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Paul Merrell

Beijing Strikes Back in US-China Tech Wars | The Diplomat - 0 views

thediplomat.com/...kes-back-in-us-china-tech-wars

surveillance state China tech-security

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • China’s new draft anti-terror legislation has sent waves across the U.S. tech community. If there is a brewing tech war between U.S. and China over government surveillance backdoors and a preference for indigenous software, China’s new draft terror law makes it clear that Beijing is happy to give the United States a taste of its own medicine. The law has already drawn considerable criticism from international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for its purported attempts to legitimize wanton human rights violations in the name of counter-terrorism. Additionally, China has opted to implement its own definition of terrorism, placing  “any thought, speech, or activity that, by means of violence, sabotage, or threat, aims to generate social panic, influence national policy-making, create ethnic hatred, subvert state power, or split the state” under the umbrella of the overused T-word. The problematic human rights issues aside, the draft anti-terror law will have important implications for foreign tech firms within China. According to Reuters’ reporting on the draft anti-terror law, counter-terrorism precautions by the Chinese government would essentially require foreign firms to “hand over encryption keys and install security ‘backdoors’” into their software. Additionally, these firms would have to store critical data — certainly data on Chinese citizens and residents — on Chinese soil. The onerous implications of this law could have lead to an immediate freeze to the activities of several Western tech companies in China, the world’s second largest economy and a booming emerging market for new technologies.
  • On the surface, the most troublesome implication of this law is that in order to comply with this law, Western firms, including non-technical ventures such as financial institutions and manufacturers, will be forced to give up a great deal of security. In essence, corporate secrets, financial data — all critical data — would be insecure and available for access by Chinese regulators. The new law would also prohibit the use of secure virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around these requirements.
  • The U.S. diplomatic response to Beijing’s new draft law is perhaps best captured in the fact that a whopping four cabinet members in the Obama administration, including Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, wrote the Chinese government expressing “serious concern.” China, for its part, seemed unfazed by U.S. concerns. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told the press that she hoped the United States would view the new anti-terror precautions in “in a calm and objective way.” Indeed, following Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the extent of the United States’ surveillance of private firms both within and outside the United States, Beijing likely views U.S. concerns as hypocritical. One U.S. industry source told Reuters that the new law was ”the equivalent of the Patriot Act on really, really strong steroids.”
Paul Merrell

How our deep partisan split affects President Obama and terror fears - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...esident-obama-and-terror-fears

politics-of-fear polls

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • On Monday, CNN released a poll indicating that 40 percent of Americans think the terrorists are winning the war on terror. It's a grim, weird finding that offers more questions about perceptions of terror than answers. Why are people in rural areas slightly more concerned about being killed in a terror attack than people in cities, as the poll finds? It doesn't make much sense, given where terrorists usually find their targets. The poll also had some good news for the White House: More than half of the country has a great deal or a moderate amount of confidence in the administration to protect the country from future terrorist acts. Among Democrats, 83 percent have confidence in the administration's ability to tackle terrorism, compared to only 17 percent of Republicans. That's pretty close to President Obama's Gallup approval ratings by party, with Republicans a bit more confident in Obama's ability to protect us than they approve of his job performance. The "who's winning the war on terror" question is similarly split on party lines, though less dramatically. Seventy-five percent of Democrats think that either the U.S. is winning or there's no clear winner, while more than half of Republicans think the terrorists are winning.
  • With big splits like that, it's little wonder, then, that even something like the imminent threat of a terror attack is viewed through a partisan lens. Among Democrats, 61 percent are not too worried about being killed in an attack, according to that CNN/ORC poll. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans are. And that almost certainly answers our rural/urban terror question. People in rural areas are probably worried about terror attacks because they're Republican, not because of where they live. Partisanship soaked in deep.
Paul Merrell

Multiple Polls: Americans Are More Afraid of the GOVERNMENT than TERRORISTS Washington'... - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...overnment-than-terrorists.html

war & peace war on terror™ polls liberty security

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 May 15 - No Cached
  • According to a pair of recent polls, for the first time since the 9/11 terrorist hijackings, Americans are more fearful their government will abuse constitutional liberties than fail to keep its citizens safe. Even in the wake of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing – in which a pair of Islamic radicals are accused of planting explosives that took the lives of 3 and wounded over 280 – the polls suggest Americans are hesitant to give up any further freedoms in exchange for increased “security.” A Fox News survey polling a random national sample of 619 registered voters the day after the bombing found despite the tragic event, those interviewed responded very differently than following 9/11. For the first time since a similar question was asked in May 2001, more Americans answered “no” to the question, “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?”
  • Of those surveyed on April 16, 2013, 45 percent answered no to the question, compared to 43 percent answering yes. In May 2001, before 9/11, the balance was similar, with 40 percent answering no to 33 percent answering yes. But following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the numbers flipped dramatically, to 71 percent agreeing to sacrifice personal freedom to reduce the threat of terrorism. Subsequent polls asking the same question in 2002, 2005 and 2006 found Americans consistently willing to give up freedom in exchange for security. Yet the numbers were declining from 71 percent following 9/11 to only 54 percent by May 2006. Now, it would seem, the famous quote widely attributed to Benjamin Franklin – “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” – is holding more sway with Americans than it has in over a dozen years.
  • A similar poll sampling 588 adults, conducted on April 17 and 18 for the Washington Post, also discovered the change in attitude. “Which worries you more,” the Post asked, “that the government will not go far enough to investigate terrorism because of concerns about constitutional rights, or that it will go too far in compromising constitutional rights in order to investigate terrorism?” The poll found 48 percent of respondents worry the government will go too far, compared to 41 percent who worry it won’t go far enough. And similar to the Fox News poll, the Post found the worry to be a fresh development, as only 44 percent worried the government would go too far in January 2006 and only 27 percent worried the government would go too far in January 2010.
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  • The Fox News poll found that a bare majority of Democrats (51%) would give up more personal freedom to reduce the threat of terror, while only 47% of Republicans – and a mere 29% of independents – would do so. This is not entirely surprising. As we noted in February: For years, “conservative” pollsters have said that Americans are furious at the government: Rasmussen noted in 2010 that only a small minority of the American people think that the government has the consent of the governed, and that the sentiment was “pre-revolutionary” Gallup noted in 2011 that a higher percentage of American liked King George during the colonial days than currently like Congress
  • And last year, Gallup noted that trust was plummeting in virtually all institutions Liberals may be tempted to think that this is a slanted perspective. But non-partisan and liberal pollsters are saying the same thing: An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from 2011 found that 76% of Americans believe that the country’s current financial and political structures favor the rich over the rest of the country The Washington Post reported in 2011 that Congress was less popular than communism, BP during the Gulf oil spill or Nixon during Watergate
  • Public Policy Polling added last month that Congress is also less popular than cockroaches, lice, root canals, colonoscopies, traffic jams, used car salesman and Genghis Khan And the liberal Pew Charitable Trusts noted last week that – for the first time – a majority of the public says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms: The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Jan. 9-13 among 1,502 adults, finds that 53% think that the federal government threatens their own personal rights and freedoms while 43% disagree. In March 2010, opinions were divided over whether the government represented a threat to personal freedom; 47% said it did while 50% disagreed. In surveys between 1995 and 2003, majorities rejected the idea that the government threatened people’s rights and freedoms.
  • *** The survey finds continued widespread distrust in government. About a quarter of Americans (26%) trust the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time; 73% say they can trust the government only some of the time or volunteer that they can never trust the government. *** Majorities across all partisan and demographic groups express little or no trust in government. Obviously, Democrats are currently more trusting in government than Republicans. For example: The Pew Research Center’s 2010 study of attitudes toward government found that, since the 1950s, the party in control of the White House has expressed more trust in government than the so-called “out party.”
  • But given that even a growing percentage of Dems believe that government is a threat to their freedom, things are indeed getting interesting … It doesn’t help that the government claims the power to assassinate American citizens living on U.S. soil, indefinitely detain Americans without trial, spy on everyone and otherwise intrude into every aspect of our lives. Postscript: What are the actual risks coming from government versus terrorism?  That’s an interesting question.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 May 15
     
    From 2013, not long after the Boston Bombing. I never had much respect for those willing to surrender my liberties so they could feel a bit more secure. "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." Helen Keller, The Open Door (1957).
Paul Merrell

Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ony-express-email-surveillance

surveillance state Canada CSE bulk-collection email

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Canada’s electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians’ emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents. The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years. The data mining operation is carried out by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the National Security Agency. Its existence is disclosed in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The emails are vacuumed up by the Canadian agency as part of its mandate to defend against hacking attacks and malware targeting government computers. It relies on a system codenamed PONY EXPRESS to analyze the messages in a bid to detect potential cyber threats.
  • Last year, CSE acknowledged it collected some private communications as part of cybersecurity efforts. But it refused to divulge the number of communications being stored or to explain for how long any intercepted messages would be retained. Now, the Snowden documents shine a light for the first time on the huge scope of the operation — exposing the controversial details the government withheld from the public. Under Canada’s criminal code, CSE is not allowed to eavesdrop on Canadians’ communications. But the agency can be granted special ministerial exemptions if its efforts are linked to protecting government infrastructure — a loophole that the Snowden documents show is being used to monitor the emails. The latest revelations will trigger concerns about how Canadians’ private correspondence with government employees are being archived by the spy agency and potentially shared with police or allied surveillance agencies overseas, such as the NSA. Members of the public routinely communicate with government employees when, for instance, filing tax returns, writing a letter to a member of parliament, applying for employment insurance benefits or submitting a passport application.
  • Chris Parsons, an internet security expert with the Toronto-based internet think tank Citizen Lab, told CBC News that “you should be able to communicate with your government without the fear that what you say … could come back to haunt you in unexpected ways.” Parsons said that there are legitimate cybersecurity purposes for the agency to keep tabs on communications with the government, but he added: “When we collect huge volumes, it’s not just used to track bad guys. It goes into data stores for years or months at a time and then it can be used at any point in the future.” In a top-secret CSE document on the security operation, dated from 2010, the agency says it “processes 400,000 emails per day” and admits that it is suffering from “information overload” because it is scooping up “too much data.” The document outlines how CSE built a system to handle a massive 400 terabytes of data from Internet networks each month — including Canadians’ emails — as part of the cyber operation. (A single terabyte of data can hold about a billion pages of text, or about 250,000 average-sized mp3 files.)
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  • The agency notes in the document that it is storing large amounts of “passively tapped network traffic” for “days to months,” encompassing the contents of emails, attachments and other online activity. It adds that it stores some kinds of metadata — data showing who has contacted whom and when, but not the content of the message — for “months to years.” The document says that CSE has “excellent access to full take data” as part of its cyber operations and is receiving policy support on “use of intercepted private communications.” The term “full take” is surveillance-agency jargon that refers to the bulk collection of both content and metadata from Internet traffic. Another top-secret document on the surveillance dated from 2010 suggests the agency may be obtaining at least some of the data by covertly mining it directly from Canadian Internet cables. CSE notes in the document that it is “processing emails off the wire.”
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15
     
    " CANADIAN SPIES COLLECT DOMESTIC EMAILS IN SECRET SECURITY SWEEP BY RYAN GALLAGHER AND GLENN GREENWALD @rj_gallagher@ggreenwald YESTERDAY AT 2:02 AM SHARE TWITTER FACEBOOK GOOGLE EMAIL PRINT POPULAR EXCLUSIVE: TSA ISSUES SECRET WARNING ON 'CATASTROPHIC' THREAT TO AVIATION CHICAGO'S "BLACK SITE" DETAINEES SPEAK OUT WHY DOES THE FBI HAVE TO MANUFACTURE ITS OWN PLOTS IF TERRORISM AND ISIS ARE SUCH GRAVE THREATS? NET NEUTRALITY IS HERE - THANKS TO AN UNPRECEDENTED GUERRILLA ACTIVISM CAMPAIGN HOW SPIES STOLE THE KEYS TO THE ENCRYPTION CASTLE Canada's electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians' emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents. The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years. The data mining operation is carried out by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada's equivalent of the National Security Agency. Its existence is disclosed in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The emails are vacuumed up by the Canadian agency as part of its mandate to defend against hacking attacks and malware targeting government computers. It relies on a system codenamed PONY EXPRESS to analyze the messages in a bid to detect potential cyber threats. Last year, CSE acknowledged it collected some private communications as part of cybersecurity efforts. But it refused to divulge the number of communications being stored or to explain for how long any intercepted messages would be retained. Now, the Snowden documents shine a light for the first time on the huge scope of the operation - exposing the controversial details the government withheld from the public. Under Canada's criminal code, CSE is no
Paul Merrell

Russia May Hit Back at Saudi Arabia for Volgogard Attacks - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37364.htm

war & peace Russia U.S. Saudis Sochi Volgograd Olympics terroism

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Russian intelligence has now reportedly obtained solid proof that Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the twin terror attacks on the city of Volgograd. The attacks killed more than 32 people and injured over 100 others. Most of the victims were civilians. According to an informed Russian official source, reported by the Fars News Agency, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has informed President Vladimir Putin of the Saudi link to the Volgograd massacre. This will come as no surprise to Putin. The Russian leader was warned by the Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan during a heated four-hour private meeting back in July that Wahhabi-sponsored terrorists based in the North Caucasus region of Russia would be targeting the Sochi Winter Olympics.
  • The Sochi Games are due to open on February 7. Volgograd is a key transport hub linking Moscow with the southern Russian territory and the Black Sea resort city of Sochi in particular, where the Winter Olympics are to be held. The double bombings on Volgograd’s transport system on 29-30 December were therefore unmistakably an assault on Russia’s hosting of the Olympics. The atrocity caused the deaths of several women and children, and in the aftermath President Putin was livid in his disgust at the attacks. He said there was no justification, whatsoever, for the killing of innocent civilians and he vowed to “destroy the terrorists” behind the bombings. This raises the onerous question: What will Putin do next if he has, in fact, been told that the authors of the Volgograd crime against humanity are connected to the Saudi rulers? This could be construed as an act of war. There are unconfirmed reports that Putin and his senior intelligence officers have already drawn up plans to “destroy Saudi Arabia” over its systematic sponsoring of terrorism on Russian territory.
  • The Volgograd atrocity is just the latest in a long series of terrorist acts connected to Saudi-sponsored radicals in the North Caucasus. Back in October, another suicide bomb on a packed bus in Volgograd left six dead. The group believed to be behind these attacks is known as the Caucasus Caliphate, led by Doko Umarov. Saudi Arabia is a major source of funds for the Caucasus Caliphate, which espouses the same fundamentalist ideology as the Saudi-sponsored Takfiris operating in Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq. Based in Chechnya and Dagestan, Umarov has publicly stated that “all means necessary would be used to derail” the Sochi Olympics. Previously, the same network carried out suicide bomb attacks on Moscow’s metro system in 2010 and 2011, which caused dozens of deaths. The Caucasus extremists are known to have close logistical connection with both American and Saudi military intelligence.
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  • Indeed, from the early 1990s following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Americans and the Saudis redeployed their Afghan Al Qaeda tactics into the southern Russian territories as a way to further destabilize Moscow. One of the architects of this plan was former CIA chief William Casey. This US and Saudi covert operations fuelled the two Chechen wars of 1994-95 and 1999-2000. Although Moscow has since managed to subdue the large-scale violence, the Caucasus Caliphate remains a potent source of terrorism and sabotage, as the latest horror in Volgograd all too grimly attests. Saudi spy chief Bandar’s earlier threat to Putin that the Sochi Games were at risk of attack from the Caucasus-based terror groups was thus no idle threat. In retrospect his words amount to self-indictment. Bandar reportedly boasted to Putin: “We control them (the Caucasus militants).” This implies that Saudi Arabia can turn on and off the conduct of these terror groups. That places Saudi Arabia as the ultimate author of a catalogue of crimes that Russia has endured for the most part of 20 years, the latest being in the city of Volgograd.
  • It is not known what precise evidence Russian intelligence has lately uncovered that allegedly pinpoints Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the Volgograd massacre. But there is already copious circumstantial evidence, as well as Bandar’s own braggadocio. One of the suicide bombers in the Volgograd double attack has been identified as Russian national Pavel Pechyonkin (32). He reportedly traveled to Syria last year and fought in the ranks of Saudi-backed extremists trying to topple the government of Bashar al Assad.
  • If the Russians have acquired hard evidence of Saudi collusion in terrorism on their soil, there is firm legal ground for Russia to exact retaliation under the doctrine of self-defense. In a second meeting between Bandar and Putin, the Russian leader reportedly told the Saudi in no uncertain terms that his support for terrorism was “a double-edged sword” that would eventually inflict damage on those who wield it. For years now Saudi Arabia has gotten away with covert state-sponsored terrorism disrupting its Middle East neighbors. Syria, Lebanon and Iraq are but the latest victims. The Saudis have done this with impunity in the service of American imperialism, just as Zionist Israel has likewise functioned as an imperial crime syndicate. But now Saudi Arabia may have swung its double-edged sword too recklessly. It has apparently been caught red-handed in an outrage against the Russian bear. Prince Bandar, we can be sure, will from now on be making extra checks beneath his car.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Jan 14
     
    Note that it has long been known that Chechen revolutionaries in Russia have been the beneficiaries of Saudi and U.S. assistance, with firm evidence of Saudi command and control.  
Paul Merrell

'Inventing Terrorists' Study Offers Critical Examination of Government's Use of Preempt... - 0 views

dissenter.firedoglake.com/...use-of-preemptive-prosecutions

surveillance state war & peace preemptive-prosecution war on terror™

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Nearly ninety-five percent of individuals on a Justice Department list of “terrorism and terrorism-related convictions” from 2001-2010 included some elements of preemptive prosecution, according to a study by attorneys which they say is the first to “directly examine and critique preemptive prosecution and its abuses.” The study is called “Inventing Terrorists: The Lawfare of Preemptive Prosecution” [PDF]. It was released by Project SALAM, which stands for Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims, and the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF), a coalition of groups that “oppose profiling, preemptive prosecution and prisoner abuse.” While Mother Jones has already published extensive work on the entrapment and prosecution of “terrorists” since the 9/11 attacks examining the Justice Department’s list, this study is noteworthy because it advances the journalism to outline how the government has perverted the criminal justice system through practices that have become popular especially against Muslims.
  • The study broke down each case into three separate categories: preemptive prosecution; “elements of preemptive prosecution,” meaning the defendants’ may have committed non-terrorism-related crimes that the government “inflated” into a terrorism charge; and terrorism-related charges that were legitimate and not the result of preemptive prosecution. The Justice Department’s list only contained 399 cases. The study concluded “the number of preemptive prosecution cases is 289 out of 399, or 72.4%. The number of elements of preemptive prosecution cases is 87 out of 399, or 21.8%.” “Combining preemptive prosecution cases and elements of preemptive prosecution cases, the total number of such cases on the DOJ list is 376, or 94.2%,” according to the study.
  • Nearly twenty-five percent of the cases contained material support charges. Nearly thirty percent were cases with conspiracy charges. Over seventeen percent of cases involved sting operations. More than sixteen percent of cases included false statement or perjury charges, and around six percent of cases involved immigration-related charges. The study also concluded that there were only eleven cases where threats had been “potentially significant” to the United States. “Only three were successful (the Tsarnaev brothers and Major Nidal Hasan), accounting for seventeen deaths and several hundred injuries.” Out of hundreds of cases, the authors were only able to come up with twenty-three individuals who they believed ever posed a threat and were not preemptively prosecuted. But, as is noted in the study, nine of these people were inexplicably listed even though they committed non-terrorism related crimes.
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  • Thus, the study clearly demonstrates how resources for fighting terrorism have mostly been used to target individuals who are suspicious and easier to prosecute because they practice a certain religion or have an “ideology” the general public will resent. And if most of these people were not people of color with Arabic-sounding names that could be used to promote a fear of foreigners in the criminal justice process, their crimes would be given the same light treatment other members of the general public typically receive.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Jun 14
     
    What to do if you're in the FBI and Congress has rained billions of dollars on you to head off the next 9-11? Tell Congress it was a false flag operation, or get out there and invent a bunch of terrorists? 
Paul Merrell

Impending Threat to Canadian Democracy: Harper Government's "Anti-Terrorism Act" isn't ... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5435766

torture Canada legislation liberties tyranny

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The Harper government’s Bill C-51, or Anti-Terrorism Act, has been in the public domain for over a month. Long enough for us to know that it subverts basic principles of constitutional law, assaults rights of free speech and free assembly, and is viciously anti-democratic. An unprecedented torrent of criticism has been directed against this bill as the government rushes it through Parliament. This has included stern or at least sceptical editorials in all the major newspapers; an open letter, signed by four former Prime Ministers and five former Supreme Court judges, denouncing the bill for exposing Canadians to major violations of their rights; and another letter, signed by a hundred Canadian law professors, explaining the dangers it poses to justice and legality. As its critics have shown, the bill isn’t really about terrorism: it’s about smearing other activities by association—and then suppressing them in ways that would formerly have been flagrantly illegal. The bill targets, among others, people who defend the treaty rights of First Nations, people who oppose tar sands, fracking, and bitumen-carrying pipelines as threats to health and the environment, and people who urge that international law be peacefully applied to ending Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. (Members of this latter group include significant numbers of Canadian Jews.)
  • But the Anti-Terrorism Act is more mortally dangerous to Canadian democracy than even these indications would suggest. A central section of the act empowers CSIS agents to obtain judicial warrants—on mere suspicion, with no requirement for supporting evidence—that will allow them to supplement other disruptive actions against purported enemies of Harperland with acts that directly violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and other Canadian laws. The only constraints placed on this legalized law-breaking are that CSIS agents shall not “(a) cause, intentionally or by criminal negligence, death or bodily harm to an individual; (b) wilfully attempt in any manner to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice; or (c) violate the sexual integrity of an individual.”
  • The second of these prohibitions—occurring in the midst of a bill that seeks systematically to obstruct citizens in the exercise of their rights, pervert justice, and defeat democracy—might tempt one to believe that there is a satirist at work within the Department of Justice. (Note, however, that CSIS agents can obstruct, pervert and defeat to their hearts’ content, so long as they do so haphazardly, rather than “wilfully.”) But the first and third clauses amount to an authorization of torture.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 15
     
    U.S. government's excesses metastasize to Canada.
Paul Merrell

Turkey has the right to conduct operations in Syria, elsewhere to combat terr... - 0 views

www.hurriyetdailynews.com/t-terror-threats-erdogan-.aspx

war & peace Turkey Syria Erdogan self-defense

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Turkey has the right to conduct operations not only in Syria but also any other place in which there are terrorist organizations that target Turkey, said President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “Turkey has every right to conduct operations in Syria and the places where terror organizations are nested with regards to the struggle against the threats that Turkey faces,” Erdoğan said Feb. 20,
  • Erdoğan’s remarks came one day after he and U.S. President Barack Obama talked on the phone for more than an hour regarding the latest developments in Syria and Turkey. During his address on Feb. 20, Erdoğan said the situation had “absolutely nothing to do with the sovereignty rights of the states that cannot take control of their territorial integrity.”“On the contrary, this has to do with the will Turkey shows to protect its sovereignty rights,” he said. “We except attitudes to prevent our country’s right [to self-defense] directly as an initiative against Turkey’s entity – no matter where it comes from.” Erdoğan said the point Turkey has reached is a place of self-defense and that no one had the right to restrict that right.“The place where we have come is a point of self-defense. No one can restrict Turkey’s right to self-defense in the face of terror acts that have targeted Turkey; they cannot prevent [Turkey] from using it,” Erdoğan said.
  • Turkey has been shelling targets belonging to the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the military wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Turkey sees as a terrorist organization due to its links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in Syria since Feb. 13. Turkey and the U.S. differ on the designation of the PYD and YPG and relations between the two NATO allies have been tense for more than a month. While Turkey regards the two groups as a terrorist organization, the U.S. sees the PYD and YPG as an important partner in its fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria. “Turkey will use its right to expand its rules of engagement beyond [responding to] actual attacks against it and to encompass all terror threats, including PYD and Daesh in particular,” Erdoğan said, using the Arabic acronym for ISIL. His remarks came after a suicide bomb attack in the Turkish capital Ankara killed 28 people and wounded 61 others on Feb. 17.        The Turkish government stated that the Ankara attack was carried out jointly by a YPG member – a Syrian national identified as 1992-born Salih Neccar – and PKK members. The YPG denied the attack, while the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) claimed the attack, saying it was carried out by an operative named Abdülbaki Sönmez.
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  • Erdoğan said that while Turkey was defending itself, they would treat anyone that stands in Turkey’s way as a “terrorist and treat them accordingly.”“I especially want this to be known this way,” he added. Erdoğan also lashed out at countries where similar terror attacks have taken place, criticizing them for severely reacting to the attacks when it was their country at stake but “preaching only patience and resoluteness” when it comes to Turkey. This is “disingenuous,” Erdoğan said.
Paul Merrell

Brussels Attack: Implications of Alleged ISIS Links - nsnbc international | nsnbc inter... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ications-of-alleged-isis-links

war & peace ISIL Brussels-attack U.S.-foreign-policy false-flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Just days after arresting French-born Belgium national  and terror suspect Salah Abdeslam in Brussels, a coordinated terror attack unfolded in the very same city, killing at least 28, and injuring many more.
  • NBC News has already  announced that European officials are linking the attack to ISIS, though it is unclear whether or not Abdeslam’s network – which carried out the November 2015 Paris terror attacks – was directly involved.
  • Police in Brussels were still hunting for several other alleged accomplices of Abdeslam, including Najim Laachraoui and Mohamed Abrini. Laachraoui and Abrini, like virtually every other suspect involved in a string of terrorist attacks across North America, Europe, and Australia, were well known to Western security agencies, having both been documented as having traveled to Syria to fight against Damascus under ISIS, with Abrini having been arrested and jailed several times in the past, and Laachraoui already having a 2014 international arrest warrant issued for him in connection to a trial involving recruiting Europeans to fight for ISIS.
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  • In other words, all of the suspects have been under the nose, on the radar, and in the prisons of Western security agencies on and off for years, yet were still able to carry out at least one high profile terrorist attack – possibly two, and with the vast majority of the suspects involved having traveled to Syria to fight alongside ISIS before inexplicably being allowed to re-enter Europe and rejoin society without consequence – as if inviting them to take their extremism to the next level.
  • The Guardian’s “Brussels attack: were they revenge for Abdeslam’s arrest?,” attempted to link the bombings in Brussels to the arrest of Abdeslam and the Paris attack terror network. The op-ed acknowledges that these terrorist attacks are being carried out by locals – Europeans – using local resources. Should the Brussels attack be linked to this same terror network, it will greatly complicate efforts by some to leverage this tragedy to further their agendas against refugees and even to change the dynamics of the war in Syria itself. Europeans are clearly already being radicalized and then leaving to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and then returning – rather than a torrent of foreigners streaming in from abroad and carrying out violence against European targets. Should the Brussels attack turn out to be the work of this ISIS-linked terror group, considering the familiarity European security agencies had with all the suspects long before even the 2015 Paris attacks, indicates criminal negligence at best, and complicity at worst.
  • ISIS’ own alleged agenda of transforming the world into a “caliphate” is cartoonishly absurd. In reality, it is clear that ISIS shows up and exercises force in regions of the world the US and its allies cannot intervene in directly. This includes North Africa, the Middle East, and even as far as Asia. Far from a “conspiracy theory,” it would be the US’ own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that would admit as much in a leaked 2012 report (.pdf) which stated: If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran). To clarify just who these “supporting powers” were that sought the creation of a “Salafist” (Islamic) principality” (State), the DIA report explains: The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.
  • Between this admission, and an earlier exposé in 2007 by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker piece titled, “The Redirection” where US and Saudi plans to use Al Qaeda to wage proxy war on Syria and Iran were revealed, it is clear that both Al Qaeda and ISIS are being used by the West to wage war on Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, and even Moscow. ISIS supply lines clearly, even admittedly run from NATO territory in Turkey where the US and its regional allies have categorically failed to interdict them and even appear to be aiding and abetting the flow of men and materiel into ISIS-held territory in Syria and Iraq. These supply lines are what has allowed pressure to be continuously placed upon Damascus and its allies over the past 5 years in ways nonexistent “moderate rebels” couldn’t.
  • In Indonesia, as Jakarta clearly began re-balancing toward Beijing, ISIS carried out its first deadly attack on the Southeast Asian nation. Thailand’s similar re-balancing also prompted threats from the US that an “ISIS attack” was imminent. In Europe, where the flames of a “clash of civilizations” are being furiously and intentionally fanned, ISIS serves as a constant implement to empower extremists on both sides, while drowning out the voices of unity, moderation, and peace in the middle. It allows for a growing police state and xenophobic tendencies to flourish at home, while justifying further war abroad. While some Western newspapers are already trying to frame the Belgium attack as “incompetence” by European security agencies, there must be a better explanation as to why this “war with ISIS” continues to drag on, when the source of ISIS’ fighting capacity appears to be within rather than beyond the West – and aiding rather than opposing Western special interests.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Mar 16
     
    Reeks of a false flag attack.
Paul Merrell

Land Destroyer: America's Covert Re-Invasion of Iraq - 0 views

landdestroyer.blogspot.mx/...overt-re-invasion-of-iraq.html

war & peace ISIL U.S.-foreign-policy war by proxy

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • mage: ISIS clearly did not materialize spontaneously within Iraq, it hasclearly redeployed from its NATO-sponsored destruction of Syria to northern Iraq, perhaps in an attempt to justify a NATO incursion and thecreation of a buffer zone straddling Syrian, Iraqi, and even possibly Iranian territory with the goal of targeting Iran directly with ISIS.   June 13, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - LD) - Heavily armed, well funded, and organized as a professional, standing army, the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept southward into Iraq from Turkey and northeastern Syria, taking the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, and now threaten the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad itself. The United States was sure to prop up two unfounded narratives - the first being that US intelligence agencies, despite assets in Iraq and above it in the form of surveillance drones, failed to give warning of the invasion, and that ISIS is some sort of self-sustaining terror organization carving out a "state" by "robbing banks" and collecting "donations" on Twitter. The Wall Street Journal in its report, "Iraqi Drama Catches U.S. Off Guard," stated: The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.
  • mage: ISIS has convoys of brand new matching Toyota's the samevehicles seen among admittedly NATO-armed terrorists operatingeverywhere from Libya to Syria, and now Iraq. It is a synthetic, state-sponsored regional mercenary expeditionary force.
  • The question remains, if a Lebanese newspaper knew ISIS was on the move eastward, why didn't the CIA? The obvious answer is the CIA did know, and is simply feigning ignorance at the expense of their reputation to bait its enemies into suspecting the agency of  incompetency rather than complicity in the horrific terroristic swath ISIS is now carving through northern Iraq. Described extensively in the full New Eastern Outlook Journal (NEO) report, "NATO’s Terror Hordes in Iraq a Pretext for Syria Invasion," the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, have funded and armed terrorists operating in Syria for the past 3 years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars - coincidentally the same amount that ISIS would require to gain primacy among militant groups fighting in Syria and to mobilize forces capable of crossing into Iraq and overwhelming Baghdad's national defenses.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • a 3-year ongoing CIA program (here, here, and here) all along the Turkish-Syrian border to "monitor" and "arm" "moderate" militants fighting the Syrian government, the US claims it was caught "by surprise." If drones and CIA operatives operating in ISIS territory weren't enough to detect the impending invasion, perhaps the CIA should have just picked up a newspaper.Indeed, the Lebanon Daily Start in March 2014 reported that ISIS openly withdrew its forces from Latakia and Idlib provinces in western Syria, and redeployed them in Syria's east - along the Syrian-Iraqi border. The article titled, "Al-Qaeda splinter group in Syria leaves two provinces: activists," stated explicitly that: On Friday, ISIS – which alienated many rebels by seizing territory and killing rival commanders – finished withdrawing from the Idlib and Latakia provinces and moved its forces toward the eastern Raqqa province and the eastern outskirts of the northern city of Aleppo, activists said.
  • The NEO report includes links to the US Army’s West Point Countering Terrorism Center reports, “Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq,” and “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq,” which detail extensively the terror network used to flood Iraq with foreign terrorists, weapons, and cash to fuel an artificial "sectarian war" during the US occupation, and then turned over to flood Syria with terrorists in the West's bid to overthrow the government in Damascus. What's ISIS Doing in Iraq? The NEO report would also post Seymour Hersh's 2007 article, "The Redirection," documenting over the course of 9 pages US, Saudi, and Israeli intentions to create and deploy sectarian extremists region-wide to confront Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hersh would note that these "sectarian extremists" were either tied to Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda itself. The ISIS army moving toward Baghdad is the final manifestation of this conspiracy, a standing army operating with impunity, threatening to topple the Syrian government, purge pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, and even threatening Iran itself by building a bridge from Al Qaeda's NATO safe havens in Turkey, across northern Iraq, and up to Iran's borders directly. Labeled "terrorists" by the West, grants the West plausible deniability in its creation, deployment, and across the broad spectrum of atrocities it is now carrying out.  
  • It is a defacto re-invasion of Iraq by Western interests - but this time without Western forces directly participating - rather a proxy force the West is desperately attempting to disavow any knowledge of or any connection to. However, no other explanation can account for the size and prowess of ISIS beyond state sponsorship. And since ISIS is the clear benefactor of state sponsorship, the question is, which states are sponsoring it? With Iraq, Syria, and Iran along with Lebanese-based Hezbollah locked in armed struggle with ISIS and other Al Qaeda franchises across the region, the only blocs left are NATO and the GCC (Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular).
  • With the West declaring ISIS fully villainous in an attempt to intervene more directly in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, creating a long desired "buffer zone" within which to harbor, arm, and fund an even larger terrorist expeditionary force, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and others are offered an opportunity to preempt Western involvement and to crush the ISIS - cornering and eliminating NATO-GCC's expeditionary force while scoring geopolitical points of vanquishing Washington's latest "villain." Joint Iraq-Iranian operations in the north and south of ISIS's locations, and just along Turkey's borders could envelop and trap ISIS to then be whittled down and destroyed - just as Syria has been doing to NATO's proxy terrorist forces within its own borders.Whatever the regional outcome may be, the fact is the West has re-invaded Iraq, with a force as brutal, if not worse than the "shock and awe" doctrine of 2003. Iraq faces another difficult occupation if it cannot summon a response from within, and among its allies abroad, to counter and crush this threat with utmost expediency.
Paul Merrell

Secret documents shine light on GCSB spying in Bangladesh - National - NZ Herald News - 0 views

www.nzherald.co.nz/...article.cfm

surveillance state war & peace NZ GCSB CIA NSA Bangladesh torture

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Secret documents reveal New Zealand has shared intelligence collected through covert surveillance with Bangladesh despite that country's security forces being implicated in extrajudicial killings, torture and other human rights abuses. The documents shine light on the major role played by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) in electronic spying operations conducted in the small South Asian nation. The surveillance has been used to aid the United States as part of its global counter-terrorism campaign, launched after the September 11 attacks in 2001. The New Zealand Herald analysed the documents in collaboration with US news website The Intercept, which obtained them from the NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
  • Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said the spy agency was "dragging" New Zealand into human rights abuses, and the Government should stop providing intelligence assistance to Bangladesh. "All three key anti-terrorism government agencies in Bangladesh have been implicated in horrendous human rights abuses, so it is impossible to guarantee that the information passed on did not lead to innocent people being killed or tortured," Dr Norman said. "John Key has always justified the GCSB on the basis that it is there to protect the good guys, but these documents reveal that it is helping the bad guys.
  • The intelligence gathered by the GCSB staff was also being forwarded to foreign intelligence agencies, including Bangladesh's state intelligence agency. In recent years, human rights groups have issued several reports documenting Bangladeshi intelligence and security agencies' disregard for international prohibitions on torture and alleged involvement in politically motivated killings. In 2014, a case was filed in the International Criminal Court accusing the Bangladesh Government of committing crimes against humanity. The GCSB's surveillance operations in Bangladesh are among the most surprising and obscure yet revealed. Bangladesh barely registers in New Zealand foreign policy. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade website says: "Relations between New Zealand and Bangladesh remain friendly, although interaction is limited." Nonetheless, a New Zealand government source told the Herald that Bangladesh is the main focus of one of the GCSB's four analysis sections, called ICT, and has been for over a decade. ICT, the Transnational Issues section, was set up in April 2002 in the wake of the September 11 attacks to focus on terrorism threats.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The 2009 document reveals that there is a special collection site in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka, for eavesdropping on local communications. New Zealand does not have a high commission or any other official building in Bangladesh in which to hide a covert listening post. The Snowden documents suggest the Dhaka unit may be located inside a US-controlled building with operations overseen by the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
  • The Bangladesh spying is revealed in an April 2013 US National Security Agency (NSA) report about its relationship with New Zealand. In a section called "What Partner Provides to NSA", it says "GCSB has been the lead for the intelligence community on the Bangladesh CT [Counter-Terrorism] target since 2004." The GCSB provides "one of the key SIGINT [signals intelligence] sources of [Bangladesh counter-terrorism] reporting to the US intelligence community."
  • The intelligence gathered by the GCSB staff was being forwarded to foreign intelligence agencies. The April 2013 NSA report said the "GCSB's Bangladesh CT [counter terrorism] reporting provided unique intelligence leads that have enabled successful CT operations by Bangladesh State Intelligence Service, CIA and India over the past year". The specific Bangladesh "State Intelligence Service" referred to is not named in the document. Bangladesh has several agencies that focus on gathering intelligence, primarily including the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), the National Security Intelligence agency (NSI), and the police Special Branch. The lead agency that executes the country's counter-terrorism operations is the Rapid Action Battalion, or RAB. Each of these agencies has been accused of involvement in severe human rights abuses over a sustained number of years. In 2008, for instance, Human Rights Watch alleged that the Special Branch headquarters in Dhaka's Maghbazar neighbourhood was used to torture detainees.
  • In 2010, a trade union activist accused the NSI of arresting, torturing, and threatening to kill him. The same activist was found dead in unexplained circumstances two years later, his toes and feet broken, legs and body battered and bruised, and his legs apparently pierced with a sharp object. Bangladesh's intelligence agencies and main police and security forces co-operate closely. Most notably, they work together as part of a notorious centre called the Taskforce for Interrogation Cell, located inside a compound in northern Dhaka that is controlled by the RAB unit. In 2011, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported the interrogation cell was used as a place to extract information and confessions from "enemies of the state". It was described as a "torture centre" used for "deliberate and systematic" mistreatment of detainees. One British man detained there in 2009 on terrorism-related charges was allegedly hooded and strapped to a chair while a drill was driven into his right shoulder and hip.
  • Other torture methods used by Bangladeshi authorities, according to Human Rights Watch, have included "burning with acid, hammering of nails into toes ... electric shocks, beatings on legs with iron rods, beating with batons on backs after sprinkling sand on them, ice torture, finger piercing, and mock executions". In February last year, the US Government suspended its own support for the RAB, citing "gross violation of human rights" committed by the force's members. The same month, a case against the Bangladesh Government was lodged in the International Criminal Court, accusing the country's officials of waging a brutal campaign of "widespread or systematic" torture, killings, and other human rights abuses that amounted to crimes against humanity.
Paul Merrell

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radi... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...sa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-porn COINTELPRO FBI must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority. The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT" -- or signals intelligence, the interception of communications -- "assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues. Among the vulnerabilities listed by the NSA that can be effectively exploited are “viewing sexually explicit material online” and “using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls.”
  • The Director of the National Security Agency -- described as "DIRNSA" -- is listed as the "originator" of the document. Beyond the NSA itself, the listed recipients include officials with the Departments of Justice and Commerce and the Drug Enforcement Administration. "Without discussing specific individuals, it should not be surprising that the US Government uses all of the lawful tools at our disposal to impede the efforts of valid terrorist targets who seek to harm the nation and radicalize others to violence," Shawn Turner, director of public affairs for National Intelligence, told The Huffington Post in an email Tuesday. Yet Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said these revelations give rise to serious concerns about abuse. "It's important to remember that the NSA’s surveillance activities are anything but narrowly focused -- the agency is collecting massive amounts of sensitive information about virtually everyone," he said. "Wherever you are, the NSA's databases store information about your political views, your medical history, your intimate relationships and your activities online," he added. "The NSA says this personal information won't be abused, but these documents show that the NSA probably defines 'abuse' very narrowly."
  • None of the six individuals targeted by the NSA is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots. The agency believes they all currently reside outside the United States. It identifies one of them, however, as a "U.S. person," which means he is either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. A U.S. person is entitled to greater legal protections against NSA surveillance than foreigners are. Stewart Baker, a one-time general counsel for the NSA and a top Homeland Security official in the Bush administration, said that the idea of using potentially embarrassing information to undermine targets is a sound one. "If people are engaged in trying to recruit folks to kill Americans and we can discredit them, we ought to," said Baker. "On the whole, it's fairer and maybe more humane" than bombing a target, he said, describing the tactic as "dropping the truth on them." Any system can be abused, Baker allowed, but he said fears of the policy drifting to domestic political opponents don't justify rejecting it. "On that ground you could question almost any tactic we use in a war, and at some point you have to say we're counting on our officials to know the difference," he said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In addition to analyzing the content of their internet activities, the NSA also examined the targets' contact lists. The NSA accuses two of the targets of promoting al Qaeda propaganda, but states that surveillance of the three English-speakers’ communications revealed that they have "minimal terrorist contacts." In particular, “only seven (1 percent) of the contacts in the study of the three English-speaking radicalizers were characterized in SIGINT as affiliated with an extremist group or a Pakistani militant group. An earlier communications profile of [one of the targets] reveals that 3 of the 213 distinct individuals he was in contact with between 4 August and 2 November 2010 were known or suspected of being associated with terrorism," the document reads. The document contends that the three Arabic-speaking targets have more contacts with affiliates of extremist groups, but does not suggest they themselves are involved in any terror plots. Instead, the NSA believes the targeted individuals radicalize people through the expression of controversial ideas via YouTube, Facebook and other social media websites. Their audience, both English and Arabic speakers, "includes individuals who do not yet hold extremist views but who are susceptible to the extremist message,” the document states. The NSA says the speeches and writings of the six individuals resonate most in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Kenya, Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia.
  • The NSA possesses embarrassing sexually explicit information about at least two of the targets by virtue of electronic surveillance of their online activity. The report states that some of the data was gleaned through FBI surveillance programs carried out under the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act. The document adds, "Information herein is based largely on Sunni extremist communications." It further states that "the SIGINT information is from primary sources with direct access and is generally considered reliable." According to the document, the NSA believes that exploiting electronic surveillance to publicly reveal online sexual activities can make it harder for these “radicalizers” to maintain their credibility. "Focusing on access reveals potential vulnerabilities that could be even more effectively exploited when used in combination with vulnerabilities of character or credibility, or both, of the message in order to shape the perception of the messenger as well as that of his followers," the document argues. An attached appendix lists the "argument" each surveillance target has made that the NSA says constitutes radicalism, as well the personal "vulnerabilities" the agency believes would leave the targets "open to credibility challenges" if exposed.
  • One target's offending argument is that "Non-Muslims are a threat to Islam," and a vulnerability listed against him is "online promiscuity." Another target, a foreign citizen the NSA describes as a "respected academic," holds the offending view that "offensive jihad is justified," and his vulnerabilities are listed as "online promiscuity" and "publishes articles without checking facts." A third targeted radical is described as a "well-known media celebrity" based in the Middle East who argues that "the U.S perpetrated the 9/11 attack." Under vulnerabilities, he is said to lead "a glamorous lifestyle." A fourth target, who argues that "the U.S. brought the 9/11 attacks on itself" is said to be vulnerable to accusations of “deceitful use of funds." The document expresses the hope that revealing damaging information about the individuals could undermine their perceived "devotion to the jihadist cause." The Huffington Post is withholding the names and locations of the six targeted individuals; the allegations made by the NSA about their online activities in this document cannot be verified. The document does not indicate whether the NSA carried out its plan to discredit these six individuals, either by communicating with them privately about the acquired information or leaking it publicly. There is also no discussion in the document of any legal or ethical constraints on exploiting electronic surveillance in this manner.
  • While Baker and others support using surveillance to tarnish the reputation of people the NSA considers "radicalizers," U.S. officials have in the past used similar tactics against civil rights leaders, labor movement activists and others. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI harassed activists and compiled secret files on political leaders, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. The extent of the FBI's surveillance of political figures is still being revealed to this day, as the bureau releases the long dossiers it compiled on certain people in response to Freedom of Information Act requests following their deaths. The information collected by the FBI often centered on sex -- homosexuality was an ongoing obsession on Hoover's watch -- and information about extramarital affairs was reportedly used to blackmail politicians into fulfilling the bureau's needs. Current FBI Director James Comey recently ordered new FBI agents to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington to understand "the dangers in becoming untethered to oversight and accountability."
  • James Bamford, a journalist who has been covering the NSA since the early 1980s, said the use of surveillance to exploit embarrassing private behavior is precisely what led to past U.S. surveillance scandals. "The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to 'neutralize' their targets," he said. "Back then, the idea was developed by the longest serving FBI chief in U.S. history, today it was suggested by the longest serving NSA chief in U.S. history." That controversy, Bamford said, also involved the NSA. "And back then, the NSA was also used to do the eavesdropping on King and others through its Operation Minaret. A later review declared the NSA’s program 'disreputable if not outright illegal,'" he said. Baker said that until there is evidence the tactic is being abused, the NSA should be trusted to use its discretion. "The abuses that involved Martin Luther King occurred before Edward Snowden was born," he said. "I think we can describe them as historical rather than current scandals. Before I say, 'Yeah, we've gotta worry about that,' I'd like to see evidence of that happening, or is even contemplated today, and I don't see it."
  • Jaffer, however, warned that the lessons of history ought to compel serious concern that a "president will ask the NSA to use the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist or human rights activist." "The NSA has used its power that way in the past and it would be naïve to think it couldn't use its power that way in the future," he said.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13
     
    By Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher, and Ryan Grim, 26 November 2013. I will annotate later. But this is by far the most important NSA disclosure from Edward Snowden's leaked documents thus far. A report originated by Gen. Alexander himself revealing COINTELPRO like activities aimed at destroying the reputations of non-terrorist "radicalizers," including one "U.S. person." This is exactly the kind of repressive activity that the civil libertarians among us warn about. 
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13
     
    By Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher, and Ryan Grim, 26 November 2013. I will annotate later. But this is by far the most important NSA disclosure from Edward Snowden's leaked documents thus far. A report originated by Gen. Alexander himself revealing COINTELPRO like activities aimed at destroying the reputations of non-terrorist "radicalizers," including one "U.S. person." This is exactly the kind of repressive activity that the civil libertarians among us warn about. 
Paul Merrell

Secret Israeli Report Sees Rift With Europe Growing - J.J. Goldberg - Forward.com - 0 views

blogs.forward.com/...t-sees-rift-with-europe-growin

war & peace Israel Europe leaked-docs

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • A classified Israeli foreign ministry document, leaked to the daily Yediot Ahronot, warns that 2015 will see Israel’s standing on the world stage steadily deteriorating. It predicts “worsening drift in Europe toward Palestinian positions, more parliaments recognizing the State of Palestine, fear of sanctions and labeling merchandise [to separate settlement products from tariff-free Israel-proper products] and no certainty that the United States will continue after Israel’s March elections to protect Israel with its veto.” The document is said to be a summary of an interministerial assessment roundtable convened by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, and is signed by foreign ministry deputy director-general Gilead Cohen. It was circulated to Israel’s ambassadors around the world, Yediot reported. In addition to labeling settlement products and parliamentary votes to recognize Palestine, the foreign ministry document warns of European nations halting the supply of replacement parts for Israeli equipment and demanding compensation for damage caused by Israel to European projects in the territories.
  • “The Europeans are creating a clear link between political and economic relations, and in this context it should be remembered that Europe is Israel’s main trading partner.” European diplomats and politicians increasingly view Israel as responsible for the failure of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, claiming that Israel sets unreasonable conditions for a peace agreement in order to continue deepening its hold on the West Bank.
  • The tensions surrounding Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to Paris this week are an outgrowth of that growing gulf of suspicion. As Haaretz diplomatic correspondents Barak Ravid and Asher Schechter both reported, French president Francois Hollande initially asked Netanyahu not to come to Paris for the Sunday solidarity rally, because he wanted to avoid injecting the divisive Israeli-Palestinian issue into the rally’s theme of national and Europe-wide unity and solidarity. Once Netanyahu announced that he was coming, Hollande made clear to him that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas would be invited as well. Netanyahu has said repeatedly since last week’s Paris attacks, in his initial sympathy statement and again in his remarks Monday at the site of the kosher supermarket attack, that the terror plaguing Europe is the same as the terror Israel faces. He said he hoped Europe would “wake up in time” to the terrorist threat. He continued: “Israel supports Europe in its fight against terrorism and it’s time Europe supported Israel in the same fight.” His comments have caused resentment in France. Like most of Europe, French leaders regard Israel’s conflict with Arab terrorists as fundamentally different from the jihadist terrorism spreading from Syria to the European continent. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is seen as a territorial dispute, albeit with religious overtones where Hamas is concerned, while Al Qaeda and ISIS are seen as essentially nihilistic movements that seek to undermine Western civilization.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • As for “waking up” to the terrorist threat, French observers note that they are carrying the fight against Al Qaeda in Mali on their own, had one of the largest NATO troop contingents fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and maintain what’s considered one of the best counter-terrorism intelligence operations in the West. In effect, Netanyahu’s call for Europe to “wake up” and “support Israel” in its struggle against terrorism is seen as a demand that Europe acquiesce in his effort to entrench Israeli presence in the territories, rather than withdrawing and permitting a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 lines.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15
     
    " ... no certainty that the United States will continue after Israel's March elections to protect Israel with its veto." That would seem to indicate that the Obama Administration is doing some very tough talking to Israeli government officials behind the scenes. But I doubt that Obama would have the U.S. abstain or vote in favor of a Security Council Resolution condemning Israel unless it was on a matter that would inflicit little actual pain on the Israeli government. In that scenario, Kerry could claim plausibly that the U.S. abstention or vote in favor was a "message" to Israeli gobvernment to get serious about making the two-state solution happen. But I have to admit it would warm my heart to see a Security Council Resolution adopted authorizing the use of force to break the Gaza siege and to push Israeli troops and its settlers back to the 1967 borders.  
Paul Merrell

The Fake Terror Threat Used To Justify Bombing Syria - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...or-group-justify-bombing-syria

war & peace Syrian-War Khorasan U.S.-foreign-policy false-flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • As the Obama Administration prepared to bomb Syria without congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval. The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat — too radical even for Al Qaeda! — administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.
Paul Merrell

DoJ Creates Special Dept to Deal with Growing Domestic Extremism Threat | nsnbc interna... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...wing-domestic-extremism-threat

liberties tyranny DoJ domestic-terrorism™

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • John Carlin, Department of Justice assistant attorney general and head of the national security division, spoke at George Washington University (GWU) about concerns over mounting threats posed by violent extremists within the US which has prompted the creation of a special counsel position to deal with these issues.
  • Carlin told the audience that “the domestic terrorism counsel would not only help oversee the prosecution of cases but also would develop plans to intervene when the threat of violence is imminent.” The DoJ expressed concern over the “staggeringly broad” threat to national security posed by domestic extremists “motivated by anti-government animus, eco-radicalism and racism have created a new urgency for federal and local law enforcement authorities.” Carlin said: “No single ideology governs hate and extremism. Nevertheless, we see commonalities among those who wish to do us harm. This gives us important information as we shape our deterrence and disruption strategies. Across the spectrum of extremist ideologies, two related traits emerge: first, the prevalence of lone offender attacks that do not require a terrorist network; and second, the increasing number of disaffected people inspired to violence who communicate their hate-filled views over the Internet and through social media.’’
  • The deputy attorney general said: “White supremacists represent the most violent. The Charleston shooter, who had a manifesto laying out a racist worldview, is just one example. His actions followed earlier deadly shooting sprees by white supremacists in Kansas, Wisconsin and elsewhere.’’ Along with white supremacists, Carlin said: “Adherents to the sovereign citizen ideology believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities or law enforcement. And although most sovereign citizens peacefully espouse these views, some sovereign citizen extremists resort to violence.’’ Foundational concerns about domestic terrorism can be found in the 2010 report Rightwing Extremism, wherein domestic extremists, particularly white supremacists, were proposed to be the newest and most dangerous threat to the US since al-Qaeda.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Oct 15
     
    To get a glimmer of just how ridiculous this DoJ initiative is, skim http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/08/youre-nine-times-likely-killed-police-officer-terrorist.html Talk about misplaced priorities. 
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia threatens to blockade Qatar over terrorism - The Irish Times - Tue, Mar 11... - 0 views

www.irishtimes.com/...qatar-over-terrorism-1.1719434

war & peace Saudis terrorism

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia has threatened to blockade neighbouring Qatar by air, land and sea unless Doha cuts ties with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, closes global channel al-Jazeera, and expels local branches of the US Brookings Institution and Rand Corporation think tanks. The threat was issued by Riyadh before it withdrew its ambassador to Doha and branded as “terrorist organisations” the brotherhood, Lebanon’s Hizbullah and al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Jabhat al-Nusra. Although the kingdom has long been the font of Sunni ultra-orthodox Salafism and jihadism, it now seeks to contain radical movements and media and other organisations giving them publicity.
  • King Abdullah has decreed that any Saudi who fights abroad could be jailed for 20-30 years, and those who join, endorse or provide moral or material support to groups classified as “terrorist” or “extremist” will risk prison sentences of five to 30 years. The decree followed the gazetting of a sweeping new anti- terrorism law prohibiting acts that disturb public order, promote insecurity, undermine national unity or harm the reputation of the kingdom.
  • While the law and decree are meant to curb jihadi operations on Saudi soil as well as counter non-jihadi dissidence, these legal instruments appear to contradict government policy on foreign jihad. While 400 Saudis have returned home from Syrian battlefields, another 1,000-2,000 are believed to be fighting with jihadi groups funded by the government as well as wealthy Saudis, Kuwaitis and Qataris. An informed source speculated the decree sends a message to Saudis: “Don’t come home. Fight unto death or victory.” For half a century Saudi Arabia used its oil wealth to promote Muslim fundamentalists, notably the brotherhood and its offshoots, to counter the secular pan-Arab nationalism preached by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties.
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  • Fearing blowback from Saudi jihadis engaged in the Syrian war, Riyadh has recently given the Syrian file to the interior minister Prince Mohamed bin Nayef, who has been in charge of an anti-terrorism campaign in the kingdom and Yemen, replacing intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The Wall Street Journal has quoted a key Saudi source who said the shift suggests that Riyadh could rely more on diplomatic than military means by exerting pressure on Russia, Iran and Hizbullah, Damascus’s chief supporters, to resolve the conflict by removing President Bashar al-Assad. Nevertheless, Riyadh also favours providing shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to “vetted” rebels, well aware these weapons could fall into al-Qaeda hands.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 14
     
    Time will tell whether the House of Saud is actually getting out of the terrorism business.
Paul Merrell

Cabinet okays jailing Israelis without charge in crackdown on Jewish terror | The Times... - 0 views

www.timesofisrael.com/-in-crackdown-on-jewish-terror

war & peace Israel administrative-detention Jewish-terrorists

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • The Israeli government authorized security officials to use administrative detention and all other appropriate means to track down and hold suspects in Friday’s murder of Palestinian infant Ali Saad Dawabsha
  • At an emergency meeting Sunday evening, ministers approved the use of “all means necessary” to catch the killers, alleged to be Jewish terrorists, who firebombed the Dawabsha home in the early hours of Friday morning, burning it down, killing Ali, and leaving his parents and brother fighting for their lives. Ministers also agreed to expedite legislation designed to counter Jewish terrorism, according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office. A ministerial committee including Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was established to oversee other requirements to ensure more effective efforts to quell the extremism.
  • Security officials quoted on Israel’s Channel 2 news warned that a group of Jewish extremists, sometimes referred to as “Hilltop youth,” were responsible for a series of hate-crime attacks in recent years, and that these “rebels” and “anarchists” are bent on undermining the rule of law in Israel. The officials said there had been a fall in the number of their attacks of late, but that the attacks themselves were becoming increasingly grave. The officials said they were not being hampered by a lack of intelligence as much as by a lack of legal tools to grapple with Jewish suspects. Of five suspects in a June arson attack at the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, at Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee, they said, three had been indicted, but they did not have the legal tools necessary to hold the other two in detention.
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  • Other security insiders told The Times of Israel Sunday, however, that the Shin Bet security service did have difficulty obtaining intelligence about Jewish extremist groupings. A Channel 2 report on Friday said that investigations into 15 arson attacks on Palestinian targets since 2008 had yielded no convictions.
  • Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin warned in the wake of Friday’s attack that Israel had been “lax” in confronting Jewish terrorism. At separate rallies on Saturday night, both he and former president Shimon Peres warned that Israel was being consumed by “flames” of hatred. They referred, too, to a stabbing attack on the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade on Thursday, in which six people were injured. The assailant in that attack was an ultra-Orthodox man, Yishai Schlissel, who had attacked the same parade in 2005 and only recently been freed from jail. One of the victims, 16-year-old Shira Banki, died of her wounds Sunday. A senior defense official told Israel Radio earlier Sunday that dealing with Jewish terror suspects necessitated using the same methods implemented against Palestinian terror suspects.
  • The official noted that the perpetrators of Friday’s firebomb attack in the West Bank village of Duma had been sophisticated in their actions — avoiding carrying mobile phones on their person — which could have been used to identify them — and leaving no tracks when they escaped the scene. Israeli security sources said Saturday that the two assailants had fled on foot in the direction of east Shiloh, a settlement area nearby. A Channel 2 report said they were suspected of coming from the area of the Esh Kodesh settlement outpost, but not from the outpost itself. A gag order has been placed on the investigation. Administrative detention — incarceration without trial — is considered a harsh and highly controversial method, but is increasingly used by world governments to combat the threat of terror, when there is not enough evidence against a suspect to justify a criminal trial. Administrative detention is temporary in nature, but may be renewed repeatedly by the defense minister.
  • The PA said that it held the Israeli government responsible for the attack in Duma.
  • Two homes in the Palestinian village of Duma, south of Nablus, were set alight, and the Hebrew words “Revenge” and “Long live the king messiah” were spray-painted on their walls, alongside a Star of David.
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Ten Commandments for a Better American World | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...ts_for_a_better_american_world

war & peace terrorists™ U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • My War on Terror Letter to an Unknown American Patriot By Tom Engelhardt Dear American Patriot, I wish I knew your name. I’ve been thinking about you, about all of us actually and our country, and meaning to write for a while to explain myself.  Let me start this way: you should feel free to call me an American nationalist.  It may sound ugly as hell, but it’s one way I do think of myself. True, we Americans usually reserve the more kindly word “patriot” for ourselves and use “nationalist” to diss other people who exhibit special feeling for their country.  In the extreme, it’s “superpatriot” for us and “ultranationalist” for them. In any case, here’s how my particular form of nationalism manifests itself. I feel a responsibility for the acts of this country that I don’t feel for those of other states or groups.  When, for instance, a wedding party blows up thanks to a Taliban roadside bomb, or the Islamic State cuts some poor captive’s head off, or Bashar al-Assad’s air force drops barrel bombs on civilians, or the Russians jail a political activist, or some other group or state commits some similar set of crimes, I’m not surprised.  Human barbarity, as well as the arbitrary cruelty of state power, are unending facts of history. They should be opposed, but am I shocked? No.
  • Still -- and I accept the irrationality of this -- when my country wipes out wedding parties in other lands or organizes torture regimes and offshore prison systems where anything goes, or tries to jail yet another whistleblower, when it acts cruelly, arbitrarily, or barbarically, I feel shock and wonder why more Americans don’t have the same reaction. Don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t blame myself for the commission of such acts, but as an American, I do feel a special responsibility to do something about them, or at least to speak out against them -- as it should be the responsibility of others in their localities to deal with their particular sets of barbarians. So think of my last 12 years running TomDispatch.com as my own modest war on terror -- American terror.  We don’t, of course, like to think of ourselves as barbaric, and terror is, almost by definition, a set of un-American acts that others are eager to commit against us.  “They” want to take us out in our malls and backyards.  We would never commit such acts, not knowingly, not with malice aforethought.  It matters little here that, from wedding parties to funerals, women to children, we have, in fact, continued to take “them” out in their backyards quite regularly. Most Americans would admit that this country makes mistakes. Despite our best efforts, we do sometimes produce what we like to call “collateral damage” as we go after the evildoers, but a terror regime? Not us. Never.
  • And this is part of the reason I’m writing you. I keep wondering how, in these years, it’s been possible to hold onto such fictions so successfully. I wonder why, at least some of the time, you aren’t jumping out of your skin over what we do, rather than what they’ve done or might prospectively do to us. Let’s start with an uncomfortable fact of our world that few here care to mention: in one way or another, Washington has been complicit in the creation or strengthening of just about every extreme terror outfit across the Greater Middle East. If we weren’t their parents, in crucial cases we were at least their midwives or foster parents.
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  • Start in the 1980s with the urge of President Ronald Reagan and his fundamentalist Catholic spymaster, CIA Director William Casey, to make allies of fundamentalist Islamic movements at a time when their extreme (and extremist) piety seemed attractively anticommunist.  In that decade, in Afghanistan in particular, Reagan and Casey put money, arms, and training where their hearts and mouths were and promoted the most extreme Islamists who were ready to give the Soviet Union a bloody nose, a Vietnam in reverse.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Mar 15
     
    Highly recommended reading. But note that, while I've never had occasion to correct Tom Engelhardt before, he errs in attributing the beginning of U.S. involvement with what we now call Al-Qaeda to the Reagan era. In fact, that honor belongs to the Carter Administration, specifically to then National Security Advisor and arch-anti-Communist Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, who wanted to give the Soviet Union its own "Viet Nam moment."  
Paul Merrell

The United Nations' Response to ISIS Beheadings in Syria. "Resolutions" Calling for "Re... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5423221

war & peace Syria ISIL Foley-family blackmail ransom

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Following the gruesome beheading of James Foley, by a terrorist group called “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” and the group’s threats to behead other captives in August 2014, The New York Times headline on page A19 reads, with Kafkaesque “logic”:  “U.S. Invokes Defense of Iraq in Legal Justification of Syria Strikes.”  US/NATO had failed, for three years, to get UN Security Council authorization for military action against Syria, and unilateral military action against Syria would be a violation of international law. However, the very visible emergence of ISIS, now defined as the most dangerous terrorist organization in the Middle East, or, perhaps, globally, and their widely publicized video beheadings of James Foley, Steve Sotloff and others, appeared to give some form of de facto justification for broader military action, including against Syria.  On August 22, 2014, The New York Times reported, page A6: “When the United States began airstrikes in Iraq this month, senior Obama administration officials went out of their way to underscore the limited nature of their action.  ‘This was not an authorization of a broad-based counterterrorism campaign,’ a senior Obama administration official told reporters at the time.  But the beheading of an American journalist and the possibility that more American citizens being held by the group might be slain has prompted outrage at the highest levels of the American government.”
  • In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Diane Foley stated that a military official forbade the family from going to the media and threatened to prosecute them for supporting terrorism if they attempted to raise the $1.32 million dollar ransom demanded by ISIS. “Three times he intimidated us with that message.  We were horrified he would say that.  He just told us we would be prosecuted.  We knew we had to save our son, we had to try,” Mrs. Foley told Anderson Cooper. Foley’s brother, Michael noted in an interview that he was ‘directly threatened with possible prosecution for violating anti-terrorism laws by a State Department official.”  Reporter Michael Isikoff states, in a September 12 article: “The parents of murdered journalist Steven Sotloff were told by a White House counterterrorism official at a meeting last May that they could face criminal prosecution if they paid ransom to try to free their son.”
  • Indeed, it can be asserted that these same administration officials who claimed “outrage” after the beheadings, inflicted the most extreme psychological torture upon the families of James Foley and Stephen Sotloff, who were desperately trying to save the lives of their sons and brother. On September 12, 2014, ABC news reported:  “Obama administration officials repeatedly threatened the family of murdered journalist James Foley that they might face criminal charges for supporting terrorism if they paid ransom to the ISIS killers who ultimately beheaded their son, his mother and brother said this week.  ‘We were told that several times and we took it as a threat and it was appalling,’ Foley’s mother Diane told ABC news in an interview.  She said the warnings over the summer came primarily from a highly decorated military officer serving on the White House National Security Council staff, which five outraged current and former officials with direct knowledge of the Foley case also recounted to ABC news in recent weeks.”
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  • Mrs. Foley diplomatically implies that her son’s death was in the “strategic interest” and she stops just short of accusing the administration of using her son’s beheading as the fig-leaf they needed to justify the administration’s unilateral attack on Syria, which was in violation of international law. If saving Foley was not in the “strategic interest,” a very frightening possibility exists. The murders of Foley and Sotloff, both of whom were beheaded by ISIS, were called ‘acts of barbarism’ by Obama in his speech announcing a military campaign to destroy the terrorist organization. Frenzied hysteria over human rights abuses in Syria continues to be incited by mainstream media, as the middle east is fragmented and decomposed by US/NATO bombings and internecine warfare so complex that the UN’s call for the “diplomatic resolution” of multiple devastating conflicts becomes an increasingly remote possibility.  Saudi Arabia and Qatar continue arming the terrorist opposition.
  • “Sotloff’s father, Art, was ‘shaking’ after the meeting with the official, who works for the National Security Council.  Sources close to the family say that at the time of the White House meeting the Sotloffs and Foleys were exploring lining up donors who would help pay multimillion dollar ransoms to free their sons.  But after the meeting those efforts collapsed, one source said, because of concerns that ‘donors could expose themselves to prosecution.’” James Nye for Mailonline reported:  “Mrs. Foley poured scorn on the Pentagon’s claim they tried to rescue Foley on July 4, only to raid the wrong base…Throughout the 20 month ordeal, Mrs. Foley said she came to regard her and her family’s efforts to rescue James as an ‘annoyance’ to the administration and began to feel that their desperation to bring James Foley home did not ‘seem to be in the strategic interest, if you will.’”
  • The front page headline states:  “U.S. General Says Raiding Syria is Key to Halting Isis.  The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria cannot be defeated unless the United States or its partners take on the Sunni militants in Syria,’ General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on August 21, 2014. ‘This is an organization that has an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision that will eventually have to be defeated.  Can they be defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria?  The answer is no.” Public horror at the beheading of James Foley and Steven Sotloff transformed public reluctance to engage in yet another seemingly endless and futile distant war, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, into public outrage and support for retaliation against the terrorists who beheaded Foley and Sotloff.  US/NATO now had a de facto form of support and legitimacy for attacking Syria.  Given little publicity, however, then and now, was the fact that ISIS offered to exchange the lives of James Foley and Stephen Sotloff for $100 million dollars in ransom.  Although top U.S. officials used their “outrage” at the beheading of Foley and Sotloff to “justify” a unilateral attack on Syria, they were not sufficiently outraged to do what was necessary to prevent these beheadings, which, once executed, provided a convenient fig-leaf for the attack on Syria for which  they had sought and failed to attain legal justification during the preceding three years.
  • At the same time that the military-industrial complex thrives on huge profits derived from these geo-politically engineered conflicts, it is worth recalling the September 10, 2014 report by Mazzetti, Schmitt and Landler in The New York Times: “Washington – “The violent ambitions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have been condemned across the world:  in Europe and the Middle East, by Sunni nations and Shiite ones, and by sworn enemies like Israel and Iran.  Pope Francis joined the call for ISIS to be stopped. “As President Obama prepares to send the United States on what could be yearslong military campaign against the militant group (ISIS), American intelligence agencies have concluded that it poses no immediate threat to the United States.  Some officials and terrorism experts believe that the actual danger posed by ISIS has been distorted in hours of television punditry and alarmist statements by politicians, and that there has been little substantive public debate about the unintended consequences of expanding American military action in the Middle East. “Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a ‘farce,’ with ‘members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.’  “It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems – all on the basis of no corroborated information,’ said Mr. Benjamin, who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College.”
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15
     
    The Feds' "no ransom" policy might better be changed to "pay the ransom then extract retribution." It would still serve as a deterrent. Nonetheless, that policy is now part of a U.N. Security Council Resolution. 
Paul Merrell

Sunday show wrap-up: Attacks dominate | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...rap-up-terror-attacks-dominate

war & peace politics of fear Paris U.S. war-propaganda

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • PARIS TERROR ATTACKS Holder: French attacks point to threats to United States  "This is the nature of the new threat we must confront," he said.  http://ow.ly/H7Y6N Holder: US at war with terrorists who 'corrupt' Islam  "We are determined to take the fight to them," he said.  http://ow.ly/H80nw Holder: US does not stereotype in identifying terror suspects  “I think we’re doing a good job monitoring those people," he said.  http://ow.ly/H89Vu Homeland Security chairman: Foreign fighters a threat to US  Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said Europe should tighten its travel restrictions.  http://ow.ly/H8kEu Senate Intel chief: Terrorist attacks could start happening every week  Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) pointed to the number of sleeper cells in Europe.  http://ow.ly/H87bW Former Intel chairwoman: Major attack on US 'in the realm of possibility'  Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said sleeper terrorist cells exist in the United States.  http://ow.ly/H82PL
  • Visa waiver program poses security threat, Dem senator says  "The visa waiver program is the Achilles heel of America," Feinstein said.  http://ow.ly/H83qO McCain: Obama has no plan to defeat terrorists  The senator said the number of threats are the result of "leading from behind."  http://ow.ly/H86xO Top GOP senator: Call it a war on terror  "There is a tendency toward political correctness," Sen. John Cornyn said.  http://ow.ly/H8iBE Top Obama military adviser: No al Qaeda link to Paris attacks  Gen. Martin Dempsey said the gunmen have been linked by family and school ties.  http://ow.ly/H825h
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15
     
    "The sky is falling; the sky is falling," shouted Henny Penny, as the little red hen fled for her life.  
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