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The collapse of the insurgent front prompted the front commanders, most of which work in liaison to U.S. Special Forces, to deploy an elite force that should prevent the Syrian Army, at all costs, from gaining access to the Jobar Entrance, and from gaining control over the Jobar area. The majority of the insurgent crack forces came from Liwa-al-Islam with some additional troops from Jabhat al-Nusrah. The commanding officer of the elite forces was a Saudi national who is known by the name Abu Ayesha, whom eyewitnesses from Ghouta later identified as Abu Abdul-Moneim. Abdul-Moneim had established a cache of weapons, some of which had a tube-like structure, and others which looked like big gas bottles. The cache was located in a tunnel in the Eastern Ghouta district of Damascus. Reports about this tunnel and the weapons cache emerged in international media, after the son of Abdul-Moneim and 12 other fighters lost their lives there, because they mishandled improvised chemical weapons and caused a leak in one of them. Besides Abu Abdul-Moneim, the supreme leader of the Liwa-al-Islam and commander of their chemical weapons specialists, Zahran Alloush took personal charge of the elite troops and chemical weapons specialists who were operating under his direct command. Liwa-al-Islam has, along with other al-Qaeda brigades, the capability to manufacture and launch primitive, but none the less very deadly chemical weapons. The chemical weapons which Zahran Alloush had delivered to Damascus were most likely from al-Qaeda’s (ISIL) chemical weapons stockpiles in Iraq.

In early September 2013, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif stated, that Iran had sent a memo to the White House via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. Tehran had reportedly informed the USA that handmade articles for chemical weapons, including Sarin gas, were being transferred to Syria. The White House failed to respond. Having to hold the Jobar Entrance and the Jobar district of Damascus “at any cost to maintain any hopes of launching a successful, major military assault on Damascus”, the insurgent commanders decided to launch a chemical weapons attack to halt the advance of the Syrian Arab Army. The political and military opposition and core members of the international alliance behind them had already decided that chemical weapons should be used in August – September. The large scale use of chemical weapons should justify renewed calls for a military intervention. Intelligence about this decision transpired in June.  nsnbc international issued several reports in late June and early July, warning that the insurgents would use large scale chemical weapons attacks in August or September.

The decision to launch the chemical weapon on 21 August was most likely based on two considerations. That the use of chemical weapons was already planned. That the Jobar Entrance should be defended at all costs. The final decision, made by Zahran Alloush may in fact have been predetermined together with his U.S. – Saudi liaison officers. Launching a chemical weapons attack would allow the USA, UK and France, to call for military strikes against Syria and to turn the tide. Also, Russian and Syrian intelligence sources described the weapons which were used in the attack as rockets which were altered so as to carry chemicals, launched by Liwa-al-Islam. The projectiles were most likely fired from a flatbed.

There is a growing and substantial amount of evidence that indicates direct U.S. and Saudi involvement in the chemical weapons attack. To begin with one merely has to answer the fundamental question “Who Benefits”, and the answer is definitely not “the Syrian government”. In fact, the  Federal German Intelligence Service (BND) claims that it has intercepted phone calls between Syrian officers and the Syrian High Command. The BND is convinced that none of the Syrian forces have used a chemical weapon. Leaving alone any moral considerations, the domestic and international repercussions were foreseeable and there would not have been any strategic benefit for the Syrian Army or the government.

Also, the involvement of Saudi Arabia ultimately points towards Washington and the White House. The involvement of Liwa-al-Islam in the chemical weapons attack establishes a strong chain of circumstantial evidence to the Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The supreme leader of Liwa-al-Islam and commander of the groups’ chemical weapons specialists, Zahran Alloush, has been working for the then Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Turki al-Faisal in both Afghanistan and Yemen in the 1980s. Since the 1990s, Alloush was involved in the Salafist – Wahabbist terrorist networks in Syria which led to his arrest by Syrian intelligence. He was released in early of 2011, when the Assad administration granted a general amnesty. Immediately after his March 2011 release from prison, Zahran Alloush began receiving substantial funds and weapons from Saudi intelligence, which enabled him to establish Liwa-al-Islam as a de facto Saudi Arabia sponsored mercenary brigade under the auspices of the Saudi Interior Ministry.

Saudi funding enabled Alloush to establish the Liwa-al-Islam as a major fighting force in Syria. The group gained fame due to risky, high-profile attacks. On 8 July 2012, the group carried out a bomb attack against the headquarters of Syria’s National Security Council in Rawda Square, Damascus. The group succeeded in assassinating several high profile members of Syria’s security establishment, including the Deputy Minister of Defense and brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad, Assaf Shawkat, Defense Minister Dawoud Rajiha, Hassan Turkmani, a former Defense Minister and military adviser to then Vice-President Farouk al-Sharaa.

Regardless of these individual defenses of encryption, the Intercept explained why these statements may be irrelevant: “Left unsaid is the fact that the FBI and NSA have the ability to circumvent encryption and get to the content too — by hacking. Hacking allows law enforcement to plant malicious code on someone’s computer in order to gain access to the photos, messages, and text before they were ever encrypted in the first place, and after they’ve been decrypted. The NSA has an entire team of advanced hackers, possibly as many as 600, camped out at Fort Meade.”

Rogers statements, of course, are not a full-fledged endorsement of privacy, nor can the NSA be expected to make it a priority. Even so, his new stance denotes a growing awareness within the government that Americans are not comfortable with the State’s grip on their data. “So spending time arguing about ‘hey, encryption is bad and we ought to do away with it’ … that’s a waste of time to me,” Rogers said Thursday. “So what we’ve got to ask ourselves is, with that foundation, what’s the best way for us to deal with it? And how do we meet those very legitimate concerns from multiple perspectives?”

The US intelligence community’s broadest surveillance authorities are enshrined in Executive Order 12333, which primarily covers the interception of electronic communications overseas. The Order authorizes the collection, retention, and dissemination of “foreign intelligence” information, which includes information “relating to the capabilities, intentions or activities of foreign powers, organizations or persons.” In other words, so long as they are operating outside the US, intelligence agencies are authorized to collect information about any foreign person — and, of course, any Americans with whom they communicate. The NSA has conceded that EO 12333 is the basis of most of its surveillance. While public information about these programs is limited, a few highlights give a sense of the breadth of EO 12333 operations: The NSA gathers information about every cell phone call made to, from, and within the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and Afghanistan, and possibly other countries. A joint US-UK program tapped into the cables connecting internal Yahoo and Google networks to gather e-mail address books and contact lists from their customers. Another US-UK collaboration collected images from video chats among Yahoo users and possibly other webcam services. The NSA collects both the content and metadata of hundreds of millions of text messages from around the world. By tapping into the cables that connect global networks, the NSA has created a database of the location of hundreds of millions of mobile phones outside the US.

Given its scope, EO 12333 is clearly critical to those seeking serious surveillance reform. The path to reform is, however, less clear. There is no sunset provision that requires action by Congress and creates an opportunity for exposing privacy risks. Even in the unlikely event that Congress was inclined to intervene, it would have to address questions about the extent of its constitutional authority to regulate overseas surveillance. To the best of my knowledge, there is no litigation challenging EO 12333 and the government doesn’t give notice to criminal defendants when it uses evidence derived from surveillance under the order, so the likelihood of a court ruling is slim. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is currently reviewing two programs under EO 12333, but it is anticipated that much of its report will be classified (although it has promised a less detailed unclassified version as well). While the short-term outlook for additional surveillance reform is challenging, from a longer-term perspective, the distinctions that our law makes between Americans and non-Americans and between domestic and foreign collection cannot stand indefinitely. If the Fourth Amendment is to meaningfully protect Americans’ privacy, the courts and Congress must come to grips with this reality.

The alliance consists of a number of mostly Islamist factions, including the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate; Ahrar al-Sham, another large group; and more moderate rebel factions that have received covert arms support from the intelligence services of the United States and its allies. The Telegraph, in an early October article complaining that Russia was bombing “non-ISIL rebels,” similarly noted that the Army of Conquest (bombed by Russia) “includes a number of Islamist groups, most powerful among them Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra. Jabhat al-Nusra is the local affiliate of al-Qaeda.” Even the Voice of America noted that “Russia’s main target has been the Army of Conquest, an alliance of insurgent groups that includes the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, and the hard-line Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham, as well as some less extreme Islamist groups.”

In other words, the claim from the anonymous Saudi official that the BBC uncritically regurgitated — that the Saudis are only arming the Army of Conquest but no groups that “include” the Nusra Front — is self-negating. A BBC reader, Ricardo Vaz, brought this contradiction to the BBC’s attention. As he told The Intercept: “The problem is that the Nusra Front is the most important faction inside the Army of Conquest. So either the Saudi official expected the BBC journalist not to know this, or he expects us to believe they can deliver weapons to factions fighting side by side with an al Qaeda affiliate and that those weapons will not make their way into Nusra’s hands. In any case, this is very close to an official admission that the Saudis (along with Qataris and Turkish) are supplying weapons to an al Qaeda affiliate. This of course is not a secret to anyone who’s paying attention.” In response to Vaz’s complaint, the BBC did not tell its readers about this vital admission. Instead, it simply edited that Saudi admission out of its article. In doing so, it made the already-misleading article so much worse, as the BBC went even further out of its way to protect the Saudis. This is what that passage now states on the current version of the article on the BBC’s site (emphasis added): He said those groups being supplied did not include either Islamic State (IS) or al-Nusra Front, both of which are proscribed terrorist organizations. Instead, he said the weapons would go to the Free Syrian Army and other small rebel groups.

So originally, the BBC stated that the “Saudi official” announced that the regime was arming the Army of Conquest. Once it was brought to the BBC’s attention that the Army of Conquest includes the al Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front — a direct contradiction of the Saudi official’s other claim that the Saudis are not arming Nusra — the BBC literally changed the Saudi official’s own statement, whitewashed it, to eliminate his admission that they were arming Army of Conquest. Instead, the BBC now states that the Saudis are arming “the Free Syrian Army and other small rebel groups.” The BBC simply deleted the key admission that the Saudis are arming al Qaeda.

But what this does highlight is just how ludicrous — how beyond parody — the 14-year-old war on terror has become, how little it has to do with its original ostensible justification. The regime with the greatest plausible proximity to the 9/11 attack — Saudi Arabia — is the closest U.S. ally in the region next to Israel. The country that had absolutely nothing to do with that attack, and which is at least as threatened as the U.S. by the religious ideology that spurred it — Iran — is the U.S.’s greatest war-on-terror adversary. Now we have a virtual admission from the Saudis that they are arming a group that centrally includes al Qaeda, while the U.S. itself has at least indirectly done the same (just as was true in Libya). And we’re actually at the point where western media outlets are vehemently denouncing Russia for bombing al Qaeda elements, which those outlets are  manipulatively referring to as “non-ISIS groups.” It’s not a stretch to say that the faction that provides the greatest material support to al Qaeda at this point is the U.S. and its closest allies. That is true even as al Qaeda continues to be paraded around as the prime need for the ongoing war. But whatever one’s views are on Syria, it’s telling indeed to watch the BBC desperately protect Saudi officials, not only by granting them anonymity to spout official propaganda, but worse, by using blatant editing games to whitewash the Saudis’ own damaging admissions, ones the BBC unwittingly published. There are many adjectives one can apply to the BBC’s behavior here: “Objective” and “neutral” are most assuredly not among them.

Doran charged that potential serious crimes were undertaken because “this is a leaking of signal intelligence.” “That’s a felony,” he told TheDCNF. “And you can get 10 years for that. It is a tremendous abuse of the system. We’re not supposed to be monitoring American citizens. Bigger than the crime, is the breach of public trust.” Waurishuk said he was most dismayed that “this is now using national intelligence assets and capabilities to spy on the elected, yet-to-be-seated president.” “We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for political purposes by a sitting president. That takes on a new precedent.”

The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a charade.  It was a download and not a transfer across the Web.  The Web won’t manage such a high speed.  It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed.  You would have to have high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us.  There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here. Bernstein: So was this a leak by somebody at Democratic headquarters? Binney: We don’t know that for sure, either.  All we know was that it was a local download.  We can likely attribute it to a USB device that was physically passed along.

Right now, our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways.  Mueller did it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution.

Bernstein:  There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate investigation.  It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because the Russians undermined the election. Binney: I have seen no evidence at all from anybody, including the intelligence community.  If you look at the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) report, they state on the first page that “We have high confidence that the Russians did this.”  But when you get toward the end of the report, they basically confess that “our judgment does not imply that we have evidence to back it up.” Bernstein:  It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election.  You’re saying it was actually selected individuals from just three agencies.  Is there anything to the revelations that FBI agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president? Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a frame-up.  It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself internally. Bernstein:  I take it you are not a big supporter of Trump. Binney:  Well, I voted for him.  I couldn’t vote for a warmonger like Clinton.  She wanted to see our planes shooting down Russian planes in Syria.  She advocated for destabilizing Libya, for getting rid of Assad in Syria, she was a strong backer of the war in Iraq.