Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This is bound to be the next big thing, fully eclipsing the Geneva pantomime. The YPG and its allies are planning a major attack to finally seize the 100-kilometer stretch of the Syria-Turkey border still controlled by ISIS/ISIL/Daesh – thus reuniting their three cantons.Erdogan was blunt; if the YPG pushes west of the Euphrates, it’s war. Well, looks like war then. The YPG is getting ready to attack the crucial towns of Jarabulus and Manbij. Russia most certainly will aid the YPG to reconquer Jarabulus. And that will directly pit – once again - Turkey against Russia on the ground.Geneva? That’s for tourists; the capital of the Syrian horror show is now Jarabulus.

The memoranda also indicate a significant disparity between what was probable, and what was feared. The analysts were most confident assessing that Saddam Hussein could be developing nuclear capabilities in just under ten years. Iraq might produce a “nuclear weapon, potentially late this decade,” the SEM notes. The SPWR, on the other hand, concludes: “Iraq is trying to jump-start a clandestine uranium enrichment program to produce the fissile material for a weapon, potentially by late this decade.” Those assessments were produced in the shadow of the failure of U.S. intelligence to detect Saddam Hussein’s clandestine nuclear program before the Gulf War. CIA analysts were hesitant to conclude that Iraq was not an immediate threat, yet they had little evidence indicating the existence of an Iraqi nuclear program that genuinely posed a hazard. “Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program, but reporting on Iraqi efforts to revive it is limited. Iraq continues to employ effective denial and deception measures and there are no indicators that Baghdad has embarked on an extensive nuclear weapons effort as it did before the Gulf War” [SEM]. The released paragraphs addressing Iraq’s support of terrorism failed to mention al-Qaeda, surprising in light of claims from Bush Administration officials that Iraq was linked to terrorism and September 11. The Senior Executive Memorandum notes: “Baghdad has reduced its reliance on surrogates, preferring instead to use its own intelligence services for sensitive terrorist operations,” making a connection to non-Iraqi terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, doubtful. Within Iraq, the 2001 memo notes how Saddam maintained a “multilayered and pervasive security apparatus.” The underground networks were critical to the anti-American insurgency that developed following the 2003 U.S. invasion, fragments of which have since evolved into the Islamic State. 

Despite their equivocal findings, these reports are evidence of the intelligence failure which contributed to the U.S. war. For example, CIA analysts linked the procurement of aluminum tubes to the potential development of centrifuges for uranium enrichment – an assertion later seized on by top officials as evidence that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. Interestingly, intelligence analysts at the Department of Energy disagreed with this CIA contention, instead assessing that the aluminum tubes in question were much more likely intended for more benign purposes. However this disagreement did not appear to receive a full vetting during the lead-up to the 2003 war. Just as dubious were the CIA statements about mobile biological warfare laboratories, information that can be traced back to the notorious dissembler Curveball.

In its announcement, DARPA acknowledged that an implant is still a long ways away, with breakthroughs in neuroscience, synthetic biology, low-power electronics, photonics and medical-device manufacturing needed before the device could be used.DARPA plans to recruit a diverse set of experts in an attempt to accelerate the project's development, according to its statement announcing the project.

The political demands the conference agreed upon include non-starters for negotiations like the demand that the Syrian President Assad would leave within 6 weeks of the negotiations start. There was also this illuminating word game: Islamist delegates objected to using the word “democracy” in the final statement, so the term “democratic mechanism” was used instead, according to a member of one such group who attended the meeting. The Ahrar al-Sham delegate at the meeting signed the deal while the Ahrar al Sham bigwigs, who took not part, damned the deal and announced they were completely against it. They demand an Islamic State in Syria that would follow their militant Salafi line of believe. Hubbard again: Ben Hubbard ‏@NYTBen Re: @Ahrar_Alsham2. It's main delegate did not walk out. Before meeting ended, members not present released statement announcing withdrawal. The session's moderator said Ahrar delegate was not aware of statement by his group until later, but did sign the final communiqué. Then Ahrar members like @aleesa71 and @a_azraeel complained on Twitter, suggesting a split between military and political leaders.

The Saudi and Qatari Wahhabi rulers want Ahrar al Sham to be part of any future solution in Syria. They hired "western" think tanks like Brookings Doha to propagandize that Ahrar is "moderate". But Ahrar can not be "moderate" when it is fighting together with al-Qaeda and kills civilians because they are "unbelievers". It is now in an uncomfortable position. If it takes part in a peace conference with the Syrian government its Jabhat al-Nusra ally will roast it, if it doesn't take part its Saudi and Qartari financiers will fry it. Since the start of the war on Syria no unity has been achieved in the opposition of the Syrian government. The U.S., in form of the CIA head John Brennan, teamed up (again) with al-Qaeda while the State Department tried to sponsor more "moderates". The ensuing chaos continues today. To prevent further blowback from this nonsense strategy will obviously require a change towards a position that supports the Syrian government. It is doubtful that the U.S. is capable of such foresight and flexibility.

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.

On Thursday, Moscow recalled its military representative from Turkey. At the same time Russian Defense Ministry said that all channels of military cooperation with Ankara were suspended including a hotline set up to share information about Russian airstrikes in Syria.

The President has approved a current cap of less than 50 troops, with the first contingent expected to be about two dozen. But more could be sent, the official said.

There will be additional Special Operations forces available for raids against targets in both Syria and Iraq when high-value ISIS targets are identified, the official said.The U.S. support for the anti-ISIS fighters has a crucial goal of making them capable of challenging ISIS control of its unofficial capital, Raqqa. The effort is to make them able to isolate, take control, and "ultimately hold" the key city, the official said. There is no prediction of when that might be possible.

The U.S. will also boost its military footprint in confronting ISIS in Syria by deploying A-10 and F-15 fighter jets to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. And the U.S. is also eying the establishment of a Special Forces task force in Iraq to boost U.S. efforts to target ISIS and its leaders, the administration official said. President Barack Obama has also authorized enhancing military aid to Jordan and Lebanon to help counter ISIS.

Obama has long resisted an American military presence on the ground to combat ISIS in Iraq and Syria but has reluctantly escalated U.S. involvement in that fight over time since launching the military effort in 2014.The number of U.S. military forces in Iraq has swelled to more than 3,500 since Obama first announced the deployment of up to 300 American military advisers to Iraq in June 2014.U.S. Special Ops have previously conducted some secretive missions on the ground in Syria as well. But the deployment marks the first permanent presence of U.S. ground troops in Syria since the U.S. began leading an international effort last year to confront ISIS, the militant Islamist group which now controls broad swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.

The troops to be sent to Syria are not expected to serve on the front lines with rebel forces and, according to a U.S. official, they will rotate in and out of Syria from the existing U.S. base in Irbil, Iraq.But they are entering a very hot combat zone and have the right to engage the enemy if they come under fire. They could also join Syrian and Kurdish forces on raids if they get explicit permission from Washington.

This is a serious threat to Turkey. Its access to Syria and ability to influence events there is becoming more limited. Professor Serat Guvenc, of the Department of Foreign Relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, says that, if this happens, “Turkey will be insulated from the Sunni Arab Middle East”.

Turkey is a member of Nato and over Syria is aligned with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Sunni states of the Gulf. But it is increasingly at odds with Russia and Iran, two powers in its near neighbourhood, and has serious differences with the US over its Syrian policy. 

The government’s brief does not acknowledge the sweeping implications of its arguments. It tries to portray its requested unlocking order as narrow and modest, because it “would not require Apple to make any changes to its software or hardware, … [or] to introduce any new ability to access data on its phones. It would simply require Apple to use its existing capability to bypass the passcode on a passcode-locked iOS 7 phone[.]” But that undersells the implications of the legal argument the government is making: that anything a company already can do, it could be compelled to do under the All Writs Act in order to assist law enforcement. Were that the law, the blow to users’ trust in their encrypted devices, services, and products would be little different than if Apple and other companies were legally required to design backdoors into their encryption mechanisms (an idea the government just can’t seem to drop, its assurances in this brief notwithstanding). Entities around the world won’t buy security software if its makers cannot be trusted not to hand over their users’ secrets to the US government. That’s what makes the encryption in iOS 8 and later versions, which Apple has told the court it “would not have the technical ability” to bypass, so powerful — and so despised by the government: Because no matter how broadly the All Writs Act extends, no court can compel Apple to do the impossible.

Russia’s time, place, and method of retaliating against Turkey is something only the Kremlin will know. But Russia’s actions upon the international stage have been so far thoroughly thought out, allowing Moscow to outmaneuver the West at every juncture and in the wake of every Western provocation. For Turkey’s government – one that has been consistent only in its constant failure regarding its proxy war against its neighbor Syria, who has been caught planning false flag provocations to trigger wider and more direct war in Syria, and whose government is now exposed and widely known to be directly feeding, not fighting ISIS – the prospect of Russian retaliation against it, either directly or indirectly, and in whatever form will leave it increasingly isolated. Until then, Russia’s best bet is to simply continue winning the war. Taking the Jarabulus-Afrin corridor and fortifying it against NATO incursions while cutting off ISIS and other terrorist factions deeper within Syria would be perhaps the worst of all possible retaliations. With Syria secured, an alternative arc of influence will exist within the Middle East, one that will inevitably work against Saudi and other Persian Gulf regimes’ efforts in Yemen, and in a wider sense, begin the irreversible eviction of Western hegemony from the region. The West, already being pushed out of Asia by China, will suffer immeasurably as the world dismantles its unipolar international order, region by region. As in the game of chess, a player often seeks to provoke their opponent into a series of moves. The more emotional their opponent becomes, the easier it is to control the game as it unfolds. Likewise in geopolitics and war, emotions can get one killed, or, be channeled by reason and superior strategic thinking into a plan that satisfies short-term requirements but serves long-term objectives. Russia has proven time and time again that it is capable of striking this balance and now, more than ever, it must prove so again.

Abaaoud, a citizen of Belgium of Moroccan descent, was well known as a violent radical miscreant linked to an Islamic cell in Verviers, Belgium, that did all sorts of mean, murderous crap.  As far as Belgian and French authorities were concerned, he had been an item long before Paris.

Washington believes the group is responsible for the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed the ambassador and three other Americans.  In November, the United Nations blacklisted Ansar al-Sharia Benghazi and its sister group, Ansar al-Sharia Derna, over links to Al-Qaeda and for running camps for the Islamist State group.  So there you have your soundbite.  The Paris outrage: Made in Libya.  Not Syria.  And brought to us by the people who killed Christopher Stevens in Benghazi. I am sure that Hillary Clinton is grateful to the French police for botching the raid to capture Abaaoud and pumping 5000 rounds into his apartment instead of capturing him; otherwise, he might have become a lively topic of interest and curiosity and the right wing could have cooked off the Benghazi! munitions through election day.  For that matter, it seems unlikely that the governments of the West, or the media cheerleaders thirsting for a rousing good vs. evil narrative, are very interested in exploring the morally fraught issue of blow back from the spectacular Libyan disaster, either. To sum up: the alleged and now reportedly deceased architect of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, did not fight “for IS.”  He fought “with” Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, a Libyan outfit whose presence in Syria predates that of ISIS.  Even after Katibat al-Battar al-Libi decided to pledge allegiance to ISIS, it retained its independent identity.  And it would appear unlikely that Abaaoud, as a European of Moroccan descent, would be a central figure in the brigade, whose personnel, funding, and mission seem to have largely emanated from Libya.

Despite his seemingly junior status in an autonomous militia, it is possible that Abaaoud was recruited by al-Baghdadi to commit the Paris outrage.  But foreign fighters flock to Syria not only to accumulate general jihadi merit, but also to acquire skills they could apply in their own struggles.  And Abaaoud may have gone to the Syrian war zone to hook up with an extremely capable Libyan outfit and acquire the experience and connections to fulfill his own ambitions for mayhem in Europe, and not necessarily to support the global or even local objectives of the IS caliphate.  So it is by no means axiomatic that Abaaoud returned to Europe with the mission to execute a high-level ISIS strategy. Instead, Abaaoud might have been an angry guy with the skills, resources, and inclination to commit mass murder on his own kick.  The police were already after him big time after the Verviers raid in January (we are now told that Abaaoud was “on” or a “candidate for” a spot on the drone assassination assignment list, but I wonder if this is post-hoc ass-covering).  So maybe he and his friends decided to pull the pin, and go out in a big way. I doubt we’ll ever get the full story.  But “Paris: Made in Libya” is an honest hook.

In addition to being a key economic concern, inequality represents the greatest societal concern associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

An underlying theme in my conversations with global CEOs and senior business executives is that the acceleration of innovation and the velocity of disruption are hard to comprehend or anticipate and that these drivers constitute a source of constant surprise, even for the best connected and most well informed. Indeed, across all industries, there is clear evidence that the technologies that underpin the Fourth Industrial Revolution are having a major impact on businesses.

A key trend is the development of technology-enabled platforms that combine both demand and supply to disrupt existing industry structures, such as those we see within the “sharing” or “on demand” economy. These technology platforms, rendered easy to use by the smartphone, convene people, assets, and data—thus creating entirely new ways of consuming goods and services in the process. In addition, they lower the barriers for businesses and individuals to create wealth, altering the personal and professional environments of workers. These new platform businesses are rapidly multiplying into many new services, ranging from laundry to shopping, from chores to parking, from massages to travel.

Overall, the inexorable shift from simple digitization (the Third Industrial Revolution) to innovation based on combinations of technologies (the Fourth Industrial Revolution) is forcing companies to reexamine the way they do business. The bottom line, however, is the same: business leaders and senior executives need to understand their changing environment, challenge the assumptions of their operating teams, and relentlessly and continuously innovate.

By signalling the start of a withdrawal, Russia is likely to soothe relations with the United States, which has accused the Kremlin of inflaming the Syrian conflict and pursuing its own narrow interests."I think we did it to show the Americans that we do not have military ambitions and don't need unnecessary wars," said Ivan Konovalov, director of the Center for Strategic Trend Studies in Moscow. "They have been accusing us of all kinds of things and this is a good way of showing them they are wrong."

Russia has said it was in Syria to fight extremist groups, but a large number of its air strikes were against anti-Assad groups that Washington and its allies designate as moderate opposition groups.Opposition fighters have alleged that Russia had combat troops on the ground fighting anti-Assad forces. The Kremlin has never acknowledged this, so it was unclear whether such forces would be covered by the withdrawal.Putin said Russia's Tartous naval base and Hmeimim air base "will function as they did previously. They must be reliably protected from land, sea and air."That continued military presence, and Russia's role as a major diplomatic and financial backer of Assad, ensures that the Kremlin will maintain powerful leverage over Syria and the progress of peace talks.Russia is likely to resist demands by the anti-Assad opposition and their Western supporters for the Syrian leader to leave office under the terms of any peace agreement.