been purposely stoked and are now trying to tamp them down. Many of them have tried to signal that the beliefs the base has been led to adopt have no basis in reason or evidence.

The latest official to throw cold water on the MSNBC-led circus is President Obama’s former acting CIA chief Michael Morell. What makes him particularly notable in this context is that Morell was one of Clinton’s most vocal CIA surrogates. In August, he not only endorsed Clinton in the pages of the New York Times but also became the first high official to explicitly accuse Trump of disloyalty, claiming, “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

But on Wednesday night, Morell appeared at an intelligence community forum to “cast doubt” on “allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.” “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire at all,” he said, adding, “There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.”

Obama’s former CIA chief also cast serious doubt on the credibility of the infamous, explosive “dossier” originally published by BuzzFeed, saying that its author, Christopher Steele, paid intermediaries to talk to the sources for it. The dossier, he said, “doesn’t take you anywhere, I don’t think.”

Morell’s comments echo the categorical remarks by Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, who told Meet the Press last week that during the time he was Obama’s DNI, he saw no evidence to support claims of a Trump/Russia conspiracy. “We had no evidence of such collusion,” Clapper stated unequivocally. Unlike Morell, who left his official CIA position in 2013 but remains very integrated into the intelligence community, Clapper was Obama’s DNI until just seven weeks ago, leaving on January 20.

Perhaps most revealing of all are the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee — charged with investigating these matters — who recently told BuzzFeed how petrified they are of what the Democratic base will do if they do not find evidence of collusion, as they now suspect will likely be the case. “There’s a tangible frustration over what one official called ‘wildly inflated’ expectations surrounding the panel’s fledgling investigation,” BuzzFeed’s Ali Watkins wrote.

Moreover, “several committee sources grudgingly say, it feels as though the investigation will be seen as a sham if the Senate doesn’t find a silver bullet connecting Trump and Russian intelligence operatives.” One member told Watkins: “I don’t think the conclusions are going to meet people’s expectations.”

What makes all of this most significant is that officials like Clapper and Morell are trained disinformation agents; Clapper in particular has proven he will lie to advance his interests. Yet even with all the incentive to do so, they are refusing to claim there is evidence of such collusion; in fact, they are expressly urging people to stop thinking it exists. As even the law recognizes, statements that otherwise lack credibility become more believable when they are ones made “against interest.”

Media figures have similarly begun trying to tamp down expectations. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, which published the Steele dossier, published an article yesterday warning that the Democratic base’s expectation of a smoking gun “is so strong that Twitter and cable news are full of the theories of what my colleague Charlie Warzel calls the Blue Detectives — the left’s new version of Glenn Beck, digital blackboards full of lines and arrows.” Smith added: “It is also a simple fact that while news of Russian actions on Trump’s behalf is clear, hard details of coordination between his aides and Putin’s haven’t emerged.” And Smith’s core warning is this:

Trump’s critics last year were horrified at the rise of “fake news” and the specter of a politics shaped by alternative facts, predominantly on the right. They need to be careful now not to succumb to the same delusional temptations as their political adversaries, and not to sink into a filter bubble which, after all, draws its strength not from conservative or progressive politics but from human nature.

And those of us covering the story and the stew of real information, fantasy, and — now — forgery around it need to continue to report and think clearly about what we know and what we don’t, and to resist the sugar high that comes with telling people exactly what they want to hear.

For so long, Democrats demonized and smeared anyone trying to inject basic reason, rationality, and skepticism into this Trump/Russia discourse by labeling them all Kremlin agents and Putin lovers. Just this week, the Center for American Progress released a report using the language of treason to announce the existence of a “Fifth Column” in the U.S. that serves Russia (similar to Andrew Sullivan’s notorious 2001 decree that anyone opposing the war on terror composed an anti-American “Fifth Column”), while John McCain listened to Rand Paul express doubts about the wisdom of NATO further expanding to include Montenegro and then promptly announced: “Paul is working for Vladimir Putin.”

But with serious doubts — and fears — now emerging about what the Democratic base has been led to believe by self-interested carnival barkers and partisan hacks, there is a sudden, concerted effort to rein in the excesses of this story. With so many people now doing this, it will be increasingly difficult to smear them all as traitors and Russian loyalists, but it may be far too little, too late, given the pitched hysteria that has been deliberately cultivated around these issues for months. Many Democrats have reached the classic stage of deranged conspiracists where evidence that disproves the theory is viewed as further proof of its existence, and those pointing to it are instantly deemed suspect.
Title: CIA funded Art to fight the Commies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 28, 2017, 02:49:46 PM
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
Title: The NGA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 31, 2017, 09:04:40 AM
http://www.anonews.co/secretive-spy-us/

 :-o :-o :-o
Title: Intel Matters, Russians, campaign, administration, spying, hacking, interfering
Post by: DougMacG on April 03, 2017, 09:11:32 AM
Steer me to the right thread for this...

There are three questions and three answers emerging in the convoluted Russian spy intelligence scandal web that has been woven:

1) Did the Russians hack/interfere/change the outcome of our election?
2) Did the Trump team play a part in that if it happened?
3) Did the Obama administration spy on the Trump team during the campaign?

As the information is coming in, the answers to that are looking like: no, no, and yes.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 03, 2017, 09:36:24 AM
1) The Electoral thread (I just use SEIU for the search command), and

2) http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2644.50

3) http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2644.50

For posts that may be of research value down the road, please feel free to post an item in more than one thread.

Title: Turkish intel using mosques to spy?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 03, 2017, 02:25:44 PM
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/04/02/turkish-govt-opened-100m-mosque-in-washington-dc-as-turkish-intel-spied-from-mosques-all-over-europe/
Title: More indications Intel Assessment of Russian Interference was rigged
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 14, 2017, 11:38:28 AM
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/05/12/more-indications-intel-assessment-russian-interference-in-election-was-rigged.html
Title: Re: More indications Intel Assessment of Russian Interference was rigged
Post by: G M on May 14, 2017, 12:33:27 PM
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/05/12/more-indications-intel-assessment-russian-interference-in-election-was-rigged.html

Still 100% evidence free!

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on May 15, 2017, 04:18:09 AM
"The House and Senate Intelligence Committees therefore should add investigations of whether this ICA was politicized to their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. "

Like bloviator in chief Schumer said, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,”



 
Title: Re: More indications Intel Assessment of Russian Interference was rigged
Post by: DougMacG on May 15, 2017, 09:51:08 AM
quote author=G M
"Still 100% evidence free!"
-----------------
Senator Warner was all charged up about the investigation on Fox News Sunday yesterday.

After all the bloviating, Wallace asked him:

WALLACE: At various points, top officials, including former Director of National Intelligence Clapper have said that at that point, they had seen no evidence of collusion between the Kremlin and what I will call Trump-world. Have you seen any evidence of collusion?

WARNER: We are still relatively early in our investigation. [No we haven't.] ... We’re going to follow that intelligence wherever it leads.
http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2017/05/14/sens-mark-warner-and-mike-lee-on-replacing-james-comey-at-fbi.html


Sen. Feinstein said the same thing recently:

Do you have evidence that there was in fact collusion between Trump associates and Russia during the campaign?” asked CNN’s Wolf Blizter.

“Not at this time,” replied Feinstein.
https://youtu.be/0BS5amEq7Fc

The point being that these people are on the committees and had classified briefings - for going on a year of looking.  No evidence "YET".

We need to investigate further because we don't have evidence - yet.  There is a cover up but no underlying crime.  A cover up of WHAT?  We need impeachment too, we just don't have the underlying crime yet for that either.

Meanwhile, we have plenty of evidence of Clinton collusion, Hillary from inside the State department and Bill from the Foundation, of collusion and pay, quid pro quo, over the State department approval of the Russian purchase of American Uranium assets.  Is there not a law against this?  Makes the Louisiana Congressman's $100,000 in the freezer look like peanuts.  He didn't sign off on a strategic asset.  The Russians didn't hack one voting machine, but millions of illegals voted at perhaps a 13% rate.  Ho hum.

Another shiny damn object that has nothing to do with reforming healthcare or growing the economy.  Twice in the hour above they interrupted collusion talk with Sen Mike Lee for a question 'about your day job', meaning the passing of legislation in the Senate.  Nothing there.  And Pres. Trump keeps feeding into this instead of either ignoring them or calling them out on it.

Strange times.  Double standard.  Shiny object.
Title: I can picture him being this kind of stupid
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2017, 02:27:32 PM
Dubious sources, but I can picture him being this kind of stupid:

 By Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe May 15 at 5:01 PM

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.
ADVERTISING

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

The revelation comes as Trump faces rising legal and political pressure on multiple Russia-related fronts. Last week, he fired FBI Director James B. Comey in the midst of a bureau investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trump’s subsequent admission that his decision was driven by “this Russia thing” was seen by critics as attempted obstruction of justice.
Team Trump’s ties to Russian interests View Graphic

[Political chaos in Washington is a return on investment in Moscow]

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — a key figure in earlier Russia controversies — into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details about an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

For most anyone in government discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal. As president, Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.

“The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation,” said H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, who participated in the meeting. “At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.”

The CIA declined to comment and the National Security Agency did not respond to requests for comment.

But officials expressed concern with Trump’s handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences. Exposure of an intelligence stream that has provided critical insight into the Islamic State, they said, could hinder the United States’ and its allies’ ability to detect future threats.

“It is all kind of shocking,” said a former senior U.S. official close to current administration officials. “Trump seems to be very reckless, and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it’s all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.”
Here’s what happened after Trump fired Comey
Play Video3:53
Democrats expressed outrage, Trump issued defiant tweets. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde, Jayne Orenstein, Alice Li, Libby Casey, Priya Mathew/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” Trump said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States only learned through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence gathering method, but described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The Washington Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

“Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said that the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russia’s presence in Syria. Moscow and would be keenly interested in identifying that source and possibly disrupting it.

Russia and the United States both regard the Islamic State as an enemy and share limited information about terrorist threats. But the two nations have competing agendas in Syria, where Moscow has deployed military assets and personnel to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Russia could identify our sources or techniques,” the senior U.S. official said. A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, “I don’t think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out.”

At a more fundamental level, the information wasn’t the United States’ to provide to others. Under the rules of espionage, governments — and even individual agencies — are given significant control over whether and how the information they gather is disseminated even after it has been shared. Violating that practice undercuts trust considered essential to sharing secrets.

The officials declined to identify the ally, but said it is one that has previously voiced frustration with Washington’s inability to safeguard sensitive information related to Iraq and Syria.

“If that partner learned we’d given this to Russia without their knowledge or asking first that is a blow to that relationship,” the U.S. official said.

Trump also described measures that the United States has taken or is contemplating to counter the threat, including military operations in Iraq and Syria as well as other steps to tighten security, officials said.

The officials would not discuss details of those measures, but the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed that it is considering banning laptops and other large electronic devices from carry-on bags on flights between Europe and the United States. The United States and Britain imposed a similar ban in March affecting travelers passing through airports in 10 Muslim-majority countries.

Trump cast the countermeasures in wistful terms. “Can you believe the world we live in today?” he said, according to one official. “Isn’t it crazy.”

Lavrov and Kislyak were also accompanied by aides.

A Russian photographer took photos of part of the session that were released by the Russian state-owned Tass news agency. No U.S. news organization was allowed to attend any part of the meeting.

Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout.

Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.

One of Bossert’s subordinates also called for the problematic portion of Trump’s discussion to be stricken from internal memos and for the full transcript to be limited to a small circle of recipients, efforts to prevent sensitive details from being disseminated further or leaked.

Trump has repeatedly gone off-script in his dealings with high-ranking foreign officials, most notably in his contentious introductory conversation with the Australian Prime Minister earlier this year. He has also faced criticism for lax attention to security at his Florida retreat Mar-a-Lago, where he appeared to field preliminary reports of a North Korea missile launch in full view of casual diners.

U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points, and often ignores those.

“He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it — and that has big downsides,” the second former official said. “Does he understand what’s classified and what’s not? That’s what worries me.”

Lavrov’s reaction to the Trump disclosures was muted, officials said, calling for the United States to work more closely with Moscow on fighting terrorism.

Kislyak has figured prominently in damaging stories about the Trump administration’s ties to Russia. Trump’s initial national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign just 24 days into the job over his contacts with Kislyak and misleading statements about them. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from matters related to the FBI’s Russia investigation after it was revealed that he had met and spoke with Kislyak despite denying any contact with Russian officials during his confirmation hearing.

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Military, defense and security at home and abroad.

“I’m sure Kislyak was able to fire off a good cable back to the Kremlin with all the details” he gleaned from Trump, said the former U.S. official who handled intelligence on Russia.

The White House readout of the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak made no mention of the discussion of a terrorist threat.

“Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria,” the summary said. Trump also “raised Ukraine” and “emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia.”

Julie Tate and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on May 15, 2017, 05:47:46 PM
"Dubious sources, but I can picture him being this kind of stupid"

Me too. Of course, if he put the information on an unsecured email server, that's totally cool with the dems.

Title: Loose lips have consequences
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2017, 06:32:49 AM
Here is my take at this moment on fast moving story:

In his meeting with the Russians, who lost an airplane full of their people over Sinai, it is quite logical and natural that they would be curious about why on flights from that region (and now expanding to flights from Europe?) we have begun requiring lap tops  be checked.

It appears that our gregarious and loquacious President (whose low awareness of security protocols we have noted previously) as part of his ongoing efforts to establish productive interactions with the Russians (whom he is trying to bring on board against the Norks btw) may have flapped his gums a bit and inadvertently given away something really important.

To the detriment of friendly intel services, America has a long history of being really bad at keeping secrets; it appears that President Trump has just added to it.
Title: Update on slain DNC staffer
Post by: ccp on May 16, 2017, 07:09:51 AM
The FBI sat on this ???    :x  What say you Comey homey?

and the DC police look like they covered it up???     :x

We have posted here that this was suspicious and did not trust those law enforcement looking into this that this was just a "botched robbery".

So who killed Seth Rich?   This appears to have been announced from a PI hired by his family.  Good for them not to trust DC.  

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/05/16/slain-dnc-staffer-had-contact-with-wikileaks-investigator-says.html
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2017, 07:18:16 AM
In case there is any additional info in this article:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/murdered-dnc-staffer-seth-rich-had-sent-44000-internal-emails-to-wikileaks-report/article/2623186
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on May 16, 2017, 07:22:09 AM
This , if true, completely debunks the whole Russia did conspiracy theory.  It was not the Russians.  It was , again if true , a DNC staffer that leaked. 

What say mccain - you disappointed you prick - sorry but I am sick of him. 
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2017, 09:30:42 AM
If memory serves, Obama flapped his gums quite a few times e.g. regarding what was found in the OBL hit, giving data on Brit nukes to the Russians, and more.  Let's see if we can dig up some citations.
Title: McMaster: “The president in no way compromised any sources or methods.”
Post by: G M on May 16, 2017, 09:32:22 AM
http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/05/live-mcmaster-speaks-to-press-about-trump-russia/

McMaster: “The president in no way compromised any sources or methods.”

 
 
 
Posted by Mary Chastain      Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 11:33am
McMaster described the discussion with the Russians as “wholly appropriate.”

Yesterday, The Washington Post caused mass hysteria when it released a report that President Donald Trump provided highly classified information to the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador. Of course the publication used anonymous sources.

Now, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster will address the media over this story. He denied the story twice yesterday, stating “I was in the room. It didn’t happen.”




McMaster starts the conference by saying that Trump will speak to leaders of Muslim countries to confront radical Islam. He continues to describe his visit to Israel.

McMaster stands by his denial of the WaPo story and the premise of the article is false. Our national security is at risk when those violate confidentiality. Trump did not say anything inappropriate or violate our national security.

He again tells the press that the discussion was “wholly appropriate” and was standard info discussed with heads of states working together. He is also not concerned that others will start withholding information from us.

McMaster reminds the press that Tillerson and Powell were in the room as well and no one thought the information was inappropriate. He also said that it’s “wholly appropriate for the president to share whatever information necessary to advance the security” of our country.

The information he talked about was about operations already going on and known to the public.

The president in NO WAY compromised sources or methods during the conversation with the Russians.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on May 16, 2017, 09:33:57 AM
If memory serves, Obama flapped his gums quite a few times e.g. regarding what was found in the OBL hit, giving data on Brit nukes to the Russians, and more.  Let's see if we can dig up some citations.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8304654/WikiLeaks-cables-US-agrees-to-tell-Russia-Britains-nuclear-secrets.html

Good thing we haven't had a malignant narcissistic incompetent buffoon who discloses sensitive information to the Russians as president before.
 rolleyes
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 16, 2017, 09:40:30 AM
In case there is any additional info in this article:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/murdered-dnc-staffer-seth-rich-had-sent-44000-internal-emails-to-wikileaks-report/article/2623186

http://www.fox5dc.com/news/local-news/254852337-story
Now, questions have been raised on why D.C. police, the lead agency on this murder investigation for the past ten months, have insisted this was a robbery gone bad when there appears to be no evidence to suggest that.

Wheeler, a former D.C. police homicide detective, is running a parallel investigation into Rich’s murder. He said he believes there is a cover-up and the police department has been told to back down from the investigation.

   -Tell the police to back down from a DC murder investigation - under Comey and Obama?  Imagine that happening under Trump.


ccp:  "This , if true, completely debunks the whole Russia conspiracy theory.  It was not the Russians."

Wikileaks has said all along it was not the Russian government.  Strange that they have more credibility than most of Washington.
Title: Obama 'Put a Target on Their Backs', SEAL Team 6 Family Members Say
Post by: G M on May 16, 2017, 09:45:56 AM
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/05/09/obama-put-a-target-on-their-backs-seal-team-6-family-members-say

Obama 'Put a Target on Their Backs', SEAL Team 6 Family Members Say
Family members question SEAL Team 6's most deadly incident.

By Paul D. Shinkman, Senior National Security Writer | May 9, 2013, at 2:22 p.m.
MORE
 
Obama 'Put a Target on Their Backs', SEAL Team 6 Family Members Say
      

(AP PHOTOS)
The families of some of the 17 SEAL Team 6 commandos who were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan during a helicopter flight to help Army Rangers pinned down by Taliban gunmen accused the Obama administration of deliberately endangering their loved ones for political ends.

[PHOTOS: America's Elite Navy SEALs]

During a press conference on Washington Thursday, family and advocates for the fallen troops called into question the rules of engagement that they say prohibited their sons from being able to return fire, and the White House's decision to announce shortly after the killing of Osama bin Laden that SEAL Team 6 was responsible for the raid.

"In releasing their identity, they put a target on their backs," said Doug Hamburger, whose son, Army Staff Sgt. Patrick Hamburger, served among the helicopter's crew.

The event was organized by Freedom Watch, a conservative advocacy group, at the National Press Club. One by one, fathers and mothers of the victims of the crash spoke about what they see as gaping holes or inconsistencies in the review of what U.S. Special Operations considers its most deadly incident.

In all, 17 members of the SEAL Team 6 counterterrorist force were on board the CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter, along with its Army National Guard aircrew, several support personnel and seven Afghan commandos. In all 38 troops died after the helicopter was shot down by what a review determined to be a Taliban RPG over Wardak Province, Afghanistan, on Aug. 6, 2011.


 

The team was responding to an Army Ranger unit that was engaged in a protracted firefight with Taliban fighters and needed reinforcements.

The families hope to raise awareness of the incident, which they say the government has largely forgotten since the official report was released in October 2011.

Some congressional lawmakers demonstrated their support for the group, including former Florida Republican Rep. Allan West -- an Iraq war vet -- and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.

[PHOTOS: Killing Osama bin Laden]

While the press conference was long on speculation and short on concrete evidence, the family members and their supporters didn't pull any punches.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense for Intelligence and was a commander in the Army's super-secret "Delta Force," denounced politicized rules of engagement as a "deliberate plot" within the American armed forces that he says puts political correctness above the safety of the troops.

"We've allowed politics to become more important than the lives and safety of those men and women," he says.

Petty Officer 1st Class Aaron Vaughn was one of the SEAL Team 6 operators who died in the crash. His father Billy Vaughn recounted Thursday a phone call from his son following the White House decision to credit the highly secretive military unit for the bin Laden raid.

"He said, 'Mom, there's chatter. My life is in danger. Your life is in danger. Get everything off your social media. Our families are in danger,' " Vaughn recalled.

[PHOTOS: Fighting in Afghanistan Continues]

Aaron Vaughn's mother, Karen, also demanded an explanation for why her son and his team were not using a special operations aircraft, such as the Chinooks flown by special operations pilots, which have specialized defenses designed to fly commandos deep behind enemy lines. The CH-47D that embarked on the mission that day had been built in the 1960s, she said, and last retrofitted in the 1985.

It is not uncommon for commandos to fly some of their missions aboard such aircraft in the war zone, however.

She also said the team was hindered by rules of engagement that prohibited their firing on potential targets unless they could see a weapon. Military officials told her operating outside of these rules "damages our efforts to win the hearts and minds of our enemies."

"The hearts and minds of our enemy are more valuable to our government than my son's blood," she said. "We have an ideology problem with this war, and we need to address it."
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/5/obama-stonewalls-seal-team-6-extortion-17-helicopt/

Obama stonewalls SEAL Team 6 helicopter crash probe, watchdog says

Petty Officer First Class Ian Regnier (above left) carries the remains of Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Joseph Strange, a cryptology technician, killed alongside members of SEAL Team 6 when their helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan in 2011 (bottom). The families of Strange and the other victims are demanding the White House release documents relevant to the incident. (Associated Press)

By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Wednesday, August 5, 2015

The Obama administration is violating a judge’s order to turn over documents in the Aug. 6, 2011, shootdown of a U.S. helicopter — call sign Extortion 17 — that killed members of SEAL Team 6 in Afghanistan, a watchdog group is charging.
On the fourth anniversary of the worst one-day loss of military life in the war on terror, families of the dead say they are aghast that the government will not honor basic requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
“It has now been four years since Extortion 17 was shot down,” said Doug Hamburger, whose Army air crew son, Patrick, was one of the 30 Americans killed. “I find it quite disturbing that the government is not willing to give us the answers we deserve. I find it very irritating that we will not question the Afghans about their knowledge of what took place that night.”
U.S. Central Command’s official investigation concluded that a rocket-launched grenade from a Taliban fighter standing near the landing zone clipped a rotary wing, sending the Ch-47 Chinook into a violent downward spin. It was the worst day for fatalities in the history of naval special warfare.
The tragedy took some of the glow off SEAL Team 6’s grand achievement just three months earlier: A team penetrated Pakistan airspace, infiltrated a compound in Abbottabad and killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
The families accept the fact that a single shot brought down the helicopter. But some say the official report, which contained no direct criticism of decision-makers that day, did not delve deeply enough.
 

They believe SEAL Team 6 had a target on its back and that persons inside the Afghan National Security Forces may have tipped off the Taliban that night in Tangi Valley. That is why, they say, a fighter just happened to be stationed in a turret within 150 yards of a landing zone that had never been used before.
A Defense Department special operations official told a House subcommittee last year that there is no indication the mission was compromised by the Afghans.
Family members are hoping Freedom Watch, a watchdog legal group led by Larry Klayman, can force new disclosures using the power of the FOIA process.
Since filing a lawsuit, Mr. Klayman says, he has been “stonewalled” by the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the CIA and the National Security Agency.
U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon in February signed an order requiring the Obama administration to release documents on a continual basis through the spring and summer. The Justice Department said at least 50 documents in the Pentagon have been identified as relevant, but only one has been turned over. And Justice unilaterally set a new deadline for the release and then ignored it, Mr. Klayman said. Throughout, he said, Justice lawyers have refused to take his phone calls.
“They don’t even produce under their own self-imposed deadline,” Mr. Klayman told The Washington Times. “We’re pleading with the judge to do something, and he’s just sitting on it.”
In one of his motions, Mr. Klayman stated: “As this Court must be aware, this is not an ordinary Freedom of Information Act case, it involves obtaining records concerning the deaths of Navy SEAL Team 6 and other special operations forces on a mission with the call sign Extortion 17. The families of these deceased heroes have been stonewalled by the Obama Department of Defense and the Obama National Security Agency in disrespect over their sons’ unexplained tragic deaths. Many of these family members are undergoing psychological care over what has become a double tragedy: the deaths of their sons and the cover-up for which these family members feel betrayed by their own government.”
Mr. Klayman said the NSA has agreed to provide some information. Since the agency’s main task is to eavesdrop on phone and Internet messages, it may have recorded communications related to the attack.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said there would be no comment beyond its court filings. Its lawyers have told the judge that the process of locating relevant documents and removing classified information takes time.
The mission
It was exactly four years ago, at 2:22 a.m., that a rebuilt conventional CH-47 Chinook helicopter took off from a forward operating base, carrying some of the most skilled and advanced warriors ever molded by U.S. special operations.
Onboard were 17 members of SEAL Team 6; five naval special warfare operators, including one to intercept communications and another to handle Bart the war dog; five Army flight crewmen, including a National Guard and an Army Reserve pilot; and three Air Force personnel. The force included seven Afghan soldiers and an Afghan interpreter.
The mission itself has proven controversial to some family members. The immediate reaction force (IRF) was assembled hastily for insertion into Tangi Valley to help Army Rangers capture fleeing Taliban.
The Rangers were not in need of rescue. Military officers interviewed by investigators said they could not recall an IRF ever being sent for such a mission.
The Chinook was descending on a noisy battlefield where Apache helicopters and a C-130 gunship had been buzzing overhead for three hours, alerting Taliban fighters. Planners selected a landing zone that had never been used before. The Chinook had no Apache escort, as did the Ranger team that enjoyed the element of surprise when it touched down hours earlier.
The two Apaches, Gun 1 and Gun 2, on scene were never emphatically told to move near the landing zone to scan for threats. They stayed fixed on enemy “squirters,” or runners, until just a few minutes before landing.
“Honestly, sir, I don’t think anybody had really looked at the LZ,” said the pilot of Gun 1. “I mean, at any time if we would have found these squirters, or they would have found weapons, we were — the way I was understanding it, we were going to be clear to engage due to the fact that they had weapons, but we had to [positively identify] them first.”
He added: “So we hadn’t started looking at the LZ yet, just due to there was so much more of a threat to the east with the squirters. I would say that on the three-minute call is when Gun 2 started looking at the LZ, giving an LZ brief op. I would say that was the first time that we really had eyes on the LZ.”
No one saw two Taliban armed with grenade launchers standing on a mud-brick turret well within range of the descending chopper.
The navigator on the AC-130 gunship said there was simply too much gun and engine noise to think that the Chinook could make an undetected entrance.
“One of the other things that we did talk about — kind of what you’re hitting on, sir, is about the fact that, you know, for three hours we had been burning holes in the sky,” the officer told investigators. “You’ve got [Apaches] flying around, so there’s a lot of noise going on and, basically, this entire valley knows that there’s something happening in this area. So, to do an infil on the X or Y, you know, having that element of surprise in the beginning of an operation is good, but by the time we’ve been there for three hours, and the party’s up, bringing in another aircraft like that, you know, may not be the most tactically sound decision.”
Today, some family members are not just disappointed in the investigation and the FOIA process, but also in how the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security conducted a brief hearing in Feb. 2014.
No family members were allowed to testify. The Pentagon’s witness stuck to a theme that no mistakes were made that night, though the investigative file contained testimony from a number of witnesses saying the mission was riddled with missteps.
“The hearing as it took place was meant to honor the heroes of Extortion 17 instead of to answer our questions,” Mr. Hamburger said.
“During the last several years it is evident that our government has spent a lot of time and resources covering up the truth on many things from both our allies and the American public,” Mr. Hamburger added. “Things like Benghazi and the NSA. I am afraid that with this FOIA case that the government is purposely delaying turning over documents because they need the time to redact and to delete things they do not want the American public to become aware of.”
Charlie Strange, whose Navy cryptologist son, Michael, was on Extortion 17, told The Times last year that it was too much of a coincidence for Taliban to be standing so near the landing zone.
“Somebody was leaking to the Taliban,” said Mr. Strange. “They knew. Somebody tipped them off. There were guys in a tower. Guys on the bush line. They were sitting there, waiting. And they sent our guys right into the middle.”
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on May 16, 2017, 09:58:13 AM
A different offense, but here is James Clapper (of Muslim Brotherhood is secular fame) lying under oath to the Senate Committee, March 12, 2013:

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked Clapper for a yes or no answer to the following question: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” Clapper replied.

Wyden, who appeared taken aback by the answer, tried again: “It does not?”

“Not wittingly,” Clapper responded. “There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

Three months later, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian newspaper began publishing a series of reports about the NSA based on documents stolen from the agency by Edward Snowden that proved Clapper had perjured himself.

Days after The Guardian’s bombshell report, Clapper told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that he had responded in “what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner.”

Three weeks later, under increasing pressure, Clapper wrote a letter to the senators on the committee, apologizing for providing a “clearly erroneous” answer. He also changed his story, jettisoning the excuse he had tried to answer in the “least untruthful” manner, and instead claimed the reason he had misled Congress is that he had “forgotten” about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which covered the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata.

Needless to say, members of Congress were not amused. Yet despite calls for his ouster and for criminal charges to be brought against him for perjury, Clapper suffered no consequences for lying to members of the Senate and remained in his position as director of DNI through the end of President Obama’s term.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3d-re0dtKA
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/james-clappers-least-untruthful-statement-to-the-senate/2013/06/11/e50677a8-d2d8-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_blog.html?utm_term=.1d63cf59b8f5
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/05/16/james_clappers_assault_on_democracy_133897.html#2

"The fault was with the Senator, for asking the question."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/mar/11/james-clappers-testimony-one-year-later/
Title: Israel did it?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2017, 10:56:17 AM
We're looking for intel leaks right now, not just fibbing.

================
 :-o :-o :-o
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/world/middleeast/israel-trump-classified-intelligence-russia.html?emc=edit_na_20170516&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

Either this is a spectacular case of people not being able to keep their mouths shut, or the Israeli's are saving Donald's ass/covering for some Arab agency.
Title: Re: Israel did it?
Post by: G M on May 16, 2017, 11:03:41 AM
We're looking for intel leaks right now, not just fibbing.

================
 :-o :-o :-o
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/world/middleeast/israel-trump-classified-intelligence-russia.html?emc=edit_na_20170516&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

Either this is a spectacular case of people not being able to keep their mouths shut, or the Israeli's are saving Donald's ass/covering for some Arab agency.

The NYT and unnamed sources have the same credibility as Prisonplanet.com IMHO.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2017, 02:37:35 PM
This from Caroline Glick:

"Oh, and to all the people attacking Trump about Russia, just one word: Stuxnet.  The top secret information Obama transferred to Iran was mountainous, the transfers were repeated acts, not one offs and their effects were ruinous to US allies and to the US itself."

MARC:  I would add revealing the Isreali landing deal with Azerbijian.

Also, wasn't there the matter of revealing that we had captured OBLs' computer?
Title: Previous intel brain farts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2017, 05:36:28 PM
secondpost

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447682/trump-shared-classified-information-russia-obama-iran-hillary-clinton-email?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-05-16&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Up from the memory hole: CIA chief in Afg dentified
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2017, 04:58:33 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-mistakenly-identifies-cia-chief-in-afghanistan/2014/05/25/ac8e80cc-e444-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html?utm_term=.caebd9eb0f60
Title: Guests Remind NBC, CNN: Obama Gave Classified Intel to Russia
Post by: G M on May 17, 2017, 06:12:46 AM
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kyle-drennen/2017/05/16/guests-remind-nbc-cnn-obama-gave-classified-intel-russia

Guests Remind NBC, CNN: Obama Gave Classified Intel to Russia
By Kyle Drennen | May 16, 2017 | 12:39 PM EDT

 
While NBC and CNN joined the rest of the media in rushing to condemn the Trump White House over an unconfirmed Washington Post report that the President inadvertently shared classified information with Russian officials, guests on both networks provided important context that the Obama administration intentionally shared classified intelligence with Russia less than a year ago.

Appearing on Friday’s NBC Today, security analyst Juan Zarate warned: “The problem is the Russians aren’t trustworthy. The Russians have proven that when we’ve provided information in the past, they’ve used it against us.” He then proceeded to explain how former President Obama gave the Russians classified information just months ago:


Back in the summer of 2016, the Obama administration provided some information to the Russians about some of the things happening on the ground. Guess what happened? The Russians then attacked some of those sites of our allies, our proxies that we were working with. And that’s a problem.


Meanwhile, over on CNN’s New Day, political analyst Jeffrey Lord provided some “perspective” to anchor Chris Cuomo:

The only thing I would say here, Chris is perspective. Perspective is all. I'm holding two headlines from the Washington Post, one of May 25th, 2014, “White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan.” The Obama administration put the name of the CIA on the press release, exposed him and endangered his life. The second one, June 30, 2016, “U.S. Offers to share Syrian intelligence on terrorist with Russia,” which is to say the Obama administration wanted to give their intelligence to the Russians. All I'm saying here is there’s perspective. We need to find out the facts and let’s have perspective.

Incidentally, notice that the 2014 story was from the same Post reporter, Greg Miller, who wrote Monday's article.

In sharp contrast to the wall-to-wall media coverage of the Trump story, Obama offering to share intel with Russia was greeted with yawns from the press.

Here are excerpts of the May 16 exchanges on NBC and CNN:

Today
7:10 AM ET

(...)

MATT LAUER: Can you just clarify something? This concerns an ISIS plot. The Russians are supposed to be our partners in fighting ISIS. So explain why sharing of information with them is so dangerous.

JUAN ZARATE: Well, two reasons. First of all, I think the President may think that he’s trying to create some degree of trust, maybe trying to create some cooperation on the ground. That may be in the back of his mind. The problem is the Russians aren’t trustworthy. The Russians have proven that when we’ve provided information in the past, they’ve used it against us.

Back in the summer of 2016, the Obama administration provided some information to the Russians about some of the things happening on the ground. Guess what happened? The Russians then attacked some of those sites of our allies, our proxies that we were working with. And that’s a problem.

And I think part of the challenge here is, how much can we trust the Russians? What you’re seeing here is a deficit of trust, a deficit of discipline, I think, on the part of the President.

(...)


New Day
6:34 AM ET

CHRIS CUOMO: All right. This latest self-imposed and perhaps most egregious error by the president is sparking all kinds of questions about competence, was his inability to protect highly classified information with Russian diplomats a sign that he's not up to the job. There's a New York Times op-ed you should read for your self from David Brooks. The headline is this, when the world is led by a child. It says, quote, “From all we know so far, Trump didn't do it,” talking about the classified information, “because he's a Russian agent or from any malevolent intent. He did it because he is sloppy, because he lacks all impulse control, and above all because he is a 7-year-old boy desperate for the approval of those he admires.” Let’s discuss Jeffrey Lord, former commentator and White House official and David from senior editor at the Atlantic. Jeffrey, I'm sure you have a robust defense for why this is a nor his criticism of the president is unwarranted so give it to us.

JEFFERY LORD: Okay. The only thing I would say here, Chris is perspective. Perspective is all. I'm holding two headlines from the Washington Post, one of May 25th, 2014, “White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan.” The Obama administration put the name of the CIA on the press release, exposed him and endangered his life. The second one, June 30, 2016, "U.S. Offers to share Syrian intelligence on terrorist with Russia," which is to say the Obama administration wanted to give their intelligence to the Russians. All I'm saying here is there's perspective. We need to find out the facts and let's have perspective. With all respect to David Brooks he's a never-Trumper. That's fine. But from that perspective, Donald Trump isn't going to do anything David Brooks likes. As I remember famously with David Brooks, he was certain Senator Obama would be a great president because of the crease in his slacks. I mean, with all due respect --

CUOMO: That was a rhetorical flourish from Brooks but let's put that to the side, you've made your point.

(...)                   
Title: Pravda on the Beach on Trump and the Intel Community
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2017, 08:00:31 AM
Obama wanting to give intel is not on point-- he ran it by intel community first.  The accusation here is that Trump did not. Nor is the fuk-up of underlings on point.
======================

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-trump-intel-war-20170516-story.html
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on May 19, 2017, 05:51:22 PM
Maybe i am wrong but i think people are being offered rewards for the information.   Money, cash, jobs , shares, something is going  on .  This is disgusting. 
Why can't we find out who are doing this and prosecute them?

https://news.grabien.com/story-networks-these-white-house-leaks-are-aimed-undermining-presi
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on May 20, 2017, 09:06:40 AM
I agree with Brennan about the leaks being the big national security problem.  But why can't the leaks be stopped? 

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2017/05/19/dems-media-intel-folks-fall-into-no-evidence-column-on-trump-campaign-collusion-with-russia/
Title: POTH: Chinese killing and imprisoning US CIA agents
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2017, 10:53:37 AM
WASHINGTON — The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.

Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.’s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.

Assessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of American assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years.

The previously unreported episode shows how successful the Chinese were in disrupting American spying efforts and stealing secrets years before a well-publicized breach in 2015 gave Beijing access to thousands of government personnel records, including intelligence contractors. The C.I.A. considers spying in China one of its top priorities, but the country’s extensive security apparatus makes it exceptionally hard for Western spy services to develop sources there.

At a time when the C.I.A. is trying to figure out how some of its most sensitive documents were leaked onto the internet two months ago by WikiLeaks, and the F.B.I. investigates possible ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, the unsettled nature of the China investigation demonstrates the difficulty of conducting counterespionage investigations into sophisticated spy services like those in Russia and China.

The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. both declined to comment.

Details about the investigation have been tightly held. Ten current and former American officials described the investigation on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing the information.
Photo
Investigators still disagree how it happened, but the unsettled nature of the China investigation demonstrates the difficulty of conducting counterespionage investigations into sophisticated spy services. Credit Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press..

The first signs of trouble emerged in 2010. At the time, the quality of the C.I.A.’s information about the inner workings of the Chinese government was the best it had been for years, the result of recruiting sources deep inside the bureaucracy in Beijing, four former officials said. Some were Chinese nationals who the C.I.A. believed had become disillusioned with the Chinese government’s corruption.

But by the end of the year, the flow of information began to dry up. By early 2011, senior agency officers realized they had a problem: Assets in China, one of their most precious resources, were disappearing.

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. opened a joint investigation run by top counterintelligence officials at both agencies. Working out of a secret office in Northern Virginia, they began analyzing every operation being run in Beijing. One former senior American official said the investigation had been code-named Honey Badger.

As more and more sources vanished, the operation took on increased urgency. Nearly every employee at the American Embassy was scrutinized, no matter how high ranking. Some investigators believed the Chinese had cracked the encrypted method that the C.I.A. used to communicate with its assets. Others suspected a traitor in the C.I.A., a theory that agency officials were at first reluctant to embrace — and that some in both agencies still do not believe.

Their debates were punctuated with macabre phone calls — “We lost another one” — and urgent questions from the Obama administration wondering why intelligence about the Chinese had slowed.

The mole hunt eventually zeroed in on a former agency operative who had worked in the C.I.A.’s division overseeing China, believing he was most likely responsible for the crippling disclosures. But efforts to gather enough evidence to arrest him failed, and he is now living in another Asian country, current and former officials said.

There was good reason to suspect an insider, some former officials say. Around that time, Chinese spies compromised National Security Agency surveillance in Taiwan — an island Beijing claims is part of China — by infiltrating Taiwanese intelligence, an American partner, according to two former officials. And the C.I.A. had discovered Chinese operatives in the agency’s hiring pipeline, according to officials and court documents.

But the C.I.A.’s top spy hunter, Mark Kelton, resisted the mole theory, at least initially, former officials say. Mr. Kelton had been close friends with Brian J. Kelley, a C.I.A. officer who in the 1990s was wrongly suspected by the F.B.I. of being a Russian spy. The real traitor, it turned out, was Mr. Hanssen. Mr. Kelton often mentioned Mr. Kelley’s mistreatment in meetings during the China episode, former colleagues say, and said he would not accuse someone without ironclad evidence.

Those who rejected the mole theory attributed the losses to sloppy American tradecraft at a time when the Chinese were becoming better at monitoring American espionage activities in the country. Some F.B.I. agents became convinced that C.I.A. handlers in Beijing too often traveled the same routes to the same meeting points, which would have helped China’s vast surveillance network identify the spies in its midst.


Some officers met their sources at a restaurant where Chinese agents had planted listening devices, former officials said, and even the waiters worked for Chinese intelligence.

This carelessness, coupled with the possibility that the Chinese had hacked the covert communications channel, would explain many, if not all, of the disappearances and deaths, some former officials said. Some in the agency, particularly those who had helped build the spy network, resisted this theory and believed they had been caught in the middle of a turf war within the C.I.A.

Still, the Chinese picked off more and more of the agency’s spies, continuing through 2011 and into 2012. As investigators narrowed the list of suspects with access to the information, they started focusing on a Chinese-American who had left the C.I.A. shortly before the intelligence losses began. Some investigators believed he had become disgruntled and had begun spying for China. One official said the man had access to the identities of C.I.A. informants and fit all the indicators on a matrix used to identify espionage threats.

After leaving the C.I.A., the man decided to remain in Asia with his family and pursue a business opportunity, which some officials suspect that Chinese intelligence agents had arranged.

Officials said the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. lured the man back to the United States around 2012 with a ruse about a possible contract with the agency, an arrangement common among former officers. Agents questioned the man, asking why he had decided to stay in Asia, concerned that he possessed a number of secrets that would be valuable to the Chinese. It’s not clear whether agents confronted the man about whether he had spied for China.

The man defended his reasons for living in Asia and did not admit any wrongdoing, an official said. He then returned to Asia.

By 2013, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. concluded that China’s success in identifying C.I.A. agents had been blunted — it is not clear how — but the damage had been done.

The C.I.A. has tried to rebuild its network of spies in China, officials said, an expensive and time-consuming effort led at one time by the former chief of the East Asia Division. A former intelligence official said the former chief was particularly bitter because he had worked with the suspected mole and recruited some of the spies in China who were ultimately executed.

China has been particularly aggressive in its espionage in recent years, beyond the breach of the Office of Personnel Management records in 2015, American officials said. Last year, an F.B.I. employee pleaded guilty to acting as a Chinese agent for years, passing sensitive technology information to Beijing in exchange for cash, lavish hotel rooms during foreign travel and prostitutes.

In March, prosecutors announced the arrest of a longtime State Department employee, Candace Marie Claiborne, accused of lying to investigators about her contacts with Chinese officials. According to to the criminal complaint against Ms. Claiborne, who pleaded not guilty, Chinese agents wired cash into her bank account and showered her with gifts that included an iPhone, a laptop and tuition at a Chinese fashion school. In addition, according to the complaint, she received a fully furnished apartment and a stipend.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on May 20, 2017, 06:38:24 PM
" prosecutors announced the arrest of a longtime State Department employee, Candace Marie Claiborne, accused of lying to investigators about her contacts with Chinese officials. According to to the criminal complaint against Ms. Claiborne, who pleaded not guilty, Chinese agents wired cash into her bank account and showered her with gifts that included an iPhone, a laptop and tuition at a Chinese fashion school. In addition, according to the complaint, she received a fully furnished apartment and a stipend."

So why would anyone think the Times or Post or CNN is simply not paying off moles inside the White House?

It would seem to be infinitely easier to find out who are responsible for the leaks here.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2017, 09:11:32 AM
"So why would anyone think the Times or Post or CNN is simply not paying off moles inside the White House?"

Because they know better than anyone that secrets are not kept.  The blow back would blow them the fk up and the know it.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on May 21, 2017, 09:46:30 AM
"So why would anyone think the Times or Post or CNN is simply not paying off moles inside the White House?"

Because they know better than anyone that secrets are not kept.  The blow back would blow them the fk up and the know it.

https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/top-5-biggest-lies-liberal-media-journalists/

They don't need sources to just make sh#t up.
Title: Caroline Glick on the Intel Communities dis-intel campaign against Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2017, 12:26:10 PM
Trump and Israel: Enemies of the System

May 22, 2017     Caroline Glick

The United States is sailing in uncharted waters today as the intelligence-security community wages an all-but-declared rebellion against President Donald Trump.

Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein’s decision on Wednesday to appoint former FBI director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating allegations of “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” is the latest and so far most significant development in this grave saga.

Who are the people seeking to unseat Trump? This week we learned that the powers at play are deeply familiar. Trump’s nameless opponents are some of Israel’s greatest antagonists in the US security establishment.

This reality was exposed this week with intelligence leaks related to Trump’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. To understand what happened, let’s start with the facts that are undisputed about that meeting.

The main thing that is not in dispute is that during his meeting with Lavrov, Trump discussed Islamic State’s plan to blow up passenger flights with bombs hidden in laptop computers.

It’s hard to find fault with Trump’s actions. First of all, the ISIS plot has been public knowledge for several weeks.

Second, the Russians are enemies of ISIS. Moreover, Russia has a specific interest in diminishing ISIS’s capacity to harm civilian air traffic. In October 2015, ISIS terrorists in Egypt downed a Moscow-bound jetliner, killing all 254 people on board with a bomb smuggled on board in a soda can.

And now on to the issues that are in dispute.

Hours after the Trump-Lavrov meeting, The Washington Post reported that in sharing information about ISIS’s plans, Trump exposed intelligence sources and methods to Russia and in so doing, he imperiled ongoing intelligence operations carried out by a foreign government.

The next day, The New York Times reported that the sources and methods involved were Israeli. In sharing information about the ISIS plot with Lavrov, the media reported, Trump endangered Israel.

There are two problems with this narrative.

First, Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster insisted that there was no way that Trump could have exposed sources and methods, because he didn’t know where the information on the ISIS plot that he discussed with Lavrov originated.

Second, if McMaster’s version is true – and it’s hard to imagine that McMaster would effectively say that his boss is an ignoramus if it weren’t true – then the people who harmed Israel’s security were the leakers, not Trump.

Now who are these leakers? According to the Washington Post, the leakers are members of the US intelligence community and former members of the US intelligence community, (the latter, presumably were political appointees in senior intelligence positions during the Obama administration who resigned when Trump came into office).

Israel is no stranger to this sort of operation. Throughout the Obama administration, US officials illegally leaked top secret information about Israeli operations to the media.

In 2010, a senior defense source exposed the Stuxnet computer worm to the New York Times. Stuxnet was reportedly a cyber weapon developed jointly by the US and Israel. It was infiltrated into the computer system at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. It reportedly sabotaged a large quantity of centrifuges at the installation.

The revelation of Stuxnet’s existence and purpose ended the operation. Moreover, much of Iran’s significant cyber capabilities were reportedly developed by reverse engineering the Stuxnet.

Obama made his support for the leak clear three days before he left office. On January 17, 2017, Obama pardoned Marine Gen. James Cartwright for his role in illegally divulging the Stuxnet program to the Times.

In 2012, US officials told the media that Israel had struck targets in Syria. The leak, which was repeated several times in subsequent years, made it more dangerous for Israel to operate against Iranian and Hezbollah forces in Syria.

Also in 2012, ahead of the presidential election, US officials informed journalists that Israel was operating in air bases in Azerbaijan with the purpose of attacking Iran’s nuclear sites in air strikes originating from those bases.

Israel’s alleged plan to attack Iran was abruptly canceled.

In all of these cases, the goal of the leak was to harm Israel.

In contrast, the goal of this week’s leaks was to harm Trump. Israel was collateral damage.

The key point is that the leaks are coming from the same places in both cases.

All of them are members of the US intelligence community with exceedingly high security clearances. And all of them willingly committed felony offenses when they shared top secret information with reporters.

That is, all of them believe that it is perfectly all right to make political use of intelligence to advance a political goal. In the case of the anti-Israel leaks under Obama, their purpose was to prevent Israel from degrading Iran’s nuclear capacity and military power at a time that Obama was working to empower Iran at Israel’s expense.

In the case of the Trump-Lavrov leak, the purpose was to undermine Israel’s security as a means of harming Trump politically.

What happened to the US intelligence community? How did its members come to believe that they have the right to abuse the knowledge they gained as intelligence officers in order to advance a partisan agenda? As former CIA station chief Scott Uehlinger explained in an article published in March in The Hill, the Obama administration oversaw a program of deliberate politicization of the US intelligence community.

The first major step toward this end was initiated by then-US attorney general Eric Holder in August 2009.

Holder announced then that he intended to appoint a special counsel to investigate claims that CIA officers tortured terrorists while interrogating them.

The purpose of Holder’s announcement wasn’t to secure indictments. The points was to transform the CIA politically and culturally.

And it worked.

Shortly after Holder’s announcement, an exodus began of the CIA’s best operations officers. Men and women with years of experience operating in enemy territory resigned.

Uehlinger’s article related that during the Obama years, intelligence officers were required to abide by strict rules of political correctness.

In his words, “In this PC world, all diversity is embraced – except diversity of thought. Federal workers have been partisan for years, but combined with the rigid Obama PC mindset, it has created a Frankenstein of politicization that has never been seen before.”

Over the years, US intelligence officers at all levels have come to view themselves as soldiers in an army with its own agenda – which largely overlapped Obama’s.

Trump’s agenda on the other hand is viewed as anathema by members of this powerful group. Likewise, the notion of a strong Israel capable of defending its interests without American help and permission is more dangerous than the notion of Iran armed with nuclear weapons.

Given these convictions, it is no surprise that unnamed intelligence sources are leaking a tsunami of selective and deceptive intelligence against Trump and his advisers.

The sense of entitlement that prevails in the intelligence community was on prominent display in an astounding interview that Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, gave to MSNBS in early March.

Farkas, who resigned her position in late 2015 to work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, admitted to her interviewer that the intelligence community was spying on Trump and his associates and that ahead of Obama’s departure from office, they were transferring massive amounts of intelligence information about Trump and his associates to Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill in order to ensure that those Democratic politicians would use the information gathered to harm Trump.

In her words, “The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealings with Russians… would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that information.”

Farkas then explained that the constant leaks of Trump’s actions to the media were part of the initiative that she had urged her counterparts to undertake.

And Farkas was proud of what her colleagues had done and were doing.

Two days after Farkas’s interview, Trump published his tweet accusing former president Barack Obama of spying on him.

Although the media and the intelligence community angrily and contemptuously denied Trump’s assertion, the fact is that both Farkas’s statement and information that became public both before and since Trump’s inauguration lends credence to his claim.

In the days ahead of the inauguration we learned that in the summer of 2016, Obama’s Justice Department conducted a criminal probe into suspicions that Trump’s senior aides had committed crimes in their dealings with Russian banks. Those suspicions, upon investigation, were dismissed. In other words, the criminal probe led nowhere.

Rather than drop the matter, Obama’s Justice Department decided to continue the probe but transform it into a national security investigation.

After a failed attempt in July 2016, in October 2016, a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court approved a Justice Department request to monitor the communications of Trump’s senior advisers. Since the subjects of the probe were working from Trump’s office and communicating with him by phone and email, the warrant requested – which the FISA court granted – also subjected Trump’s direct communications to incidental collection.

So from at least October 2016 through Trump’s inauguration, the US intelligence community was spying on Trump and his advisers, despite the fact that they were not suspected of committing any crimes.

This brings us back to this week’s Russia story which together with the media hysteria following Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, precipitated Rosenstein’s decision to appoint Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating the allegations that Trump and or his advisers acted unlawfully or in a manner that endangered the US in their dealings with Russia.

It is too early to judge how Mueller will conduct his investigation. But if the past is any guide, he is liable to keep the investigation going indefinitely, paralyzing Trump’s ability to conduct foreign policy in relation to Russia and a host of other issues.

This then brings us to Trump and Israel – the twin targets of the US intelligence community’s felonious and injurious leaks.

The fact that Trump will be coming to Israel next week may be a bit of fortuitous timing. Given the stakes involved for Trump, for Israel and for US national security, perhaps Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can develop a method of fighting this cabal of faceless, lawless foes together.

How such a fight would look and what it would involve is not immediately apparent and anyways should never be openly discussed. But the fact is that working together, Israel and Trump may accomplish more than either can accomplish on their own. And with so much hanging in the balance, it makes sense to at least try.
Title: Well, now that Comey is out of the way, perhaps an investigation can get going
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2017, 09:29:31 AM
Well, now that Comey is out of the way, perhaps an investigation can get going

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/world/europe/trump-may-leaks-manchester.html?emc=edit_na_20170525&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Trump tells Duterte about subs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2017, 12:06:27 PM
https://www.buzzfeed.com/nancyyoussef/the-pentagon-is-facepalming-hard-over-trumps-disclosure-of?utm_term=.dsPxA1zWj#.sdEAR7ye1

Maybe a naive question, but if you were trying to get Duterte back on board against the Norks and backing away from the Chinese, letting him know who the strong horse is seems to have a logic, yes?
Title: Russian Espionage ignored for many years, getting very aggro
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2017, 06:52:50 AM
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/01/russia-spies-espionage-trump-239003
Title: WaPo: Trump Admin negotiating return of Russian compounds in US?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2017, 06:58:27 AM
second post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-moves-to-return-russian-compounds-in-maryland-and-new-york/2017/05/31/3c4778d2-4616-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?utm_term=.10fe7779c714
Title: IC too big?
Post by: bigdog on June 01, 2017, 01:43:32 PM
https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/09/nctc-nolan/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2017, 02:30:26 PM
I'm willing to entertain that argument , , ,
Title: Re: IC too big?
Post by: G M on June 01, 2017, 06:53:52 PM
https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/09/nctc-nolan/

In dire need of major cuts. For a multitude of reasons, most importantly, it's threat to American freedom.
Title: Re: IC too big?
Post by: DougMacG on June 02, 2017, 07:05:41 AM
https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/09/nctc-nolan/
In dire need of major cuts. For a multitude of reasons, most importantly, it's threat to American freedom.

There is something misguided about having 17 agencies in charge of something, which leads to no one being in charge and people assuming someone else is handling what is most important.  It leads to leaks and it makes the leaks exponentially harder to track down.   Decisions tend to get made by consensus instead of knowledge and wisdom.

I supported collecting NSA metadata for connecting foreign threats to domestic contacts back when we could say there are no examples of its abuse.  That is no longer true.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2017, 10:01:48 AM
", , , when we could say there are no examples of its abuse.  That is no longer true."

EXACTLY SO.
Title: Gowdy vs. Comey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2017, 10:14:56 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpj6xd9iWz4
Title: Lets get our military electronics from a Chinese company
Post by: ccp on June 04, 2017, 05:03:54 PM
That weasels its' way in the door through a subcontractor:


http://freebeacon.com/national-security/chinese-telecom-zte-subcontracting-pentagon-dhs/

 :-o
Title: Re: Lets get our military electronics from a Chinese company
Post by: G M on June 04, 2017, 07:24:00 PM
That weasels its' way in the door through a subcontractor:


http://freebeacon.com/national-security/chinese-telecom-zte-subcontracting-pentagon-dhs/

 :-o

Wow. We are in the best of hands.
Title: WSJ: Samantha Power unmasked
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2017, 10:16:52 PM
 Barack Obama in 2014 made a large to-do about his reforms of U.S. surveillance programs to “protect the privacy” of Americans. We may soon learn how that squares with his Administration’s unmasking of political opponents.

The House Intelligence Committee Wednesday issued seven subpoenas as part of its Russia probe. But the three most notable demanded that the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation turn over records related to the Obama Administration’s “unmasking” of Trump transition members.

We know that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely eavesdropped on foreign officials who were talking about or meeting with Trump aides. Much less routine is for political appointees to override privacy protections to “unmask,” or learn the identity of, U.S. citizens listed in a resulting intelligence report.

The new subpoenas seek details of all unmasking requests in 2016 by three people: former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. Democrats claim Ms. Rice needed to unmask names to do her job, though this is questionable given that she wasn’t running counterintelligence investigations. They have a better claim with Mr. Brennan.

But Ms. Power’s job was diplomacy. Unmaskings are supposed to be rare, and if the mere ambassador to the U.N. could demand them, what privacy protection was the Obama White House really offering U.S. citizens? The House subpoenas should provide fascinating details about how often Ms. Power and her mates requested unmaskings, on which Trump officials, and with what justification. The public deserves to know given that unmasked details have been leaked to the press in violation of the law and privacy.

Meantime, we learned from Circa News last week of a declassified document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which excoriated the National Security Agency for an “institutional lack of candor.” The court explained that Obama officials had often violated U.S. privacy protections while looking at foreign intelligence but did not disclose these incidents until the waning days of Mr. Obama’s tenure.

“The Oct. 26, 2016 notice [by the Obama Administration] informed the Court that NSA analysts had been conducting [queries that identified U.S. citizens] in violation of [prohibitions] with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court,” read the unsealed document, dated April 26, 2017.

All of this matters because Congress will be asked by the end of this year to reauthorize programs such as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for spying on bad guys and is a vital terror-fighting tool. Even Mr. Obama endorsed 702’s necessity. Congress needs to keep the program going, but it has every right to know first if Team Obama eavesdropped on political opponents.

Appeared in the June 1, 2017, print edition.
Title: The Real Crime-- Leaking
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2017, 10:21:20 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2017/06/04/punishing-real-russia-crime-leaking/
Title: NYTimes outs top CIA operative
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2017, 07:40:12 AM
http://libertyunyielding.com/2017/06/04/following-nyts-outing-top-cia-operative-iran-websites-put-name-town-wifes-name-photos/
Title: Leaker caught!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2017, 05:13:30 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/06/05/breaking-fbi-catches-a-leaker-heres-how-they-did-it/
Title: Leaker a lefty
Post by: G M on June 05, 2017, 07:31:10 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/06/05/breaking-fbi-catches-a-leaker-heres-how-they-did-it/

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/06/05/report-nsa-leaker-part-of-the-left-wing-resistance-ties-to-muslim-civil-rights-groups/
Title: here is the recipient of the lead
Post by: ccp on June 06, 2017, 04:13:59 AM
And the leaker they say is an airforce veteran!!!  And her family is claiming they still don't know what she did. 
Like driving 60 in a 25 mile hr zone and the police officer pulls a person over and the person asks, "what for?"

https://theintercept.com/
Title: Re: here is the recipient of the lead
Post by: G M on June 06, 2017, 06:33:36 AM
And the leaker they say is an airforce veteran!!!  And her family is claiming they still don't know what she did. 
Like driving 60 in a 25 mile hr zone and the police officer pulls a person over and the person asks, "what for?"

https://theintercept.com/

The left's long march through America's institutions is bearing fruit.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on June 06, 2017, 06:46:22 AM
"The left's long march through America's institutions is bearing fruit."

they need to make an example out of her.

The LEFT MSM will have their parade of defenders coming on making excused for her.  like 1 st amendment etc
I also want to know if there is anyway that the media can be found complicit.  They need to be held accountable.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on June 06, 2017, 06:51:47 AM
"The left's long march through America's institutions is bearing fruit."

they need to make an example out of her.

The LEFT MSM will have their parade of defenders coming on making excused for her.  like 1 st amendment etc
I also want to know if there is anyway that the media can be found complicit.  They need to be held accountable.

She should use the Hillary defense.
Title: Are you fg kidding me?!? Can no one keep his mouth shut?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2017, 05:47:44 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/world/middleeast/scott-darden-transoceanic-yemen-pentagon.html?emc=edit_ta_20170606&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Fire and remove clearances
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2017, 11:35:47 AM


http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/ishmael-jones-a-modest-proposal.php
Title: Intel History: The commies DID penetrate, and McCarthyism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2017, 05:27:43 PM
http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/a-closer-look-under-the-bed/
Title: Dicey Flynn stuff
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2017, 10:48:04 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/us/politics/mike-pompeo-cia.html?emc=edit_na_20170620&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Re: Dicey Flynn stuff
Post by: DougMacG on June 21, 2017, 06:18:43 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/us/politics/mike-pompeo-cia.html?emc=edit_na_20170620&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

I'm unpersuaded, can't get over a skepticism of sources.  So much else of what they've written has turned out to be false or misleading.  What I'm hearing is that the previous administration admits eavesdropping on the incoming administration and is trying to take them down one person at a time.

Flynn took fees he didn't disclose.  Probably a fraction of 'fees' that went to the Clinton machine over the decades.  Flynn lost his job.  Yates was a partisan.  What is the conspiracy?  What is the unnamed blackmail material?  Are these different anonymously sources close to the administrations that were wrong the last ten times?  Of course they discuss lifting sanctions; it's the issue of the day to the Russians and how we save face for letting them occupy sovereign countries without consequence.  Why is this a story in June?  NYT is concerned that a CIA director won't tell the press and the world what he tells the President, as CIA Directors never have.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2017, 08:41:02 AM
Taking money from the Turks unannounced while advising President Elect Trump on the Turks is a serious breach of integrity IMHO.
Title: Re: Dicey Flynn stuff, Tom Cotton responds to NYT via twitter
Post by: DougMacG on June 22, 2017, 04:48:00 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/us/politics/mike-pompeo-cia.html?emc=edit_na_20170620&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0

Tom Cotton also not persuaded by NYT story.  His series of tweets:

1. Yet another @nytimes story that is "almost entirely wrong," to quote the former FBI Director about their past reporting... 1/? https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/877489037254295552 …

2. Implication is D/CIA Pompeo should've excluded Flynn from PDB because Flynn was "compromised." Let's consider that. 2/?

3. Democratic partisan Sally Yates claimed Flynn was "compromised" because he misstated to VP the nature of talks with Russian ambassador. 3/?

4. But this @nytimes story refutes itself, saying Yates told WH of misstatement on Jan. 26, thus eliminating risk of "compromise"! 4/?

5. Plus, Pompeo confirmed by Senate late on Jan. 23, so on own terms this @nytimes story talking AT MOST about two days! 5/?

6. Putting aside Democrat Yates's breathless, overwrought theories of potential "compromise." 6/?

7. Which probably were already undermined anyway by this @IgnatiusPost from Jan. 12: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-did-obama-dawdle-on-russias-hacking/2017/01/12/75f878a0-d90c-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html?utm_term=.94930bcbca6f …

8. And, by the way, if Democrat Yates so worried about Flynn, did she ever try to rescind his security clearance? Did John Brennan? 8/?

9. should spend more time on accurate, logical reporting than just regurgitating @RonWyden talking points. 9/?

10. Besides @AllMattNYT & @adamgoldmanNYT need time to explain to FBI investigators their revealing of highly classified info. 10/10

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/cotton-does-the-times-in-10-tweets.php
Title: More on Flynn
Post by: DougMacG on June 22, 2017, 05:33:25 PM
Taking money from the Turks unannounced while advising President Elect Trump on the Turks is a serious breach of integrity IMHO.

Agree with you on that (after reading up).  But Flynn is gone.  This attack is on Trump.  

PolitiFact has a Flynn timeline:  http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/may/23/timeline-michael-flynns-connections-russians-white/

It is very hard to find real coverage on the Flynn story.  A lot was based on a Politico story, but like the rest of this shameful period in 'professional journalism', much is based on unnamed sources, biased sources and innuendo.  Much of the other unnamed source material has proven to be wrong, see Tom Cotton's quote of Comey's testimony on the NYT.

Flynn changed his story after finding out the Obama administration was 'wiretapping' and eavesdropping on the Trump transition team.  There was a slight delay as facts came to light and then he (was forced to) resign.

Discussing sanctions is what a transition team or administration does with Russian ambassadors when sanctions are the policy and the issue between the countries.  Why he denied it, I do not know.  Media appearances I might guess, making Trump look soft on Russia, after Obama was soft on Putin for 8 years - and gave away part of Europe to him.  

The Politico story the rest of the media focused on goes past Flynn to say his Turkish contacts had prior ties to Russia.  So does everyone in that realm.

Obama warned Trump about Flynn.  And Obama warned America about Trump.  Obama made the Iran deal, Paris accord, Iraq surrender, lied about Benghazi etc.  Obama is not a trusted source on (anything) foreign policy.  Yates and Brennan are partisan hacks.  Sorry to say that about folks formerly in high places but it's a pretty obvious fact.  Even the intel sources saying they know what was discussed aren't to be trusted given the politization and weaponization of our intel agencies.  If a truth came through them, HOW WOULD WE KNOW?  

It is when Flynn changed his story that things changed with Pres. Trump.  He erred in trusting a person he trusted.  Upon discovery, Trump took swift and decisive action, in my judgement.

Tom Cotton is saying the delay of including Flynn where he perhaps shouldn't have was two days.  Flynn got briefed on national security matters in that time.  BFD.  HRC who took more money than that and kept her security clearance for an extra 4 years?? Two standards, always.  If Flynn sells that info now while under investigation he will go to prison.

Miami Herald story on this and others keep asking the Treason question.  They conclude, probably not.  

I don't know what to think about Turkey, today, under the elected Islamic dictator(?) but they are a NATO ally.  Treason law has to do with siding with our enemies.

The situation in Syria is complicated.  I wish I could find an article (I think it was VDH) where the irony of who is our ally on one front and allied with our enemy on another front goes on and on in the Middle East.  But the idea that we might want to take into account what Erdogan in Turkey thinks before we side with his enemy isn't far out of line.  I would take the Turkish Kurds over the government of Turkey anyday, but I don't have to deal with the aftermath as they do.  In the end, Trump took the Kurds over the NATO ally too.  Not exactly evidence he is in bed with Putin, Turkey or anyone else for the wrong reasons, as they keep trying to infer.

The media (IMHO) is AGAIN off chasing shiny objects and trying to delegitimize an administration that meets all the highest standards of its predecessor.  
Title: At what point does this become Treason?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2017, 06:35:16 PM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/an-epidemic-of-lawlessness.php
Title: Re: At what point does this become Treason?
Post by: G M on June 25, 2017, 06:53:58 PM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/an-epidemic-of-lawlessness.php

It already has.
Title: Ex CIA officer released after two years for leaking; another one gets 3.5 years
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2017, 07:36:24 PM
From 2015

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/us/former-cia-officer-released-after-nearly-two-years-in-prison-for-leak-case.html?_r=0

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/ex-cia-officer-sentenced-in-leak-case-tied-to-times-reporter.html
Title: the Hill: intel chairman accuses OBAma aides of massive unmasking
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 27, 2017, 07:19:38 PM


http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/344226-intelligence-chairman-accuses-obama-aides-of-hundreds-of-unmasking
Title: Re: the Hill: intel chairman accuses OBAma aides of massive unmasking
Post by: G M on July 27, 2017, 07:48:47 PM


http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/344226-intelligence-chairman-accuses-obama-aides-of-hundreds-of-unmasking

'If you like your privacy, you can keep your privacy"!
Title: WaPo releases full transcripts of Trump calls
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2017, 11:01:48 AM
http://www.dailywire.com/news/19297/dangerous-white-house-leakers-spill-transcripts-ben-shapiro?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=080217-news-title&utm_campaign=two
Title: McMaster grants Susan Rice security clearance
Post by: ccp on August 03, 2017, 05:49:40 PM
Perhaps this is routine?   not sure why she needs this or is clued in to national security issues at this point. 

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/03/h-r-mcmaster-promised-susan-rice-keep-security-clearance-secret-letter/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2017, 08:01:15 PM
Common practice for her position, but given her history, this is more than a little generous.
Title: Re: McMaster grants Susan Rice security clearance
Post by: DougMacG on August 04, 2017, 05:41:48 AM
Perhaps this is routine?   not sure why she needs this or is clued in to national security issues at this point. 

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/03/h-r-mcmaster-promised-susan-rice-keep-security-clearance-secret-letter/

It sure smells, doesn't it.  The man has quite an impressive background:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._R._McMaster.

She doesn't have an impressive background at all, known for bad faith, motives and methods.  This either sets up some Sandy Burglar opportunities to steal more documents or it sets up a trap for the old administration perhaps to get out of her own unmasking vulnerability.  She was likely only unmasking wrongly at the instruction of others.  Maybe the IC needed McMaster to grant this access but I can't fathom why.

I can't conceive of how she is still relevant to national security - except to cooperate in an investigation where the target is higher up, which includes only the former President, VP and Sec State that I can think of.  Nor can I think of any conceivable conspiracy that would include Rice and McMaster.

Of course this could be a fake doc, no date or address info at the top, but the disclosure source seems reliable to me.

"National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has concluded that Rice did nothing wrong, according to two U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to me on condition of anonymity."  - Eli Lake (reliable reporter IMHO) 
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-03/you-can-thank-leakers-for-new-russia-sanctions

McMaster will be on Hugh Hewitt tomorrow, 8am (eastern?) MSNBC.

As Drudge would say, developing...
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on August 04, 2017, 07:18:26 AM
In my opinion McMaster has some explaining to do.  WE all know Rice would do *anything* along with her mentor Obama who we know is kept in the loop about everything  to bring down Trump and the Republicans

national security my ass!
Title: Intel Matters, Unmasking Samantha Power
Post by: DougMacG on August 14, 2017, 02:40:28 PM
Why did the Obama administration need to know the identities of the Trump officials?  Why was Samantha Power, wife of Cass Sunstein, Ambassador to the United Nations the point person on that?

[Why was Susan Rice, fully removed from the situation, the point person on Benghazi?]

Oddly both were UN Ambassadors.

Who will write the definitive account of the Obama administration once all the failures and scandals are fully known?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/unmasking-samantha-power-1502492067

"...if high-level members of the Obama Administration were abusing intelligence to spy on Trump people during that same campaign, the American people deserve answers on that..."

Title: Rumor of Trump pardon for Assange
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2017, 10:16:41 AM
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/348773-could-trump-pardon-assange
Title: Intel Matters and Conspiracy Theories
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2017, 09:50:08 AM
By George Friedman

Fifty-four years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the U.S. intelligence community finally released its files on his death. Only it didn’t release all the files – it urgently appealed to the president to hold the release of some of them. The intelligence agencies claimed that the files contained highly sensitive material that would damage national security and that they needed time to review and remove this information. Given that they had known from the beginning that the files would be released someday, and that they had known for years when that day was coming, the request was doubly extraordinary: First, that more than half a century after the assassination there was still material so sensitive it had to be withheld, and second, that they hadn’t yet identified all the critical information.

This is the point at which a reasonable person would assume that there is something amiss. The intelligence community wants the public to believe that the material is highly sensitive and that the complexity of removing said information is beyond the public’s grasp. The public takes this to a logical conclusion: that the intelligence community is hiding something important. Speculation grows about what that something is. And why not? This is called a conspiracy theory, and anyone who subscribes to conspiracy theories is ordinarily described as being “nuts.”

Reasonable Questions

Yet there are reasonable questions to be asked about the Kennedy assassination – the mystery that started it all – but also in other cases. Let me give two examples.
Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. The Soviets sent him to Minsk to work in a radio factory. While there he met Marina, who lived with her uncle, a colonel in the MVD, the security arm of the Soviet Interior Ministry. He married her after knowing her for six weeks, then applied for an exit visa from the Soviet Union and received it for Marina and himself. This was at a time when exit visas from the Soviet Union were as rare as hen’s teeth. Yet the niece of an MVD colonel was permitted to marry an American defector and leave with him because he was dissatisfied with life in the Soviet Union. Upon returning to the U.S., the Oswalds were apparently not subjected to extensive debriefing.
 
On Oct. 26, the National Archives released a trove of classified files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
James Earl Ray, who shot Martin Luther King Jr., was an escaped convict who had spent much of his life in prison. Between his escape and the shooting, he acquired a car and traveled about. After the assassination, he went to Canada, where, in addition to obtaining a U.S. passport, he obtained a Canadian passport. According to many reports, he was found with about $10,000 on him. By all accounts, Ray was not the brightest bulb, and getting forged passports under other names took some savvy. I would also doubt that he had ever in his entire life had $10,000 on him prior to his capture.

If these facts are true – and they seem to be, according to the Warren Commission report and published reports on Ray – then they raise questions that ought to be answered by the intelligence community half a century after the fact. Perhaps the investigations couldn’t find answers, or perhaps the official stories – strange as they seem – are the truth. What is clear is that the intelligence community’s handling of the conspiracy theories – dismissed with contempt but not answered in any way – does not build the community’s credibility.

I find the lone gunman explanation in both cases insufficient, but for the most part the intelligence community does not appear to me to be engaged in a vast conspiracy – they merely look clueless. It is only when I consider that the people in that position are not clueless that I fill the blanks with speculation. Let me emphatically state that I might have no idea what I’m talking about. But given what I think I know, these are not unreasonable things to question.

National Security

Starting with the handling of the Kennedy assassination, the intelligence community has done substantial damage to the stability of the United States. It has systematically created the sense that it knows more than it is telling about the assassination, one of the most traumatic events in American history. There’s a contradiction between telling the public that Oswald was a lone gunman but that sharing all the facts would be dangerous. If he operated alone, then there can’t be anything very important to reveal: He shot the president and that’s that. But then why the secrets?

The sense of mystery that the intelligence community generated about Kennedy’s death spread to other assassinations. If there is a hidden truth to the Kennedy assassination, why not to King’s killing four years later? If we can’t trust what we are told about those deaths, should we trust what we are told about 9/11? And if we are in doubt about those things, then perhaps Donald Trump is a Russian spy or Hillary Clinton was working for the Saudis. Kennedy’s assassination became the foundation of a worldview in which the truth is hidden and “reality” is an illusion. The belief that we are being lied to has gone from the margins of society to the mainstream. And the intelligence community, intentionally or not, has fueled this movement.

It’s the job of the intelligence community to find secrets and to protect how it collected them. But the need to protect secrets and sources can easily appear to be an attempt to keep the truth about how the world works away from the public, or even to lead the public to believe that the real secret is that the intelligence community is using its secrets to accumulate power for itself. This can be dismissed as crazy talk for only so long before the view legitimizes itself. “The CIA does not comment on its operations” frequently translates to “mind your own business” and can lead the public to assume that the business of governance is no longer the province of the people. And that, in the end, will destabilize the country.

The belief that there is a hidden world that governs the one we see, a world that is out of our control, is fatal to democracy. The intelligence community has as its primary duty “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic.” At this point in history, the main threat to the Constitution is the growing conviction that the government can’t be trusted because it conceals the truth: that democracy has been supplanted by secret powers.

The intelligence community is far more concerned with the security of its foreign operations than with the state of American democracy. So it perpetuates the belief that there’s a frightening reality behind Kennedy’s assassination by insisting that revealing all the files would hurt American security. But national security is also about the Constitution, and the republic can’t stand if the public doesn’t trust the government. Right now, protecting clandestine operations overseas may not be as important as healing the breach between the American public and its government. The intelligence community needs to look around its own country and recognize that “trust me” at this moment in history only increases distrust and further rattles the country.

This is obviously not something the intelligence community will solve itself. Elected officials must do that, which means the public must elect trustworthy leaders. But with half the electorate believing that the president is linked to Russia and the other half believing that the “deep state” is trying to destroy him, this is unlikely to happen. The trail of distrust that began in 1963 and mushroomed into a political culture of fear and loathing is at the root of the problem. The intelligence community’s demand that the Kennedy files not be fully released is another small step down a dangerous path.

Title: Bill cracking down on unmasking
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2017, 01:21:59 PM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/1/house-panel-approved-bill-crack-down-unmasking/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRrellUbGlOR1l3TVdNeCIsInQiOiIwWXErSnpxaUhnQytFWTE1NkI3MzJ2cTY5RVwveXdKc1pjR3V4Y2xlZmN0V2FvQzFSeVc2ZzhpNWgxVzZITmhcL0J6UVdhUlpxb3BWSWhMYWN1UGwxNWxZVnM2TzFQZGZRZEc1RDU0amN5XC80V2QxVXc2blcrRjVwVGY0OURjckhLMCJ9
Title: Ex-CIA officer arrested for being Chinese mole
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2018, 04:11:09 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/cia-china-mole-arrest-jerry-chun-shing-lee.html?emc=edit_na_20180116&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: kid with a dangerous attidute
Post by: ccp on January 21, 2018, 02:36:57 PM
He is in Britain.

Probably will get a plea deal and a job working for British Intelligence as the part of the deal.

As far as I am concerned he belongs in Gitmo for life:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5385422/brit-teen-hacker-kane-gamble-cia-boss-secret-military-files-rape-threats/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 21, 2018, 05:32:26 PM
Yes , , , and there is a special degree of chutzpah to hacking the director of the CIA and getting sexually rude with his wife , , ,
Title: Obama used classified intel leaks for political gain
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2018, 12:10:56 PM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/21/barack-obama-used-classified-intelligence-leaks-po/?utm_source=FB-ARB&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=TWT_Chacka_171220_Breaking%20News_New2018_LP&utm_content=142163348&utm_term=142163348
Title: Baraq the leaker
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2018, 07:09:22 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/21/barack-obama-used-classified-intelligence-leaks-po/?utm_source=FB-ARB&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=TWT_Chacka_Breaking%20News&utm_content=144117374&utm_term=144117374
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2018, 11:15:21 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-are-witnessing-a-democratic-nightmare/2018/02/07/2e602d16-0c51-11e8-8890-372e2047c935_story.html?undefined=&utm_term=.adb71ebf971b&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

Title: FISA Wiretaps
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2018, 03:32:05 AM
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fisa-wiretaps/story?id=45913892
Title: Re: Intel Matters, While our agencies were chasing Trump
Post by: DougMacG on February 15, 2018, 09:09:54 AM
Nikolas Cruz Was Reported to FBI As Potential School Shooter in September (Screenshot of Threat)
February 15, 2018
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/02/nikolas-cruz-reported-fbi-potential-school-shooter-september-screenshot-threat/
Title: Stratfor: The Looming Tow: Retreading the Road to 9/11
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2018, 10:18:00 AM
The Looming Tower: Retreading the Road to 9/11
By Jay Ogilvy
Contributor Perspectives offer insight, analysis and commentary from Stratfor’s Board of Contributors and guest contributors who are distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise.


We know both the story's climax and its end. Yet the 9/11 attacks, their lead-up and their aftermath are the subject of the new Hulu original series "The Looming Tower," based on Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same title. Creating suspense won't be that hard, even without the mystery of what happens next. As Wright told me, there's the viewer's perspective on the events unfolding, and then there's the characters' perspective. While the viewer knows the outcome — the horror of 9/11 and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden nearly 10 years later — the people in the story don't. And it is their stories that the series will follow.

It is Stratfor's general proclivity in making sense of the world to look past individuals to examine the fundamental geopolitical forces they express rather than drive. In this case, however, it's hard not to see the hatred between John O'Neill (played by Jeff Daniels), the FBI's top investigator, and then-CIA Director George Tenet (portrayed by Alec Baldwin) as essential to the institutional rivalry underlying the agencies' catastrophic intelligence failure.

We all know that there was a failure to "connect the dots" and prevent the tragedy of 9/11. The CIA knew that al Qaeda operatives were alive and well in the United States in the months leading up to the attacks. But on repeated occasions, when analysts were explicitly asked and could have shared crucial intelligence with the FBI, they failed to do so. And the reticence went both ways. We all know this.

So how will the writers and director and actors of "The Looming Tower" keep us glued to our screens for the 10-part series that kicks off with a three-episode pilot Feb. 28?

The Rollicking Role of John O'Neill

For sheer dramatic effect, the story has to center around O'Neill, the garrulous, glad-handing, sharply dressed Irishman who headed the FBI's quest to find bin Laden. He had multiple girlfriends, a fast lifestyle and a swaggering band of followers known as the Sons of John to do his bidding. But in his brash and incessant search for the al Qaeda leader, he made enemies.

Herein lies the kind of dramatic destiny that pervades great tragedies. Partly because of his monomaniacal insistence on the danger bin Laden presented and, absurdly, because of a temporarily lost briefcase that contained some classified information, O'Neill had to face the fact that his upward mobility in the FBI had come to an end. On the 20th anniversary of his enrollment in the bureau, the day his pension fully vested and mere weeks before 9/11, he left the agency he loved and took a job heading up security at the World Trade Center in New York. There he was literally crushed by agents of the man who had been his nemesis during his time at the FBI. How's that for tragic irony?

It shouldn't be hard to make a gripping story out of this drama even if we know the outcome. The essence of the story is not about its conclusion — already well told in several books and the hit movie "Zero Dark Thirty." It's surely not just about the horror of 9/11. It's about the lead up: the long years of festering Islamic rage; the rise of al Qaeda; the roles of figures such as current al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abdullah Anas, a former mujahid. It's about tensions among the Arabs and the Afghans; it's about the role of religion, the continuing frictions between Sunnis and Shiites, and the varying hatred of radicals from either sect toward the United States, modernity and the West.

Origins and Roots of Islamic Radicalism

Wright's book delves deeply into these issues. It goes all the way back to the origins, to the life and events that led Sayyid Qutb to write the seminal texts at the root of radical Islam. Even the word "radical" itself derives from "root," or "radix" in Latin; likewise, radical Islam goes to the root of Islamic belief — obedience, a complete and total obedience to the word of the Koran. Once there, if the imam suggests that the sublime ecstasy of martyrdom is attainable by strapping on bombs and marching into a public square to detonate them in hopes of killing the maximum number of infidels, well then a sufficiently radicalized follower is all in. This state of mind, heart and soul is hard for modern secularists to understand, so it needs to be communicated in a way that reaches not only intellectually to the mind, but also dramatically to the heart and soul.

I've written before about the natural affinity between television and terror and the way terrorists can exploit the medium. With this series, Hulu will turn the tables and use the medium to better comprehend the motivations and stories on both sides of the struggle.

Spy vs. Spy

At the heart of one side of that struggle lies the antagonism between the FBI and CIA. The rivalry is in part structural; the FBI's beat, after all, is mainly (though not entirely) inside the United States, while the CIA's is mainly (though not entirely) outside it. The competition between them flourishes not just because their beats occasionally overlap, nor because of a kind of collegiate team spirit, but much more insidiously because of each agency's deep suspicions of the other. Would sharing information sacrifice one agency's security to the other agency's moles? It's not just a matter of limitations — a lack of funding, of linguists and translators, or of adequately trained operatives at the CIA or the FBI. The real problem is a culture of secrecy that makes interagency sharing seem like a scandal rather than a standard procedure, a liability rather than an asset.

Take just one incident out of many detailed in Wright's book:

    "Tom Wilshire, who was the CIA's intelligence representative to the FBI's international terrorism section at FBI headquarters, was studying the relationship between Khaled al-Mihdhar and Khallad, the one-legged mastermind of the Cole bombing. … 'Something bad was definitely up,' Wilshire decided. He asked permission to disclose this vital information to the FBI. The agency never responded."

Though he couldn't share what he knew with the FBI, he wanted to know what the FBI knew. On June 11, 2001 — precisely three months before 9/11 — representatives from both agencies held a multihour meeting in New York. When an FBI agent asked whether other surveillance photographs of two of the attack's plotters were available:

    "(The CIA supervisor) refused to say. (An FBI intelligence analyst) promised that 'in the days and weeks to come' she would try to get permission to pass that information along. The meeting became heated; people began yelling at each other. The FBI agents knew that clues to the crimes they were trying to solve were being dangled in front of their eyes, but they couldn't squeeze any further information from (the CIA supervisor) or the two FBI analysts."

What-Ifs and the Roles of Individuals

What might have happened if the plot had been stopped? What peace might have loomed? What if the United States had never invaded Iraq and put Saddam Hussein in his grave? The thought of a less troubled Middle East, the thought of thousands undead, trillions unspent — it's enough to make you wonder.

And it all goes back to the actions of this one individual, bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire who financed the rise of al Qaeda and the assault on the World Trade Center. Wright wonders:

    "One can ask ... whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it. The answer is certainly not. Indeed the tectonic plates of history were shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and the vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest."

The same might be said of a few individuals on the American side of the contest. Tune in and you will likely be swept up and moved, possibly changed, by a drama involving some very colorful individuals.

Jay Ogilvy joined Stratfor's board of contributors in January 2015. In 1979, he left a post as a professor of philosophy at Yale to join SRI, the former Stanford Research Institute, as director of research. Dr. Ogilvy co-founded the Global Business Network of scenario planners in 1987. He is the former dean and chief academic officer of San Francisco’s Presidio Graduate School. Dr. Ogilvy has published nine books, including Many Dimensional Man, Creating Better Futures and Living Without a Goal.
Stratfor

YOU'RE READING
The Looming Tower: Retreading the Road to 9/11

Title: Intel folks recognize Presidential authority a bit late
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2018, 07:26:18 AM
From 2/1/18

https://spectator.org/intelligence-recognizes-presidential-authority-a-case-of-too-little-too-late/
Title: CIA vs. Nork smuggling
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2018, 07:28:01 AM
second post

1/29/18

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a15914961/cia-north-korea-smuggling/
Title: Putin's hit in Britain
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2018, 05:56:06 PM
http://thehill.com/homenews/the-memo/378047-the-memo-british-spy-drama-echoes-through-washington?userid=188403

Surprise! President Trump is silent , , , wuzzup with that?
Title: Re: Putin's hit in Britain
Post by: G M on March 14, 2018, 06:28:50 PM
http://thehill.com/homenews/the-memo/378047-the-memo-british-spy-drama-echoes-through-washington?userid=188403

Surprise! President Trump is silent , , , wuzzup with that?


Probably listening to his advisors for once and keeping his mouth shut about an act of war that per our NATO treaties we would have to get into.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 14, 2018, 06:33:06 PM
Well, normally he is rather loquacious when something irks him , , ,
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on March 14, 2018, 07:10:28 PM
Well, normally he is rather loquacious when something irks him , , ,

Stop listening to your sitzpinkler Lefty soy boys on Facebook. I'm sure they are whipped into a froth because Trump hasn't moved us closer to a nuclear exchange with Russia.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 14, 2018, 10:21:43 PM
 :lol: :lol: :lol:
Title: Brennan's career
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2018, 05:25:31 PM
Should ever you find yourself discussing Brennan, you want to be armed with this.


http://andmagazine.com/us/1520349089.html
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on March 19, 2018, 05:43:12 PM
good post

Brennen is a stooge for the LEFT.  First owes his career to Clinton .  Probably has a stain on his suit .
Then played up to Brock.
and now plays it up for MSNBC and the other LEftist stations

Title: Tim Kennedy waterboarded in support of Haspel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2018, 04:36:48 PM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/green-beret-livestreams-himself-being-waterboarded-to-support-gina-haspels-nomination-as-cia-director
Green Beret livestreams himself being waterboarded to support Gina Haspel's nomination as CIA director
by Katelyn Caralle
 | May 13, 2018 03:38 PM
Green Beret and former UFC fighter Tim Kennedy livestreamed a video of himself Saturday voluntarily being waterboarded by his friends to illustrate that the practice could not be compared to real torture tactics.

The more than 40-minute-long video, Kennedy said, was meant to show support for President Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director.

Many Democrats and some Republicans in the Senate oppose Haspel because she oversaw in 2002 a CIA black site that tortured terror suspects. However, Haspel's confirmation seems likely as at least two Democrats who are vulnerable in the 2018 midterms say they'll vote in her favor.  Between sessions of being waterboarded, Kennedy would answer questions posed by those watching the live stream, reiterating that this was an enhanced interrogation method of question and not torture, adding that it was simply an uncomfortable experience.

“The reason we are doing this ... is for us to have a conversation. Right now, an amazing hero has been appointed to be director of the CIA and because of that, some of the things she has done are being attacked,” Kennedy said.

The homemade waterboarding station was set up in a backyard where Kennedy laid on a collapsible plastic table propped up on one side by Yeti coolers.
Title: WSJ: Vincent: At the CIA immorality is part of the job
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2018, 10:52:26 AM


By Fay Vincent
May 16, 2018 7:01 p.m. ET
175 COMMENTS

The confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel to head the Central Intelligence Agency became a theater of the absurd, as senators pressed her for an assurance that she would apply “moral” standards to intelligence-gathering, including interrogation of terrorists.

As I watched, I kept thinking of Sen. Frank Church and the disaster his Senate select committee inflicted upon the CIA in 1975. The committee was troubled by the disclosures of various misguided, even bizarre CIA endeavors during the Cold War, including an attempt to kill Fidel Castro. It ultimately adopted a series of proposals to rein in the agency that led the Carter administration to impose broad changes.

The effort to reform intelligence operations to make them moral was a noble one—and the damage it wrought to national security took decades to undo. The new generation of CIA veterans like Ms. Haspel must wonder if anyone in the current Senate has even heard of the Church Committee.

Senators today seem to assume there is agreement on what constitutes moral conduct in spycraft. But recruiting spies is not the work of moralists. The CIA’s mission involves persuading others to disregard their deepest moral and legal obligations. It is a dirty yet necessary business, not best examined in open hearings.

In 1977 my friend Dick Helms was prosecuted by the Carter Justice Department for perjury after he denied in an open Senate hearing that the CIA had been involved in the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Helms was bound by his oath as a CIA officer never to reveal classified secrets. Yet before the Senate he was under the perjury threat if he fulfilled his obligation to preserve intelligence secrets. What was the moral thing to do in that situation?

Helms lied because he was operating under longstanding directions he and others at the agency had received from senior senators, including Democrat Richard Russell of Georgia, who worried candid answers in open hearings might risk “the lives of our boys.” They instructed Helms to protect intelligence operations in such hearings.

Helms’s defense lawyer. Edward Bennett Williams, warned the Justice Department he would have Helms testify in open court to numerous examples of CIA officials lying to Congress to preserve secret agency activities, with the likely exposure of important top-secret operations. The government relented, and Williams arranged for Helms to plead guilty to a misdemeanor with no penalty. In 1983 President Reagan recognized Helms’s long service with a National Security Medal as an implicit apology. No CIA director has since been charged with a crime.

Intelligence work can involve complex judgments about morality and even legality. The law must remain our bulwark, morality a sweet frosting. To serve as head of the CIA is to be in charge of vital operations that must be subject to the rule of law, not the moral sensitivities of any one person.

Dick Helms died in 2002. His portrait hangs in honor at CIA headquarters. There is no portrait of Frank Church.

Mr. Vincent, a retired lawyer, was commissioner of Major League Baseball, 1989-92.
Title: Re: WSJ: Vincent: At the CIA immorality is part of the job
Post by: G M on May 17, 2018, 12:42:31 PM
My copy of the Constitution must be missing some pages. I can't find the sections that allow the DOJ/FBI or CIA to operate as independent branches of the government, immune to Congressional oversight and control from the executive branch.




By Fay Vincent
May 16, 2018 7:01 p.m. ET
175 COMMENTS

The confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel to head the Central Intelligence Agency became a theater of the absurd, as senators pressed her for an assurance that she would apply “moral” standards to intelligence-gathering, including interrogation of terrorists.

As I watched, I kept thinking of Sen. Frank Church and the disaster his Senate select committee inflicted upon the CIA in 1975. The committee was troubled by the disclosures of various misguided, even bizarre CIA endeavors during the Cold War, including an attempt to kill Fidel Castro. It ultimately adopted a series of proposals to rein in the agency that led the Carter administration to impose broad changes.

The effort to reform intelligence operations to make them moral was a noble one—and the damage it wrought to national security took decades to undo. The new generation of CIA veterans like Ms. Haspel must wonder if anyone in the current Senate has even heard of the Church Committee.

Senators today seem to assume there is agreement on what constitutes moral conduct in spycraft. But recruiting spies is not the work of moralists. The CIA’s mission involves persuading others to disregard their deepest moral and legal obligations. It is a dirty yet necessary business, not best examined in open hearings.

In 1977 my friend Dick Helms was prosecuted by the Carter Justice Department for perjury after he denied in an open Senate hearing that the CIA had been involved in the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Helms was bound by his oath as a CIA officer never to reveal classified secrets. Yet before the Senate he was under the perjury threat if he fulfilled his obligation to preserve intelligence secrets. What was the moral thing to do in that situation?

Helms lied because he was operating under longstanding directions he and others at the agency had received from senior senators, including Democrat Richard Russell of Georgia, who worried candid answers in open hearings might risk “the lives of our boys.” They instructed Helms to protect intelligence operations in such hearings.

Helms’s defense lawyer. Edward Bennett Williams, warned the Justice Department he would have Helms testify in open court to numerous examples of CIA officials lying to Congress to preserve secret agency activities, with the likely exposure of important top-secret operations. The government relented, and Williams arranged for Helms to plead guilty to a misdemeanor with no penalty. In 1983 President Reagan recognized Helms’s long service with a National Security Medal as an implicit apology. No CIA director has since been charged with a crime.

Intelligence work can involve complex judgments about morality and even legality. The law must remain our bulwark, morality a sweet frosting. To serve as head of the CIA is to be in charge of vital operations that must be subject to the rule of law, not the moral sensitivities of any one person.

Dick Helms died in 2002. His portrait hangs in honor at CIA headquarters. There is no portrait of Frank Church.

Mr. Vincent, a retired lawyer, was commissioner of Major League Baseball, 1989-92.
Title: Re: WSJ: Vincent: At the CIA immorality is part of the job
Post by: DougMacG on May 17, 2018, 03:18:13 PM
G M:  My copy of the Constitution must be missing some pages. I can't find the sections that allow the DOJ/FBI or CIA to operate as independent branches of the government, immune to Congressional oversight and control from the executive branch.

One small problem with the leftist "Living Constitution" is that it isn't written down anywhere.  Other than that, it's a really good limit on government - if you don't want the powers of government constrained by a written document that people are sworn in to uphold.


Title: NSA Security Posters from the Cold War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2018, 02:54:29 PM
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/security-alert-nsa-security-education-posters-from-the-cold-war/
Title: China hacking Pentagon/defense contractors?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2018, 06:03:49 PM
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/393741-new-fears-over-chinese-espionage-grip-washington?userid=188403
Title: Senate employee indicted
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2018, 02:31:17 PM
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/former-us-senate-employee-indicted-false-statements-charges
Title: IC matters
Post by: ccp on August 14, 2018, 06:42:55 AM
https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/how-to-fix-the-intelligence-community/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/hard-to-trust-doj-fbi-cia-without-accountability/
Title: CIA comms penetrated by Chinese; dozens of agents executed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 17, 2018, 01:51:55 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/
Title: Re: CIA comms penetrated by Chinese; dozens of agents executed
Post by: G M on August 17, 2018, 01:58:36 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/

Brilliant. Our top people!
Title: Brennan was Homeland Security Advisor at that time
Post by: ccp on August 17, 2018, 03:53:26 PM
CIA Director at that time was :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Morell


From the above Wiki article:

"In December 2016, Morell suggested the interference of Russia in the 2016 United States presidential election was "the political equivalent of 9/11."[30] He added that President Obama should retaliate imminently, in spite of president-elect Donald Trump's doubts about the allegations of Russian influence.[31] In March 2017, Morell said: "On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire at all. There's no little campfire, there's no little candle, there's no spark. And there's a lot of people looking for it."[32]"

The initial part of the above will get him on CNN.  The latter part will not .   

Title: The Atlantic: Brennan and CIA spied on Senate committee in 2014
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 19, 2018, 06:46:47 AM

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief-history-of-the-cias-unpunished-spying-on-the-senate/384003/
Title: Brennan takes the bait
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2018, 08:32:52 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/john-brennan-former-cia-director-diminishes-himself/
Title: Chinese chips infiltrating US companies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2018, 08:07:06 PM
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: rickn on October 05, 2018, 05:52:41 AM
On government intel, it would only matter if the chips were capturing government info flowing on those networks.

But as related to those government employees who used private networks to store and send classified information; e.g., Hilary Clinton, if she was using AAPL devices for her personal stuff, then there is a much greater risk that the Chinese would have intercepted everything she sent or stored there once they figured that she was using that network.  And that applies to all government employees - not just her.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2018, 01:30:58 PM
 :-o :-o :-o :x :x :x :cry: :cry: :cry:
Title: This does not help us get intel assets in the future
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 10, 2018, 08:46:53 AM
https://clarionproject.org/you-wont-believe-what-happened-to-the-man-who-helped-get-bin-laden/
Title: Re: This does not help us get intel assets in the future
Post by: G M on October 10, 2018, 06:20:11 PM
https://clarionproject.org/you-wont-believe-what-happened-to-the-man-who-helped-get-bin-laden/

Nope. Beyond enraging.
Title: US bites back against Chinese Industrial Espionage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 11, 2018, 10:15:51 AM
Oct 11, 2018 | 03:22 GMT
4 mins read
The United States Bites Back Against Chinese Industrial Espionage
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) greets U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (R) prior to a meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on Monday, Oct. 8, in Beijing, China.
(DAISUKE SUZUKI/Pool/Getty Images)

    In an unusual turn of events, the latest China-U.S. industrial espionage case resulted in the detention of a Chinese intelligence officer.

    The arrest is a warning to the Chinese Ministry of State Security that the United States takes industrial espionage threats seriously.

    Such action is, however, unlikely to stop Beijing's aggressive behavior.

Editor's Note: This security-focused assessment is one of many such analyses found at Stratfor Threat Lens, a unique protective intelligence product designed with corporate security leaders in mind. Threat Lens enables industry professionals and organizations to anticipate, identify, measure and mitigate emerging threats to people, assets, and intellectual property the world over. Threat Lens is the only unified solution that analyzes and forecasts security risk from a holistic perspective, bringing all the most relevant global insights into a single, interactive threat dashboard.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Oct. 10 that charges would be levied against a Chinese intelligence officer for conspiring and attempting to conduct economic espionage for state gain and theft of trade secrets. The officer, Yanjun Xu, is reportedly employed by China's Ministry of State Security. Belgian authorities arrested him April 1 in Brussels based on a U.S. criminal complaint filed March 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. Xu was indicted April 4, and his indictment was unsealed Oct. 10 in connection with his extradition from Belgium to the United States.

A Familiar Cycle

The case follows a familiar cycle in which employees of a foreign company with technology the Chinese government wants access to are asked to travel to China to speak at a university, trade group or conference. Such employees are then commonly met by intelligence officers under cover of a university or association, who then assess the person and attempt to recruit them if deemed valuable. If successful, an ongoing relationship is then established.

In this case, a co-conspirator approached the target, identified as "Employee 1" in the indictment, in March 2017 under the guise of an academic exchange. As the conversation progressed, Employee 1 was eventually invited to speak at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronomics (NUAA). After delivering his presentation in China in June 2017, Employee 1 was introduced to Xu, who was operating under the cover name Qu Hui and claimed to be from the Jiangsu Science and Technology Promotion Association, which is affiliated with NUAA. Xu flattered Employee 1, paid him $3,500 in cash for his presentation and set up arrangements to continue communicating. This visit to China was used for the spotting and developing stages of the human intelligence cycle.

As Xu continued to communicate with Employee 1, he pressed for technical data while holding out the carrot of another speaking engagement in China that would bring another cash payment. During these communications, it is clear that Employee 1 reported the interaction with Xu to his company (identified as "Company A" in the indictment"), which notified the U.S. government. Employee 1 agreed to provide more information to Xu and sent him a copy of the registry of his company-owned laptop, which the criminal complaint notes the company had sanitized and approved for release. This file contained warnings that it was the proprietary information of Company A.

The file directory appears to have whetted Xu's appetite for more information, so Xu discussed with Employee 1 the possibility of copying the contents of his hard drive. Xu also changed his plan, and instead of bringing Employee 1 to China where he ostensibly could not bring his company-issued computer, Xu agreed to meet Employee 1 in Brussels during a previously scheduled business trip. This would mean Employee 1 would have his laptop for Xu to clone the hard drive. In reality, Xu walked into a sting operation.

A Harder U.S. Stance on China

While this case is news to the world today, the Chinese, Americans, Belgians and presumably other NATO allies have known about it since April 1, so any shock at the official level should be over. It comes amid a recent harder U.S. stance on China in the media. In an Oct. 4 statement, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence called China the foremost threat to the United States. Other recent government statements have referred to the industrial espionage threat China poses, while FBI Director Christopher Wray called China "the broadest, most complicated, most long-term" threat to U.S. interests in Oct. 10 testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Xu might well be convicted, but in the end, we suspect he will be traded as part of a spy swap for a U.S. intelligence officer, Chinese agent or perhaps dissident. Either way, the case has fired a shot across the bow of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, warning it that the United States takes the industrial espionage threat very seriously — and will pursue intelligence operations in third countries previously seen as safe theaters for collection. Even so, it is unlikely to dampen the aggressive nature of the Chinese Ministry of State Security and other intelligence agencies as they attempt to fulfill their political mandate to steal whatever China needs to catch up with the West.
Title: Saudi spy vs spy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2018, 10:13:43 PM
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-45906396?fbclid=IwAR2zjUpnjacHYMOpPTyxAfttaTUT5rGYSZDE0sO02M4qorHL8v4YDmS6pt0
Title: Russia's GRU
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 19, 2018, 10:49:46 PM
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/russia-and-the-rise-of-gru-military-intelligence-service-a-1233576.html
Title: President Trump and CIA improve working relationship
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2018, 04:58:23 PM


https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/16/donald-trump-cia-improve-working-relationship/?bt_ee=dErFEO%2BI4hSEuyZxcXmHZo%2BA8FGJ%2FN%2BbsBvbaeJJErLpNSeXKJzdRs%2FANT0s3jG3&bt_ts=1545075434675
Title: 2019 National Intelligence Strategy
Post by: bigdog on January 24, 2019, 02:26:17 AM
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/item/1943-2019-national-intelligence-strategy
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on January 30, 2019, 11:45:40 AM
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20190129-u-s-intel-chiefs-warn-washington-risks-losing-friends-influence

“It is increasingly a challenge to prioritize which threats are of greatest importance,” Coats said, sharing testimony that often and repeatedly contradicted past assertions by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2019, 01:54:12 PM
Working from memory, the CIA et al have a very uneven record on assessing threats, including under Bush 43 saying Iran was not working on nukes-- which had the effect of enabling the Euros to justify doing business with Iran as Bush 43 was trying to get our beloved allies to act as such in the effort to squeeze Iran.

There's more in this vein and there is the entire matter of the Obama intel apparatus (Brennan, Clapper, et al) playing Deep State.  Who leaked Trump's conversations in his first month in office with PM of Australia?  with the President of Mexico? and much more , , ,

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on January 30, 2019, 02:29:36 PM
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20190129-u-s-intel-chiefs-warn-washington-risks-losing-friends-influence

“It is increasingly a challenge to prioritize which threats are of greatest importance,” Coats said, sharing testimony that often and repeatedly contradicted past assertions by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Our IC is mostly a complex mix of huge budgets combined with corruption and incompetence. Oh, and lots of rent-seeking beltway bandits!
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: bigdog on January 31, 2019, 03:55:23 AM
Working from memory, the CIA et al have a very uneven record on assessing threats, including under Bush 43 saying Iran was not working on nukes-- which had the effect of enabling the Euros to justify doing business with Iran as Bush 43 was trying to get our beloved allies to act as such in the effort to squeeze Iran.

There's more in this vein and there is the entire matter of the Obama intel apparatus (Brennan, Clapper, et al) playing Deep State.  Who leaked Trump's conversations in his first month in office with PM of Australia?  with the President of Mexico? and much more , , ,



I may be misreading your point here, but sometimes I am surprised your positions. You clearly support our troops, police and etc. However, you seem to lack a similar sentiment to our intelligence professionals and their service. On this point, please remember that the DNI is the statutory head of all members of the intelligence community, which includes military intelligence, and many agencies which support the military mission of the United States, including DIA, for example. Many of the members have missions which support missions you approve of, and have much success in achieving those goals, including for example, the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 31, 2019, 11:30:08 AM
"I may be misreading your point here, but sometimes I am surprised your positions."

The world can be a surprising place, so if our positions do not surprise sometimes as well, that should be a surprise haha  :-D

"You clearly support our troops, police and etc."

Yup!

"However, you seem to lack a similar sentiment to our intelligence professionals and their service."

Correct.

For those in the field, the respect is there.  For those at the top in Washington, not so much.

I forget the exact words, but when President Trump started taking on the IC folks, Schumer said words to the effect of "That's a big mistake.  Those IC folks will fuk you up."  Schumer has been around a long time in the inner sanctums of Imperial Washington for decades now , , ,

Putting aside the inevitable errors that go with intel work (e.g. missing the collapse of the Soviet Empire) there is the matter of political machinations.

For example, working from memory here:  

a) Bush 43 was pushing hard to get the Euros in line to squeeze Iran for its nuke program and then the CIA said that Iran was not working on its nukes anymore.  This gave the Euros all the room they needed to keep doing business with Iran, thus sabotaging his efforts to bring economic pressure to bear.

And where was the IC when Obama-Kerry were concocting the disastrous Obama executive order that put $150B into Iran's hands and gave them green light to go nuke in twelve years?!?

b) As tracked here on this forum, in the final days of the Obama administration, there was that matter of expanding from 3 to 17 the number of agencies receiving raw data of a certain type, thus making it hard to track down leaks detrimental to President Trump.  I found it, and find it, to be profoundly spectacular that the transcripts of our President's phone calls with foreign heads of state (Australia -- or was it New Zealand?- and Mexico) could be leaked, yet somehow no effort was ever made to find those responsible.

c) There was the role of the CIA in formulating the Susan Rice Benghazi talking points.  I'm drawing a blank on the name of the particular point man for CIA on this (Mike Morell?), nor do I have the time to track down the citations to support what I say, but clearly he was making a play to get appointed to head of CIA under President Hillary.

d) Even more, there are the actions of Brennan and Clapper in the attempted Collusion Soft Coup ((no hyperbole here, I mean this quite seriously and quite literally) in conspiracy with the top folks at the FBI, who not only threw the investigation of Hillary (no hyperbole here, I mean this quite seriously and quite literally) with one of the FBI conspirators being the head of the FBI's counter espionage division (IIRC this was Strock) and KNOWINGLY (see Ohr's testimony on this) signing off on using Russian provided twaddle via a British spy to use the intel apparatus of the United States to bootstrap its way into spying on the Trump campaign.

"On this point, please remember that the DNI is the statutory head of all members of the intelligence community, which includes military intelligence, and many agencies which support the military mission of the United States, including DIA, for example."

Yeah, headed by the political hack and moron Clapper who called the Muslim Brotherhood "secular".  IIRC there was plenty of flimflammery about 17 agencies supporting conclusions to Trump's detriment but upon examination this turned out to not be quite the case , , ,  BTW, the DIA was headed my General Flynn-- what inference is to be drawn from that?  Was he the target of dirty tricks?  Or was he himself a dirty trickster, taking money from the Turks while advising President Elect Trump?  Either way, it does not lead one to salute the DIA flag unquestioningly.

"Many of the members have missions which support missions you approve of, and have much success in achieving those goals, including for example, the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. "

Absolutely!

Nor does this mean that I will give unquestioningly assume that some of the Washington players of the IC are not intensely partisan and personally ambitious people subjected to extraordinary temptation to use the knowledge and Orwellian powers at their disposal in service of those ends.  Throw into the mix the deep inherent challenges of the intel world, a shadowy world a lies and duplicity which requires a good and patriotic intel officer to play complicated games and well, I will think for myself as best as I can about what the top players emit.

PS:  Edited to add:  I gather one of the points of discord between the President and the recent report is its assertion that Iran is not working on going nuke.  A few thoughts on this:
a) Iran IS working on missiles that have no purpose other than nukes.  Why is that?
b) Iran has a history of working with the Norks (witness cf. the Nork reactor in Syria that the Israelis took out) It seems more than a little plausible to me that the Iranians have been off-shoring their nuke program to North Korea, indeed perhaps they are financing it with some of the $150B that Obama-Kerry gave them.
Title: in the world of spying hard to know who to believe
Post by: ccp on February 13, 2019, 11:02:44 AM
https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-air-force-intel-vet-monica-witt-is-accused-of-being-irans-dumbest-spy

Just a thought.  What if she was a double agent working really for us.
She works her way into Iran spy activity then runs off to Iran pretending to be with them and the US purposely feeds her false information to send to Iran  and then later is trying to protect the cover (and her life)  puts out a "wanted for spying" bulletin.

All the time she is working for us.

Just like the music industry .  Cannot take anyone(s) at their word. 

Title: WSJ: Intel agencies not so intelligent
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2019, 04:58:58 PM
Hoping Big Dog is still with us , , ,

An Indictment Exposes America’s Witless Intelligence Agencies
Monica Witt allegedly spied for Iran—but she defected in 2013, so she’ll never be brought to justice.
2 Comments
By Bill Gertz
Feb. 19, 2019 6:43 p.m. ET
The wanted poster for former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence official Monica Witt, who allegedly spied for Iran.
The wanted poster for former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence official Monica Witt, who allegedly spied for Iran. Photo: /Associated Press

U.S. officials revealed last week that a federal grand jury indicted Monica Witt, a former Air Force counterintelligence official, on charges of passing extremely sensitive secrets to agents of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The case highlights how broken the U.S. intelligence system has become. For more than 30 years it has demonstrated an inability to keep secrets, to protect itself from foreign penetrations by hostile spy services, or to prevent current and former officials from defecting.

The result: Brave foreign nationals who risk their lives inside harsh regimes to spy for America are being killed and imprisoned on a significant scale.

Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials portrayed Ms. Witt’s indictment as a victory of sorts, lauding the exposure of a foreign spy after a multiyear probe. Yet the real story is not Ms. Witt’s indictment but her defection to Iran in 2013. She brought with her details of a secret communications system American handlers use to talk to their recruited agents.

The FBI fumbled the case in 2012 by warning Ms. Witt she might be targeted for recruitment by Iranian intelligence. A trained counterspy, she knew that the tip-off meant she was under investigation and surveillance. It likely set in motion her flight to Iran a year later. As she boarded the plane, she texted her handler: “I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home.” Other texts reveal she “told all” to an Iranian ambassador in Central Asia and had plans to go public in the manner of renegade National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The indictment is largely symbolic, since the prospects of bringing the case to trial are slim to none. But it is one way for the FBI to dispose of the matter.

Officials did not detail the impact of Ms. Witt’s betrayal. Jay Taub, the FBI’s assistant director for national security, would say only that she became an “ideological” defector after converting to Islam. Her actions, he added, inflicted “serious damage to national security.”

According to prosecutors, Ms. Witt worked at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations from 2003-08 and then as a contractor, running an ultrasecret Special Access Program, or SAP, until August 2010. The program gave her access to details about counterintelligence operations, true names of recruited agents, and identities of U.S. intelligence operatives in charge of recruiting foreign agents. One program “allowed agents to communicate in the open without disclosing the nature of their operations,” the indictment states.

Ms. Witt left the contractor in August 2010 for unspecified reasons. In May 2011, Iranian state media announced that 30 people had been arrested as CIA spies and 42 others were suspected of involvement with U.S. intelligence.

It is not known how the agents were discovered, but a likely cause was a breakdown in agent-handler communications. Ms. Witt could conceivably have been involved. The indictment states that she provided defense information to Iran but does not say when. The spy charges cover the period from 2012-15. And that communications compromise appears to link the roundup in Iran to a second colossal intelligence failure under the Obama administration: the loss of all recruited agents in China.

Last year, the New York Times and Yahoo News both reported that between 20 and 30 recruited Chinese agents were killed or imprisoned between 2009 and 2013. Yahoo reported the loss was caused by a breach in an internet messaging system used to communicate with agents in Iran that spread to other countries. The Times blamed the loss on a former CIA officer, Jerry Chung Shin Lee, who was arrested in January 2018 and is suspected of passing along their names to China.

These recent losses follow decades of similar disasters. Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, spied for Moscow and gave up the agency’s network of agents working against the Soviet Union and Russia between 1985 until his arrest in 1993. At nearly the same time, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, also a turncoat counterspy, gave over secrets on recruited agents to Moscow between 1979 and 2001.

Ana Montes, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior analyst on Cuba, had already been recruited to spy for Havana when she joined DIA in 1985. Until her arrest in 2001, she helped Cuba neutralize all recruited CIA agents in the country. Another failure compromised all recruited agents in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

These disasters and others can be traced to a lack of effective counterintelligence—finding and neutralizing foreign spies. Critics of the late CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton dismissed the efforts as “sickthink,” and since Angleton was ousted in the 1970s, counterintelligence has been the bastard stepchild of American intelligence.

Congress should demand quality controls on the $60 billion it appropriates for intelligence services each year. New and more effective counterintelligence programs should be a priority. A good first step would be to elevate the practice of neutralizing foreign spies to a strategic level of importance. This would involve better vetting and monitoring of those granted access to agent secrets, including after they leave government.

The most effective way to prevent further spy betrayals is to shift the focus toward offensive counterintelligence operations. That means devoting more people and funds to getting inside hostile spy services before they can penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies.

Mr. Gertz is senior editor of The Washington Free Beacon and national security columnist for The Washington Times. His most recent book is “iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age.”
Title: Re: WSJ: Intel agencies not so intelligent
Post by: G M on February 19, 2019, 07:52:39 PM
I wonder when she converted to Islam. Was she recruited by Iran at the same time?

Hoping Big Dog is still with us , , ,

An Indictment Exposes America’s Witless Intelligence Agencies
Monica Witt allegedly spied for Iran—but she defected in 2013, so she’ll never be brought to justice.
2 Comments
By Bill Gertz
Feb. 19, 2019 6:43 p.m. ET
The wanted poster for former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence official Monica Witt, who allegedly spied for Iran.
The wanted poster for former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence official Monica Witt, who allegedly spied for Iran. Photo: /Associated Press

U.S. officials revealed last week that a federal grand jury indicted Monica Witt, a former Air Force counterintelligence official, on charges of passing extremely sensitive secrets to agents of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The case highlights how broken the U.S. intelligence system has become. For more than 30 years it has demonstrated an inability to keep secrets, to protect itself from foreign penetrations by hostile spy services, or to prevent current and former officials from defecting.

The result: Brave foreign nationals who risk their lives inside harsh regimes to spy for America are being killed and imprisoned on a significant scale.

Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials portrayed Ms. Witt’s indictment as a victory of sorts, lauding the exposure of a foreign spy after a multiyear probe. Yet the real story is not Ms. Witt’s indictment but her defection to Iran in 2013. She brought with her details of a secret communications system American handlers use to talk to their recruited agents.

The FBI fumbled the case in 2012 by warning Ms. Witt she might be targeted for recruitment by Iranian intelligence. A trained counterspy, she knew that the tip-off meant she was under investigation and surveillance. It likely set in motion her flight to Iran a year later. As she boarded the plane, she texted her handler: “I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home.” Other texts reveal she “told all” to an Iranian ambassador in Central Asia and had plans to go public in the manner of renegade National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The indictment is largely symbolic, since the prospects of bringing the case to trial are slim to none. But it is one way for the FBI to dispose of the matter.

Officials did not detail the impact of Ms. Witt’s betrayal. Jay Taub, the FBI’s assistant director for national security, would say only that she became an “ideological” defector after converting to Islam. Her actions, he added, inflicted “serious damage to national security.”

According to prosecutors, Ms. Witt worked at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations from 2003-08 and then as a contractor, running an ultrasecret Special Access Program, or SAP, until August 2010. The program gave her access to details about counterintelligence operations, true names of recruited agents, and identities of U.S. intelligence operatives in charge of recruiting foreign agents. One program “allowed agents to communicate in the open without disclosing the nature of their operations,” the indictment states.

Ms. Witt left the contractor in August 2010 for unspecified reasons. In May 2011, Iranian state media announced that 30 people had been arrested as CIA spies and 42 others were suspected of involvement with U.S. intelligence.

It is not known how the agents were discovered, but a likely cause was a breakdown in agent-handler communications. Ms. Witt could conceivably have been involved. The indictment states that she provided defense information to Iran but does not say when. The spy charges cover the period from 2012-15. And that communications compromise appears to link the roundup in Iran to a second colossal intelligence failure under the Obama administration: the loss of all recruited agents in China.

Last year, the New York Times and Yahoo News both reported that between 20 and 30 recruited Chinese agents were killed or imprisoned between 2009 and 2013. Yahoo reported the loss was caused by a breach in an internet messaging system used to communicate with agents in Iran that spread to other countries. The Times blamed the loss on a former CIA officer, Jerry Chung Shin Lee, who was arrested in January 2018 and is suspected of passing along their names to China.

These recent losses follow decades of similar disasters. Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, spied for Moscow and gave up the agency’s network of agents working against the Soviet Union and Russia between 1985 until his arrest in 1993. At nearly the same time, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, also a turncoat counterspy, gave over secrets on recruited agents to Moscow between 1979 and 2001.

Ana Montes, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior analyst on Cuba, had already been recruited to spy for Havana when she joined DIA in 1985. Until her arrest in 2001, she helped Cuba neutralize all recruited CIA agents in the country. Another failure compromised all recruited agents in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

These disasters and others can be traced to a lack of effective counterintelligence—finding and neutralizing foreign spies. Critics of the late CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton dismissed the efforts as “sickthink,” and since Angleton was ousted in the 1970s, counterintelligence has been the bastard stepchild of American intelligence.

Congress should demand quality controls on the $60 billion it appropriates for intelligence services each year. New and more effective counterintelligence programs should be a priority. A good first step would be to elevate the practice of neutralizing foreign spies to a strategic level of importance. This would involve better vetting and monitoring of those granted access to agent secrets, including after they leave government.

The most effective way to prevent further spy betrayals is to shift the focus toward offensive counterintelligence operations. That means devoting more people and funds to getting inside hostile spy services before they can penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies.

Mr. Gertz is senior editor of The Washington Free Beacon and national security columnist for The Washington Times. His most recent book is “iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age.”
Title: File this under “Posts that didn’t age well”
Post by: G M on March 24, 2019, 08:32:54 PM
Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.
Title: Re: File this under “Posts that didn’t age well”
Post by: G M on March 24, 2019, 09:26:16 PM
Am I to understand that the conservatives on this forum are willing to excuse Russian interference into the U.S. presidential election? If I am reading this correctly, consider me stunned.

(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/03/Screen-Shot-2019-03-22-at-9.02.45-PM.png?resize=600%2C465&ssl=1)
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2019, 11:09:45 PM
The Russians DID interfere.  Haven't they always done so? 

This time, as we vigorously complained it was via Hillary, via $140M paid to the Clinton Foundation, via the Steele dossier, via releasing true emails from the hacked DNC server, and some $45K in Facebook trollery.

As I see it, it is probable they will be fg with us in 2020 too, only much more effectively e.g. with the new technology that allows for realistic looking CGI putting fake words in the mouth of video footage and the like.

This is only going to get worse.

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on March 24, 2019, 11:25:07 PM
They have always done so, and it was never an item of concern for the American left. UNTIL that became the narrative why Trump won. Right, BigDog?


https://www.dailysignal.com/2016/12/14/ted-kennedy-made-secret-overtures-to-russia-to-prevent-ronald-reagans-re-election/


The Russians DID interfere.  Haven't they always done so? 

This time, as we vigorously complained it was via Hillary, via $140M paid to the Clinton Foundation, via the Steele dossier, via releasing true emails from the hacked DNC server, and some $45K in Facebook trollery.

As I see it, it is probable they will be fg with us in 2020 too, only much more effectively e.g. with the new technology that allows for realistic looking CGI putting fake words in the mouth of video footage and the like.

This is only going to get worse.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on March 25, 2019, 05:52:17 AM
The Russians DID interfere.  Haven't they always done so? 

This time, as we vigorously complained it was via Hillary, via $140M paid to the Clinton Foundation, via the Steele dossier, via releasing true emails from the hacked DNC server, and some $45K in Facebook trollery.
...

I never heard confirmation that the wikileaks emails came from the Russians.  For one thing, didn't Podesta give away his password?  He wasn't 'hacked'.

The Russian Facebook trollery looks just like the Left, amplifies them makes those views look like they are more widely held.  It was not worse than what was already happening, it was just more of it. 

On the Steele dossier, they were asked to interfere, paid to interfere.  As documented here, sources wrote that, not Steele.

On the hookers urination thing, they went too far.  That was the part that made the dossier famous, and look stupid.  Urination on n the bed that Obama slept in, because he was black?  Proving racism??  Good grief.  He is a basic womanizer, cheater, no reason to think anything weirder than that.  We tested the gullibility of liberals and it was an embarrassment.

Russians tried to sow discord more than pick a winner.  To the extent that they hated Hillary, they picked the wrong candidate.  Doesn't reflect well on their strategic intelligence.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2019, 07:32:44 AM
I'd say their strategic intelligence hit a fg grand slam.  Hard to imagine a more destructive outcome than the one actually achieved.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: G M on March 25, 2019, 10:38:15 AM
I'd say their strategic intelligence hit a fg grand slam.  Hard to imagine a more destructive outcome than the one actually achieved.

They can always count on the Left in this country.
Title: CT and the internet
Post by: bigdog on April 03, 2019, 01:32:08 PM
https://tnsr.org/2019/04/crossroads-counter-terrorism-and-the-internet/
Title: Quelle coincidence (Assange)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 11, 2019, 04:43:57 PM
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ecuador-imf/ecuador-inks-4-2-billion-financing-deal-with-imf-moreno-idUSKCN1QA05Z?fbclid=IwAR2ElDuBAI4P_-oXX5H0SXOd6CIvFr9bkHRmoasqWK_kWQOuf3FtXak92VM
Title: Defense One: Progress finally being made on clearance backlog
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 26, 2019, 07:45:36 AM


https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/04/progress-finally-being-made-security-clearance-backlog/156509/?oref=d_brief_nl
Title: Epoch Times: Chinese bid for DC Metro and other contracts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 10, 2019, 08:01:10 AM


https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-bidding-for-dc-metro-contracts-is-a-major-security-threat_2915299.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=6ef3c1f0d9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_09_09_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-6ef3c1f0d9-239065853
Title: Leaker charged
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 10, 2019, 08:02:58 AM


https://www.theepochtimes.com/ex-nsa-defense-contractor-analyst-charged-for-leaking-classified-information-to-reporter_2915436.html?ref=brief_BreakingNews&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=6ef3c1f0d9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_09_09_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-6ef3c1f0d9-239065853
Title: Famous But Incompetent (and Corrupt)
Post by: G M on October 08, 2019, 09:53:20 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/383651.php

As usual, no one will pay any serious penalty. Nice to be on the inner party tier of the criminal justice system.
Title: No investigation of Sen. Feinstein's Chinese spy driver
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 15, 2019, 06:30:43 AM
https://www.ammoland.com/2019/01/no-investigation-senator-feinsteins-chinese-spy/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork&fbclid=IwAR1Dpo-x1t1WLQhfeWpgKzP7mKwYpKNesZmxbG9HD2ZwYmQWogq8gSmBR8Y#axzz61SM6dPyJ
Title: Biting the hand at the other end of the leash; the real CIA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2019, 11:18:01 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/the_real_cia.html?fbclid=IwAR29yqAgwXXBvSQjqLKg7A5TzF1SVKMclE1ewHRTMRjSgaZBoWgr-aEFbUE#ixzz62dHeULtD&f

This article was brought to my attention by someone who had high security clearance while in government and was strongly supported by someone else who currently has high security clearance.
Title: Re: Biting the hand at the other end of the leash; the real CIA
Post by: G M on October 18, 2019, 10:21:31 PM
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/the_real_cia.html?fbclid=IwAR29yqAgwXXBvSQjqLKg7A5TzF1SVKMclE1ewHRTMRjSgaZBoWgr-aEFbUE#ixzz62dHeULtD&f

This article was brought to my attention by someone who had high security clearance while in government and was strongly supported by someone else who currently has high security clearance.

Absolutely correct.
Title: Naturalized Chinese man with top secret clearance betrays his new country
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 27, 2019, 06:55:55 PM


https://www.wnd.com/2019/10/us-navy-officer-top-security-clearances-busted-allegedly-smuggling-equipment-china/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons&fbclid=IwAR0vDTVXaRAfxw8K9ThCshPVSitdiMcPKaJWo4t9rc13-2S8Ahnd8tkrUOY
Title: CIA: arbiters of truth
Post by: ccp on November 01, 2019, 05:37:50 AM
"Thank God for the deep state"

what ?  what deep state?  I thought that concept is a delusional conspiracy?

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/31/former-cia-acting-director-on-impeachment-inquiry-thank-god-for-the-deep-state/

Title: Whistleblower anonymity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2019, 05:43:01 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/20/schiffs-claim-that-whistleblower-has-statutory-right-anonymity/
Title: At Least Eight Times FBI and CIA were out of Control
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2019, 09:56:05 AM


https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/8-historic-cases-show-fbi-and-cia-were-out-control-long-russiagate?fbclid=IwAR1fMhBKbNymEis_3P5s_7emTjLFZWpOD-AgfA4KJjfSwUy_Uxxr9D9RW98
Title: Haspel in a bind
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2019, 01:11:46 PM


Intel probe puts CIA’s Haspel in a bind
The review led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is making life uncomfortable for America’s cautious spy chief.

Gina Haspel
CIA Director Gina Haspel. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

By NATASHA BERTRAND

12/27/2019 05:03 AM EST

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The prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to examine the origins of the Russia investigation is focusing much of his attention on the CIA, placing the agency’s director, Gina Haspel, at the center of a politically toxic tug-of-war between the Justice Department and the intelligence community.

The prosecutor, John Durham, has reportedly asked the CIA for former director John Brennan’s communications as he examines the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in the election specifically to help Donald Trump.

Story Continued Below
Barr has been skeptical of the agency’s conclusions about Putin’s motivations, despite corroboration by the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee and an adversarial review by former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

Story Continued Below
But intelligence community veterans say the Durham probe could force Haspel to choose between protecting her agency from Trump’s wrath and bowing to Barr’s wishes; they point to FBI chief Chris Wray, who has found himself at odds with the president in recent weeks over a watchdog report about the bureau’s conduct in the Russia probe.

And they say the Barr-Durham probe represents overreach by an attorney general who seems to have already made up his mind and is bent on imposing his own skeptical view of the Russia investigation on the intelligence community.

Haspel, a veteran intelligence officer known for her fierce loyalty to the CIA and acute political antennae, has rarely made headlines during her 19-month tenure atop the nation’s top spy agency, turning her focus inward on building morale and boosting recruitment. That strategy has kept her out of Trump’s sights and largely protected the CIA’s more than 20,000 employees from the kinds of political attacks that have hobbled the FBI.

When it comes to Durham, Haspel is likely “confident there has been no serious wrongdoing, and will therefore find a means to cooperate” with the investigation, said John Sipher, a 28-year CIA veteran.

Trump often attacks the intelligence community, and said last summer that “the intelligence agencies have run amok” and needed to be reined in. But he’s never openly criticized Haspel, instead calling her “highly respected” and tweeting last year that “there is nobody even close to run the CIA!”


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My highly respected nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror. Win Gina!

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Haspel’s plight, though, may depend on how deeply Durham investigates an uncorroborated theory pushed by Trump allies that a key player in the Russia probe, a Russia-linked professor named Joseph Mifsud, was actually a Western intelligence asset sent to discredit the Trump campaign — and that the CIA, under Brennan, was somehow involved.

Haspel was the CIA’s station chief in London in 2016 when the U.S. Embassy there was made aware of Mifsud’s contact with a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, by Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. Haspel was briefed on Downer’s outreach to the embassy, according to a person familiar with the matter, but it’s unclear whether she was then made aware of the FBI’s plans to interview him or knew about the bureau’s use of an informant in London.

An inspector general report released earlier this month said the embassy’s deputy chief of mission at the time briefed the FBI’s legal attache and another official—whose title is redacted, but is Haspel, according to another person familiar with the matter—on Downer’s outreach. The attache told the inspector general that Haspel, upon being briefed, said the Downer information sounded “like an FBI matter.”

One former intelligence official said it’s unlikely Haspel would have been read in to the FBI’s subsequent operation given how closely held it was within the bureau and the Justice Department. But Trump’s allies have been asking questions about what Haspel knew about the probe since before she was sworn in as director.

Barr, who has taken a hands-on approach to the Durham investigation, was reportedly in London over the summer discussing the probe with British intelligence officials. He told NBC that the purpose of his recent travel to the U.K. and other friendly foreign governments “was to introduce Durham to the appropriate people and set up a channel through which he could work with these countries.”

Gina Haspel sworn in
Gina Haspel is sworn in as CIA director with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in May 2018. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

“A U.S. attorney doesn’t just show up to your doorstep in some of these countries and say ‘Hey, I want to talk to your intelligence people,” Barr said. “The countries wanted to initially talk to me to figure out, ‘What is this about? What are the ground rules? Is this going to be a criminal case?’”

Former CIA officials, however, said a U.S. attorney shouldn’t be showing up at a foreign government intelligence service’s doorstep at all.

“It is unprecedented and inappropriate to do this via Justice Department prosecutors, who will tend to apply the standards of a courtroom to the more nuanced, and often more challenging world of intelligence analysis,” said John McLaughlin, who served as both deputy director and acting director of the CIA from 2000 to 2004.

Sipher asked why such a review would be “done over the head of” the intelligence community’s inspector general.

“I find this troubling, and I suspect many inside the intelligence community do as well,” Sipher said, specifically pointing to the CIA’s Brennan records review. The inquiry “was initiated and sold in a partisan manner and this news only highlights that concern,” he said.

Another issue former officials have flagged: It isn’t clear whether Durham has consulted with the intelligence community inspector general, Michael Atkinson, as part of his review, which reportedly evolved into a criminal probe in October.

Normally, potential intelligence community misconduct is reviewed by an agency’s internal watchdog, who would then recommend criminal charges if warranted to a U.S. attorney with jurisdiction, noted Greg Brower, a former FBI assistant director.

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“It appears that the cart has been put before the horse. Here, Durham appears to be acting as a sort of super IG and prosecutor in one."

- Greg Brower, a former FBI assistant director

“It appears that the cart has been put before the horse,” said Brower. “Here, Durham appears to be acting as a sort of super IG and prosecutor in one. The difference: Durham works for the attorney general, while the IC IG, like any IG, operates independently from executive branch direction.”

In May, Trump gave Barr unprecedented authority to review the intelligence community’s “surveillance activities” during the 2016 election, issuing a sweeping declassification order that granted Barr extensive powers over the nation’s secrets.

The attorney general has since emerged as a chief protector and defender of the president, going so far as to disagree publicly with a finding by DOJ’s inspector general that the FBI’s Russia probe was properly predicated. And he’s now leaning on Durham’s investigation to produce a more fulsome picture of the intelligence community’s actions in 2016, he told Fox last week.

“He is looking at all the conduct, both before and after the election,” Barr said of Durham. “I certainly will rely on John.”
Title: Where are the Spies?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2020, 05:06:24 PM
https://andmagazine-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/andmagazine.com/talk/2019/12/27/where-are-the-spies-three-recent-intel-failures/amp/
Title: Re: Where are the Spies?
Post by: G M on January 02, 2020, 05:20:01 PM
https://andmagazine-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/andmagazine.com/talk/2019/12/27/where-are-the-spies-three-recent-intel-failures/amp/

Note that the State of Wyoming has the same approximate population as the City of Baltimore, MD. Wyoming has some of the laxest gun laws in the US. Guess who has a higher homicide rate...
Title: Re: Where are the Spies?
Post by: DougMacG on January 02, 2020, 05:47:42 PM
Note that the State of Wyoming has the same approximate population as the City of Baltimore, MD. Wyoming has some of the laxest gun laws in the US. Guess who has a higher homicide rate...

From particle theory:  Collisions increase with the square of density.
Title: Re: Where are the Spies?
Post by: G M on January 02, 2020, 05:52:36 PM
Note that the State of Wyoming has the same approximate population as the City of Baltimore, MD. Wyoming has some of the laxest gun laws in the US. Guess who has a higher homicide rate...

From particle theory:  Collisions increase with the square of density.

Do you think that if the residents of Wyoming were in a city the size of Baltimurder, that they would have the same crime rate?
Title: Re: Where are the Spies?
Post by: DougMacG on January 02, 2020, 06:02:10 PM
"Do you think that if the residents of Wyoming were in a city the size of Baltimurder, that they would have the same crime rate?"

No.   But the people of Wyoming wouldn't choose to live in Baltimore.

Big cities draw in certain mobs of people with their main industry, giving out free sh*t.
Title: Intel that led to Soleimani hit came out of Syria
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 14, 2020, 03:06:20 PM
https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Syrian-official-gave-US-intel-on-Soleimani-whereabouts-report-614143
 
Title: Chinese Industrial Espionage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2020, 01:39:51 PM
https://www.newamerica.org/fellows/books/scientist-and-spy/
Title: Tablet: Iran's spy games can turn deadly
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2020, 11:22:10 AM


https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/298078/irans-spy-games-can-turn-deadly?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=2ecbece462-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_02_03_07_38&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-2ecbece462-207194629
Title: CIA owned the encryption machine company
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 11, 2020, 08:46:57 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
Title: Bloomberg: Trump not suppressing intel about Russia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 23, 2020, 09:06:26 AM
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-21/trump-isn-t-trying-to-suppress-intelligence-about-russia-and-2020
Title: Intel briefer overstated Russian interference
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2020, 12:18:24 PM
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/23/politics/intelligence-briefer-russian-interference-trump-sanders/index.html
Title: Jane Harman: The Spooks are Spooked
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2020, 01:35:39 PM
second post

Trivia:  The author of this piece was my Democrat opponent when I ran for Congress in 1992.  At one of the debates an older man came up to me and introduced himself as Dick Harman.

"You must be very proud of your daughter" I said.

"She's my wife."

Both an awkward and a funny moment.

Turns out Dick was the president of Harman Electronics and the money of their June-November marriage enabled Jane to finance her campaign with a loan of $900,000.

After she won, of course she held fundraisers "to pay off her campaign debt" i.e. the money went straight into her pocket.

She served for a three or four terms IIRC.  With all the defense contractors in the district (South Bay, Los Angeles) she became known as "GI Jane" for her support of relevant military spending.  She is now a regular on the Sunday morning talk shows.
=========================================================

It’s a really bad day at the office when the spooks are spooked. That’s what happened on Wednesday when President Trump announced that Richard Grenell, the ambassador to Germany, will become the acting director of national intelligence. Though Mr. Grenell is credited with effectively pushing the White House’s agenda on Iran and China, he has virtually no intelligence experience and is viewed as very partisan. This rattled the spy community and stoked fears that a purge may be coming, fears that seemed to be confirmed on Friday when Mr. Grenell ousted his office’s No. 2 official. In fact, our whole country should be spooked.

Mr. Grenell was appointed after the president reportedly became angered by a congressional briefing that said Russia is trying to help him in the 2020 election by meddling in the Democratic primaries. So Mr. Trump removed Joseph Maguire, the highly regarded acting director of national intelligence, and temporarily assigned Mr. Grenell, who is keeping his other roles.

Reports say that Kashyap Patel, a former National Security Council staff member who sought to discredit the Russia inquiry, is a senior adviser to Mr. Grenell. The worry is that this new team is meant to do one thing: undermine the core mission of the intelligence community, which is to speak truth to power.


We’ve seen this movie before, and it didn’t end well. In 2004, the C.I.A.’s director, Porter Goss, forced out career experts over a counterintelligence dispute. A review of that activity by the Silberman-Robb Commission ultimately resulted in Mr. Goss’s resignation. The coming purge could be far worse.



With acting cabinet secretaries everywhere, the Departments of Homeland Security and State hollowed out, and the recent departure of high-profile, nonpolitical appointees on the National Security Council staff (the Vindman brothers and Victoria Coates), the judgment and experience about who wants to attack us and where is basically gone. This creates an enormous risk to our country.

While our intelligence community is the most impressive in the world, we can’t see and know everything. No nation can. So we rely on other intelligence services. And not just the ones of Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand that, along with the United States, make up the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance. We also need allies with eyes and ears in places we just can’t go, like North Korea and China. A purge of our best and brightest intelligence officers will signal to them that new management is coming, and current relationships aren’t useful any longer.

Allied services also won’t trust us if our own officers face constant pressure to politicize intelligence. That means reporting streams will dry up, we won’t get early warning on planned attacks and we will lose critical knowledge about the decisions adversaries are making that may not have consequences today, but could have huge ones in the next decade. It’s impossible to know how many clues we will miss if our intelligence community is isolated from the world and the president’s daily brief only reinforces what the administration wants to hear.

A so-called house clearing could damage our intelligence abilities for at least a generation. Recruitment and retention will of course plummet, and those officers and analysts left won’t have the mentorship or the experience to ensure our assessments are based on truth.

For the sake of our country, I hope Mr. Grenell makes a careful assessment of the intelligence community’s capacities and impressive work force before making further changes. How dangerous it would be if we lose the tip of the spear against those who would destroy us.

Jane Harman, a Democrat, represented California in the House from 1993 to 1999 and from 2001 to 2013.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.








Title: Hezbollah Honey Trap
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 18, 2020, 12:07:34 AM
Lessons From a Hezbollah Honey Trap
Scott Stewart
Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
7 MINS READ
Mar 17, 2020 | 11:00 GMT

(JARIRIYAWAT/SHUTTERSTOCK)

HIGHLIGHTS

The arrest of a U.S. military translator accused of spying for Hezbollah shows that state intelligence agencies are not the only ones who can conduct human intelligence operations.

Honey traps continue to be an effective tactic that can be used against anyone at any age.

Employees of governments, companies and organizations that could be targeted for recruitment by state or nonstate intelligence officers should be educated about such tactics.

FBI special agents arrested Mariam Taha Thompson, an American contract interpreter, Feb. 27 in Arbil, Iraq. Thompson, who held a top-secret security clearance, has been charged with passing classified information to a man with links to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Following her arrest, the 61-year-old Thompson, who is from Rochester, Minnesota, reportedly waived her Miranda rights and admitted to interviewing agents that she had passed information to a man with whom she was romantically involved, and that the man had a nephew in the Lebanese Interior Ministry. Under further investigation, she admitted that she suspected the nephew was likely linked to Hezbollah. Thompson's Lebanese paramour was reportedly overseas when she passed him the classified information.

Tradecraft

According to the indictment in this case, investigators determined that on Dec. 30, 2019, one day after the U.S. military launched airstrikes against a number of targets associated with a faction of the Iranian-backed popular mobilization units (PMU), Kataib Hezbollah, Thompson's use of classified computer systems changed dramatically. The audit logs allegedly reflected that she repeatedly accessed classified reports she had no legitimate need to access for her job. Incidentally, this was the same day that Kataib Hezbollah militia members stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The indictment specified that between Dec. 30 and Feb. 10, Thompson accessed 58 classified files related to eight human intelligence sources who were providing information to the U.S. military in Iraq. These files, reportedly classified at the secret level, included the true names, personal identification data and photographs of the human intelligence sources. She also reportedly viewed operational cables that detailed specific information provided to the U.S. military by those sources.

The Big Picture

Espionage has long been referred to as the world's "second oldest profession." While much attention is being paid to cybersecurity in the present age, people who ignore the persistent threat of human intelligence do so at their own peril.

See Security

According to the indictment, Thompson then memorized the information about the sources and later made detailed notes about the sources that she wrote in Arabic (presumably to help avoid the scrutiny of security). She then showed the notes to her paramour over a video chat she had with him via her cellphone. During a search of Thompson's living quarters, investigators recovered one of these notes that she had hidden under her mattress. The recovered note reportedly provided the names of three of the sources, noted that their phones should be monitored, and warned that an unidentified person the U.S. military was targeting should be warned. According to the indictment, the person Thompson said should be warned is a member of a designated foreign terrorist organization. Presumably, this person was a leader in one of the Iraqi PMUs designated foreign terrorist groups, or perhaps even in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force. IRGC-QF leader Gen. Qassim Soleimani and Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were killed in a U.S. airstrike Jan. 2, so it is unlikely one of them was the target Thompson sought to warn.

After obtaining a subpoena for the contents of a social media account used by Thompson's handler, the FBI recovered a still image of a second note that listed the details of two other human intelligence sources.
 
It is unclear if the information Thompson passed was later used to target the human intelligence sources she identified. But even if her betrayal did not result in the deaths of the sources or their families, it at the very least severely compromised several human intelligence operations providing the U.S. military with invaluable information about the IRGC and the Iraqi PMUs.

Lessons

We can draw several lessons from this case. The first is that human intelligence operations, including honey traps, are not just the purview of state actors such as Chinese, Cuban or Russian intelligence agencies. Hezbollah clearly demonstrated that it has a sophisticated, transnational intelligence capability.
Title: Pompeo's advisory board
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2020, 09:12:51 PM
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/27/mike-pompeos-cia-advisory-board-rankled-agency-veterans-283350

A friend seriously savy in these things comments:

"After Brennan, it’s abundantly clear that the Agency needs a shakeup.  This sort of thing is further evidence of that.  There are plenty of little bureaucrats who hate being challenged, and who hide behind behind classification.  They’re also huge on the idea of “independence,” which is a crock of shit."
Title: China penetrates NIH; dozens fired
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2020, 07:56:02 PM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/u-s-medical-research-agency-fires-dozens-of-scientists-with-financial-ties-to-china/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=corruption+chronicles&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200617230150
Title: CIA recruitment video
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2020, 04:19:35 PM
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/06/here-is-the-cias-brand-new-recruitment-video/?utm_campaign=DailyEmails&utm_source=AM_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Master+List&utm_campaign=922e23fb48-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_23_08_51&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c4ef113e0-922e23fb48-61658629&mc_cid=922e23fb48
Title: Chinese Prof convicted
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2020, 07:50:55 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-professor-found-guilty-of-economic-espionage-theft-of-us-trade-secrets_3404031.html?ref=brief_News&__sta=vhg.qblkmhbwphzxphzemdsbg%7CJTJ&__stm_medium=email&__stm_source=smartech
Title: Half of counter-intel cases are China related
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2020, 11:39:51 AM
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-director-wray-says-half-of-bureaus-5000-counterintelligence-cases-are-related-to-china

and here is an example

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-dhs-china-cyberattacks-us-organizations-coronavirus
Title: Disinformed to Death
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2020, 11:11:16 AM
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/fake-news-disinformed-to-death/
Title: How we got here
Post by: G M on August 13, 2020, 01:22:40 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q
Title: Re: How we got here
Post by: DougMacG on August 13, 2020, 03:09:58 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q

He called it exactly. 

"Unlike me, you have nowhere to defect to."
Title: Gina Haskell among the conspirators?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2020, 11:00:02 AM
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16597/gina-haspel-trump-conspirators
Title: Re: Gina Haskell among the conspirators?
Post by: G M on October 05, 2020, 11:28:55 AM
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16597/gina-haspel-trump-conspirators

No doubt about her.

https://summit.news/2020/10/05/nunes-shut-down-intel-agencies-until-they-declassify-smoking-gun-evidence-against-hillary-clinton/
Title: Russian Dis-Info Campaign
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2020, 11:14:59 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/russias-disinformation-campaign/#slide-1
Title: Cyber Command
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 12, 2020, 02:18:04 PM
http://www.croftandassociates.com/work-blog/cybercommand-secure-communications-facility?fbclid=IwAR1resCDuHP60IcaTLZ88whaSPKSQ1VVUqtnhopmfN6T0Rs5I_7YMdYAqVE
Title: Intel officers lied with Russian dis-intel accusations
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 15, 2020, 08:30:16 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/the-embarrassing-russian-disinformation-canard/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20201215&utm_term=Jolt-Smart
Title: China uses stolen data to track CIA in Africa
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 23, 2020, 08:40:00 AM
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/china-used-stolen-data-to-track-cia-operatives-in-africa-europe-report.amp?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR0Me5EA064_ULYmLqVUWX9do741ZxZgw9rc3rQ9gaw0TuPwuAEljZeWTPA
Title: time for libs to admit
Post by: ccp on December 23, 2020, 09:16:35 AM
we are at WAR with China
Title: Re: time for libs to admit
Post by: G M on December 23, 2020, 11:19:54 AM
we are at WAR with China

They are on China's side.
Title: They are on their side
Post by: ccp on December 23, 2020, 02:04:01 PM
https://www.alibaba.com/countrysearch/CN/gold-yen.html

and of course they hate America as is
so yes

they will life Chinese and single party marxism

and big tech hegemony

 https://www.google.com/search?q=bloomberg+smiling&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=Egfx9RSpYVyXBM%252CmK1tyMXdQNRxbM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kSGXNOxdAjQkkdYEECJYiipFchzKg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjBoLygkeXtAhVFUt8KHYsgBD4Q9QF6BAgIEAE&biw=1440&bih=789#imgrc=Egfx9RSpYVyXBM


https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=zuckerberg+smiling&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjb_tHDkeXtAhViiOAKHSFlACEQjJkEegQIARAB&biw=1440&bih=789
Title: WJ: A pardon for Snowden?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 28, 2020, 06:56:14 PM
an Snowden Bamboozle Trump?
He stole American security secrets. His allies cajole the President for a pardon.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 27, 2020 4:17 pm ET
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Edward Snowden is displayed on a screen as he speaks during a video conference in 2019.
PHOTO: JORG CARSTENSEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES



Donald Trump ran for President on wiping out the Islamic State and stopping China’s economic predations. Edward Snowden’s illegal disclosures weakened America’s defenses against foreign terrorists and boosted Beijing’s cyber-espionage against the U.S.

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So why are there murmurs that the President is considering a pardon for the unrepentant former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, who stole over a million American national-security documents and absconded to Hong Kong and then Moscow?

In office Mr. Trump was stung repeatedly by grandiose government leakers who thought they stood above the democratic process. That description also fits Mr. Snowden, who never formally registered complaints about U.S. intelligence policies while contracting for the government, but has since made himself a celebrity with claims of moral righteousness.

But Mr. Trump seems to be in a mood to break things as his term comes to a close, and Mr. Snowden’s defenders have sought to appeal to the President’s suspicion of the U.S. intelligence agencies to entice him toward a midnight pardon. The likes of Roger Stone and Senator Rand Paul suggest that Mr. Snowden is a useful figure in Mr. Trump’s campaign against the intelligence establishment.


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It would be a travesty if the President fell for this. The victims of Snowden-style treachery are ordinary Americans, not Mr. Trump’s “deep state” foes. A pardon for Mr. Snowden’s behavior would invite more of it.

Mr. Trump has supported law enforcement, but if intelligence methods can be stolen with impunity, border security and drug enforcement would be weakened. Mr. Trump can boast of confronting China’s abuses, but Mr. Snowden stole information about NSA surveillance that protects Americans from Chinese military hacks.

Perhaps Mr. Trump thinks that only his critics in the security bureaucracies see Mr. Snowden as a traitor. But a 2016 report by Rep. Devin Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee detailed Mr. Snowden’s abuses, writing that “if the Russian or Chinese governments have access to this information, American troops will be at greater risk in any future conflict.” In 2014 then- Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn told Congress that “the greatest cost” from Mr. Snowden’s leaks would likely be “human lives on tomorrow’s battlefield.”

Mr. Trump divides the world into friends and enemies, and it’s true that officials in America’s intelligence apparatus have attacked him throughout his Presidency. The promotion of Trump-Russia conspiracies by the likes of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan will undermine those agencies’ credibility with tens of millions of Americans for years.

If the President is persuaded to give Mr. Snowden a reprieve, their behavior will have helped create the political cover for him to do so. Yet the responsibility for betraying the security of the American people would rest on his shoulders alone.

Title: GPF: CIA's Jakarta Method
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 02, 2021, 06:55:43 AM
What We're Reading: Ugly History
Weekly reviews of what's on our bookshelves.
By: Phillip Orchard
The Jakarta Method
By Vincent Bevins

“The Jakarta Method” traces the evolution of U.S. Cold War anti-communist tactics in the Third World (his word, not mine, which, as he points out, was not originally a pejorative term). It does this primarily through the lens of Indonesia, which functioned as perhaps the foremost crucible of CIA experimentation and mass atrocity.

It's an ugly history, to put it mildly. The U.S. was never particularly good at or interested in distinguishing between the sorts of center-left, anti-imperialist movements that popped up all over the developing world following the collapse of colonialism and the tightly Soviet-aligned movements capable of truly threatening core U.S. interests. Nor was it particularly good at accurately gauging Soviet intentions and capabilities of pulling countries into its orbit. As often as not, the governments that ultimately sided with Moscow did so in order to keep CIA-backed enemies at bay.

More accurately, any whiff of leftism or non-alignment was deemed susceptible to metastasizing into Stalinism and therefore required extermination. (Unless, that is, it was the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, whose anti-Vietnam stance earned it U.S. backing even after its members exterminated 20 percent of Cambodia's population. Center-left movements in Western Europe also tended to get a pass.)

What did evolve, though, were the CIA’s tactics. Humiliating, ham-fisted attempts to deal with leftist movements with direct force early on – e.g. the Bay of Pigs, bombings in Indonesia in 1958 – gave way to a strategy of more subtle manipulation, centered primarily on economic coercion, cooption of local oligarchs and military elites, and support for whatever methods they thought best suited for eliminating received communist threats once and for all. In Indonesia, after Suharto's takeover, this took the form of a staggering mass murder campaign that resulted in the deaths of around a million Indonesians, not to mention another few hundred thousand East Timorese. (See also: The wonderful and haunting documentary, “The Act of Killing.”) Again, it was ugly. But it evidently worked. Indonesia became a reliable U.S. ally for the remainder of the Cold War, and “the Jakarta method” was adopted as an anti-communist blueprint by governments across Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Title: High level Chinese Defector
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2021, 02:36:59 PM
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/06/17/breaking-chinese-defector-confirmed-as-top-counterintelligence-official-n398374?fbclid=IwAR1CIQyu9h6BI1YfhPSXCDbaQDCmUrjNt_un0Mn72u3RWY-no1YoaCC3YYs

https://www.theblaze.com/news/chinese-counterintelligence-official-defector-wuhan
Title: Why just her phone? (Barbara Boxer)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 27, 2021, 07:41:14 AM
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/07/26/barbara-boxer-attacked-robbed-in-california-n2593141
Title: ET: China's intel chief
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 05, 2021, 04:59:31 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-complex-power-hierarchy-behind-chinas-internal-spy-chief_3932390.html/amp?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=digitalsub&__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR1kQ3ZkDAWg_DJ9iVZZJHVCoOvqWSQeT03CZLLrgq-n7W1xNDxltaKV-Vs
Title: Former CIA director sees us as = to Taliban
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2021, 07:28:20 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/23/former-cia-director-michael-hayden-compares-trump-supporters-to-the-taliban/
Title: Re: Former CIA director sees us as = to Taliban
Post by: G M on August 23, 2021, 08:15:00 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/23/former-cia-director-michael-hayden-compares-trump-supporters-to-the-taliban/

Does that mean they are preparing to surrender?
Title: Israel cuts sharing with Biden Admin
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 28, 2021, 02:54:40 AM
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-scaled-back-intelligence-sharing-when-biden-took-office-report/
Title: Gatestone: Intel Report kow tows to China
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 03, 2021, 02:14:08 AM
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17710/intelligence-report-china-covid
Title: Killing Assange contemplated
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2021, 01:45:27 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-officials-trump-discussed-assassinating-julian-assange?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Title: 9th circuit vindicates Snowden?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2021, 08:22:59 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/u-s-court-vindicates-patriot-edward-snowden/
Title: CIA assets being killed or captured
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2021, 01:39:14 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informants-killed-captured.html
Title: Corrupt AND inept
Post by: G M on October 17, 2021, 07:53:49 AM
https://www.thedrive.com/news/2821/cia-forgets-plastic-explosives-in-a-working-school-bus

Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

BTW, detection dogs used by US LE don’t use live explosives for training purposes. Why did the CIA?
Title: China stealing encrypted data now to decrypt later
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 23, 2021, 12:49:10 PM


https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/11/report-china-may-steal-encrypted-government-data-now-decrypt-quantum-computers-later/187025/
Title: George Friedman: Intelligence and Love
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 26, 2021, 05:58:39 AM


November 26, 2021
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Intelligence and Love
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
In the Bible, Matthew 5:44 enjoins you to love your enemies. The Jewish Passover Seder begins with the words, “Remember Laban the Syrian who injured our father Jacob.” These passages would suggest that Christianity is a religion of peace and forgiveness, while Judaism is a religion of war. But ignoring the fact that Christianity can be as warlike as any other religion, and Judaism as pacific, the paradox here is this: The greatest weapon of war is intelligence – understanding the enemy, his intentions and his capabilities. Without intelligence, wars are lost. The Christian notion of loving your enemy is the foundation of intelligence, and therefore of war.

It’s been said that you cannot grasp the enemy’s intentions without understanding him. I would put it more radically: You must become him. You must see what he sees as he does, fear what he fears, lust after what he lusts after, and from this understand what he will do and how he will do it because, being him, it is what you would do and how you would do it. If you hate your enemy, the hatred will blur your vision, telling you things that you believe about him rather than the things he believes. Analysis is therefore a form of madness whereby you split yourself in two, merging one part with the enemy and stowing away part of yourself for safekeeping.

I thought of this dilemma after I wrote a recent piece called “Russia’s Move.” A few people wrote to me asserting that I did not mention the evil of Russian President Vladimir Putin or the primitive nature of Russian culture. The charges were true insofar as I excluded moral judgment. To understand Russia’s moves, I needed to see the situation as Putin or a Russian would. I am a Hungarian refugee whose family fled Soviet power, so my own view might comport with those of my critics. But I cannot permit myself the comfort of moral superiority. I must understand them as they understand themselves.

The idiosyncrasies of conflict are such that it’s rare to find leaders or warriors who think of themselves as evil. They think the others are evil. They think they are the protectors of decency. Adolf Hitler did not think he was immoral, nor did millions of others. Putin would say that the U.S. violated fundamental understandings with Russia made at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and that the evil arrogance of the United States is responsible for all that has followed. He would say that the ruthless American actions of overthrowing a constitutionally elected president in Ukraine violated all norms of decency. This is not a hypothetical argument; it’s one that I’ve heard from numerous Russians.

If your goal is to defeat an enemy, you must first understand his nature fully, and you can’t do that if your goal is to feel morally superior. The question of who is worse might make for a worthwhile conversation in a Viennese coffee shop, where you will always prove your superiority to your own satisfaction, but it does not win wars. I have had to put myself in the place of many leaders and nations at various times. And in embracing them, I found none who thought they were evil.

Here’s another example. Not so long ago, the Japanese invaded China. The U.S. demanded that the Japanese withdraw from China. Japan refused. Washington proceeded to freeze Japanese assets in the United States, interfered with Tokyo’s ability to buy oil, and sought to cripple its economy. The Japanese concluded that if they compromised, they would be permanently subservient to the U.S. They went to war believing that the United States started the war.

The debate of who was in the right and who wasn’t is a subject for moralists. The American problem is that it did not anticipate what Japan would do and was therefore surprised at Pearl Harbor. It was surprised because it saw Japan as evil, not as it saw itself. The U.S. could not predict that Japan would choose war and did not imagine its people were brave and bright enough to hit Pearl Harbor. U.S. intelligence analysts didn’t understand the fear the U.S. engendered or how recklessly the U.S. was acting. Washington therefore failed to avoid war or at least failed to control its opening. It’s true that Japan committed atrocities in China. But in concentrating on how evil and stupidly wicked the Japanese were, the U.S. failed to imagine the possibility of American defeat.

So whether Putin is good or evil is a nice conversation to have. But if you want a sense of what he might be thinking, start with the fact that he doesn’t think he is evil and grasp what he is afraid of and confident in. Empathize with him. He is a former KGB officer and a patriot who watched his country collapse and be treated with disdain. Feel the pain he feels and then grasp how intelligent he is. Then it is possible you might catch a glimpse of his next move.

Analysts must bury themselves in the countries and leaders they’re dealing with. It’s their job to know the leader’s mind, and to do that, passages like Matthew 5:44 are essential. Loving your enemy is the means to destroy him. Hating him blinds you to his fundamental strength: the fact that he believes deeply in his virtue. And if you don’t understand the pride and patriotism of someone like Putin, you will never contain him.

The public will inevitably draw moral judgments. It will make clever counters difficult but not impossible. But if the people charged with predicting the actions of nations succumb to the pleasures of moral judgment, then all is lost. There is no one I regard as more evil than Hitler, and I have probably spent more time in his head than in anyone else’s. I had to understand him, and that meant I had to feel what it meant to be him. I had to imagine the Western Front in World War I, his capture of a group of French soldiers single-handedly, the award of the Iron Cross, and then German capitulation. Imagine risking your life so others could surrender while you lay blinded by poison gas in a hospital. In “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway’s title character said, “Fish, I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.” That is the strange logic of analysis.
Title: CIA deputy for digital innovation talks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 05, 2021, 04:42:26 PM
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/cia-deputy-for-digital-innovation-talks-mission-partnerships-and-espionage?fbclid=IwAR04gKXVS04_QTXpYy2Zblb5GYbuRJqm4_9nRvxEEIoHQk187fEuppQUTrY


Sounds like we are losing , , ,
Title: GPF: The impact of the Uke War on Russki espionage, part one
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 15, 2022, 04:31:14 PM
The Impact of the Ukraine War on Russian Espionage in Europe, Part I
undefined and Director of Analysis at RANE
Sam Lichtenstein
Director of Analysis at RANE, Stratfor
14 MIN READApr 15, 2022 | 14:35 GMT





Police on April 8, 2022 guard the Russian Embassy in Helsinki, Finland. Amid the intense global media coverage of the military conflict in Ukraine, another battle is being waged largely in the shadows: Russia's spy network across Europe is being decimated.
Police on April 8, 2022 guard the Russian Embassy in Helsinki, Finland.

(JUSSI NUKARI/Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty Images)

Amid the intense global media coverage of the military conflict in Ukraine, another battle is being waged largely in the shadows: Russia's spy network across Europe is being decimated. In a statement on April 11, French authorities announced that they had uncovered an unspecified "clandestine operation" being carried out by "six Russian agents under diplomatic cover" who officials said would be removed from the country. The statement came shortly after a series of coordinated moves the week before in response to alleged Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, when multiple European countries and the European Union itself said they would expel nearly 270 Russian diplomats they implicitly or explicitly accused of being spies.

Their announcements came after similar statements from a host of other European countries that had already flagged more than 150 Russian diplomats for expulsion since the invasion of Ukraine in February. With varying degrees of specificity regarding alleged espionage, each country said the diplomats being expelled had violated the terms of their diplomatic status. Cumulatively, this wave (which will all but certainly grow) is by far the largest mass diplomatic expulsion in history, more than doubling the approximately 150 Russian diplomats Western countries expelled in 2018 — at the time, the largest expulsion since the Cold War — following the poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom.

While unprecedented in scale, the expulsions are unsurprising. Last April, a former British spy chief estimated that only a tenth of Russian spy operations in Europe have been uncovered, and in June the head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency told an interviewer that Russian espionage on German soil had reached Cold War levels. These represent just a small fraction of the steady drumbeat of warnings from Western intelligence services over increasingly frequent and flagrant Russian espionage operations in Europe that until now had not faced serious European pushback. Just as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reinvigorated European defense planning, it also appears to have finally forced a reckoning over Russian espionage. But while the mass removal of alleged spies is undoubtedly a major setback to the Kremlin's spying activities in Europe, there are undoubtedly limitations and trade-offs in effectiveness that we will explore in this first part of a two-part series.

Persona Non Grata
More than most countries, Russia uses its foreign embassies and consulates not merely to conduct diplomacy, but to pursue espionage. As is widely acknowledged and alluded to in France's April 11 statement, some diplomats work under "official cover," in which they operate under diplomatic immunity doing ostensibly legitimate work, but then either in tandem or wholly in place of that also work as spies. Contrary to most action movies, the vast majority of this work does not involve car chases through city streets, but instead crucial human intelligence, or "humint," work like recruiting and handling assets, facilitating and overseeing various in-country operations, and sending constant intelligence updates back home.

Even for Russia, whose intelligence services are vast and capable, the loss of more than 400 officers will undoubtedly complicate and in some cases cripple its humint efforts in Europe. This is particularly the case as some countries — like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — have not merely kicked out Russian spies, but also closed some of the Russian consular offices from which they operate. Others, like Slovakia and Slovenia, have capped the number of Russian personnel allowed at diplomatic facilities, meaning that Russia cannot simply send replacements for expelled personnel. To give a sense of scale, according to the Czech Republic, which had already expelled dozens of Russian diplomats last year after public revelations of Russian sabotage in the country in 2014, there are now just six Russian diplomats in Prague, down from more than 100 this time last year.

Not only will Russia be forced to draw on far fewer spies, but those who do remain under diplomatic cover in Europe will have to act much more carefully, especially because they will presumably face even more intense scrutiny from local security services. Last month, even before the most recent and largest wave of expulsions, Belgian authorities said they had observed a decrease in Russian spying ahead of a coordinated set of NATO, EU and G-7 meetings in Brussels. "They are less active, they have become more cautious and observe a lot of the security rules," a Belgian security spokesperson said of Russian spies' recent activities.

This may also have to do with another related challenge for Russian spies: a collapse in morale, not only within their ranks but also among their recruited assets. While it is very hard to verify reports of discontent within Russian security services over the country's campaign in Ukraine, presumably at least some spies deployed in Europe have serious misgivings, especially because they are exposed to Western news and lifestyles. Even if they still believe the Kremlin's narrative, they may resent the way in which President Vladimir Putin has publicly dressed down his security chiefs (their bosses), and they are likely closely monitoring rampant reports of mass firings within military and intelligence agencies. Regardless of veracity, these accounts can make spies less motivated to do their work, a challenge that may also befall Russian assets in Europe. While some individuals will continue to pass information to Russian handlers no matter what happens, it is safe to assume that others may be questioning their activities. After all, even if they're not appalled by Russian activities in Ukraine, seeing reports of mass diplomatic expulsions leads to an obvious question: Will I be found next?

As a final complication, those spies who do remain may make tempting targets for European recruitment as double agents. Even if they're not pro-Western ideologues, they also very well may blame the Kremlin for tarnishing Russia's reputation and causing the mass expulsion of their colleagues. In fact, during the Cold War, many of the West's greatest successes "turning" Russian spies were people who had a strong sense of Russian nationalism but felt their leaders were leading their country toward calamity. Even the mere suggestion that some personnel may be targets for recruitment by Western security services could cause distrust within the ranks of Russia's spy network and force Russian personnel to spend more time monitoring each other than conducting operations. In what is a remarkable example of online trolling, in recent weeks the FBI has been sending geolocated targeted advertisements near the Russian Embassy in Washington urging personnel there to provide information to U.S. authorities.

Russians NOC-ing at the Door
Nonetheless, these impacts will diminish over time. For one thing, spies can be replaced. While it is true that some countries have taken steps to make this harder, precedent indicates that Russia will send replacements, requiring European security services to once again try to work out who is a legitimate cultural attaché or first secretary and who is a spy. Certainly, this game of musical chairs will not enable new personnel to merely pick up where their expelled comrades left off. For instance, cover stories will need to be created and assets will need to be turned over to new handlers. But ultimately a strong espionage network like Russia's will be sufficiently resilient to withstand the loss of personnel, even when numbering in the hundreds. This is particularly true in Europe, where freedom of movement makes it simple for spies in one country to conduct operations in another. This means it will be easier for Russia to exploit more permissive operating environments in the bloc to base its regional espionage activities. Hungary, for instance, is a notable EU outlier in not dismissing any Russian personnel.

Moreover, no matter the loss of Russian spies on the ground, the value of humint comes much more from the access of recruited assets than the talents of the handlers overseeing them. Even if some assets may be questioning their cooperation with Russian intelligence services, the four frequently cited reasons for agreeing to pass information — money, ideology, coercion, and ego (known more frequently by the acronym MICE) — can be powerful motivators. Moreover, those who have long served as Russian assets presumably already understand the type of government for which they are working, having seen repeated prior acts of Russian brutality. Furthermore, while some assets may worry about being detected by their country's security services and therefore seek to end their activities, Russian spies have a powerful retort: if you stop cooperating, you don't have to worry about your own security services finding you because we will expose you to them (or do worse). Unlike Russian diplomats under official cover who only need to worry about being sent home, recruited assets are therefore somewhat trapped: either continue to pass information or stop but at the risking of facing jail time, blackmail, or even violence — not an unreasonable concern given Russia's track record of targeted assassinations on foreign soil.

Adding to the resilience of Russian espionage operations — but cognizant that estimating these things is inherently difficult — Russia is, with the possible exception of China, probably the most prolific user of spies who operate under "non-official cover" (commonly known as NOCs). Unlike officially accredited diplomats who have immunity and operate out of embassies and consulates, NOCs do not have a publicly known, direct link to their home government and lack an official cover story to hide their intentions. Although this means they are more vulnerable if discovered, they are also much more difficult to identify in the first place. This means they will also remain in Europe, despite the mass expulsions. While Americans may be familiar with so-called Russian "illegals" (popularized by the fictionalized television show "The Americans" and the real-life arrests in 2010 of 10 Russian NOCs who posed as ordinary citizens), Russia is believed to use a much wider array of NOCs in Western countries.

By posing as everyday citizens, NOCs by definition may be able to access information diplomatic spies under official cover cannot obtain. To be sure, developing an effective NOC is a time-consuming, challenging task. Moreover, given that they lead ostensibly normal lives, much of the information they acquire may be seemingly benign. Even non-classified information, however, can be valuable, and their jobs may afford them unique abilities to carry out various espionage activities. For instance, in one of the rare recent incidents in which a Russian NOC was successfully prosecuted in the West, in 2016 Evgeny Buryakov plead guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence for being part of a conspiracy in which he operated under the cover of being an employee at the New York office of the Russian state-owned development bank Vnesheconombank. During his tenure, Buryakov helped two Russian diplomatic spies under official cover recruit local assets and gather information about U.S. sanctions on Russia, efforts to develop alternative energy sources and sensitive financial industry data.

While Buryakov was mainly an information provider (though he did make some operational suggestions, including for a clandestine information warfare campaign targeting Canada), other NOCs can cause much more damage. In a now-infamous case, in 2018 the two Russian intelligence officers who poisoned Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, posed as tourists. While notable in that the would-be assassins were later identified after showing some sloppy tradecraft, the operation also showed just how easy it can be for NOCs to move throughout Europe and return home safely to Russia. A string of other suspected Russian targeted hits, sabotage efforts and other espionage operations in Europe is testament to this. And despite their identities being compromised and scores of Russian diplomats under official cover being expelled from Western countries, brazen Russian operations on European soil did not stop, such as the slaying in broad daylight of an ethnic Chechen, Georgian national in a Berlin park just over a year after the attempted killing of Skripal.

Even when not carrying out hits, NOCs can still make major operational contributions, especially when it comes to handling recruited assets who may now be without their Russian handlers. Given that in-person meetings are by no means the primary form of communication (a trend the pandemic has accelerated for spies, just as it has for regular workers), NOCs should be able to relatively easily rely on clandestine communication methods, such as encrypted mobile communications apps or "dead drops" (where individuals leave pass items and/or messages at a secret location to avoid directly meeting) to help communicate as they cover for their expelled comrades.

As in the cases of Buryakov and the assassins, some Russian NOCs may be willing conspirators, but others may be coerced. Russian intelligence officers are widely suspected of pressuring citizens or people of Russian heritage abroad to work for them. This is generally believed to occur when Russian spies pressure their marks through some sort of personal "kompromat" or a threat to their family and/or friends back home in Russia. Unsurprisingly, by definition verifiable accounts of these activities are rare, but there are sufficiently plausible rumors to assume Russia can also lean on this cohort to help make up for the mass expulsions.

In other cases, no coercion is needed. Russian intelligence services are well-known for working with sympathetic members of Russian communities abroad to exploit their established position in country to report information back to Moscow and even conduct operations on their own, such as generating protests to spur social unrest. At a minimum, they can help lay the groundwork for deployed operatives to arrive. For instance, mysterious explosions in 2014 at Czech ammunition storage facilities — which gained attention last year when new evidence emerged implicating Russia and, more specifically, the two Salisbury "tourists" — could not have occurred without some sort of on-the-ground assistance, be it to provide advance site surveillance, local housing or other supporting activities.

There are even concerns that, just as diplomats under official cover are getting expelled, Russia may be exploiting the outflow of Ukrainian refugees to infiltrate saboteurs. Although for now more of a hypothetical rather than verified concern, doing so would certainly fit within the Kremlin's playbook (similar concerns arose in the second half of last year when Belarus engineered a migrant crisis to pressure the European Union) and illustrates the many creative ways to insert Russian personnel into Europe. To this end, the sheer number of Russian-speaking Ukrainians fleeing to the West and the large number of Russians who have fled Russia since the start of the war will create large anti-Putin diaspora communities where NOCs may be able to hide.

A 20th Century Response to a 21st Century Problem
No matter how NOCs and others are operationalized, they offer Moscow flexibility when its spies under official cover are sent home because NOCs and other sympathizers will remain in country or can be brought in from elsewhere to pick up some of the slack. To be sure, this is an imperfect solution; after all, NOCs can't just show up at the nearest Russian embassy or consulate. But as seen, they can certainly help limit the negative impact of expulsions on espionage activity — and in some cases are even more attractive for spy work because, given their lack of clear ties back to Moscow, their activities enjoy at least some plausible deniability.

Ultimately, however, the resilience of Russia's espionage efforts in Europe will be determined not by its humint operations, but by Russian intelligence services' ability to adapt to the changing realities of spying in the modern era. In this respect, the response of European governments to expel hundreds of Russian spies, while notable and ultimately still important, may not be going after the most important targets — something we turn to in part two of the series.
Title: GPF: The impact of the Uke war on Russki espionage in Europe, Part 1
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2022, 12:31:40 PM
The Impact of the Ukraine War on Russian Espionage in Europe, Part I
undefined and Director of Analysis at RANE
Sam Lichtenstein
Director of Analysis at RANE, Stratfor
14 MIN READApr 15, 2022 | 14:35 GMT





Police on April 8, 2022 guard the Russian Embassy in Helsinki, Finland. Amid the intense global media coverage of the military conflict in Ukraine, another battle is being waged largely in the shadows: Russia's spy network across Europe is being decimated.
Police on April 8, 2022 guard the Russian Embassy in Helsinki, Finland.

(JUSSI NUKARI/Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty Images)

Amid the intense global media coverage of the military conflict in Ukraine, another battle is being waged largely in the shadows: Russia's spy network across Europe is being decimated. In a statement on April 11, French authorities announced that they had uncovered an unspecified "clandestine operation" being carried out by "six Russian agents under diplomatic cover" who officials said would be removed from the country. The statement came shortly after a series of coordinated moves the week before in response to alleged Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, when multiple European countries and the European Union itself said they would expel nearly 270 Russian diplomats they implicitly or explicitly accused of being spies.

Their announcements came after similar statements from a host of other European countries that had already flagged more than 150 Russian diplomats for expulsion since the invasion of Ukraine in February. With varying degrees of specificity regarding alleged espionage, each country said the diplomats being expelled had violated the terms of their diplomatic status. Cumulatively, this wave (which will all but certainly grow) is by far the largest mass diplomatic expulsion in history, more than doubling the approximately 150 Russian diplomats Western countries expelled in 2018 — at the time, the largest expulsion since the Cold War — following the poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom.

While unprecedented in scale, the expulsions are unsurprising. Last April, a former British spy chief estimated that only a tenth of Russian spy operations in Europe have been uncovered, and in June the head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency told an interviewer that Russian espionage on German soil had reached Cold War levels. These represent just a small fraction of the steady drumbeat of warnings from Western intelligence services over increasingly frequent and flagrant Russian espionage operations in Europe that until now had not faced serious European pushback. Just as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reinvigorated European defense planning, it also appears to have finally forced a reckoning over Russian espionage. But while the mass removal of alleged spies is undoubtedly a major setback to the Kremlin's spying activities in Europe, there are undoubtedly limitations and trade-offs in effectiveness that we will explore in this first part of a two-part series.

Persona Non Grata

More than most countries, Russia uses its foreign embassies and consulates not merely to conduct diplomacy, but to pursue espionage. As is widely acknowledged and alluded to in France's April 11 statement, some diplomats work under "official cover," in which they operate under diplomatic immunity doing ostensibly legitimate work, but then either in tandem or wholly in place of that also work as spies. Contrary to most action movies, the vast majority of this work does not involve car chases through city streets, but instead crucial human intelligence, or "humint," work like recruiting and handling assets, facilitating and overseeing various in-country operations, and sending constant intelligence updates back home.

Even for Russia, whose intelligence services are vast and capable, the loss of more than 400 officers will undoubtedly complicate and in some cases cripple its humint efforts in Europe. This is particularly the case as some countries — like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — have not merely kicked out Russian spies, but also closed some of the Russian consular offices from which they operate. Others, like Slovakia and Slovenia, have capped the number of Russian personnel allowed at diplomatic facilities, meaning that Russia cannot simply send replacements for expelled personnel. To give a sense of scale, according to the Czech Republic, which had already expelled dozens of Russian diplomats last year after public revelations of Russian sabotage in the country in 2014, there are now just six Russian diplomats in Prague, down from more than 100 this time last year.

Not only will Russia be forced to draw on far fewer spies, but those who do remain under diplomatic cover in Europe will have to act much more carefully, especially because they will presumably face even more intense scrutiny from local security services. Last month, even before the most recent and largest wave of expulsions, Belgian authorities said they had observed a decrease in Russian spying ahead of a coordinated set of NATO, EU and G-7 meetings in Brussels. "They are less active, they have become more cautious and observe a lot of the security rules," a Belgian security spokesperson said of Russian spies' recent activities.

This may also have to do with another related challenge for Russian spies: a collapse in morale, not only within their ranks but also among their recruited assets. While it is very hard to verify reports of discontent within Russian security services over the country's campaign in Ukraine, presumably at least some spies deployed in Europe have serious misgivings, especially because they are exposed to Western news and lifestyles. Even if they still believe the Kremlin's narrative, they may resent the way in which President Vladimir Putin has publicly dressed down his security chiefs (their bosses), and they are likely closely monitoring rampant reports of mass firings within military and intelligence agencies. Regardless of veracity, these accounts can make spies less motivated to do their work, a challenge that may also befall Russian assets in Europe. While some individuals will continue to pass information to Russian handlers no matter what happens, it is safe to assume that others may be questioning their activities. After all, even if they're not appalled by Russian activities in Ukraine, seeing reports of mass diplomatic expulsions leads to an obvious question: Will I be found next?

As a final complication, those spies who do remain may make tempting targets for European recruitment as double agents. Even if they're not pro-Western ideologues, they also very well may blame the Kremlin for tarnishing Russia's reputation and causing the mass expulsion of their colleagues. In fact, during the Cold War, many of the West's greatest successes "turning" Russian spies were people who had a strong sense of Russian nationalism but felt their leaders were leading their country toward calamity. Even the mere suggestion that some personnel may be targets for recruitment by Western security services could cause distrust within the ranks of Russia's spy network and force Russian personnel to spend more time monitoring each other than conducting operations. In what is a remarkable example of online trolling, in recent weeks the FBI has been sending geolocated targeted advertisements near the Russian Embassy in Washington urging personnel there to provide information to U.S. authorities.

Russians NOC-ing at the Door

Nonetheless, these impacts will diminish over time. For one thing, spies can be replaced. While it is true that some countries have taken steps to make this harder, precedent indicates that Russia will send replacements, requiring European security services to once again try to work out who is a legitimate cultural attaché or first secretary and who is a spy. Certainly, this game of musical chairs will not enable new personnel to merely pick up where their expelled comrades left off. For instance, cover stories will need to be created and assets will need to be turned over to new handlers. But ultimately a strong espionage network like Russia's will be sufficiently resilient to withstand the loss of personnel, even when numbering in the hundreds. This is particularly true in Europe, where freedom of movement makes it simple for spies in one country to conduct operations in another. This means it will be easier for Russia to exploit more permissive operating environments in the bloc to base its regional espionage activities. Hungary, for instance, is a notable EU outlier in not dismissing any Russian personnel.

Moreover, no matter the loss of Russian spies on the ground, the value of humint comes much more from the access of recruited assets than the talents of the handlers overseeing them. Even if some assets may be questioning their cooperation with Russian intelligence services, the four frequently cited reasons for agreeing to pass information — money, ideology, coercion, and ego (known more frequently by the acronym MICE) — can be powerful motivators. Moreover, those who have long served as Russian assets presumably already understand the type of government for which they are working, having seen repeated prior acts of Russian brutality. Furthermore, while some assets may worry about being detected by their country's security services and therefore seek to end their activities, Russian spies have a powerful retort: if you stop cooperating, you don't have to worry about your own security services finding you because we will expose you to them (or do worse). Unlike Russian diplomats under official cover who only need to worry about being sent home, recruited assets are therefore somewhat trapped: either continue to pass information or stop but at the risking of facing jail time, blackmail, or even violence — not an unreasonable concern given Russia's track record of targeted assassinations on foreign soil.

Adding to the resilience of Russian espionage operations — but cognizant that estimating these things is inherently difficult — Russia is, with the possible exception of China, probably the most prolific user of spies who operate under "non-official cover" (commonly known as NOCs). Unlike officially accredited diplomats who have immunity and operate out of embassies and consulates, NOCs do not have a publicly known, direct link to their home government and lack an official cover story to hide their intentions. Although this means they are more vulnerable if discovered, they are also much more difficult to identify in the first place. This means they will also remain in Europe, despite the mass expulsions. While Americans may be familiar with so-called Russian "illegals" (popularized by the fictionalized television show "The Americans" and the real-life arrests in 2010 of 10 Russian NOCs who posed as ordinary citizens), Russia is believed to use a much wider array of NOCs in Western countries.

By posing as everyday citizens, NOCs by definition may be able to access information diplomatic spies under official cover cannot obtain. To be sure, developing an effective NOC is a time-consuming, challenging task. Moreover, given that they lead ostensibly normal lives, much of the information they acquire may be seemingly benign. Even non-classified information, however, can be valuable, and their jobs may afford them unique abilities to carry out various espionage activities. For instance, in one of the rare recent incidents in which a Russian NOC was successfully prosecuted in the West, in 2016 Evgeny Buryakov plead guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence for being part of a conspiracy in which he operated under the cover of being an employee at the New York office of the Russian state-owned development bank Vnesheconombank. During his tenure, Buryakov helped two Russian diplomatic spies under official cover recruit local assets and gather information about U.S. sanctions on Russia, efforts to develop alternative energy sources and sensitive financial industry data.

While Buryakov was mainly an information provider (though he did make some operational suggestions, including for a clandestine information warfare campaign targeting Canada), other NOCs can cause much more damage. In a now-infamous case, in 2018 the two Russian intelligence officers who poisoned Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, posed as tourists. While notable in that the would-be assassins were later identified after showing some sloppy tradecraft, the operation also showed just how easy it can be for NOCs to move throughout Europe and return home safely to Russia. A string of other suspected Russian targeted hits, sabotage efforts and other espionage operations in Europe is testament to this. And despite their identities being compromised and scores of Russian diplomats under official cover being expelled from Western countries, brazen Russian operations on European soil did not stop, such as the slaying in broad daylight of an ethnic Chechen, Georgian national in a Berlin park just over a year after the attempted killing of Skripal.

Even when not carrying out hits, NOCs can still make major operational contributions, especially when it comes to handling recruited assets who may now be without their Russian handlers. Given that in-person meetings are by no means the primary form of communication (a trend the pandemic has accelerated for spies, just as it has for regular workers), NOCs should be able to relatively easily rely on clandestine communication methods, such as encrypted mobile communications apps or "dead drops" (where individuals leave pass items and/or messages at a secret location to avoid directly meeting) to help communicate as they cover for their expelled comrades.

As in the cases of Buryakov and the assassins, some Russian NOCs may be willing conspirators, but others may be coerced. Russian intelligence officers are widely suspected of pressuring citizens or people of Russian heritage abroad to work for them. This is generally believed to occur when Russian spies pressure their marks through some sort of personal "kompromat" or a threat to their family and/or friends back home in Russia. Unsurprisingly, by definition verifiable accounts of these activities are rare, but there are sufficiently plausible rumors to assume Russia can also lean on this cohort to help make up for the mass expulsions.

In other cases, no coercion is needed. Russian intelligence services are well-known for working with sympathetic members of Russian communities abroad to exploit their established position in country to report information back to Moscow and even conduct operations on their own, such as generating protests to spur social unrest. At a minimum, they can help lay the groundwork for deployed operatives to arrive. For instance, mysterious explosions in 2014 at Czech ammunition storage facilities — which gained attention last year when new evidence emerged implicating Russia and, more specifically, the two Salisbury "tourists" — could not have occurred without some sort of on-the-ground assistance, be it to provide advance site surveillance, local housing or other supporting activities.

There are even concerns that, just as diplomats under official cover are getting expelled, Russia may be exploiting the outflow of Ukrainian refugees to infiltrate saboteurs. Although for now more of a hypothetical rather than verified concern, doing so would certainly fit within the Kremlin's playbook (similar concerns arose in the second half of last year when Belarus engineered a migrant crisis to pressure the European Union) and illustrates the many creative ways to insert Russian personnel into Europe. To this end, the sheer number of Russian-speaking Ukrainians fleeing to the West and the large number of Russians who have fled Russia since the start of the war will create large anti-Putin diaspora communities where NOCs may be able to hide.

A 20th Century Response to a 21st Century Problem

No matter how NOCs and others are operationalized, they offer Moscow flexibility when its spies under official cover are sent home because NOCs and other sympathizers will remain in country or can be brought in from elsewhere to pick up some of the slack. To be sure, this is an imperfect solution; after all, NOCs can't just show up at the nearest Russian embassy or consulate. But as seen, they can certainly help limit the negative impact of expulsions on espionage activity — and in some cases are even more attractive for spy work because, given their lack of clear ties back to Moscow, their activities enjoy at least some plausible deniability.

Ultimately, however, the resilience of Russia's espionage efforts in Europe will be determined not by its humint operations, but by Russian intelligence services' ability to adapt to the changing realities of spying in the modern era. In this respect, the response of European governments to expel hundreds of Russian spies, while notable and ultimately still important, may not be going after the most important targets — something we turn to in part two of the series.
Title: Clapper, Morell, Panetta at it again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 24, 2022, 01:10:50 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2022/04/21/hunter-biden-laptop-clapper-panetta-russian-disinformation-big-tech/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=r7lnCzpbLrkdhKXB.inlCIvU7xXzBIppcPOknLM2qwdm2li4Eo5XnrztUsJ0AaTE8R.v9rL9
Title: James Rosen: FBI tried ambushing my source(s)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2022, 12:17:41 PM
Haven't read the whole thing, but my first reaction is "Of course they did!  Your sources were breaking the law!"

https://theintercept.com/2022/06/03/fbi-ambush-leak-reporter-source/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter
Title: Russian spy caught at International Court
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2022, 03:52:11 PM
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61831961
Title: Haspel personally observed CIA waterboarding
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 26, 2022, 09:14:30 AM
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/foia-intelligence-torture-archive/2022-06-23/haspel-personally-observed-cia-waterboarding?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=f847ed01-f5ae-482e-98e1-6cf9ab4fb289
Title: Like getting Trump out of office...
Post by: G M on July 24, 2022, 08:52:46 PM
https://www.revolver.news/2022/07/james-woolsey-cia-interferes-with-elections-only-for-a-very-good-cause/
Title: Eh tu CIA director William Burns?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 01:58:00 AM
https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/12/cia-william-burns-lance-gooden-carnegie-endowment-chinese-communist-party/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=u7dsAntCJfsYwKHKqiy2SZGU4En_VYp_PeXlne1pr0dmc7hsVjCdoahQ6AZv.ucyl4IOmeKT
Title: Intel Matters Germany
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 19, 2022, 01:09:16 PM
New: Germany just sacked its cybersecurity chief because of his allegedly close ties to Russian intelligence, Germany's Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported Tuesday. His name is Arne Schönbohm, and since 2016 he's been in charge of Berlin's Federal Office for Information Security. But before taking that role, he'd helped start an advisory firm known as the Cyber Security Council Germany back in 2012; that council included a company called Protelion, "which was a subsidiary of a Russian firm reportedly established by a former member of the KGB," the BBC reports. Protelion was ejected from that council last week—three days after a late-night satirical news show, "ZDF Magazin Royale," highlighted Schönbohm's prior links to the council.

Berlin's Interior Ministry said Schönbohm is presumed innocent, but cited a loss of trust in his judgment, according to the BBC; it also promised a "thorough and vigorous" investigation into the allegations.
Title: CIA pooh bah on how we think
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 18, 2022, 07:58:19 AM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc
Title: FA: Open Secrets
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 22, 2022, 09:24:57 AM
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/open-secrets-ukraine-intelligence-revolution-amy-zegart?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fatoday&utm_campaign=Open%20Secrets&utm_content=20221222&utm_term=FA%20Today%20-%20112017

Open Secrets
Ukraine and the Next Intelligence Revolution
By Amy Zegart
January/February 2023

Rob Dobi
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a watershed moment for the world of intelligence. For weeks before the shelling began, Washington publicly released a relentless stream of remarkably detailed findings about everything from Russian troop movements to false-flag attacks the Kremlin would use to justify the invasion.

This disclosure strategy was new: spy agencies are accustomed to concealing intelligence, not revealing it. But it was very effective. By getting the truth out before Russian lies took hold, the United States was able to rally allies and quickly coordinate hard-hitting sanctions. Intelligence disclosures set Russian President Vladimir Putin on his back foot, wondering who and what in his government had been penetrated so deeply by U.S. agencies, and made it more difficult for other countries to hide behind Putin’s lies and side with Russia.

The disclosures were just the beginning. The war has ushered in a new era of intelligence sharing between Ukraine, the United States, and other allies and partners, which has helped counter false Russian narratives, defend digital systems from cyberattacks, and assisted Ukrainian forces in striking Russian targets on the battlefield. And it has brought to light a profound new reality: intelligence isn’t just for government spy agencies anymore.

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Over the past year, private citizens and groups have been tracking what Russia is planning and doing in ways that were unimaginable in earlier conflicts. Journalists have reported battlefield developments using imagery from commercial space satellites. Former government and military officials have been monitoring on-the-ground daily events and offering over-the-horizon analyses about where the war is headed on Twitter. A volunteer team of students at Stanford University, led by former U.S. Army and open-source imagery analyst Allison Puccioni, has been providing reports to the United Nations about Russian human rights atrocities in Ukraine—uncovering and verifying events using commercial-satellite thermal and electro-optical imaging, TikTok videos, geolocation tools, and more. At the Institute for the Study of War, a go-to source for military experts and analysts, researchers have even created an interactive map of the conflict based entirely on unclassified, or open-source, intelligence.

Technological advances have been central to this evolution. It is, after all, the Internet, social media, satellites, automated analytics, and other breakthroughs that have enabled civilians to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence. But although new technologies have helped shine a light on Russian military activity, their effects are far from uniformly positive. For the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, new technologies are creating more threats at a far faster rate. They are dramatically increasing the amount of data that analysts must process. They are giving companies and individual citizens a newfound need for intelligence, so that these private entities can help safeguard the country’s interests. And they are giving new intelligence capabilities to organizations and individuals outside the U.S. government, as well as to more countries. 

These shifts have been years in the making, and intelligence leaders are working hard to adapt to them. But anticipating the future in the new tech era demands more. Washington must embrace wholesale changes in order to understand and harness emerging technologies. It must, in particular, get serious about creating a new agency dedicated to open-source intelligence. Otherwise, the U.S. intelligence community will fall behind, leaving Americans more vulnerable to catastrophic surprises.

BRAVE NEW WORLD
When the Central Intelligence Agency was created, in 1947, the world was in an unusually precarious place. The allies had won World War II, but Soviet troops already threatened Europe. Repressive regimes were on the rise, democracies were weary and weak, and the international system was dividing into free spheres and illiberal ones. Amid this intensifying uncertainty and anxiety, the United States was called to lead a new global order. U.S. policymakers realized that they needed new capabilities for this role, including better intelligence. Centralizing intelligence in a new agency, they thought, would deliver timely insights about the future to prevent the next Pearl Harbor and win the Cold War.

In many ways, the present looks eerily similar to those early postwar years. The dog-eat-dog world of strong states using brute force to get what they want has returned. An authoritarian leader in Moscow is invading neighbors and again menacing all of Europe. Once more, democracies are looking fragile. The United States and its allies are engaged in yet another great-power competition—this time with China, a country whose rise looks less peaceful by the day, with its crackdowns on freedoms in Hong Kong, belligerent rhetoric about retaking Taiwan, and provocative military exercises that encircled the island. Even Marxism-Leninism is making a comeback. In China’s carefully choreographed 20th Party Congress, President Xi Jinping made it clear to party officials that ideology and personal loyalty were more important than continued economic liberalization. In case anyone missed the message, Xi’s economic reform-minded predecessor, Hu Jintao, was pulled from his chair and escorted out of party proceedings, perp-walk style, in full view of the press.

But looks can be deceiving. Thanks to technological innovations, the challenges of today differ greatly from postwar ones. Emerging technologies are transforming the planet in an unprecedented fashion and at an unprecedented pace. Together, inventions are making the world far more interconnected and altering the determinants of geopolitical advantage in fundamental ways. Increasingly, emerging technologies and data are major sources of national power, and they are intangible, harder to see and understand, and often created and controlled by companies, not governments. For the CIA and other intelligence agencies, understanding the geopolitical dangers and dynamics of the twenty-first century will likely be much harder than it was in the twentieth.

A woman taking a selfie near a Russian military helicopter, Horlivka Raion, Ukraine, September 2022
Near a Russian military helicopter, Horlivka Raion, Ukraine, September 2022
Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters
Consider the Internet. In the mid-1990s, less than one percent of the global population was online. Now sixty-six percent of the world is connected, from the far reaches of the Arctic to Bedouin tents in the desert. In the last three years alone, more than a billion more people have come online. This connectivity has already transformed global politics, for better and for worse. Social media has fueled protests against autocracies, such as the Arab Spring and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. But it has also empowered a new wave of government techno-surveillance led by Beijing and has enabled Russia’s massive disinformation operations to influence elections and undermine democracies from within.

Digital connectivity is not the only technology upending the world order. Artificial intelligence is disrupting nearly every industry—from medicine to trucking—to the point that one expert now estimates AI could eliminate up to 40 percent of jobs worldwide in the next 25 years. It is changing how wars are fought, automating everything from logistics to cyberdefenses. It is even making it possible for states to build unmanned fighter jets that could overwhelm defenses with swarms and maneuver faster and better than human pilots. Little wonder, then, that Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that whoever leads in AI development “will become the ruler of the world.” China has also made no secret of its plans to become the global AI leader by 2030.

Technological breakthroughs are also making it far easier for anyone—including weak states and terrorist groups—to detect events unfolding on earth from space. Commercial satellite capabilities have increased dramatically, offering eyes in the sky for anyone who wants them. Satellite launches more than doubled between 2016 and 2018; now, more than 5,000 satellites circle the earth, some no larger than a loaf of bread. Commercial satellites have less sophisticated sensing capabilities than do their spying counterparts, but civilian technologies are rapidly improving. Some commercial satellites now have resolutions so sharp that they can identify manhole covers, signs, and even road conditions. Others have the ability to detect radio frequency emissions; observe vehicle movements and nuclear cooling plumes; and operate at night, in cloudy weather, or through dense vegetation and camouflage. Constellations of small satellites can revisit the same location multiple times a day to detect changes over short periods—something that was once impossible. All these changes are leveling the intelligence playing field, and not always in a good way. In 2020, for example, Iran used commercial satellite images to monitor U.S. forces in Iraq before launching a ballistic missile attack that wounded more than 100 people.

Other technological advances with national security implications include quantum computing, which could eventually unlock the encryption protecting nearly all the world’s data, making even highly classified information available to adversaries. Synthetic biology is enabling scientists to engineer living organisms, paving the way for what could be revolutionary improvements in the production of food, medicine, data storage, and weapons of war.

In modern warfare, weapons don’t look like weapons.
Understanding the promise and perils of these and other emerging technologies is an essential intelligence mission. The U.S. government needs to know who is poised to win key technological competitions and what the effects could be. It must assess how future wars will be fought and won. It must figure out how new technologies could tackle global challenges such as climate change. It needs to determine how adversaries will use data and tech tools to coerce others, commit atrocities, evade sanctions, develop dangerous weapons, and secure other advantages.

But these important questions are becoming harder to answer because the landscape of innovation has changed and expanded, making inventions more difficult to track and understand. In the past, technological breakthroughs, such as the Internet and GPS, were invented by U.S. government agencies and commercialized later by the private sector. Most innovations that affected national security did not have widespread commercial application, so they could be classified at birth and, if necessary, restricted forever. Today, the script has flipped. Technological innovations are more likely to be “dual use”: to have both commercial and military applications. They are also far more likely to be invented in the private sector, where they are funded by foreign investors, developed by a multinational workforce, and sold to global customers in private and public sectors alike.

Those that are born in the private sector are more widely accessible and not as easily restricted. Artificial intelligence, for example, has become so prevalent and intuitive that high school students with no coding background can make deepfakes—AI-generated, manipulated videos that show people saying and doing things they never said or did. In March 2022, someone released a deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky telling Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms. More recently, deepfakes impersonating Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, have been used to dupe Ukrainian officials into revealing information about the war effort. McFaul deepfakes have become so pervasive that the real McFaul had to tweet warnings asking people not to fall for what he called “a new Russian weapon of war.”

These changes in the innovation landscape are giving private-sector leaders new power and national security officials fresh challenges. Power isn’t just shifting abroad. Power is shifting at home. U.S. social media platforms now find themselves on the frontlines of information warfare, deciding what is real and what is fake, what speech is allowed and what speech is not. Startup founders are inventing capabilities that can be used by enemies they can’t foresee with consequences they can’t control. Meanwhile, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are struggling to adopt critical new technologies from the outside and move at the speed of invention instead of at the pace of bureaucracy. Private-sector leaders have responsibilities they don’t want, and government leaders want capabilities they don’t have.

UP TO SPEED
Intelligence is often misunderstood. Although spy agencies deal with secrets, they are not in the secrets business. Their core purpose is delivering insights to policymakers and anticipating the future faster and better than adversaries. Clandestinely acquired information from sources such as intercepted phone calls or firsthand spy reports is important, but secrets are just part of the picture. Most information in a typical intelligence report is unclassified or publicly available. And raw information—secret or not—is rarely valuable on its own because it is often incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory, poorly sourced, misleading, deliberately deceptive, or just plain wrong. Analysis is what turns uncertain findings into insight by synthesizing disparate pieces of information and assessing its context, credibility, and meaning.

Intelligence insights are not always correct. But when they are, they can be priceless. When U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, it gave Washington critical time to help arm Kyiv and unify the West around a response. But it may soon become harder for spy agencies to replicate this success because the global-threat landscape has never been as crowded or as complicated as it is today—and with threats that move faster than ever. It is now more difficult for intelligence officers to do their jobs. After spending nearly half a century largely focused on countering the Soviet Union and two decades fighting terrorists, they today must confront a diverse multitude of dangers. They must deal with transnational threats such as pandemics and climate change; great-power competition with China and Russia; terrorism and other threats from weak and failed states; and cyberattacks that steal, spy, disrupt, destroy, and deceive at stunning speeds and scale. Intelligence agencies are, to put it mildly, overtaxed.

Technology makes today’s threat list not only longer but more formidable. For centuries, countries defended themselves by building powerful militaries and taking advantage of good geography. But in cyberspace, anyone can attack from anywhere, without pushing through air, land, and sea defenses. In fact, the most powerful countries are now often the most vulnerable because their power relies on digital systems for business, education, health care, military operations, and more. These states can be hit by big attacks that disable their critical infrastructure. They can be subject to repeated small attacks that add up to devastating damage before security officials even know it. China, for example, has robbed its way to technological advantage in a variety of industries, from fighter jets to pharmaceuticals, by stealing from U.S. companies one hack at a time, in what FBI Director Christopher Wray has called one of the greatest transfers of wealth in human history and “the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.”

The line between the wisdom of crowds and the danger of mobs is thin.
Russia has also used cyberattacks to great effect, proving that technology can allow malignant actors to hack minds—not just machines. Russian operatives created bots and fake social media profiles impersonating Americans that spread disinformation across the United States during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, polarizing the country and undermining its democracy. Today, China could turn Americans against each other without even using U.S. tech platforms. The Chinese firm ByteDance owns TikTok, the popular social media app that boasts more than a billion users, including an estimated 135 million Americans, or 40 percent of the U.S. population. Both Democrats and Republicans now worry that TikTok could enable the Chinese government to vacuum all sorts of data about Americans and launch massive influence campaigns that serve Beijing’s interests—all under the guise of giving U.S. consumers what they want. In today’s world of information warfare, weapons don’t look like weapons.

Because cyberattacks can happen so quickly, and because policymakers can track breaking events and get hot takes with the touch of a button, U.S. intelligence agencies also need to operate with newfound speed. Timeliness, of course, has always been important to spycraft: in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, U.S. President John F. Kennedy had 13 days to pore over intelligence and consider his policy options after surveillance photographs from a U-2 spy plane revealed Soviet nuclear installations in Cuba, and on September 11, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush had less than 13 hours after the World Trade Center attacks to review intelligence and announce a response. Today, the time for presidents to consider intelligence before making major policy decisions may be closer to 13 minutes or even 13 seconds.

But moving fast also carries risks. It takes time to vet a source’s credibility, tap expert knowledge across fields, and consider alternative explanations for a finding. Without careful intelligence analysis, leaders may make premature or even dangerous decisions. The potential consequences of rash action became evident in December 2016, when a news story reported that Israel’s former defense minister was threatening a nuclear attack against Pakistan if Islamabad deployed troops in Syria. Pakistan’s Defense Minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, quickly tweeted: “Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh. Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too AH.” But the original story had been fabricated. Asif had dashed off his response before finding out the truth. Satisfying policymakers’ need for speed while carefully collecting, vetting, and assessing intelligence has always been a delicate balance, but that balance is getting harder to strike.

NEED TO KNOW
Intelligence agencies must deal with a data environment that is vast, not just fast. The volume of information available online has become almost unimaginably immense. According to the World Economic Forum, in 2019, Internet users posted 500 million tweets, sent 294 billion emails, and uploaded 350 million photos to Facebook every day. Every second, the Internet transmits roughly one petabyte of data: the amount of data that an individual would have consumed after binge-watching movies nonstop for over three years.

U.S. intelligence agencies are already collecting far more information than humans can analyze effectively. In 2018, the intelligence community was capturing more than three National Football League seasons’ worth of high-definition imagery a day on each sensor they deployed in a combat theater. According to a source at the Department of Defense, in 2020, one soldier deployed to the Middle East was so concerned about the crushing flow of classified intelligence emails he was receiving that he decided to count them. The total: 10,000 emails in 120 days. These quantities are likely to grow. Some estimates show that the amount of digital data on earth doubles every 24 months.

And increasingly, intelligence agencies must satisfy a wider range of customers—including people who do not command troops, hold security clearances, or even work in government. Today, plenty of important decision-makers live worlds apart from Washington, making consequential policy choices in boardrooms and living rooms—not the White House Situation Room. Big Tech companies, including Microsoft and Google, need intelligence about cyberthreats to and through their systems. Most of the United States’ critical infrastructure is controlled by private firms, such as energy companies, and they also need information about cyber risks that could disrupt or destroy their systems. Voters need intelligence about how foreign governments are interfering in elections and waging operations to polarize society. And because cyberthreats do not stop at the border, U.S. security increasingly depends on sharing intelligence faster and better with allies and partners.

To serve this broader array of customers, the U.S. intelligence community is making unclassified products and engaging with the outside world to an extent it has not before. The National Security Agency, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies are now creating public service videos about foreign threats to U.S. elections. In September 2022, the CIA launched a podcast called The Langley Files, aimed at demystifying the agency and educating the public. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyzes satellite imagery and other geospatial intelligence, launched a project called Tearline—a collaboration with think tanks, universities, and nonprofits to create unclassified reports about climate change, Russian troop movements, human rights issues, and more. In 2021, the NSA began issuing joint advisories with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency detailing major cyberthreats, exposing the entities behind them, and explaining how firms could shore up their security. In October, these three agencies even released the technical details of the top 20 cyber vulnerabilities exploited by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. and allied networks, along with meticulous instructions about how to improve cyber defenses. The U.S. government is now also issuing advisories with foreign intelligence partners.

The success of this public-facing strategy has been on full display in Ukraine. It helped the United States warn the world about Russia’s invasion. It helped rally the West behind a fast response. And it continues to frustrate Moscow. Most recently, after Washington revealed intelligence indicating that senior Russian military leaders were discussing using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Xi issued a rare public warning against the “use of, or threats to use, nuclear weapons.” Xi’s “no limits” relationship with Putin suddenly had limits after all.

CROWD SURFING
In addition to more customers, technology has given U.S. intelligence agencies more competition. The explosion of open-source information online, commercial satellite capabilities, and the rise of AI are enabling all sorts of individuals and private organizations to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence.

In the past several years, for instance, the amateur investigators of Bellingcat—a volunteer organization that describes itself as “an intelligence agency for the people”—have made all kinds of discoveries. Bellingcat identified the Russian hit team that tried to assassinate former Russian spy officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom and located supporters of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Europe. It also proved that Russians were behind the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine.

Bellingcat is not the only civilian intelligence initiative. When the Iranian government claimed in 2020 that a small fire had broken out in an industrial shed, two U.S. researchers working independently and using nothing more than their computers and the Internet proved within hours that Tehran was lying. As David Albright and Fabian Hinz quickly found, the building was actually a nuclear centrifuge assembly facility at Iran’s main uranium enrichment site. The damage was so extensive that the fire may well have been caused by an explosion—raising the possibility of sabotage. In 2021, nuclear sleuths at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California used commercial satellite imagery to discover more than 200 new intercontinental ballistic missile silos in China, a finding that could signal historic increases in China’s nuclear arsenal.   

A satellite picture of damage in Mariupol, Ukraine, October 2022
A satellite picture of damage in Mariupol, Ukraine, October 2022
Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty
For U.S. intelligence agencies, this burgeoning world of open-source intelligence brings significant new opportunities as well as risks. On the positive side, citizen-sleuths offer more eyes and ears around the world scanning for developments and dangers as they arise. The wisdom of the crowd can be a powerful tool, especially for piecing together tiny bits of information. Unbound by bureaucracy, open-source intelligence analysts can work quickly. And because open-source information is by definition declassified, it can be shared easily within government agencies, across them, and with the public without revealing sensitive sources or methods.

But these features are also flaws. Open-source intelligence is available to everyone, everywhere, no matter their motives, national loyalties, or capabilities. Citizen-sleuths do not have to answer to anyone or train anywhere, and that invites all kinds of hazards. Volunteer analysts are rewarded for being fast (especially online) but are rarely punished for being wrong—which means they are more likely to make errors. And the line between the wisdom of crowds and the danger of mobs is thin. After a 2013 terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon killed three people and wounded more than 260 others, Reddit users jumped into action. Posting pet theories, unconfirmed chatter on police scanners, and other crowdsourced tidbits of information, amateur investigators fingered two “suspects” and the mainstream media publicized the findings. Both turned out to be innocent.

These weaknesses can create serious headaches for governments. When errors go viral, intelligence agencies have to burn time and resources fact-checking the work of others and reassuring policymakers that the agencies’ original intelligence assessments should not change. Accurate open-source discoveries can cause problems, too. Findings, for example, might force policymakers into corners by making information public that, if kept secret, could have left room for compromise and graceful exits from crises. To diffuse the Cuban missile crisis, for example, Kennedy agreed to secretly remove U.S. nuclear weapons from Turkey if the Soviets took their missiles out of Cuba. Had satellite imagery been publicly available, Kennedy might have been too worried about domestic political backlash to make a deal.

OPEN RELATIONSHIP
U.S. intelligence leaders know that their success in the twenty-first century hinges on adapting to a world of more threats, more speed, more data, more customers, and more competitors. Their agencies have been working hard to meet these challenges by launching organizational reforms, technology innovation programs, and new initiatives to recruit top science and engineering talent. They have had some important successes. But these are difficult problems to overcome, and so far, the intelligence community’s efforts have been piecemeal.

The rate of progress is especially concerning given that the challenges are well known, the stakes are high, and intelligence weaknesses have been festering for years. Multiple reports and articles (including one in this magazine) have found that intelligence agencies are not keeping pace with technological developments. These reports point to an unfortunate reality. Washington cannot address its present challenges by making incremental changes to existing agencies. Instead, developing U.S. intelligence capabilities for the twenty-first century requires building something new: a dedicated, open-source intelligence agency focused on combing through unclassified data and discerning what it means.

Creating a 19th intelligence agency may seem duplicative and unnecessary. But it is essential. Despite Washington’s best efforts, open-source intelligence has always been a second-class citizen in the U.S. intelligence community because it has no agency with the budget, hiring power, or seat at the table to champion it. As long as open-source intelligence remains embedded in secret agencies that value clandestine information above all, it will languish. A culture of secrecy will continue to strangle the adoption of cutting-edge technical tools from the commercial sector. Agencies will struggle to attract and retain talent that is desperately needed to help them understand and use new technologies. And efforts to harness the power of open-source intelligence collectors and analysts outside government will fall short.

Even the best open-source intelligence has limits.
A new open-source intelligence agency would bring innovation, not just information, to the U.S. intelligence community by providing fertile soil for the growth of far-reaching changes in human capital, technology adoption, and collaboration with the burgeoning open-source intelligence ecosystem. Such an agency would be a powerful lever for attracting the workforce of tomorrow. Because it deals with unclassified information, the agency could recruit top scientists and engineers to work right away, without requiring them to wait months or years for security clearances. Locating open-source agency offices in technology hubs where engineers already live and want to stay—places such as Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle—would make it easier for talent to flow in and out of government. The result could be a corps of tech-savvy officials who rotate between public service and the private sector, acting as ambassadors between both worlds. They would increase the intelligence community’s presence and prestige in technology circles while bringing a continuous stream of fresh tech ideas back inside.

By working with unclassified material, the open-source agency could also help the intelligence community do a better and faster job of adopting new collection and analysis technologies. (The open-source agency could test new inventions and, if they proved effective, pass them along to agencies that work with secrets.) The agency would also be ideally positioned to engage with leading open-source intelligence organizations and individuals outside the government. These partnerships could help U.S. intelligence agencies outsource more of their work to responsible nongovernmental collectors and analysts, freeing up intelligence officials to focus their capabilities and clandestine collection efforts on missions that nobody else can do.

And there will still be many such missions. After all, even the best open-source intelligence has limits. Satellite imagery can reveal new Chinese missile silos but not what Chinese leaders intend to do with them. Identifying objects or tracking movements online is important, but generating insight requires more. Secret methods remain uniquely suited to understanding what foreign leaders know, believe, and desire. There is no open-source substitute for getting human spies inside a foreign leaders’ inner circle or penetrating an adversary’s communications system to uncover what that adversary is saying and writing. Analysts with clearances will also always be essential for assessing what classified discoveries mean, how credible they are, and how they fit with other, unclassified findings.

But secret agencies are no longer enough. The country faces a dangerous new era that includes great-power competition, renewed war in Europe, ongoing terrorist attacks, and fast-changing cyberattacks. New technologies are driving these threats and determining who will be able to understand and chart the future. To succeed, the U.S. intelligence community must adapt to a more open, technological world
Title: China claims ability to break encryption.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2023, 07:08:24 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-claims-about-breaking-quantum-encryption-should-make-us-uncomfortable-expert_4971938.html?fbclid=IwAR11wPveKXuJIMramGDKC3EhBdC8PcqpcHEDBPTSqqRdS1bNvglduBDJP4o
Title: Anarchy in the CIA?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2023, 03:20:28 AM
https://americanmind.org/salvo/anarchy-in-the-cia/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=249675672&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9G3i-BmZFRgUX3RdjiuQ6r8-k9KS3d9rurZK-wCQCYxUI67KtN7IOs15_Un4fO_I5jhVyoV2YktJ-0QzgThgK7yc-XyQ&utm_content=249675672&utm_source=hs_email
Title: Re: Anarchy in the CIA?
Post by: G M on March 13, 2023, 05:33:59 AM
https://americanmind.org/salvo/anarchy-in-the-cia/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=249675672&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9G3i-BmZFRgUX3RdjiuQ6r8-k9KS3d9rurZK-wCQCYxUI67KtN7IOs15_Un4fO_I5jhVyoV2YktJ-0QzgThgK7yc-XyQ&utm_content=249675672&utm_source=hs_email

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/after-learning-of-whitey-bulger-lsd-tests-juror-has-regrets
Title: leaker found !!
Post by: ccp on April 13, 2023, 07:35:07 AM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pentagon-leaks-linked-young-gun-051038221.html

funny leaker finally found (since when are leakers for the LEFT ever found)
and he is RACIST GUN ENTHUSIAST!!!!

for the LEFT => happy days are here again .

This will be carried by every msm outlet
ad nauseam for the rest of the month
till the next DJT story

[of course that said, he should be placed in front of a firing squad for what "he/she/they/them" did ]
Title: NRO: America's Dumbest Leaker: This is the dumbest timeline
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 14, 2023, 11:18:18 AM


What America’s Dumbest Leaker Revealed

On the menu today: The FBI caught the leaker of the gargantuan trove of America’s intelligence secrets, and if you buy into the idea of a multiverse, where alternate dimensions play out different scenarios of history, you are likely to accept the increasingly common slogan, “This is the dumbest timeline.” It’s one thing to have our country’s secrets revealed by an ideologue such as Edward Snowden, or have some hapless schmo spill the beans to some Russian honeytrap like Anna Chapman. But no, we just had our biggest secrets revealed to the whole world by a 21-year-old Air Force National Guard tech-guy dweeb who wanted to look like an “original gangster” in front of his teenage friends on an online server.

A Devastating and Comprehensive Leak

Earlier this week, I noted that the usual response to a massive leak of classified information — enacting more restrictions upon who gets to see what intelligence, and explicitly or implicitly discouraging the sharing of information from one agency to another — inevitably leads to “stovepiping.” In fact, the Pentagon has already begun enacting new limits on who within its ranks receives its highly classified daily intelligence briefing. When critical information gets stovepiped, the U.S. government’s response to all kinds of threats from terrorists to hostile regimes gets slower and less effective.

And yet, upon learning about the details of this most recent leak . . . stovepipe away, spooks, because this sounds ridiculous:

As a newly minted member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard returned home from training, his mother took to her flower shop’s Facebook page to express pride in his accomplishments.

“Jack is on his way home today, tech school complete, ready to start his career in the Air National Guard!” said the post, dated June 3, 2021. It was accompanied by a photograph of a patriotic-themed balloon tied to a mailbox and emblazoned, “Welcome home!”

Patriotic zeal appeared common around Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira, 21, who had followed in the footsteps of numerous family members to join the military. Teixeira, slim and boyish in photographs taken in his blue dress uniform, had been assigned to manage and troubleshoot computers and communications systems for the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, according to the Air Force. . . .

While Teixeira was relatively inexperienced in the military, he had access to highly classified military intelligence through a Defense Department computer network known as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, said a U.S. official familiar with the matter. The system would have allowed Teixeira to read and potentially print classified documents, though there are guidelines to handle those in accordance with the law.

A 21-year-old Air National guardsman had access to some of the biggest secrets of our intelligence community, including, but not limited to, reports stating:

The Ukrainians are on a pace to run out of air-defense missiles by May; the document stated that the Ukrainians’ “ability to provide medium range air defense to protect the [front lines] will be completely reduced by May 23. UKR assessed to withstand 2-3 more wave strikes.”
Western plans to arm and train Ukraine’s army, “including the status of nine Ukrainian brigades, the amount of armor and artillery in each one and the precise number of shells and precision-guided rockets Ukraine is firing each day.” As The Economist surmises, “If accurate, the data could allow Russian military intelligence to identify the specific brigades that have probably been tasked with breaching Russian defenses at the outset of the offensive. That, in turn, could allow Russia to carefully monitor those units to assess the location and timing of an offensive. One slide indicates that Ukraine’s 10th Corps is likely to command the operation, which will now make its headquarters an obvious Russian target. Another shows when the muddy ground is expected to harden sufficiently for heavy armored vehicles to pass over.”
U.S. intelligence agencies have “penetrated nearly every aspect of the Russian intelligence apparatus and military command structure.”
U.S. assessments that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is likely to face significant challenges and achieve limited gains in the coming year.
The Mossad encouraged Israel’s anti-Netanyahu protests.
“China approved provision of lethal aid to Russia in its war in Ukraine earlier this year and planned to disguise military equipment as civilian items.”
“The China’s People’s Liberation Army had . . . successfully tested a new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile called the DF-27.”
As CNN described, “One document attributed to a signals intelligence report said that Jordan’s Foreign Ministry in late February planned to assure Beijing about its interest in a continued economic relationship, after Beijing reportedly complained that Chinese companies were not involved in the country’s 5G network rollout. Another said Nicaragua was negotiating with a Chinese company for the construction of a deepwater port on its Caribbean coast, attributing this information to signals intelligence.”
“President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt . . . a major recipient of U.S. aid, recently ordered subordinates to produce up to 40,000 rockets to be covertly shipped to Russia.”
Information about secret conversations at the highest level of the South Korean government, revealing that the U.S. is intercepting the electronic communications of President Yoon Suk Yeol and his top aides.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán identified the United States as one of his party’s “top three adversaries” during a “political strategy session” on February 22.
Russian intelligence officers bragged that they had “convinced the . . . United Arab Emirates ‘to work together against US and UK intelligence agencies.’”
As the Washington Post put it, the leak involved classified information from just about every major U.S. intelligence agency: “Documents describe intelligence activities at the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, law enforcement agencies and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) — arguably the most secretive intelligence agency in the government, responsible for a multibillion-dollar constellation of spy satellites.”

Other countries’ counterintelligence agencies love information like this because it lets them know which forms of communication are being intercepted by the U.S., and then they get their governments to stop using those forms of communication. It also helps them figure out who among their ranks is revealing or selling information to our spies.

Teixeira was a “cyber transport systems specialist” — in other words, he was one of the computer guys. The U.S. Air Force touts that job: “Whether it’s repairing a network hub at a stateside base or installing fiber-optic cable at a forward installation overseas, these experts keep our communications systems up and running and play an integral role in our continuing success.”

Teixeira was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod. It is very far from clear as to why Teixeira would have or need so much access to so much classified information to perform his duties; obviously, no one noticed or paid attention to the information he was accessing.

Over in The Atlantic, Juliette Kayyem, a former homeland-security adviser to former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick who helped oversee the state’s Air National Guard, says she can’t understand it, either. “Based on my experience, I am at a loss to explain why a 21-year-old member of the state intelligence wing, who does not appear to have been working in any federal capacity, would need access to the kind of materials whose release has so unnerved the Pentagon and supporters of the Ukrainian war effort. . . . It stretches any notion of homeland defense to think a low-level state Air Guard member should have access to materials about a war that the United States is not actively fighting and that poses no domestic risk.”

Teixeira was no whistle-blower, nor is there any evidence at this point that he was being influenced, blackmailed, or strong-armed by any foreign intelligence service. No, he’s just stupid, and he wanted to look like a big deal in front of his peers on a Discord chat server. His chosen online initials “OG” likely mean “original gangster,” a slang term for someone who’s incredibly exceptional, authentic, or “old-school.” I will remind you that this “original gangster” only recently became old enough to legally purchase alcohol.

President Biden said on Thursday that while he was concerned sensitive government documents had been leaked, “there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence.”

This is an attempt at spin so ludicrously inaccurate it raises questions about Biden’s understanding of what happened. The Ukrainians had to alter some of their battle plans for the counteroffensive because of this leak; Ukraine’s top intelligence official lamented, “Russia is the only beneficiary of this.”

Either President Biden is lying his butt off, they’re not briefing him on all of the details, or he can’t remember what he was told in his briefings. Or some variation of all three.

ADDENDUM: From the Washington Post’s report: “The photos of documents posted online included a trail of clues, with items in the background that included Gorilla Glue, a Boston Red Sox hat, and hunting magazines.”

New York Yankees fans this morning: “I knew it.”

I was going to make a joke that while Red Sox fans spill national secrets, Yankees fans kill dictators such as Moammar Qaddafi, but that is apparently not the case. At this time, the preferred baseball team of the man who killed Qaddafi remains unknown.
Title: What's really behind the leak?
Post by: G M on April 16, 2023, 01:21:11 PM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/04/13/the-full-surveillance-power-of-the-u-s-govt-could-not-find-the-classified-intel-leaker-but-the-media-did/
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2023, 08:27:54 PM
You are beginning to scare me GM.  I am now at the point where that sounds plausible , , ,
Title: Yes it was a Deep State soft coup
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 10, 2023, 11:00:10 AM
https://patriotpost.us/articles/97070-the-american-intel-psyop-that-rigged-the-2020-election-2023-05-05?mailing_id=7473&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.7473&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2023, 07:54:47 AM
https://www.afio.com/publications/HOLZER_GIBSON_Ultra_Diplomacy-WIMAD_AFIO_Intelligencer_WinterSpring_2023_Vol28_No1.pdf
Title: The Origins of Five Eyes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2023, 08:28:46 AM
https://www.afio.com/publications/HOLZER_GIBSON_Ultra_Diplomacy-WIMAD_AFIO_Intelligencer_WinterSpring_2023_Vol28_No1.pdf
Title: George Friedman: A convocation of spies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2023, 03:16:26 AM
Not how I see things, but GF is a very smart guy:
=================================

June 6, 2023
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A Convocation of Spies
By: George Friedman

Over the past weekend, major global media outlets revealed that the heads of intelligence of about two dozen countries held a (formerly) secret meeting in Singapore and had in fact been held annually for several years. The venue for the talks was the Shangri-La Hotel, also the meeting place for a large, widely known conference called the Shangri-La Dialogue, involving about 600 representatives from around the world. Such conferences, perhaps usually smaller, are common gatherings of government officials and others who want to be and are allowed to be there.

Among the roughly 24 intelligence chiefs at the informal meeting were the heads of U.S. and Chinese intelligence. India’s top intelligence chief was also present, as were chiefs from the Five Eyes network (the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand), but no other attendees were identified. It was noted that Russia was not represented – whether by its choice or by the organizers' exclusion is unclear.

According to Reuters, the source of the information was five separate (and I assume unconnected) people. When one person leaks information, it is one of those things. When five leak the same information simultaneously, it is the equivalent of a press release. The existence of these meetings, and the revelation that the U.S. and China were both there and Russia was not, is important. What is fascinating is that there was an organized attempt by someone to blow the cover off the meeting. That the leakers seem not to have identified the others present is interesting, since it suggests the leak came from official sources who respected requests for anonymity – and indicates that those named didn’t mind it being revealed that they had attended secret meetings with major powers for some years.

Equally interesting is that the meeting of two dozen heads of intelligence could have been kept secret. A meeting of such people requires several weeks of logistical planning, security preparations, and exchange of proposed agendas and position papers. Heads of intelligence need to know what they will be dealing with, at least generally. Intelligence chiefs know secrets that their governments don’t want blurted out, and they aren’t casual about this. Their briefings on official positions and authorized threats that might be made require weeks of preparation for the chief and some staff. The American head of intelligence can’t be casually chatting with the Chinese. Obviously, preparations for the Shangri-La Dialogue mostly would have covered the smaller conference. But it is hard to believe that 24 national intelligence heads, plus other officials in each country who had to know of the preparations, could for years fail to leak a conference such as this.

The focus on security might seem less important than the reasons for the leak, but in this case, they are closely linked. The cover of the meeting was blown simultaneously by five sources. The loss of secrecy will raise public concern in at least some countries as to why the meetings were held, why they were kept secret, and what was discussed and agreed to. In democratic countries like the United States, intelligence agencies are already distrusted by many.

If any serious discussions were held, it is hard to believe they took place in the company of all the other nations present. I would guess that the meeting was accompanied by secret bilateral meetings, if not by others then by the Americans and Chinese. Russia's absence from the smaller group is also important. I doubt that Russia was absent from prior meetings, but it was missing from this one. Obviously, China did not insist that Russia be included. The willingness of the Chinese to sit down with other powers without Moscow's presence signifies that Russia is not seen as a great power. It was not missed. China and India had things to talk about concerning conflict on their border. And China and the U.S. had things to talk about as well.

I doubt the discussion was about potential war. I think that is a distant possibility, and any such discussion would be about the substance of war, rules of interception, warning systems and so on. At this fundamental level, the discussion more likely would be about geopolitics – more precisely, Russia. Recall the alliance between Russia and China that went nowhere.

There are two likelier subjects. There have been rumors that the U.S., which has an interest in ending the Ukraine war at or near the front, has asked China to try to work with its putative ally to end the conflict. Discussing China’s ability to do this and the price it would demand for its labor might well be at the level of intelligence directors. Another, even more probable possibility is that the two countries, sensing Russia's decline, want to think of what the future might look like, hoping to prevent conflict between the two remaining superpowers.

After the meeting, it was revealed that India is shifting away from its relationship with Russia, long a major supplier of weapons for India, and toward the United States. Since India has been fighting China along their shared border, this agreement, like other agreements reached in the Pacific, places China in a difficult military position. It is locked out of the Pacific and facing an increasingly powerful India to its southwest.

It is, of course, not clear how long this U.S. relationship with India will last, but for the moment, added to the decline of Russia as an ally and the aggressive actions the U.S. has taken to form alliances in the Western Pacific, China is in a difficult position. I have long argued that China could not risk a war in the Pacific. Now, in my view, China must take steps to deescalate the tension. A meeting involving China’s head of intelligence and his counterparts from the U.S., India, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – and not Russia – suggests Beijing understands the position it is in and that it had to shift. The leaders seemed very careful to make the balance of power public.

There has been a spate of speeches and articles in China emphasizing the need to avoid conflict and increase cooperation. Given the geopolitical reality they face, and studying the Russian experience in Ukraine, the Chinese have a new sense of the way the world works, or a confirmation of a reality they saw months ago and hoped would evaporate. It is uncertain if the shift in tone is permanent. The test will be if they stop threatening war over Taiwan or at least confine their threats to ritual gestures. But China is on the whole signaling new relations, and the intelligence meeting and its publication was sobering.

Secret meetings of intelligence heads are dangerous. They can trigger distrust at home, particularly in the United States. But the fact that someone wanted the world to know that the meetings had been going on for a long time and who was involved in them indicates that the leakers came from countries that did well at the gathering. The other 20 or so retained their anonymity. This is a major event in the shifting balance of power.
Title: George Friedman: Five Eyes in our Time
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 01, 2023, 09:27:33 AM


August 1, 2023
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Five Eyes in Our Time
By: George Friedman

A few years ago, I was invited to a military meeting in Australia. When I walked into the room, I expected to see Australian officers. Instead, the room was awash in American and British uniforms, plus smaller numbers of New Zealanders, and I thought I could make out a couple of Canadians in the distance. It drove home to me that the Five Eyes was not just an agreement on intelligence sharing but a functioning military alliance without the paperwork or, more precisely, with much paperwork that taken together achieved uncertainty. The members of the Five Eyes, for different reasons, did not want to formalize what existed in practice.

The Five Eyes, without the cool name, originated in World War II. Having common enemies, the five nations created a set of alliances to defeat them – and obviously, to share intelligence. Before joining the war, the Americans supported Britain. The Australians also sent forces. In our house, we have a picture of my Australian wife’s cousin, who was shot down on a recon mission flying with the Brits over Germany. After Pearl Harbor and the British defeat in Singapore, the United States became the center of gravity of the Pacific war, with the Australians providing forces and bases in Australia, along with New Zealand. The Canadians had aligned early with Britain. Other nations were involved, but these five had the advantage of having a common language, if not quite a common culture. The American forces grew larger than the British, and many warm discussions were held between British and American commanders. Mistrust still existed, just as it does between and within all services fighting the same war.

War has its foundation in intelligence, in knowing the enemy. The British excelled at human intelligence in Europe and code-breaking. The Americans similarly broke the Japanese code, but they did not have intelligence in Japan or in the island chain they were fighting for. Australia could not provide human intelligence from Japan, but it could provide coast watchers in the Solomons and other islands, reporting on the movement of Japanese warships and Japanese landings. The Five Eyes coordinated operations, from invasions to logistics, but in many ways, the key was the intelligence that they could provide.

The relationship was not formalized. It was simply essential. It remained in place after the beginning of the Cold War based on a simple formula. Any of the five members would share intelligence, if not methods of collection, with the others.

The military side of the Cold War saw intense cooperation between the British and the Americans, with the British holding northern Germany and the Americans the central front. Fearing a potential Soviet nuclear attack, the Americans needed to detect incoming missiles as far away as possible. So, the Distant Early Warning Line was built in northern Canada, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, based in Colorado, was established, giving the Canadians access to U.S. intelligence and methods for protecting North America. To face off against China, the Australians developed a navy to join the U.S. in the Pacific, where the British were always present. The New Zealanders chose to be prickly, denying U.S. access to their ports unless the U.S. certified that no nuclear weapons were on board its ships. The U.S. refused.

The point I am trying to make is that the Five Eyes was from the beginning, even before the term existed, a military alliance designed to fight in World War II and to collaborate in the Cold War. Each country had other alliances and sometimes shared alliances, but the Five Eyes constitutes a unique relationship of shared interests. At the beginning of the Cold War, the United States became the center of the Five Eyes. But the point is that the alliance members shared the American burden, however ill-advised they may have thought the venture. When the United States invaded Iraq, the British took responsibility for southern Iraq. New Zealand refused combat but did send troops to Afghanistan.

There is an economic dimension to this relationship that is rarely noticed. The Five Eyes nations combined have about 7 percent of the world’s population but over 28 percent of its gross domestic product. There is no common Five Eyes market, but there is a series of bilateral trade agreements intense in joint ventures of various sorts. Obviously, the American economy is the largest, but on a per capita basis all of the countries should be seen as economic successes, domestic grumbling noted.

In practice, the Five Eyes has never been simply an intelligence-sharing agreement. It also entails cooperation as a military-political force. We see this in Ukraine, where Britain and the U.S. are playing roles together, and in the Pacific against China, where the U.S. and Australian navies – including, in time, nuclear submarines – operate, in addition to coordinating economic pressure. The U.S. Congress is in the process of authorizing the implementation of the trilateral AUKUS agreement to, along with the U.K., give Australia nuclear-powered submarines. This would mark a further deepening, operationally and technologically, of the cooperation between three members of the Five Eyes. Additionally, Australia and the U.K. are pushing for more cooperation on other technologies such as hypersonic weapons and quantum computing.

As I said, each country has many allies. But in history, military capability and economic power, the Five Eyes is unique. They have come together out of geopolitical imperatives, but one can’t ignore that the Five Eyes countries are the heirs of English culture. All nations have immigrants and histories of oppressing minorities. Nevertheless, the Five Eyes became a combined global power because, as much as they irritate each other, they also understand each other as only heirs of a tradition could. That creates an international cement that is not present in NATO or in the Chinese-Russian alliance.

I was comfortable at the meeting because I understood the jokes being told. I don’t always get them in Hungary, where I was born. Understanding snide remarks is not a bad foundation for alliances.
Title: Not so first hand
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 02, 2023, 01:14:37 PM


https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/09/27/oh-so-thats-why-the-trumpukraine-whistleblower-complaint-is-loaded-with-errors-n2553847
Title: ET: China busts ministry official
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2023, 03:24:06 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/china/china-arrests-ministry-official-who-allegedly-spies-for-the-cia-5477937?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-08-22&src_cmp=uschina-2023-08-22&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=China&est=guHWUfVdP23UCVoTx4lNsXUIfwvdtkUcJDS5relQH6C0eYttPYJarDpOIAjzJk5OdVOD
Title: Our man in Iran
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 28, 2023, 07:37:56 PM


https://nypost.com/2023/08/28/key-biden-official-lost-security-clearance-over-handling-of-classified-material-iranian-media-claims/?fbclid=IwAR3eoQTP_Q_OxRBYT5ee-tyCMv6S34OF4w3bD0SLBQwKL62kn5RtEhvgHas
Title: Real Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2023, 07:28:53 PM
Have not watched/listened to this yet but it comes very well recommended:

https://mega.nz/folder/0dABgLLR#FmXfgQ-4llV6by0les3XCA
Title: China's spy post in Cuba poses big dangers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2023, 05:49:45 AM
https://asiatimes.com/2023/09/chinas-new-spy-post-in-cuba-poses-nuclear-risks/
Title: 911 conspiracy stuff
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2023, 05:58:36 AM
We've seen a lot of conspiracies confirmed , , ,


Mueller connection to 9/11?
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1701237488876916961

911 connection with CIA?
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/04/18/9-11-hijackers-cia-recruits/

Hijackers were CIA assets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuGE3nokCRY

https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/columnists/mike-kelly/2022/03/13/sept-11-fbi-links-saudi-arabia-spy-attacks/9442454002/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9791837/FBI-tried-flip-Saudi-official-suspected-assisting-9-11-hijackers.html

https://asiatimes.com/2023/05/fbis-changed-9-11-plot-story-fingers-a-saudi-spy/



Title: Iranian Spies in the State Dept
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2023, 01:42:29 PM
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/iran-spy-ring-robert-malley-lee-smith?_se=ci5pbWJyb2dub0B0aW4uaXQ%3D&utm_campaign=Extremism_Roundup+202310-05&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sendinblue
Title: George Friedman: Thinking about Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 14, 2023, 11:25:23 AM
October 13, 2023
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Thinking About Intelligence
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

The news from Israel has been stunning, and the explanation that many are providing for what happened is that there was an “intelligence failure.” This reminds me of a Yankees baseball pitcher who had a no-hitter going into the 9th inning. On the second out of the inning, a White Sox player squished a sad little grounder toward third base, forcing the Yankees third baseman to charge and pivot to throw to first. The runner outran the throw. The newspapers ignored the magnificence of a one-hit game and ripped the pitcher for the one lonely hit. The critics could not make it to the lowest rungs of the minor leagues but sat in smug condemnation of a great pitcher.

Pitching in the majors is grueling. But people in the intelligence field have so much more at stake and far less control of the process. They might need to take a satellite image, then comprehend and analyze it to build a picture of reality, all before the enemy takes his next step. A satellite image, like most pieces of intelligence, is not a crisply clean picture but a mystery that has to be decoded while experts debate what it means. Or take human intelligence, where a spy agency might penetrate an office or palace to observe and gather information, all while pretending to be everything they are not and being aware that the enemy is on guard for espionage. A single misstep – usually after a very painful conversation with a man who makes his living making men reveal the truth – could cost them their life.

Failure is, regrettably, built into intelligence. Reacting to some intelligence failure, a reader suggested once that the lapse had been deliberate in order to achieve some end. The lack of understanding of how hard and dangerous intelligence is can cause us to have unreasonable expectations. I have sometimes wondered whether intelligence is not worth the trouble. But intelligence is what we have. It tells us something, and over time it can tell us a great deal. The fear of being discovered can also affect the enemy, who knows that his target’s intelligence will ultimately unscramble some important part of his plan and that he must move at flank speed to strike before being struck. The success of a military operation may well depend on guessing how much time one has. And that may lead to failure.

In analyzing the Hamas attack, the first step is figuring out what you don’t know. The military will task the intelligence organizations and tell them what it needs, which is usually far more than it is going to get. So assume that the question is whether the Iranians were funding Hamas. How would you find out? Accessing transactions is tough. Penetrating the national bank would be nice, but that assumes the Iranians are using the national bank. And when you think about it, finding out who is getting the money is also tough. And at the moment it is not a question of great importance.

Israel is fighting Hamas, which is holding hostages it will likely kill during an assault. Israel’s worry now is to determine precisely where the hostages are and what routine has been set, and to let special operations forces devise and execute an attack plan. The enemy is holding children, and for the moment that outranks money. The Iranians are a hostile force; deciding how bad they are is academic.

For me, a more interesting question is who supplied Hamas with the weapons and other supplies and what route they took to get to Gaza. It is a long journey from Iran, and supplying an attack from there would entail crossing many borders, which would trigger many alerts – or so Hamas would have to assume. But there was no alert, so that means that the supplies were moved slowly to a forward base, with the fighters approaching through misdirection. This is a more important question than money because the answer would mean that several U.S. allies were involved and therefore other threats might materialize. The word “might” is the operant term, except that unless Hamas built up its arsenal in Gaza, Egypt and a line of countries might have been involved, turning the intelligence challenge into something monumental.

The primary issue is understanding not whether Iranian money was used but the politics that permitted Hamas to amass and equip its assault force, whether it occurred in Gaza or elsewhere. How do you hide the movement of many men, carrying arms and moving through some very empty country? That is my question, but I don’t know if it is the right one. And that is the nightmarish problem of intelligence. Finding answers is doable in several ways. More difficult is knowing what question needs answering and putting into operation collectors from the places the weapons may be found.

My own approach to intelligence has developed into forecasting things that will happen and often leaving out the date they will take place. I like to think there is value in having a sense, however imprecise the timing, about the future. But knowing the right questions to ask within hours of an attack, and tasking collectors to find the answers, is a job that does not permit error. And that’s where the intelligence nightmare begins.
Title: Tablet: What did US know?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2023, 11:24:59 AM
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/biden-administration-tries-hide-knew-impending-massacre-leaving-iran-untouched-hamas-lee-smith?fbclid=IwAR2teIvtIEYdnMCX8MT_jWON5C7rJSKNw5y9BuU9v79Bw6CI16Fof3Vre0k
Title: China Bans Teslas in “Sensitive” Areas due to Espionage Concerns
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 19, 2023, 03:46:17 PM
Piece argues it’s safe to assume any Chinese vehicle is indeed spying for China:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCzU5BF-110&t=712s
Title: NSA has been penetrated by the Woken Dead.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2023, 06:37:41 PM


https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-leaked-nsa-doc-reveals-massive-woke-glossary-pushing-critical-race-theory-gender-ideology-on-govt-employees
Title: Former CIA Director Hayden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 24, 2023, 04:33:18 PM
https://americanwirenews.com/former-cia-boss-likens-patriotic-christians-to-hamas-terrorists/?utm_campaign=james&utm_content=11%2F24%2F23%20SOE%20AM&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=Get%20response&utm_term=email
Title: CIA Palestine selfie
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2023, 05:31:15 AM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12803173/CIA-Palestine-Israel-Facebook-flag-selfie.html
Title: Re: CIA Palestine selfie
Post by: DougMacG on November 29, 2023, 06:16:51 AM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12803173/CIA-Palestine-Israel-Facebook-flag-selfie.html

We used to complain that they were gutting our intelligence agencies and now we wish they had.

These are the people who should have warned us the attack was coming?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2023, 10:17:09 AM
About twenty years ago someone approached me about working for the CIA, but I was told that I would have to prove my loyalty by doing something against Israel's interest.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on November 29, 2023, 10:23:06 AM
because you are Jewish?
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2023, 10:32:47 AM
Exactly so.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: ccp on November 29, 2023, 10:49:55 AM
do they ask others similar questions?

like if you are Muslim would you go against your former country or your religion

or if you are gay would you be willing to infiltrate gay criminal orgs?

or if you are Black would you be willing to infiltrate BLM?

what about political party allegiance or memebership?

Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: DougMacG on November 29, 2023, 11:35:16 AM
To be fair I suppose they asked people from all those backgrounds if they're willing to do something against israel.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2023, 01:41:36 PM
Inquiring minds want to know if they ask Chinese Americans to act against China.

Then there is the matter of the apparent Iranian spies currently working for the Biden Administration , , ,
Title: Clapper
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 30, 2023, 07:06:41 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP990OHj0MI
Title: Hillsdale: CIA is fuct
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 04, 2023, 03:43:34 PM
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/why-the-cia-no-longer-works-and-how-to-fix-it/
Title: Were Hunter Laptop Disinfo Signatories on the CIA’s Dime?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 08, 2023, 05:25:24 PM
Not that I expect an honest answer….

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/12/08/were-former-intel-officials-who-debunked-hunters-laptop-on-the-cia-payroll-n597638
Title: Re: Were Hunter Laptop Disinfo Signatories on the CIA’s Dime?
Post by: DougMacG on December 09, 2023, 11:36:46 AM
Not that I expect an honest answer….

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/12/08/were-former-intel-officials-who-debunked-hunters-laptop-on-the-cia-payroll-n597638

If so, and how will we know, what is the consequence?  Nothing of course.

Didn't Blinken organize it and he was rewarded with the highest cabinet position.  How do you revoke the advise and consent of the Senate on that appointment?  Impeachment I suppose, but of course no Democrat is offended by that behavior.
Title: FISA bill negotiations
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 31, 2024, 05:28:04 AM
https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=56988ef2a35f158944f618fd528ebd1e_65ba60ea_6d25b5f&selDate=20240131
Title: Fort Campbell soldier arressted for treason
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2024, 04:13:09 PM
https://www.wsmv.com/2024/03/07/fbi-discuss-cause-involving-national-concern-nashville/?outputType=amp
Title: Germany awash in Russian Spies?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2024, 05:03:31 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-says-one-nato-nation-is-awash-with-russian-spies/ar-BB1jzBfm?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=28a2a71fc9034fe9afb8b5e0e1c85961&ei=16
Title: Re: Germany awash in Russian Spies?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 09, 2024, 06:59:40 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-says-one-nato-nation-is-awash-with-russian-spies/ar-BB1jzBfm?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=28a2a71fc9034fe9afb8b5e0e1c85961&ei=16


There’s a surprise, what with all the ex-Stasi in need of employment post-reunification, though I guess we should count our lucky stars our Microsoft Network didn’t aggregate it due to some climate change, trans, of Trump is a Russian stooge hook.
Title: Re: Intel Matters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2024, 09:00:20 AM
In search of the underlying theme here what I come up with everyone is listening in on everyone.  Witness e.g. our leaks of Russian convos at the highest level.

Witness our deliberate leaks in the run up to the Uke War of the level at which we were listening in to the Russians.

Witness Hillary's private server in a bathroom in Colorado.

etc etc