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End Torture, Shut Down the CIA! Written by Ron Paul Sunday July 27, 2014

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, “we don’t torture people”? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, “this government does not torture people”? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier.   Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it “enhanced interrogation” and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA had not only lied about the torture of large numbers of people after 9/11, but it had vastly exaggerated any valuable information that came from such practices. However secret rendition of prisoners to other places was ongoing.

The US not only tortured people in its own custody, however. Last week the European Court of Human Rights found that the US government transferred individuals to secret detention centers in Poland (and likely elsewhere) where they were tortured away from public scrutiny. The government of Poland was ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to two victims for doing nothing to stop their torture on Polish soil.

All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged. Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color. As our new report makes clear, it’s time for American police to remember that they are supposed to protect and serve our communities, not wage war on the people who live in them.

t is widely known that policing tactics across the country often unfairly target communities of color. According to our investigation, the use of paramilitary weapons and tactics appears to be no different. These maps show the distribution of SWAT raids by racial composition of neighborhoods in two cities, but this trend is echoed nationwide. Read the complete report for more.

It’s not uncommon for SWAT teams to brutalize bystanders in their search for a suspect. One family in Atlanta was woken up in the middle of the night when officers burst into their home and threw a flashbang grenade into the playpen where a toddler was sleeping. This is their story.  

President Obama says it all the time — no combat troops will return to Iraq.But many experts believe it will be extremely hard to achieve Obama’s newly expanded military mission there without more Americans on the ground.“I think the slippery slope analogy is the right one for Iraq right now,” said Barry Posen, director of the Security Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.On Thursday, Obama authorized a new open-ended operation in response to gains by the Islamic State militants in northern Iraq.

For now, the new mission relies on aircraft based outside Iraq. The U.S. will help defend the Kurdish city of Erbil from Islamic State fighters using “targeted air strikes,” Obama said. Those air strikes began Friday morning and included at least three separate bombings before noon, defense officials said.The second mission is a commitment to protect some 40,000 Iraqi Yazidis who are trapped on a mountain surrounded by the militants. That began Thursday night with air drops of food and water for at least 8,000 people.Military experts say tactical commanders will want more ground forces. Forward air controllers could provide more precise targeting information. U.S. advisers could support the Kurdish forces fighting the militants. And U.S. commanders may need to expand their intelligence effort on the ground.

Getting the Yazidis off the mountain and safely transporting them to a secure location will require either an “an enormous helicopter air lift” or ground combat units to confront militants and secure a safe-passage corridor for the refugees, Mansoor said.“That may require some kind of ground presence to escort them through enemy held territory,” Mansoor said.“That is [IS] controlled territory. There could be major combat along the way. This could be very difficult,” Mansoor said.

Reports, including photographic evidence reveal that Israel is using an energy weapon to attack targets in Gaza. The destructive beam, thought to be a high energy laser, is emitted from a plane identified as a Boeing KC707 “Re’em,” originally configured for Electronic Warfare. Those observing the attacks cite a beam from a 4 engine jet hitting a target which immediately turns “white hot.” After these attacks, the target area is then hit with either bombs or artillery to destroy evidence of the use of an American designed and built energy weapon illegally given to Israel. BACKGROUND The weapon used is identified as part of the YAL 1 system, a COIL laser (chemical, oxygen/iodine laser), originally intended as an aircraft mounted system to shoot down ICBMs. Boeing approached the Department of Defense in 2002 and by 2004 had mounted its first system on a 747/400 previously flown by Air India. Boeing had convinced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that this system, mounted on as many as 7 aircraft, could fly 24 hours a day around Iran and defend “the free world” against nuclear tipped ICBMs that Rumsfeld believed Iran was planning to use. Please note that it was Rumsfeld that told television audiences that Afghanistan was “peppered” with underground cities serviced by rail links that supported division sized Al Qaeda units that, after ten years, no one was able to locate.

Boeing tested the system in 2007. The Department of Defense claimed the system could shoot down low earth orbit satellites and that in tests conducted in 2010, destroyed multiple test missiles. There is no reliable confirmation of this other than a press release from then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. CANCELLATION AND MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE The Center for Strategic Studies, in an interview with then Defense Secretary Gates published the following: “I don’t know anybody at the Department of Defense who thinks that this program should, or would, ever be operationally deployed. The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire.” So, right now the ABL would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase. And if you were to operationalize this you would be looking at 10 to 20 747s, at a billion and a half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate. And there’s nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept.”

After $5 billion was spent, the functioning prototype only capable of being fired directly at nearby targets, a system very capable of acquisition and destruction of ground targets with no air defense protection only, was said to have been flown to a scrap yard. The plane itself is still there, at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, with other failed dreams and nightmares. However, the weapons system disappeared, only to reappear in Israel as a “missile defense” project, an adjunct to the “Iron Dome” system. Israel’s Rafael Defense had been trying to develop laser weapons on its own to intercept rockets being fired from Gaza. It was never able to neither deploy a laser powerful enough nor develop a radar system able to be effective.

Pro-Palestinian protesters on Monday continued a campaign to block an Israeli commercial vessel from docking in Oakland, California, for a third day. About 20 protesters arrived at the port at 5 a.m. local time to block the container ship, owned by Zim Shipping Services Ltd., one of the world’s largest container shipping companies, from entering the Port of Oakland and unloading cargo. Two demonstrators were detained and cited, according to the Oakland Police Department.  Another protest was planned for 6 p.m. — an action quickly organized after rumors spread that the ship would again attempt to dock. In addition to picketing at the docks, protesters have been attempting to gain the support of the longshoremen who would handle the unloading. “It’s not clear yet whether this will be a sustained action,” said Daniela Kantorova, who spoke with Al Jazeera on her way to the port. “It takes a lot of effort and energy to sustain this action. But these ships arrive every Saturday. People are thinking of making this a regular action, a weekly action.” 

Inspired by a call from Palestinian civil society to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel until it ends its occupation of Palestinian lands, the action was part of a series of events organized by Block the Boat, a loose Oakland-based coalition of grass-roots organizations. Saturday’s protest, which launched the campaign, drew 3,000 to 5,000 protesters. Block the Boat organizers are planning similar actions in Seattle, Vancouver and other U.S. and Canadian ports in coming weeks.

The port blockade, organizers say, aims not just to put a dent in the Israeli economy but also to expose Americans to all elements of the U.S. relationship with Israel — a partnership they say is also resulting in the militarization of U.S. police forces nationwide. This, the organizers charge, has led to a recent surge in police brutality against communities of color and the killings of young black men like Brown. “We will no longer stay silent as our governing bodies play a role in what’s happening with Israel as we will no longer stand for the violence against communities here in the U.S.,” said Reem Assil, one of Block the Boat’s organizers. It remains unclear whether Israeli police techniques are being employed in Ferguson, but St. Louis County police have received instruction from their counterparts in Israel.  In April 2011, then–St. Louis County Police Chief Timothy Fitch was sent to Israel “to study counterterrorism” measures, where he was “briefed by senior members of the Israel National Police as well as the Israel Defense Forces and intelligence/security organizations,” according to a press release from the St. Louis County Police.

As US aircraft continued to pound the Islamist militants in northern Iraq, the Obama administration was studying a range of options for pressuring Isis in Syria, primarily through training "moderate" Syrian rebels as a proxy force, with air strikes as a possible backup.

The favoured option, according to two administration officials, is to press forward with a training mission, led by elite special operations forces, aimed at making non-jihadist Syrians an effective proxy force. But the rebels are outgunned and outnumbered by Isis and the administration still has not received $500m from Congress for its rebel training plans. Pentagon officials said they had yet to work out what the training program would actually look like, where it will be hosted, or if air strikes on Isis targets in Syria will support it. For all the internal administration focus on propping up moderate Syrian rebels, the US military would not be able to begin training them until October, the earliest that Congressional approval could be obtained for the required funding and authorisation. Kirby said he was unaware of any "plan to accelerate it". Nor have critical details for the training program been worked out, despite it being effectively the lynchpin of what the administration considers a long-term plan to defeat Isis. "I can't tell you where it would take place, or how many people would be trained, and there's still a vetting process that needs to be fully developed here," Kirby conceded.

the White House went further than before in its condemnation of Isis, describing the killing of Foley as an act of terrorism. "When we see somebody killed in such a horrific way, that represents a terrorist attack against our country and against an American citizen, Rhodes said, saying the US would do whatever necessary to protect Americans in future."We are actively considering what is necessary to deal with that threat and we are not going to be restricted by borders," said Rhodes, briefing reporters at Martha's Vineyard, where the president is on vacation.

On three separate occasions, 9/11 Families United for Justice Against Terrorism has sent letters to President Obama, asking him to declassify the 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers. Each letter takes a slightly different approach to pleading for the release of the redacted section of a joint House/Senate intelligence study, but one thing they share in common is the response from the president and the White House: complete silence. One would think an organized group of 9/11 family members would at least merit the courtesy of a presidential reply—if only to say he had received their letter and would give due consideration to their request. Instead, Obama has opted to ignore them, despite the fact that he has reportedly twice promised 9/11 families he would declassify the 28 pages. The group sent its first letter on June 20, 2013, and never heard back. The group tried again on May 9, 2014—just ahead of the dedication of the 9/11 Museum in New York. Again, silence. Still determined, the organization sent a third letter on June 24 of this year that has likewise gone unanswered.

The letters remind the president of his promises to 9/11 families, and point to the large and growing number of credible experts—including former Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the inquiry that created the 28 pages, and both the chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission—who say there’s no valid national security reason for the continued secrecy. Indeed, even past and present Secretaries of State in the Obama White House Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are on record urging the declassification of the 28 pages; they did so as senators in a letter to George W. Bush. You can read the group’s most recent letter here. It was delivered to the White House by North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones, who introduced and continues to champion H.Res.428, which urges the president to declassify the 28 pages.

As President Obama laid out his “strategy” last night for dealing with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and as bipartisan leadership in Congress pushes to approve as much as $4 billion to arm Syrian “rebels,” it should be noted that the keystone to his anti-Assad policy — the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) — is now admitting that they, too, are working with the Islamic State. This confirms PJ Media’s reporting last week about the FSA’s alliances with Syrian terrorist groups. On Monday, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted a FSA brigade commander saying that his forces were working with the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate — both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations — near the Syrian/Lebanon border. “We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade. “We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” confirmed Abu Khaled, another FSA commander who lives in Arsal. “Let’s face it: The Nusra Front is the biggest power present right now in Qalamoun and we as FSA would collaborate on any mission they launch as long as it coincides with our values,” he added.

In my report last week I noted that buried in a New York Times article last month was a Syrian “rebel” commander quoted as saying that his forces were working with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in raids along the border with Lebanon, including attacks on Lebanese forces. The Times article quickly tried to dismiss the commander’s statements, but the Daily Star article now confirms this alliance. Among the other pertinent points from that PJ Media article last week was that this time last year the bipartisan conventional wisdom amongst the foreign policy establishment was that the bulk of the Syrian rebel forces were moderates, a fiction refuted by a Rand Corporation study published last September that found nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hard-core Islamists.

Another relevant phenomenon I noted was that multiple arms shipments from the U.S. to the “vetted moderate” FSA were suspiciously raided and confiscated by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, prompting the Obama administration and the UK to suspend weapons shipments to the FSA last December. In April, the Obama administration again turned on the CIA weapons spigot to the FSA, and Obama began calling for an additional $500 million for the “vetted moderate rebels,” but by July the weapons provided to the FSA were yet again being raided and captured by ISIS and other terrorist groups. Remarkably, one Syrian dissident leader reportedly told Al-Quds al-Arabi that the FSA had lost $500 million worth of arms to rival “rebel” groups, much of which ended up being sold to unknown parties in Turkey and Iraq.

It was less than 48 hours ago when Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, joined millions marching in Paris to pay tribute to the 17 people killed by ISIS-supporting extremists. Then, almost the moment he got back, things changed, and as the FT politely paraphrases what transpired, the "country’s president struck a much more confrontational tone." That's one way of putting it. Another is that the former PM and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of NATO-member Turkey did the unthinkable: accused the west, and French citizens in particular, of staging the Charlie Hebdo murder in order to blame Muslims, even as the mayor of Ankara said "Mossad is definitely behind such incidents . . . it is boosting enmity towards Islam."

"The duplicity of the west is obvious,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a press conference on Monday evening. “As Muslims we have never sided with terror or massacres: racism, hate speech, Islamophobia are behind these massacres.” His punchline: "The culprits are clear: French citizens undertook this massacre and Muslims were blamed for it,” he added. The FT is confused: "Although political leaders in Turkey have repeatedly condemned the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, a Jewish supermarket and a policewoman, a parallel narrative has emerged in the country, with conspiracy theorists blaming the murders on foreign intelligence agencies rather than radical Islamists."

The FT is further confused that Turkey is not the only place which has dared to offer conspiratorial theories: Russia is too. In Russia, some pro-Kremlin commentators sought to link the killings to geopolitical machinations by the US.    Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of Russia’s leading tabloids, ran the headline: “Did the Americans stage the terror attack in Paris?” and posted a series of interviews on its website that presented various reasons why Washington might have organised the attack. 

In 2013 a contract employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory found himself stripped of his security clearance and suspended from his job shortly after he published an article arguing the benefits of getting rid of nuclear weapon stockpiles. This month he begins mediation with the lab after his second whistleblower claim was accepted by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Dr. James Doyle worked at the Los Alamos lab, one of the laboratories in the Department of Energy nuclear complex, for 17 years. Prior to submitting his article for publication, he had it reviewed by a classification analyst at the lab, met with the director of the security office to address any concerns, and made it clear in the article that he was providing his own opinion as an individual and not as an Energy Department employee. But just two days after the article was published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Dr. Doyle was accused of disclosing classified information. Lab officials searched his personal computer, retroactively classified the article, and suspended his security clearance. Dr. Doyle was understandably confused and filed a complaint alleging that lab officials were retaliating against him for expressing unpopular opinions in the article. After filing the complaint, Dr. Doyle was fired from his position at the lab and his whistleblower complaint was rejected. While the Department maintains that his termination was due to budget cuts, Dr. Doyle believes it was due to his push-back against the retroactive classification of his article.

Several nuclear watchdog groups, including the Project On Government Oversight, rallied around Dr. Doyle, sending a letter in 2014 to the Secretary of Energy and the Inspector General urging a review of his case. Dr. Doyle filed a second complaint because he was fired before his first complaint was resolved. The Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor reported last week in an article titled “NNSA Accepts Second Whistleblower Claim From Laid-Off Los Alamos Analyst” (behind a paywall) that this claim was accepted in late 2014 and that Dr. Doyle began mediation with the lab this month. This is a step in the right direction, and one step further than his first complaint ever got.

Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of previously unknown joint operations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government and used the information extracted from rendition victims as evidence during partially secret court proceedings in London, according to an analysis of official documents recovered in Tripoli since the Libyan revolution. The exhaustive study of the papers from the Libyan government archives shows the links between MI5, MI6 and Gaddafi’s security agencies were far more extensive than previously thought and involved a number of joint operations in which Libyan dissidents were unlawfully detained and allegedly tortured. At one point, Libyan intelligence agents were invited to operate on British soil, where they worked alongside MI5 and allegedly intimidated a number of Gaddafi opponents who had been granted asylum in the UK.

the research suggests that the fruits of a series of joint clandestine operations also underpinned a significant number of court hearings in London between 2002 and 2007, during which the last Labour government unsuccessfully sought to deport Gaddafi’s opponents on the basis of information extracted from people who had been “rendered” to his jails. In addition, the documents show that four men were subjected to control orders in the UK – a form of curfew – on the basis of information extracted from victims of rendition who had been handed over to the Gaddafi regime.

Gaddafi’s agents recorded MI5 as warning in September 2006 that the two countries’ agencies should take steps to ensure that their joint operations would never be “discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”. In fact, papers that detail the joint UK-Libyan rendition operations were discovered by the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch in September 2011, at the height of the Libyan revolution, in an abandoned government office building in Tripoli. Since then, hundreds more documents have been discovered in government files in Tripoli. A team of London-based lawyers has assembled them into an archive that is forming the basis of a claim for damages on behalf of 12 men who were allegedly kidnapped, tortured, subject to control orders or tricked into travelling to Libya where they were detained and mistreated.

Editor's Note:With the rise of the Islamic State (IS), the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and the struggle between Iran and the West over nuclear issues, the Middle East remained chaotic in 2014. What about 2015? What kind of role will the US play in the regional political landscape? At a seminar held by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China, Global Times (GT) reporter Liu Zhun talked to Flynt Leverett (Flynt), former senior director of Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC), and Hillary Mann Leverett (Hillary), former director of Iran, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the NSC, about these issues. GT: What is your forecast of the situation of the Middle East this year?

Flynt: More and more negative consequences of the failed US drive for the hegemony in the Middle East will become increasingly evident. The US is struggling to come to terms with that. Washington should reconsider its basic strategy for this region, but President Barack Obama has a great belief in US' hegemonic agenda. Many analysts in the US argue that Washington should "double-down" on its strategy. But this is the wrong direction.Hillary: There will be more violence throughout the region - violence encouraged by the US. A potential difference rests on the possibility that an alternative mindset will be brought in by China as it rises. Whether Russia, with the support of China and Iran, can put Syria's conflicts on a different trajectory toward resolution is important - whether they can bring in a different paradigm for conflict resolution. I am not sure they can yet, but I am encouraged by China's rise and its focus on sovereignty and conflict resolution. GT: If the US changes its course, will the region be a better place?Flynt: Yes, it will be a better place. The historical record has proven that. For 20 years after China's revolution, the US was doing everything it could to isolate and hurt the People's Republic of China. After it gave up its hostile policies toward China, China, as well as other East Asian countries, embarked on a long and productive period of economic expansion with rising prosperity for hundreds of millions of people. The Middle East will not be perfect after the US changes its policy, but it will be better.

GT: But the chaos in the Middle East, much of which is driven by religious issues, is more complicated than the conflicts China encountered with the US, which were basically ideological. What do you think of the role of Islam in the chaos of the Middle East?Hillary: There has been a perception that there is something wrong with Islam and that it is the major contributor to the complications of the problems in the Middle East. But if you look historically, that is not really true. There is no evidence that Muslims are historically terrorists. The head of the IS was in an American prison, where he became more extreme in his own views and forged a network with other extremists.The perennial chaos of the Middle East, to a large extent, is caused by a long history of military penetration by Western countries such as France, the UK and now the US. GT: You suggest the US should shift its Middle East policy and pull back from trying to be a hegemon - for example, by restoring ties with Iran. What do you think of Obama's current strategy to the Middle East?Flynt: People are talking about the Obama doctrine and his being less interventionist. I don't really think that is right. I think the Obama administration is no less committed to so-called global leadership, which is actually hegemony, over strategically important areas like the Middle East. The Obama administration thinks it has a smarter way of promoting that leadership than its immediate predecessor. But that is more a tactical than strategic difference.

WikiLeaks is a treasure trove of information for academic research.  Yet, in a library search that I did three days ago, in preparation for a question from my Dissertation Committee on the status of my use of WikiLeaks sources, I found that only thirty-five articles had been published in peer-reviewed academic journals.  In those articles, not a single author had referenced a single WikiLeaks document, nor did any of those articles provide a URL for any WikiLeaks document.  At the time, I concluded that the academic community was an extension of The State rather than an extension of The People with a responsibility to oversee and question the activities, policies, and behavior of The State. 

Then, yesterday, I received a message containing the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news of the sentencing of Barrett Brown because he posted links online to the Stratfor e-mails that were posted on WikiLeaks.[1]  Brown did not hack Stratfor, but as an investigative journalist, reported on the content of the hack and provided links to his readers. There have been many news articles about the fact and the content of the Stratfor e-mails.[2]  As well, information pointing to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant being involved in the hacking of Stratfor, which raises a whole host of other questions about the continued unlawful conduct of the U.S. government.[3]  Despite several news articles containing sensational information on the Stratfor hack, again, a search of peer-reviewed journals that I conducted just now revealed only one article in a computer-related journal.  Therefore, whether the topic was WikiLeaks or Stratfor, the academic community is basically missing in action in examining and investigating this extremely important information.

A walk back in time shows the same reticence on the part of the academic community to use controversial, but declassified, government documents in its research.  In searches of the academic literature while I was studying the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of the FBI as a part of my Ph.D. research, I found, with a few extremely important exceptions, that the most important COINTELPRO documents remain virtually by-passed by the academic community—even to this date.  With this in mind, I really shouldn’t be surprised to see a lack of the use of WikiLeaks documents, even though the information contained could lead to critical insights on U.S. public policy.  Most importantly for those of us who expect to create change in U.S. domestic police state and foreign military policy, it is the most controversial of such documents that deserve scrutiny from not only journalists, but also from the academic community.  The operation of the Deep State is real and must be exposed if the possibility of return to Constitutional rule and the Bill of Rights is possible.  Thus, not only are the young people who broke into an FBI office and found and publicized the COINTELPRO papers heroes, so too are our modern day sunshine activists at Cryptome, Narconews, Wayne Madsen Reports, and WikiLeaks.  Whistleblowers like John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Jeffrey Sterling who are either already in jail or in exile until a new United States is created by the rest of us are modern-day profiles in courage.

Growth of Real Hourly Compensation for Production/Nonsupervisory Workers and Productivity, 1948–2011

Is America in the throes of a class war? Look at the chart and decide for yourself. It’s all there in black and white, and you don’t need to be an economist to figure it out. But, please, take some time to study the chart, because there’s more here than meets the eye. This isn’t just about productivity and compensation. It’s a history lesson too. It pinpoints the precise moment in time when the country lost its way and began its agonizing descent into Police State USA. That’s what it really means.

Did you know that inequality has actually gotten worse under Obama? Much worse. It’s true. He might proclaim his determination to “tax millionaires” in one of his blustery orations, but it’s all just rhetorical fakery. The fact is, the 1 percenters have done better under Obama than they did under Bush. Check this out from Naked Capitalism:

To the young Syrian rebel fighter, the Skype message in early December 2013 appeared to come from a woman in Lebanon, named Iman Almasri, interested in his cause. Her picture, in a small icon alongside her name, showed a fair-skinned 20-something in a black head covering, wearing sunglasses.They chatted online for nearly two hours, seemingly united in their opposition to the rule of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader still in power after a civil war that has taken more than 200,000 lives. Eventually saying she worked “in a programing company in Beirut,” the woman asked the fighter whether he was talking from his computer or his smartphone. He sent her a photo of himself and asked for another of her in return. She sent one immediately, apologizing that it was a few years old.“Angel like,” he responded. “You drive me crazy.”

What the fighter did not know was that buried in the code of the second photo was a particularly potent piece of malware that copied files from his computer, including tactical battle plans and troves of information about him, his friends and fellow fighters. The woman was not a friendly chat partner, but a pro-Assad hacker — the photos all appear to have been plucked from the web.

The Syrian conflict has been marked by a very active, if only sporadically visible, cyberbattle that has engulfed all sides, one that is less dramatic than the barrel bombs, snipers and chemical weapons — but perhaps just as effective. The United States had deeply penetrated the web and phone systems in Syria a year before the Arab Spring uprisings spread throughout the country. And once it began, Mr. Assad’s digital warriors have been out in force, looking for any advantage that could keep him in power.In this case, the fighter had fallen for the oldest scam on the Internet, one that helped Mr. Assad’s allies. The chat is drawn from a new study by the intelligence-gathering division of FireEye, a computer security firm, which has delved into the hidden corners of the Syrian conflict — one in which even a low-tech fighting force has figured out a way to use cyberespionage to its advantage. FireEye researchers found a collection of chats and documents while researching malware hidden in PDF documents, which are commonly used to share letters, books or other images. That quickly took them to the servers where the stolen data was stored.

In highly unusual testimony inside the federal supermax prison, a former operative for Al Qaeda has described prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family as major donors to the terrorist network in the late 1990s and claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.The Qaeda member, Zacarias Moussaoui, wrote last year to Judge George B. Daniels of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over a lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia by relatives of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said he wanted to testify in the case, and after lengthy negotiations with Justice Department officials and the federal Bureau of Prisons, a team of lawyers was permitted to enter the prison and question him for two days last October.

He said in the prison deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of donors to the group. Among those he said he recalled listing in the database were Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country’s leading clerics.“Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money,” he said in imperfect English — “who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad.”Mr. Moussaoui said he acted as a courier for Bin Laden, carrying personal messages to prominent Saudi princes and clerics. And he described his training in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Transcripts of testimony by Zacarias Moussaoui, a former Qaeda operative, under questioning over two days in October by lawyers in a suit filed against Saudi Arabia by relatives of 9/11 victims. Exhibit 5 Exhibit 6 Exhibit 7 Exhibit 8

According to a new poll released by International Consulting Services (ICS), approximately 57% of Venezuelans have confidence that the Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro will improve the economy. The poll also featured several results which suggest that Chavismo continues to be the preferred political option for the country's citizens.  In the midst of an economic crisis triggered by crashing oil prices and economic war in which basic goods remain scarce, only one fourth of Venezuelans regard scarcities as the country's biggest problem. This finding contradicts the image of widespread hunger and desperation among Venezuelans projected by the international media.  Moreover, in the face of an inflation rate fast approaching 70%, only 1 in 10 Venezuelans consider inflation as the nation's principal issue. Rather, insecurity, a perennial problem in Venezuela, remains the top concern for half of the country's citizens. 

The study also contained some unexpected findings regarding upcoming parliamentary elections. Contrary to international predictions of a landslide victory for the opposition, 43.6% of Venezuelans said they would vote for the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allied parties if elections were held today.  This figure means that even in the midst of acute economic difficulties, the PSUV retains a strong lead over the opposition, which was the preference of less than 32% of poll respondents.  Additionally, the poll found that on the eve of the second anniversary of the death of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, around 62% of Venezuelans consider themselves chavistas, or "partisans... of the ideals" of the late Venezuelan leader. This result attests to the ongoing majoritarian popularity of the Bolivarian project initiated by Chávez, even despite his physical absence. 

The poll was conducted between February 10 and February 20 and included a sample of 1300 respondents drawn from every state in the country. The figures were reported with a confidence level of 95%. 

In the United States and Europe, it is unchallenged in political and media circles that intelligence documents purporting to be from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program for which the IAEA long demanded an Iranian explanation are genuine.   But evidence has continued to accumulate that the documents - sometimes called the “laptop documents” because they were said to have been on a laptop computer belonging to one of the participants in the program - were fabricated by Israel’s foreign intelligence agency (Mossad).  We now know that the documents did not come from an Iranian participant in the alleged project, as the media were led to believe for years; they were turned over to German intelligence by the anti-regime Iranian terrorist organisation, Mujahedeen E Khalq, (MEK). I first reported this in 2008 and have now confirmed from an authoritative German source in my book on the Iran nuclear issue. The MEK was well known to have been a client of the Mossad, serving to launder Israeli intelligence claims that the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves.

Although it has never been mentioned in news media, former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General, Mohamed El Baradei recalled in his memoirs that he was doubtful of the authenticity of the documents. “No one knew if any of this was real,” he wrote in reference to the laptop documents. Another former senior IAEA official told me, “It just really didn’t add up.  It made more sense that this information originated in another country.”  And as I have detailed in articles and in my book, key documents in the collection bear clear indications of fabrication. Support for that virtually unknown part of the Iran nuclear story has come from a surprising source: a popular Israeli account, celebrating the successes of the Mossad’s covert operations. “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service,” first published in Hebrew in 2010, and then published in English in 2012, was Israel’s best-selling book for months in 2010. But not only does it acknowledge that it was indeed the MEK that delivered the documents, it also suggests that at least some of the documents came from the Mossad.  

The co-authors of the book are far from critics of Israel’s policy toward Iran; One of the co-authors, Michael Bar-Zohar, is a well-connected former member of the Israeli Knesset and former paratrooper, who had previously written an authorised biography of Shimon Peres, as well as the biography of Isser Harel, the Mossad chief who presided over the kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann in Argentina. Much of what Bar-Zohar chronicled in the book had already been reported earlier by Israeli journalists - especially Ronen Bergman of the daily Yedioth Ahronoth.  In fact, Bergman accused Bar-Zohar of plagiarising his articles for much of the book, while changing only a few words.  But one thing that Bar-Zohar and co-author Nisham Mishal did not get from other Israeli journalists, was the role of the Mossad in regard to the laptop documents. 

ESEARCHERS WORKING with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept. The security researchers presented their latest tactics and achievements at a secret annual gathering, called the “Jamboree,” where attendees discussed strategies for exploiting security flaws in household and commercial electronics. The conferences have spanned nearly a decade, with the first CIA-sponsored meeting taking place a year before the first iPhone was released. By targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple’s devices, the researchers have sought to thwart the company’s attempts to provide mobile security to hundreds of millions of Apple customers across the globe. Studying both “physical” and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware. This could enable spies to plant malicious code on Apple devices and seek out potential vulnerabilities in other parts of the iPhone and iPad currently masked by encryption.

The CIA declined to comment for this story. The security researchers also claimed they had created a modified version of Apple’s proprietary software development tool, Xcode, which could sneak surveillance backdoors into any apps or programs created using the tool. Xcode, which is distributed by Apple to hundreds of thousands of developers, is used to create apps that are sold through Apple’s App Store. The modified version of Xcode, the researchers claimed, could enable spies to steal passwords and grab messages on infected devices. Researchers also claimed the modified Xcode could “force all iOS applications to send embedded data to a listening post.” It remains unclear how intelligence agencies would get developers to use the poisoned version of Xcode. Researchers also claimed they had successfully modified the OS X updater, a program used to deliver updates to laptop and desktop computers, to install a “keylogger.”

Other presentations at the CIA conference have focused on the products of Apple’s competitors, including Microsoft’s BitLocker encryption system, which is used widely on laptop and desktop computers running premium editions of Windows. The revelations that the CIA has waged a secret campaign to defeat the security mechanisms built into Apple’s devices come as Apple and other tech giants are loudly resisting pressure from senior U.S. and U.K. government officials to weaken the security of their products. Law enforcement agencies want the companies to maintain the government’s ability to bypass security tools built into wireless devices. Perhaps more than any other corporate leader, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has taken a stand for privacy as a core value, while sharply criticizing the actions of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. “If U.S. products are OK to target, that’s news to me,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute. “Tearing apart the products of U.S. manufacturers and potentially putting backdoors in software distributed by unknowing developers all seems to be going a bit beyond ‘targeting bad guys.’ It may be a means to an end, but it’s a hell of a means.”

The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 21, 2010,  was the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. The resulting devastation to human health and the environment continues to this day. A new Florida State University study, published on Jan. 20 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, reports that up to 10 million gallons of crude oil “missing” from the spill settled at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, imperiling wildlife and marine ecosystems. Stuart H. Smith, an environmental plaintiff attorney who served as lead counsel on more than 100 oil pollution cases and has won major litigation against oil giants Chevron and ExxonMobil, came to represent thousands of claimants against BP. He saw from the inside how BP and the American government really responded to the crisis. This article is adapted from his book, Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know about the New Environmental Attack on America (BenBella Books, 2015).