2011: A wild ride for the CIA

Compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed

Πηγή: CNN
By Pam Benson
Dec 30 2011

The year has been a rollercoaster ride for the CIA–incredible highs coupled with significant lows. But those dramatic ups and downs also underscored how intelligence is evolving and the agency is changing to keep pace. Keeping secrets is becoming more difficult and what the agency now does is sometimes more visible. And– the enemy is getting better.

On the critical counterterrorism front, 2011 was a momentous year. The crowning moment–maybe of even the last decade–was the CIA finally pinning down the location of enemy number one, Osama bin Laden, and then overseeing the raid by Navy special forces on a safehouse in Pakistan which led to his death, bringing an end to the nearly ten year pursuit of America's most wanted terrorist.

The raid is a prime example of the new warfare the CIA is engaged in. The counterterrorism battle is frequently being waged by CIA officers and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) forces working side by side. Former CIA Director Mike Hayden said "it's clear the Agency and JSOC are now in a privileged position in terms of how we want to fight this war." The retired Air Force general referred to the CIA today as looking more like the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War two-era intelligence service that had a more operational, paramilitary role.

That type of warfare is heavily dependent on the use of unmanned, armed aircraft.

Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist and operator for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was blown apart by a CIA operated drone attack while driving in a remote area of Yemen. Al Awlaki had been tied to the attempt by Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the so called underwear bomber, who unsuccessfully tried to blow up a passenger airliner on its way to Detroit on Christmas day two years ago. And alleged Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan had been in communication with al Awlaki before his shooting spree that left 13 dead at the Texas U.S. Army post.

U.S. intelligence officials have said hundreds of other extremists have been taken off the battlefield through CIA operations in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.

Shortly after leaving his job as CIA director, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in July that the U.S. is now "within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda."

His deputy for intelligence issues, Michael Vickers, even put a timeframe on al Qaeda's ability to carry out terrorist operations saying that "within 18 to 24 months, core al Qaeda's cohesion and operational capabilities could be degraded to the point that group could fragment and exist mostly as a propaganda arm."

A senior U.S. official said documents seized from the bin Laden compound "showed both he and his lieutenants were complaining that they were losing the intelligence war."

The use of the drones to eliminate suspected terrorists has been problematic for the CIA. The recent crash of an agency-operated unmanned spy plane in Iran was a stark reminder of the aircraft's vulnerability. Although the Iranians bragged that they had brought the plane down, possibly by means of a cyber attack, the U.S. insisted the crash had nothing to do with outside intervention. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers emphatically said "there was a technical problem that was our problem, nobody else's problem."

Rogers added these types of planes have gone down in a number of different places. "These things are not infallible. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong in these environments," he said.

There are also claims by Pakistan’s government that hundreds of civilians have been killed in Pakistan by missiles launched from CIA drones. U.S. officials have insisted the drone strikes have become far more precise, with few civilian casualties this year, but it is one of the risks of the program.

No one wants to talk publicly about the secret drone program even though its one of the few more visible operations run by the usually opaque CIA. Panetta would not specifically discuss the drone programs run by both the military and the CIA, but did recently say "there are technologies that are extremely important in developing the kind of intelligence and information we need in order to be able to defend the security of our country...we are going to continue to use them in the defense of US security."

Another low point this year for the CIA was the exposure by the terrorist organization Hezbollah of CIA informants in Lebanon followed by the outing of several CIA officers working in the country. Hezbollah was apparently able to track the cell phones conversations of the parties.

The careers of those covert officers are likely hampered now that they have been identified. Former CIA officer Robert Baer said "they've been burned." Hezbollah is often seen as a group of "bearded primitive bomb throwing terrorists," said Baer, but in reality, it is a formidable adversary. "They're into police files. They're into military intelligence files. They can get on any skype message. They tap telephones, get into phone databases. You name it, they can do it and they're very good at it." Baer maintained it is the US that needs to catch up to Hezballah. "We're so used to fighting the Taliban and these tribal groups in Afghanistan that we're really falling behind on what's called spycraft or tradecraft," he said.

But Congressman Mike Rogers said human intelligence, often referred to as HUMINT, is one of the toughest aspects of spying. "Anytime you have HUMINT activity around the world, somebody is going to get caught. That's the unfortunate part of this business. So I don't want people to be led to believe there has been a collapse in tradecraft at the CIA. I don't believe that to be true." But Rogers acknowledges the CIA will have to make adjustments in Lebanon, a likely reference to having to pull out the compromised officers and bring in new ones.

Ronald Kessler, the author of "CIA at War" said considering the risky work undertaken by officers trying to gather intelligence in restricted locations or enemy territory, "it's no wonder there aren't more roll-ups of CIA officers and CIA assets."

A senior U.S. official would not discuss the specifics of some of the claims made concerning CIA operations, but the official did say "It seems to me that if Iran, Hezbollah, Pakistan, and al Qaeda are feeling compelled to wage propaganda operations against the Agency, then the CIA must be doing something right. And let's remember that any intelligence organization that takes risks will win some and lose some–the Agency is winning way more than its losing."

Some members of Congress criticized the CIA for not predicting the extent of the Arab uprising.

When Tunisia's democracy movement ignited a year ago and soon spread to Egypt and other nations, questions were raised about whether the intelligence community failed to predict things were about to boil over.

Some Senators wanted to know whether the intelligence community failed to realize tens of thousands of Egyptians would take to the street after years of massive unemployment and dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regime. Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said, "I've looked at some intelligence in this area which indicates some lacking."

Adm. Mike Mullen, America's top military officer at the time, told the Daily Show in February, "To a great degree I think the timing of it certainly caught us as it moved from Tunisia and sort of across to the really difficult challenge that sits there right now in Egypt."

Intelligence expert Kessler said people often have unrealistic expectations of the intelligence community and expect the CIA to have a crystal ball. He said the Arab spring is a perfect example. "When people said the CIA should have known this individual in Tunisia was going to set himself on fire and that was going to ignite the Arab spring, that's just foolish," said Kessler.

An incident with a CIA contractor operating in Pakistan continued the downward spiral of US relations with a critical counterterrorism partner. Security contractor Raymond Davis was jailed after he killed two armed Pakistani men who threatened him. Davis was eventually released by the Pakistanis after the victims families were paid off, but it once again raised the question of the U.S. government's dependence on contractors.

The United States was unaware of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's death until its announcement on North Korean TV two days after the fact. Could that be considered an intelligence failure? The experts we spoke to agreed that you can't expect the CIA to know exactly when the leader of a police state has died if that country wanted to keep it secret which was the case here.

A U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, "The key point in a situation like this is not marking the exact second the dictator dies-while clearly that would be great to know-but having a solid framework to assess what might come next. Experts have spent a lot of time developing and updating assessments of things to watch for, to help policymakers understand which direction the transition is going."

But Kim's death led to the inevitable discussion about the command and control of North Korea's nuclear program. And some experts maintain the U.S. just doesn't know enough. Paul Stares, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations said, "It's a black hole. I don't think we even know whether they have a deployed capacity. The devices they tested, it's unclear whether they were truly weaponized devices. There's some speculation about having some bomb designs for that purpose."

Former CIA Director Hayden said North Korea, Hezballah and Iran are the most challenging adversaries. "They have been the three toughest target areas we had.. the Iranians were very good, North Korea was a closed society and we all considered Hezballah to be the A team, a very sophisticated adversary," said Hayden. He called Hezbollah a disciplined, high-tech terrorist organization whose intelligence capacities rival that of governments.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Rogers agreed that the enemy is getting better. "Our counterintelligence threat is more significant than it has been in the past. These intelligence services are getting much, much better. I can't say they are on par with the United States but some are darn close," Rogers said.

There are other factors impacting the intelligence community, namely the digital revolution. "Remember the internet has changed a lot," said Rogers. "It has changed our counterintelligence strategy like you wouldn't believe–sometimes hard to believe– but it has changed the spy business in a way I've never really seen before."

Gen. Hayden said the intelligence business is much more difficult because of electronics and social media. "Everything is so inter-connected. Everyone's electronic signature is so much more powerful and ubiquitous that it really is more difficult to do things and remain secret for an extended period of time," Hayden said. But the enemy has the same problems. Hayden pointed to Iran's failed effort to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S. this year. "We each have our successes and failures," said Hayden.

As successful as the CIA's counter terrorism efforts have been this year, Hayden, who was CIA chief from 2006-2009, understands the pressure the Agency is under to balance its missions. "When I was director, I had to keep reminding myself that this counterterrorism role wasn't the only thing we're doing, that we had to also remind ourselves to keep focused on our traditional espionage mission and the tradecraft required for it. It's not saying our tradecraft suffered. This is a constant risk and a constant challenge because of the roles the Agency is playing today."

Clark Ervin, a former Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security may have summed it up best when he said, "intelligence is an art and not a science and it's tough to be right always."

The CIA would not respond to the specific issues raised in this story, but spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood offered the following written comment: "At the end of the day, I think it's clear that this has been a year of extraordinary achievement by the hardworking men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency who truly believe that what we do matters, and helps to keep America safe. At the end of the day, the President, Congress, and the American people ask us to take on the hard jobs-as our mission statement says 'we accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go'-and the hard jobs get done only when you take some risks."

China reveals its space plans up to 2016

In this undated photo shows researchers installing China's first space station module Tiangong-1 inside the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu Province, on the edge of the Gobi Desert. China launched the experimental module on Thursday, Sept. 29 to lay the groundwork for a future space station underscoring its ambitions to become a major space power.

Πηγή: CTVnews
By AP
Dec 31 2011


BEIJING — China plans to launch space labs and manned ships and prepare to build space stations over the next five years, according to a plan released Thursday that shows the country's space program is gathering momentum.

China has already said its eventual goals are to have a space station and put an astronaut on the moon. It has made methodical progress with its ambitious lunar and human spaceflight programs, but its latest five-year plan beginning next year signals an acceleration.

By the end of 2016, China will launch space laboratories, manned spaceship and ship freighters, and make technological preparations for the construction of space stations, according to the white paper setting out China's space progress and future missions.

China's space program has already made major breakthroughs in a relatively short time, although it lags far behind the United States and Russia in space technology and experience.

The country will continue exploring the moon using probes, start gathering samples of the moon's surface, and "push forward its exploration of planets, asteroids and the sun."

It will use spacecraft to study the properties of black holes and begin monitoring space debris and small near-Earth celestial bodies and build a system to protect spacecraft from debris.

The paper also says China will improve its launch vehicles, improve its communications, broadcasting and meteorological satellites and develop a global satellite navigation system, intended to rival the United States' dominant global positioning system (GPS) network.

China places great emphasis on the development of its space industry, which is seen as a symbol of national prestige.

Its space principles - including peaceful development, enhancing international cooperation and deep space exploration - are largely unchanged from its previous two documents detailing the progress of China's space missions, released in 2000 and 2006.

In 2003, China became the third country behind the U.S. and Russia to launch a man into space and, five years later, completed a spacewalk. Toward the end of this year, it demonstrated automated docking between its Shenzhou 8 craft and the Tiangong 1 module, which will form part of a future space laboratory.

In 2007, it launched its first lunar probe, Chang'e-1, which orbited the moon, collecting data and a complete map of the moon.

Since 2006, China's Long March rockets have successfully launched 67 times, sending 79 spacecraft into orbit.

Some elements of China's program, notably the firing of a ground-based missile into one of its dead satellites four years ago, have alarmed American officials and others who say such moves could set off a race to militarize space. That the program is run by the military has made the U.S. reluctant to cooperate with China in space, even though the latter insists its program is purely for peaceful ends.

"China always adheres to the use of outer space for peaceful purposes, and opposes weaponization or any arms race in outer space," Thursday's white paper states.

The Chinese government's policy is to "reinforce" space cooperation with developing countries and "value" space cooperation with developed countries. The paper lists cooperation between China and countries including Russia, Brazil, France and Britain, and says of the United States: NASA's director visited China "and the two sides will continue to make dialogue regarding the space field."

Turkey: Hundreds of Kurds protest killing of alleged PKK rebels

Πηγή: ekurd net
By AFP
Dec 31 2011

DIYARBAKIR, The Kurdish region of Turkey, — Hundreds of Kurds on Saturday protested against the killing of two Kurdish youngster allegedly were Kurdish rebels in southeastern Turkey in a shootout with the police who attacked their hideout.

The protestors demonstrated near where the two suspected members of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) died in a gun battle with the police early Saturday in Diyarbakir city.

The crowd chanted slogans and threw stones at the police, who responded with water cannon and tear gas grenades and made several arrests.

Ten demonstrators were detained, according to eyewitnesses.

One protestor was injured and immediately taken to hospital, said an AFP reporter at the scene,www.ekurd.net who was warned by police not to talk to the demonstrators.

According to reports coming through two young people have been killed by police in Diyarbakir, in the Kayapınar area. Earlier independent reports said that during a house raid by police a clash broke out and two wounded people threw themselves or were thrown out from the building, ANF News agency reported.

It is now claimed by eyewitnesses that in fact the two boys have been shot on the street by the police.

The governor of the city has told the press that two people died as a result of an armed clash.

Eyewitnesses contradict this version of events and claim that the two youngster have been shot on the street and no clash was lived.

BDP, İHD (Human Rights Association), Mazkum-Der and Diyarbakir lawyers are on the scene.

As circumstances of the death of two boys remain uncleared, new witnesses say the boys were shot by plain clothes policemen. Also people in the building say police have taken all the mobile phones in the building.

Tensions are running high in the region after a botched Turkish air strike killed 35 Kurdish civilians, prompting the PKK to issue a call for an "uprising."

Turkey's military command said it carried out the air strike after a spy drone spotted a group moving toward its sensitive southeastern border under cover of darkness late Wednesday, in an area known to be used by militants.

But Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan admitted Friday that the victims were smugglers and not separatist rebels as the army had originally claimed.

Since it was established in 1984, the PKK has been fighting the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to establish a Kurdish state in the south east of the country, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.

But now its aim is the creation an autonomous Kurdish region and more cultural rights for ethnic Kurds who constitute the greatest minority in Turkey, numbering more than 20 million. A large Turkey's Kurdish community openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK rebels.

PKK's demands included releasing PKK detainees, lifting the ban on education in Kurdish, paving the way for an autonomous democrat Kurdish system within Turkey, reducing pressure on the detained PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, stopping military action against the Kurdish party and recomposing the Turkish constitution.

Turkey refuses to recognize its Kurdish population as a distinct minority. It has allowed some cultural rights such as limited broadcasts in the Kurdish language and private Kurdish language courses with the prodding of the European Union, but Kurdish politicians say the measures fall short of their expectations.

The PKK is considered as 'terrorist' organization by Ankara, U.S., the PKK continues to be on the blacklist list in EU despite court ruling which overturned a decision to place the Kurdish rebel group PKK and its political wing on the European Union's terror list.

Opposition groups sign deal on post-Assad Syria

Members of the Syrian opposition meeting in Istanbul on Thursday announced a list of 140 dissidents forming a "national council" they established in August.

Πηγή: Courant
Dec 31 2011

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Two leading Syrian opposition parties have agreed a road map to democracy if mass protests succeed in toppling President Bashar al-Assad, according to a copy of the document seen by Reuters.
The leading opposition group in exile, the Syrian National Council (SNC), signed the deal with the National Coordination Committee, a group whose majority is inside Syria and which had disagreed with the SNC's calls for foreign intervention.

That was one of several disputes that had fractured opposition groups and prevented them from reaching agreement on what a post-Assad Syria would look like.

Under their pact, the two sides "reject any military intervention that harms the sovereignty or stability of the country, without considering Arab intervention to be foreign."

Activists in Syria expressed pessimism Saturday that Arab League monitors now visiting the country can halt Assad's nine-month crackdown on the protests and have called for Arab states to take tougher measures to stop the bloodshed.

The deal outlines a one-year transitional period, which could be renewed once if necessary. In that period, the country would adopt a new constitution "that ensures a parliamentary system for a democratic, pluralistic civil state and guarantees the exchange of power through elections for a parliament and president of the republic."

The document says the deal will be presented to other opposition groups at a conference next month. Moulhem Droubi, a top ranking member of the SNC from Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, confirmed to Reuters the document had been signed Friday.

The document states "the people will be the source of power and basis of legality" and requires the state to be based on a separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers.

It also states religious freedom will be guaranteed by the new constitution and condemns any signs of sectarianism or "sectarian militarization."

Syria's revolt has become increasingly bloody as protests become overshadowed by armed rebels taking the fight to the security forces. The violence has sparked fears of sectarian war, as the backbone of the protest movement is Syria's Sunni Muslim majority while Assad is backed by many from the minority Alawite sect to which he belongs.

Opposition groups have come under criticism from some of their own members for not condemning sectarianism more openly and seeking full religious freedoms.

Cables Hold Clues to U.S.-Iran Mysteries

WikiLeaks logo

Πηγή: Consotiumnews
By Robert Parry (Originally published Nov. 29, 2010)

Dec 31 2011

From the Archive: As the West’s confrontation with Iran grows more dangerous – and major U.S. news outlets blame Iran – it may be worth recalling the documents that revealed how the U.S. and its allies showed bad faith in talks with Iran about its nuclear program, as Robert Parry reported in 2010.

Classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks show that the Obama administration, like its predecessors, has played a double game with Iran’s Shiite government, mixing public offers of reconciliation with secret collaboration on hard-line strategies favored byIran’s Sunni Arab rivals and Israel.

The classified cables also make clear that the major U.S. news media was mistaken in dumping the blame on Iran for the failed negotiations in 2009 and 2010 seeking a swap of some Iranian low-enriched uranium for nuclear isotopes. The cables reveal that those U.S. gestures were, in part, calculated to fail and thus to justify harsher sanctions against Iran.

According to the cables, key oil sheikdoms in the Persian Gulf were alarmed at comments from the newly elected President Barack Obama advocating a “new beginning” between the United States and Iran, including substantive negotiations on its nuclear program.

The United Arab Emirates deemed Obama’s reconciliation offers “confusing” and the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia said Obama’s position “fueled Saudi fears that a new U.S. administration might strike a ‘grand bargain’ [with Iran] without prior consultations.”

European governments also expressed misgivings about ambiguities in Obama’s position, prompting the new administration to dispatch Daniel Glaser, acting assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, to a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on March 2 and 3, 2009, involving many of Europe’s top Middle East experts.

Glaser explained that Obama’s “engagement” strategy with Iran was only the velvet glove covering an iron fist. “’Engagement’ alone is unlikely to succeed,” Glaser told the meeting, suggesting the overtures were merely necessary steps to justify a more aggressive strategy. Referring to the short time window for any talks, he added, “time was not on our side.”

The experts got Glaser’s message. “Iran needs to fear the stick and feel a light ‘tap’ now,” said Robert Cooper, a senior European Union official. The cable added, “Glaser agreed, noting the stick could escalate beyond financial measures under a worst case scenario.”

So, even as the Obama administration was discussing a possible swap of Iranian low-enriched uranium, it was pressing ahead with plans to enlist the world community, including Iranian trading partners China and Russia, in a new round of sanctions.

The leaked cables show that China was swayed by promises that Saudi Arabia would replace any oil from a possible Iranian cutoff, and Russia was brought onboard by Obama’s agreement to move a ballistic missile defense site from Poland and the Czech Republic to a ship-based system targeted on Iran.

By early 2010, both China and Russia had agreed not to exercise their UN Security Council vetoes to stop new sanctions against Iran. A January 2010 cable reported that a Russian official had “indicated Russia’s willingness to move to the pressure track.” [New York Times, Nov. 29, 2010]

Derailing a Uranium Swap

Meanwhile, Iran’s internal dissension had complicated an agreement on a low-enriched uranium swap. Though the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad embraced the idea in fall 2009, agreeing to give up about half of Iran’s low-enriched uranium to get nuclear isotopes for medical research, some of his political opponents – favored by the West – attacked the proposed deal.

When Ahmadinejad’s government sought some modifications on how the uranium would be transferred, the Obama administration dismissed any changes and the major U.S. news media jumped on Ahmadinejad for supposedly reneging on the original agreement.

The leaked cables, however, shed new light on what was actually occurring. The Obama administration wasn’t really committed to the swap idea as much as it was using the appearance of negotiations to set the stage for a new round of sanctions. The moves by Iran’s internal opposition to torpedo the deal also look different in this context, as possibly a tactic to help the West isolate Ahmadinejad’s government.

In spring 2010, Ahmadinejad agreed to another version of the uranium swap proposed by the leaders of Brazil and Turkey, with the apparent backing of President Obama. However, that arrangement came under fierce attack by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, considered a hawk on Iran, and was mocked by leading U.S. news outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The ridicule of Brazil and Turkey – as bumbling understudies on the world stage – continued even after Brazil released Obama’s private letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva encouraging Brazil and Turkey to work out the deal. Despite the letter’s release, Obama didn’t publicly defend the swap and instead joined in scuttling the deal.

Much like during the run-up to war with Iraq, opinion leaders at the New York Times and Washington Post eagerly beat the drums for another confrontation.

A New York Times editorial praised the new round of anti-Iran sanctions from the UN, but complained they “do not go far enough.” The Times also took another swipe at Brazil and Turkey, which voted against the new sanctions from their temporary seats on the Security Council.

“The day’s most disturbing development was the two no votes in the Security Council from Turkey and Brazil,” the Times wrote. “Both are disappointed that their efforts to broker a nuclear deal with Iran didn’t go far. Like pretty much everyone else, they were played by Tehran.”

Though this Times point of view fits with neocon orthodoxy – that any reasonable move toward peace and away from confrontation is a sign of naivete and weakness – the fact is that the Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal was torpedoed by the United States, after Obama had encouraged it. This wasn’t a case of the two countries being “played by Tehran.”

The documents just released by Wikileaks underscore this point. The Obama administration was using the appearance of engagement as a means for neutralizing opposition to its plans for another escalation of tensions in the Middle East.

A Loose Coalition

The cables also make clear that Israel and the Sunni oil sheikdoms had formed into a loose anti-Iran coalition pushing for more aggressive U.S. policies toward the Shiite-ruled country.

In late 2009, one cable reported that the king of Bahrain told U.S. officials that Iran’s nuclear program “must be stopped,” adding that “the danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.”

According to another cable, Saudi King Abdullah urged the United States to “cut off the head of the snake” before it was too late.

However, such alarmist rhetoric from the region’s oil sheikdoms regarding Iran is nothing new. The Saudis and other Persian Gulf states have been demanding stern action against Iran – and decrying alleged U.S. softness – since Islamists overthrew the autocratic Shah of Iran in 1979.

Some of those warnings were contained in other classified U.S. cables that came out in an unauthorized fashion, in that case from the Iranian student militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, after the Carter administration permitted the deposed Shah into the United States for cancer treatment.

Playing on America’s Cold War fears, Saudi leaders warned that the Islamic government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would soon give way to a communist takeover.

“Developments in Iran … could be seen as an example of U.S. seeming indifference or impotence,” Saudi Prince Fahd complained to visiting Carter administration officials. “Instead of pressuring the shah into bringing his thoughts and actions up to date so as to pull the rug out from under the communist agitators, you let him go.”

Fahd predicted that this communist success in Iran would spread across the Middle East and threaten Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich sheikdoms.

“Shortly, perhaps within a few months, Khomeini will be out and Iran will become another Ethiopia, ruled by communists placed there by Moscow,” Fahd warned.

The cable continued, “The crown prince regretted that the United States did nothing to counter the communist threat in the region. Fahd further noted that Iran was threatening Bahrain, Kuwait, and other Arab countries of the Gulf. There had, however, not been a word of caution to Iran from President Carter to reassure not only weak countries, like Bahrain, but also America’s other friends in the area and around the world.”

Of course, the Saudi fears of a communist wave tossing out Khomeini and then rolling across the oil-rich Middle East never materialized. Three decades later, the Islamist government of Iran remains largely intact, threatened mostly by dissidents who favor only a modestly less religious political system.

Calling in a Debt

In 1979, the greater danger to the sheikdoms came – not from communism – but from the ascetic lifestyles of Khomeini and Iran’s other theocratic rulers, which contrasted with the playboy opulence of the Saudis and other royal families from the region.

In effect, a nervous Fahd was calling due the post-World War II American commitment to protect the security of the Persian Gulf sheikdoms in exchange for reasonably priced oil. One secret State Department cable, dated July 5, 1979, bluntly explained the point: “Oil for security is still the essence of the special relationship” with the Saudis.

The new cables from WikiLeaks add a few insights into how Iran was contained in those years after the revolution, largely by the military intervention of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

According to one of those cables, in December 2005, Saudi King Abdullah lashed out at George W. Bush’s administration for ignoring his warnings against invading Iraq in 2003, noting that the new Iraqi government was dominated by Shiites with close ties to Iran.

“Whereas in the past the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein had agreed on the need to contain Iran, U.S. policy had now given Iraq to Iran as a ‘gift on a golden platter,’” the U.S. Embassy cable quoted the king as complaining.

Abdullah’s comment offered a glimpse into the Realpolitik that has been played for generations in the oil-rich region.

A “top secret” U.S. document that I uncovered in congressional files in 1994 claimed that – according to senior Middle East leaders – even President Jimmy Carter, the renowned peacemaker, engaged in this ruthless big-power politics.

The document, a two-page “Talking Points” prepared by Secretary of State Alexander Haig for a briefing of President Reagan, recounted Haig’s first trip to the Middle East in April 1981.

In the report, Haig wrote that he was impressed with “bits of useful intelligence” that he had learned. “Both [Egypt's Anwar] Sadat and [Saudi Prince] Fahd [explained that] Iran is receiving military spares for U.S. equipment from Israel,” Haig reported.

This fact might have been less surprising to Reagan, whose intermediaries allegedly had collaborated with Israeli officials in 1980 and early 1981 to smuggle weapons to Iran behind President Carter’s back. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

But Haig followed that comment with another stunning assertion: “It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd.”

Questions about Carter

In other words, according to Haig’s information, Saudi Prince Fahd (later King Fahd) claimed that Carter, apparently hoping to strengthen the U.S. hand in the Middle East and desperate to pressure Iran over the stalled hostage talks, gave clearance to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran.

Haig’s written report contained no other details about the “green light,” and Haig declined my subsequent requests for an interview about the Talking Points. But the paper represented the first documented corroboration of Iran’s long-held belief that the United States had encouraged Iraq’s 1980 invasion.

In 1980, President Carter termed those Iranian charges of U.S. complicity “patently false.” Later, he mentioned Iraq’s invasion only briefly in his presidential memoir, in the context of an unexpected mid-September hostage initiative from a Khomeini in-law, Sadeq Tabatabai.

“Exploratory conversations [in Germany] were quite encouraging,” President Carter wrote about that approach, but he added: “As fate would have it, the Iraqis chose the day of [Tabatabai's] scheduled arrival in Iran, September 22, to invade Iran and to bomb the Tehran airport. Typically, the Iranians accused me of planning and supporting the invasion.”

The Iraqi invasion did make Iran more desperate to get U.S. spare parts for its air and ground forces. Yet the Carter administration continued to demand that the American hostages be freed before military shipments could resume. The Republicans around Ronald Reagan were more accommodating to Iran, apparently beginning during Campaign 1980.

Secret FBI wiretaps revealed that an Iranian banker, the late Cyrus Hashemi, who supposedly was helping President Carter on the hostage talks, actually was assisting Republicans with arms shipments to Iran and with money transfers in fall 1980.

Hashemi’s older brother, Jamshid, testified in the early 1990s that the Iran arms shipments, via Israel, resulted from secret meetings in Madrid between Reagan’s campaign director, William J. Casey, and one of Khomeini’s emissaries, a hard-line Islamic mullah named Mehdi Karrubi. (Today, Karrubi – now considered a “reformer” – is a leader of Iran’s political opposition which lodged strong objections to the uranium-swap proposal in 2009.)

Whatever the full truth about the 1980 back-channel maneuvers – known as the October Surprise mystery – there’s no doubt that the Reagan administration did arrange for secret shipments of sophisticated U.S. missiles and other weapons to Iran during the 1980s. When disclosed in 1986, those deals became the center of the Iran-Contra scandal.

It was also discovered in the late 1980s that the Reagan administration had been secretly providing military support to Iraq as well.

The Iran-Iraq War raged on for more than eight years, killing and maiming an estimated one million people. The economic dislocations also set the stage for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 over a dispute regarding Iraq’s war debt.

The subsequent U.S.-led military campaign to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 placed U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, infuriating Islamists such as Saudi Osama bin Laden, who vowed to drive American forces out of Islamic lands by attacking U.S. military and civilian targets.

That led to the 9/11 terror attacks and to George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003.

The new cables from WikiLeaks indicate that the Obama administration now has taken its place in a long line of U.S. governments trying its hand at complicated – and often misguided – strategies for power and influence in the oil-rich Middle East.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

Crackpot Anti-Islam Activists, “Serial Fabricators,” and the Tale of Iran and 9/11

Πηγή: Dissident Voice
By Gareth Porter
Dec 31 2011

Behind a mysterious December 22 Associated Press story about “finding of fact” by a District judge in Manhattan Friday that Iran assisted al Qaeda in the planning of the 9/11 attacks is a tapestry of recycled fabrications and distortions of fact from a bizarre cast of characters.

The AP story offers no indication of the nature of the evidence in the case except that former members of the 9/11 Commission and three Iranian defectors provided testimony. What it didn’t say was that at least two of the Iranian defectors have long been dismissed by US intelligence as “fabricators” and that the two “expert witnesses” who were supposed to determine the credibility of those defectors’ claims are both avowed advocates of crackpot conspiracy theories about Muslims and Shariah law who believe the United States is at war with Islam.

The ostensible purpose of the case brought by families of 9/11 terror attack victims was to win damages from those responsible for 9/11. Dozens of such cases involving different terrorist attacks have been brought to US courts over the years, in which “default judgments” have been made against Iran over various attacks in which Iran was allegedly involved, but there is no chance of getting any money for the families.

The only real effect of the case is to promote right-wing political myths about Iran. One of the peculiarities of such cases is that the witnesses are not subject to cross examination in court. The witnesses have every incentive, therefore to indulge in false testimony, knowing that there will be no one to challenge them.

“A Fabricator of Monumental Proportions”

The lawyers and the “expert witnesses” behind the accusation of Iran in regard to 9/11 hoped to sell the press and public on recycled claims first made by Iranian “defectors” several years ago that they had personal knowledge of Iranian participation in the 9/11 plot. The lawyers produced videotaped affidavits by three such defectors who were identified, with a dramatic flourish, as Witnesses “X,” “Y” and “Z.”

In the one public hearing held on the case, the lawyers revealed the identity of purported former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi – probably a pseudonym – and described his testimony that he had received a series of “coded messages” from a former colleague in the Iranian government in the late summer and early fall of 2001 warning that a terrorist attack against the United States was being planned, and that it was a plan that had been concocted by Tehran in the late 1980s.

Although the judge and the public were being led to believe that this is somehow new information going beyond what was known by the 9/11 Commission report, it is, in fact, very old information and has long been completely discredited. Mesbahi’s story doesn’t hold up, for several reasons, and the most obvious is that, despite his claim that he was warned nearly a month before the 9/11 attacks that civilian airliners would be crashed into buildings in major US cities, including Washington and New York on September 11, he never conveyed that information to the US government before that date.

In October 2001, Mesbahi claimed to right-wing journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman, as reported in Timmerman’s 2005 book that he had tried calling the legal attaché at the US Embassy in Berlin, but was “unsuccessful in several attempts.” But he did not claim any other attempt to reach a US consulate or the US Embassy in Germany by fax, e-mail or letter before September 11, nor did he go to the US Embassy in person to convey this warning. He told Timmerman that he called an Iranian dissident contact in the United States who, he believed, had contacts with US intelligence agencies only some hours after the attacks on New York and Washington.

It wasn’t the first time Mesbahi had claimed inside information about Iranian involvement in a terrorist attack only after the attack had taken place. He hadtold investigators working on the December 1988 terror bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that Iran had asked Libya and Abu Nidal to carry out the attack on the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini. Unfortunately for his credibility, however, he had not come forward with the allegation until after the bombing had happened.

He had also provided affidavits to Argentine investigators in the case of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, claiming his well-informed friends in Iranian intelligence had tipped him off that the decision to bomb the Jewish Community Center had been made at a meeting attended by top Iranian officials in August 1993.

But, in fact, by his own admission Mesbahi had not worked for Argentine intelligence since 1988, and the FBI’s Hezbollah Office’s James Bernazzani, who had helped the Argentine intelligence service with the investigation in 1997, told me in a November 2006 interview that American intelligence officials had concluded Mesbahi did not have the continued high-level access to Iranian intelligence officials throughout the 1990s and beyond that he was claiming. They regarded him as someone who was desperate for money and ready to “provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran,” according to Bernazzani.

Mesbahi wasn’t even consistent in the story he told about the alleged “coded messages.” In an interview with Timmerman, Mesbahi stated that he had gotten two messages from his contact, one on September 1, 2001 and a second three days later. And Timmerman wrote that his alleged contact had “phoned him again” on September 4, indicating that Mesbahi had made no reference to an elaborate scheme to send coded messages through articles in Iranian newspapers.

But in his affidavit to the 9/11 court case, he said he had gotten three messages – on July 23, August 13 and August 27 – and that the coded messages were placed in newspaper articles. Timmerman, who referred the lawyers to Mesbahi, discretely avoided pointing out the huge discrepancy between the two stories, which clearly indicates that Mesbahi fabricated the tale of messages in newspaper articles to make it more dramatic and convincing.

The second defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, claimed he had been an officer of Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security and had provided security for a meeting at an airbase near Tehran on May 4, 2001 attended by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Hashemi Rafsanjani and Osama bin Laden’s son Saad bin Laden. He also claimed to have seen replicas of the twin towers, the White House, the Pentagon and Camp David in the entry hall to the main headquarters of the MOIS with a missile suspended above the targets, and “Death to America” written in Arabic (rather than Farsi) on the side.

Like Mesbahi, Zakeri also first told his tale to Timmerman, who recounts it in his 2005 book. Zakeri, who apparently defected from Iran in late July 2001, claimed he had told the US Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 26, 2001 about the alleged meeting and replicas, warning them that he believed the Iranians and al Qaeda were planning an attack on those targets that would occur September 11. But CIA officials denied categorically to Timmerman that Zakeri had given any such warning to the Embassy and called Zakeri “a fabricator of monumental proportions” and “a serial fabricator.” Zakeri failed an FBI polygraph test in 2003, according to Timmerman.

Crackpot Hate-Islam Extremists as “Expert Witnesses”

Significantly, no reputable retired intelligence analyst on Iran was asked to help judge the testimony of the Iranian defectors. Instead, Clare M. Lopez and Bruce Tefft, both former CIA covert operations case officers, were invited to be “expert witnesses,” in large part to view the videotaped testimony of the three Iranian defectors and assess their credibility.

Based on the record of their public statements, however, they were selected for that role because they could be counted upon to endorse the defectors’ allegations of Iranian involvement in planning the 9/11 attacks and any other assertion, no matter how outlandish, that suggested Iranian guilt.

Lopez has been linked with the neoconservative faction of the Bush administration and the pro-Likud Party extreme right ever since she became Executive Director of the Iran Policy Committee in 2005. Through a series ofpolicy papers issued that year, the Committee sought support from outside the push by a group of pro-Likud officials within the administration for a policy of regime change in Iran.

In particular, the Committee called for using the Mujahedin-E-Khalq or MEK, the armed opposition group listed by the US State Department as a terrorist group because of its assassinations of US officials during the regime of the Shah and bombings of large civilian events in Iran. The MEK had long enjoyed close working relations with Israel, but not with the United States, and the State Department had continued to oppose delisting and alliance with the MEK against Tehran, as proposed by the Defense Department and the Vice-President’s office.

Since 2009, Lopez has been a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policyfounded and headed by notorious Islam-hating extremist Frank J. Gaffney. One of Lopez’s projects has been to stir up public fear over an alleged threat to America – not from al Qaeda attacks, but from subversion by Muslim-Americans. She is one of a number of authors of a book published by Gaffney’s Center in October 2010 called “Shariah: the Threat to America,” which declares, “The United States is under attack by foes who are openly animated by what is known as Shariah (Islamic Law).”

Revealing the project’s anti-Islam paranoia, the book asserts, “Shariah dictates that non-Muslims be given three choices: convert to Islam and conform to Shariah; submit as second class citizens (dhimmis), or be killed.”

In a videotaped talk she gave on February 23, 2011, Lopez said Muslims, “believe they should be in charge of the world.” The main threat from Islam, she said, is “stealth Jihad” waged by Muslims who “hide behind a moderate image,” but whose “purpose is still the same” as that of al Qaeda.

A second aspect of Lopez’s work for Gaffney has been to intimidate opponents of the hard-line policies toward Iran – and especially the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) – by accusing them of being covert lobbyists for Iran.

Tefft, who retired from the CIA’s Operations Division in 1995, is even more explicit in arguing that there is a worldwide war against Islam. “We are fighting a 14-century war against Islam and its adherents, Muslims,” he declared in an interview with the right-wing website FrontPage in October 2007. “And it is a war that they have declared on all non-Muslims….” Islamic ideology requires Muslims to “make the world Islamic under the Caliphate, and to convert, kill or enslave all non-Muslims….” When the interviewer suggested that there are “moderate Muslims,” Tefft responded, “I don’t think so….” he said. “Were there ‘good’ or ‘moderate’ Nazis?”

Tefft referred to the way “the West” had “prevailed” over Islam with the “defeat of the marauding armies of Islam at the Gates of Vienna in 1529″ and added, “We need to recall that period…and again contain Islam to its existing borders.”

When asked by this writer in a phone interview last week if he had been aware of the advocacy of Islamophobe arguments by Lopez and Tefft, Thomas Mellon, Jr., one of two lead lawyers in the case, did not answer directly, but said, “To the extent that you are accurate, we would say, fine, take them out.” He insisted that the lawyers for the case had not relied on any one of the ten “expert witnesses” listed on the case.

Also playing a central role in weaving the tale of Iranian complicity in the 9/11 attacks for the court case was the right-wing author and anti-Iran activist Kenneth R. Timmerman. According to the lawyers’ brief on the case, it was Timmerman who sought out one of the attorneys, Timothy B. Fleming, and brought to his attention the three Iranian “defectors” who claimed personal knowledge that Iran was involved in the planning of 9/11.

Like Lopez, Timmerman has been linked with hardline pro-Likud organizations and involved in efforts to overthrow the regime in Tehran. Along with Joshua Muravchik, and a group of Iranian exile foes of the Islamic regime, he established the “Foundation for Democracy in Iran” in 1995.

Timmerman has also expressed views sympathetic to the Hate-Islam movement. His 2003 book, “Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War against America,” portrays the United States and Israel as innocent victims of a vicious campaign against the West by whole Islamic societies that refuse to accept the US-Israeli narrative on terrorism. And his new novel, “St. Peter’s Bones,” has been praised by notorious Islam-hater Robert Spencer for revealing the “long-hidden origins of Islam.”

The “Material Support” and “Save Haven” Ploys

The most egregious allegations of Iranian complicity in 9/11 come from three former staff members of the 9/11 Commission – Daniel Byman, Dietrich Snell and Janice Kephart. They had all worked on the section of the 2004 report that had given heavy emphasis to the fact that Iran had not stamped the passports of Saudis who had later become hijackers in the 9/11 attacks when they entered Iran. The section had suggested that this and other evidence could indicate Iranian complicity in the plot, even if it could not yet be proven.

In their affidavits to the court, those three former staffers, two of whom (Snell and Kephart) are lawyers, argue that Iran’s failure to stamp the passports of the al Qaeda operatives constituted provision of “material support” to al Qaeda in executing the 9/11 attacks. US anti-terrorist law specifies that the provision of “material support” to terrorists includes any “service” to terrorists if the provider is “knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out” a terrorist action.

However, a key piece of information in a different chapter of the 9/11 Commission report shows that Iran’s failure to stamp passports was not intended to aid al Qaeda. On page 169, the report says that, in order to avoid the confiscation by Saudi authorities of passports bearing a Pakistani stamp, the Saudi al Qaeda operatives, “either erased the Pakistani visa from their passport or traveled through Iran, which did not stamp visas directly into passports.” In other words, the Iranian practice of not stamping visas directly into passports applied to everyone. And since, as the Commission report acknowledged, there was no evidence of Iranian foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the existence of that policy did not support the thesis of Iranian “material support” for the al Qaeda plot.

The Commission staff went back to the two senior planners of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, in July 2004, to ask them specifically about the Iranian failure to stamp the passports of the hijackers, but, strangely, the Commission report gives no indication of what they said about whether the Iranian practice was intended to assist al Qaeda. Either the staff never asked the question, or the answer was ignored because it contradicted the line that those staff members were pushing in 2004 and are still pushing today.

The former Commission staffers also joined right-wing activists in highlighting the intelligence Commission report statements that “an associate of a senior Hizbullah operative” was on the same mid-November flight from Beirut to Tehran as a group of future hijackers, and that Hezbollah officials in Beirut and Iran had been “expecting the arrival of a group [from Saudi Arabia] during the same time period.” The former staffers insist that these could not have been coincidences and that they had to mean that Iran was involved in the al Qaeda plot.

The argument that the presence of an “associate” of a top Hezbollah official on the same flight as future al Qaeda hijackers could not have been a coincidence is absurd. There were obviously many “associates” of top Hezbollah officials, most whom would have had occasion to travel to Iran frequently. The statistical likelihood that one of them would be on the same flight as the future hijackers would not be so small as to merit suspicion.

And the very same section of the Commission report provides a clear explanation of the anticipation of a group travelling from Saudi Arabia to Iran that reveals the conspiratorial interpretation as dishonest. It says that a senior Hezbollah operative – said to have been Imad Mugniyeh – visited Saudi Arabia in October 2000 to “coordinate activities” there, that he planned to assist a group travelling to Iran in November, and that intelligence reports showed the planned visit to Iran involved a “top Hezbollah commander” and “Saudi Hezbollah contacts.”

But that didn’t stop the lawyers for the case from twisting the Commission report to fit the desired narrative: “The ‘activities’ that Mughniyah went to coordinate,” clearly revolved around the hijackers’ travel, their obtaining new Saudi passports and/or US visas for the 9/11 operation, as several of them did, as well as the hijackers’ security, and the operation’s security.”

Paul Pillar, who was the CIA’s senior intelligence officer on the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and had previously been the senior analyst at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, was categorical about the matter when I interviewed him in 2006. The facts detailed in the Commission Report about passports, travel of the hijackers through Iran, and the presence of a Hezbollah official on one of the flights “don’t show Iranian collusion with al Qaeda,” he told me.

The lawyers’ brief refers to “the existence of a secret network of travel routes and safehouses” worked out from the mid-1990s onward as being “confirmed by al Qaeda military chief Saef al Adel in a May 2005 interview.” That implies that secret arrangements on such “travel routes and safehouses” were made between al Qaeda and the Iranian government. But al-Adel said nothing of the sort. He made it clear in his interview with a Saudi journalist that the Iranians who helped them with housing and logistics were not connected with the Iranian regime.

The “expert witnesses” and the lawyers carefully skirt the fact that in the latter half of the 1990s – at a time when the United States was officially still “neutral” on the civil war in Afghanistan – Iran was providing funding, arms and other support to the Northern Alliance, the non-Pashtun forces seeking to overthrow the Taliban regime which bin Laden and al Qaeda were helping to keep in power.

That Iranian support for the Northern Alliance was still ongoing when the organization’s chief, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was assassinated September 10, 2001 by two Arabs posing as journalists. The leader of the CIA’s post-9/11 covert paramilitary team in Afghanistan, Gary Schroen, reported that there were two IRGC Colonels attached to the Commander of the Northern Alliance, Bismullah Khan, when the CIA team arrived. Nevertheless, Lopez and Tefft as well as Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman, a former intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who boasts of his “close personal contacts” with senior Israel intelligence and military officials, cite reports supposedly originating with German intelligence that Iran helped al Qaeda operatives carry out the Massoud assassination.

All the “expert witnesses” insist vehemently that Iran continued to provide “safe haven” for al Qaeda operatives who fled from Afghanistan to Iran after 9/11, allowing them to direct terrorist activities against Saudi Arabia in particular. But that accusation merely recycles the claim first made in early 2002 by Bush administration officials seeking to prevent negotiations between the United States and Iran and push for the adoption of a regime change strategy in Iran.

The central pretense of the neoconservative “safe haven” ploy was that, if any al Qaeda operatives were able to function in Iran, Iran must have deliberately permitted it. But the United States has been unable to shut down al Qaeda’s operation in Pakistan after a decade of trying, despite the cooperation of the Pakistani intelligence service and the drone coverage of the tribal areas. If the same criteria applied to Iran were to be applied to the Bush administration and the government of Germany, they could be accused of having provided “safe haven” for al Qaeda operatives prior to 9/11.

In fact, after US complaints about al Qaeda presence in Iran in late 2001, Tehran detained nearly 300 al Qaeda operatives, and gave a dossier with their names, passport pictures and fingerprints to the United Nations. Iran alsorepatriated at least 200 of those detainees to the newly formed government of Afghanistan.

US Ambassador Ryan Crocker revealed last year that, in late 2001, the Iranians had been willing to discuss possible surrender of the senior al Qaeda officials it was detaining to the United States and share any intelligence they had gained from their investigations as part of a wider understanding with Washington. But the neoconservative faction in the administration rejected that offer, demanding that Iran give them the al Qaeda detainees without getting anything in return.

Iran’s crackdown on al Qaeda continued in 2002-03 and netted a number of top officials. One of the senior al Qaeda detainees apparently detained by Iran during that period, Saif al-Adel, later told a Jordanian journalist that Iran’s operations against al Qaeda had “confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plan.” The arrests included “up to 80 percent” of Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s group, he said, and those who had not been swept up were forced to leave for Iraq.

In further negotiations with the Bush administration in May 2003, Iran again offered to turn over the senior al Qaeda detainees to the United States in return for the MEK captured by US forces in Iraq. The Bush administration again refused the offer.

By 2005, a “senior US intelligence official” was publicly admitting that 20 to 25 top al Qaeda leaders were in detention in Iran and that they were “not able to do much of anything.”

In 2008, one US official told ABC news that administration officials had not been raising the al Qaeda issue publicly, because “they believe Iran has largely kept the al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate.”

But in the world of the right-wing Islam-hating extremists and others pushing for confrontation with Iran, reality is no obstacle to spinning tales of secret Iranian assistance to al Qaeda.

• This article first appeared in Truthout.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

Libya 'broke international justice standards by holding Saif Gaddafi without access to lawyer'

Πηγή: newKerala
By ANI
Dec 31 2011

Tripoli, Dec 31 : The new Libyan government has broken international standards of justice by holding slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam without access to a lawyer on charges that could carry the death penalty, a human rights activist has said.

Gaddafi, who was captured on November 19, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague on two counts of alleged crimes against humanity.

Libya’s new authorities want to conduct Gaddafi''s trial themselves, possibly including extra charges of alleged corruption. 

But first, they will have to show the ICC that any proceedings would be held under international standards, The Telegraph reports.

Fred Abrahams, a Human Rights Watch researcher who met Saif in detention, said the Libyan authorities’ failure to give him a lawyer fell below these standards. 

“Their unwillingness or inability to grant Saif Gaddafi a lawyer suggests a fair trial is not on the cards,” he added.

Both Libyan and international standards require “prompt” access to a lawyer for a suspect in detention. This means a delay of no more than 48 hours. 

Gaddafi, however, has spent almost six weeks in detention in the town of Zintan. 

Gathafi’s fall, Al-Qaeda’s rise: Jihadists set sights on Libya

They ousted Gathafi. Will they oust Al-Qaeda?

Πηγή: Middle East Online
Dec 31 2011

US officials say Al-Qaeda has sent militants to Libya in bid to recruit fighting force after fall of Moamer Gathafi's regime. 

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaeda has sent militants to Libya in a bid to recruit a fighting force after the fall of Moamer Gathafi's regime, but the group has yet to gain a strong foothold there, US officials said Friday.

The assessment of Al-Qaeda's efforts in Libya came in response to a report by CNN television that experienced militants from the network -- including a former British terror suspect -- had been dispatched to the country and had managed to mobilize fighters.

US officials confirmed that Al-Qaeda had sent some members to Libya and was pushing its North African branch, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), to promote Islamist extremism, but the practical effect remained unclear.

"Al-Qaeda has sent some operatives, and is encouraging local affiliates -- namely AQIM -- to infiltrate Libya in an attempt to drum up extremist activities," one American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

But the official said Al-Qaeda was badly damaged by a decade-long US campaign and that the extremist network found itself marginalized by a wave of popular uprisings in Libya and across the Arab world.

"When it comes to the overthrow of Gathafi, and the Arab Spring in general, Al-Qaeda is arriving late to the game," the official said in an email.

"It shouldn't be a surprise that an organization so close to strategic defeat would seek opportunities to rehabilitate its image and be relevant again.

"But this is a threat we are well aware of and are working with Libyan authorities to counter."

According to CNN, Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri personally ordered a seasoned operative -- a former British detainee -- to Libya, the television news channel reported citing a Libyan source briefed by Western officials.

The operative, who arrived in Libya in May, has allegedly recruited some 200 fighters in the country's east and Western intelligence agencies are tracking his efforts, CNN said.

Another operative, with European and Libyan passports, was arrested en route to Libya from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in "an unnamed country," according to CNN.

US officials, however, could not confirm Zawahiri's role or the estimated number of fighters recruited.

Following the collapse of Gathafi's regime in the face of an armed rebellion and a NATO-led air campaign, Western governments have voiced concern about extremists trying to exploit instability in the country or getting their hands on surface-to-air missiles.

A second US official said there was no sign Al-Qaeda was making headway in Libya.

"It is way too early for people to suggest that Al-Qaeda is going to establish a firm foothold in Libya," said the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"It is entirely conceivable they would reject out of hand any attempt by Al-Qaeda or other extremist groups to shape their future."

A US diplomatic cable from 2008 published earlier this year by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks portrayed the eastern Libyan town of Derna as a bastion for extremists.

The ranks of Al-Qaeda in Iraq had large numbers of Libyan volunteers from the eastern area, according to documents found in Iraq.

IMF Warned Greece on Debt Levels

Πηγή: WSJ
By IAN TALLEY And COSTAS PARIS

Dec 30 2011

WASHINGTON—The International Monetary Fund recently told the Greek government that a worsening economic outlook suggests the beleaguered nation may be unable to reduce its debt to sustainable levels even with a planned 50% write down in privately-held Greek government bonds, according to two officials familiar with the conversations.

"A 50% haircut may no longer be enough" to bring Greece's debt to sustainable levels given the new IMF economic forecasts, said one of the officials.

An official at the IMF confirmed staff are working on starker economic assessment than outlined last month in its loan-program review for the country. Some IMF officials think "the debt sustainability analysis is not valid anymore" under the new economic forecasts, the official said. For Greece's debt to be sustainable now "requires either a deeper haircut or additional loans from Europe," he said.

The comments underscore the fragility of Greece's finances and speculation in markets that it is heading towards a default on its debt.

An IMF spokeswoman declined to comment. The IMF says it isn't involved in negotiations between the government and creditors on the extent of private sector participation, except as an observer. But in order for the IMF to continue lending money, its staff must conclude that a borrowing country will be able to return its debt back to sustainable levels.

Last week, IMF chief Christine Lagarde said the IMF would likely lower its outlook estimate for the global economy in 2012, pointing to the euro zone debt crisis as the primary cause. Growth is a key factor in determining whether a country can escape from a heavy debt burden.

The fund said in a report prepared last month that if a 50% write-down was universally subscribed by private holders, Greece's debt could reach a long-term sustainable level of around 120 percent of gross domestic product. Then, it expected for Greece's economy to contract by 5.5% this year and 3% next year. It warned, however, that "Results remain sensitive to growth outcomes ... and even small deviations from the macro and program targets would not bode well for debt sustainability."

A "low-growth case would produce an unsustainable outcome," the IMF said then.

Private creditors are hoping to soon conclude negotiations with Greek officials on the details of a planned debt-reduction program. In late October, euro-zone governments called on Greece to secure a 50% writedown on the debt held by private creditors as a condition for payouts under the existing €130 billion ($168.49 billion) bailout package to continue. The debt deal was also seen as essential for any potential expansion of the program.

Gaddafi's daughter reportedly eyeing asylum in Israel

Aisha Kadafi waves a flag at a pro-regime demonstration in March in Tripoli's Bab Azizia compound, where the Libyan leader was to speak.

Πηγή: LAtimes
By Batsheva Sobelman

Dec 29 2011

REPORTING FROM JERUSALEM -- Is Aisha Kadafi, daughter of the slain Libyan ruler Moammar Kadafi, considering seeking asylum in Israel? Unlikely as it seems, according to the Israeli news site Walla!, this may be the case.

The Israeli site quoted a report published in Intelligence Online that said Aisha indicated to confidants from Europe that only in Israel will she feel safe and hopes to be allowed to live there. In August, she fled Libya for Algeria with her mother, two of her brothers and several other family members. Recently she expressed concern that her Algerian hosts may not be able to resist pressure from Libya's new government to extradite her to stand trial along with her brother, Saif al-Islam.

The report said her friends discouraged her from making an official request for asylum in Israel, which would probably balk at harboring the daughter of a slain Arab dictator.

Aisha Kadafi already has at least one Israeli connection -- her attorney. Until recently, Nick Kaufman was a senior prosecutor with the Israeli Ministry of Justice. A former prosecutor at the United Nation's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Israeli lawyer was recently hired by Aisha and her brother Saadi to advance a probe into the killing of their father and another brother with the ICC, the International Criminal Court.

The family may have had other roundabout ties. Two years ago, Saif al-Islam reportedly negotiated with Israel through a mediator for a peaceful compromise concerning an aid ship he sent toward Gaza, where a naval blockade keeps vessels from docking.

But Aisha may not need to make a formal request and chance refusal; she might qualify for immigration rights. Stubborn rumors have persisted among Libyan Jews in Israel for years that Kadafi himself is Jewish.

In recent years, several elderly Israelis of the Jewish community that once lived in Libya have come forth with stories about the dictator's allegedly Jewish heritage. One of them is Gita Buaron, an Israeli approaching 80. She says she is related to Kadafi, whose mother was her great-aunt. As for his children, being half-Jewish won't cut it for religious purposes if it's the wrong half -- Judaism is acquired through matrilineal heritage (or conversion) -- but it's often sufficient for immigration under Israel's Law of Return legislation.

Congress, Obama Codify Indefinite Detention: Where is the “progressive” outrage?

Πηγή: Reason
By Sheldon Richman

Dec 28 2011

In yet another reversal of his professed commitment to the rule of law, President Obama says he will sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which formalizes his authority to imprison terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge or trial.

Where is the “progressive” outrage?

George W. Bush and Obama both claimed that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) empowered them to have the military hold people merely suspected of association with al-Qaeda or related organizations without charge for the duration of the “war on terror.” It didn’t matter if the suspect was a foreigner, a U.S. citizen, or a legal resident. It also didn’t matter if the alleged offense was committed inside or outside the United States. The battlefield encompassed the whole world.

In interpreting the AUMF this way, both administrations went well beyond its language. On its face, the AUMF only authorizes “the President … to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Clearly the power is restricted to people involved in 9/11 and those who protected them. Yet under novel theories of the executive branch’s constitutional authority, this was turned into a virtual blank check.

The AUMF also makes no reference to indefinite detention or to turning citizens and legal residents over to the military, rather than civilian law enforcement, when they are merely suspected of being involved in a vague class of activities such as “supporting” “associated forces” in the commission of belligerent acts.

Regardless of the absence of the relevant language, both the Bush and Obama administrations claimed these broad powers that make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights’ Fifth Amendment in particular.

Now these powers have been formally set down on paper. Ironically, the Obama administration hinted at a veto of the bill because it introduced restrictions on its authority. Carrying on the Bush philosophy that under the Constitution the executive branch has virtually unlimited power, Obama objected to any congressional intrusion into its prerogatives, even if only to codify authority already claimed and exercised.

For example, one section requires the executive branch to turn over to the military a person suspected of terrorism. Note that this would even include individuals resisting the American occupation of Afghanistan or the bombing in Sudan or Somalia. It could also include someone who innocently gave money to a charity not knowing it had some connection to an “associated” organization. But the Obama administration did not like being required to do this. Rather, it prefers to have it as an option. In the end, the administration was granted the power to use civilian courts, but only after filing a waiver with Congress.

The section goes on to say that included within the military’s authority is “detention under the law of war without trial until the end of hostilities.” This section, however, exempts Americans citizens captured inside the country.

The next section does apply to American citizens and other legal residents. Although it explicitly says the administration is not required to turn them over to the military, it may do so if it wishes. Obama successfully opposed a blanket prohibition in this section against the military detention of American citizens.

As one of its defenders, Sen. Lindsey Graham, said of the provision: “The statement of authority to detain does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.” This shouldn’t be surprising: Obama already claims the authority to kill Americans without due process.

Obama’s intention to sign the NDAA tells us exactly where he stands on the Bill of Rights. As Human Rights Watch put it: “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

The late Chalmers Johnson, the scholar who did so much to chronicle America’s world domination, liked to say that you either abolish the empire or live under it. Is there any doubt he was right?

Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman, where this article originally appeared.

US to sell Beoing-made F-15s to Saudi Arabia

Πηγή: KSDK
By LOLITA C. BALDOR (AP)
Dec 29 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Obama administration is poised to announce the sale of nearly $30 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Boeing produces the F-15 at its Boeing plant in Hazelwood.

The deal will send 84 new fighter jets and upgrades for 70 more, for a total of $29.4 billion, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because the sale has not been made public.

The agreement boosts the military strength of Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, at a time when the Obama administration is looking to counter Iranian threats in the region. Underscoring that effort was a fresh threat this week from Tehran, which warned that it could disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital Persian Gulf oil transport route, if Washington levies new sanctions targeting Iran's crude oil exports.

About a year ago, the administration got the go-ahead from Congress for a 10-year, $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia that included F-15s, helicopters and a broad array of missiles, bombs and delivery systems, as well as radar warning systems and night-vision goggles.

The plan initially raised concerns from pro-Israeli lawmakers, but U.S. officials reassured Congress that Israel's military edge would not be undercut by the sale. Additionally, there is now broad agreement among Israel, the Gulf Arab states and the West that Iran poses a significant and unpredictable threat.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are bitter regional rivals. Tensions between them were further stoked earlier this year after the U.S. accused Iran of plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in Washington.

Saudi Arabia is already the most militarily advanced of the Arab Gulf states, one of the richest countries in the world, and central to American policy in the Middle East. It is also vital to U.S. energy security, with Saudi Arabia ranking as the third-largest source of U.S. oil imports.

Where Greece Is Right and Germany Is Wrong

Illustration by Jiro Bevis

Πηγή: Bloomberg Business
By Peter Coy

Dec 22 2011

Merkel's hard line on fiscal responsibility is a growth inhibitor. Spending will help prevent a European recession.

The patient, E.Z., is in failing health, and the European surgeons are arguing bitterly at the operating table. The Greek doctors call for a feeding tube, oxygen, antibiotics, the works. Nonsense, say the Germans. Get the patient up on his feet and slap him around a little. What he really needs is to lose some weight.

Never mind that each is acting in accordance with his own self-interest. It’s the profligate Greeks, whose screw-ups helped drag Europe into its deepest crisis since World War II, who are mostly right in this argument—and the disciplined, hard-working Germans who are mostly wrong. Europe’s economy is already so weak that Teutonic belt-tightening, however meritorious in ordinary times, threatens to push the Continent into a deep and long-lasting recession.

The European stimulus-vs.-austerity debate that raged throughout 2011 is a replay of the one from the Great Depression. Then it was a Briton, John Maynard Keynes, arguing the case for boosting demand and an Austrian, Friedrich Hayek, wanting to purge the rottenness from the system. It’s a measure of the discipline’s meager progress that economists and policymakers haven’t managed to settle this dispute in the intervening 80 years.

The very human tendency to mix up economics and morality is what makes the Keynesian case for expansionary government policy hard for politicians to defend. From the standpoint of righteousness and clean living, the Germans are way ahead of the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Italians. Saving and investing are virtuous for families; it’s hard for people to imagine that on the scale of nations, too much frugality can cause problems.

Frugality can backfire, however—and in 2011, it did. Keynes had put his finger on the problem, calling it the “paradox of thrift.” One person’s spending is another’s income, he observed. So when everyone spends less in a recession, incomes fall. The more people try to save, the more the economy slows, and the harder it gets to put money aside.

There’s even a related “paradox of toil.” It says that when an economy is stuck in a rut, with interest rates at or near zero, cutting wages can backfire. Wage cuts lead to expectations of deflation and cause employment to fall rather than rise, says the person who coined the new paradox, Gauti Eggertsson, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s a scary thought for the Greeks, who are hoping they can keep the euro but effect an internal devaluation based on lower wages, and in the process make their economy competitive again.

Austerity got a fair shot in Europe in 2011, and it’s failing. Countries on the periphery are attempting to close budget deficits through a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts. The hope is that evidence of financial probity will impress the financial markets, lower interest rates, and give the private sector the confidence to spend and invest, revving up growth.

Instead, nearly the complete opposite is taking place. Government retrenchment sucked demand out of the economy, depressing tax revenue and making balance even harder to achieve. Private forecasts of European growth sank throughout the past year as this dynamic played out. A 2012 recession is highly possible, although as of late November the European Central Bank staff economists were still predicting growth of 0.4 percent to 1 percent in the coming year.

There’s no doubt that Southern Europe needs to earn its way out of debt by running trade surpluses instead of chronic deficits. In other words, it needs to act more Germanic. But it’s impossible for every country to run a trade surplus, just as it’s impossible for every person to be a better-than-average driver. Italy and the others can manage to run trade surpluses only if Germany agrees to do the opposite, importing more than it exports. If we’re going to expect the Greeks to act like Germans, the reverse needs to happen as well. Germany needs to live a little, spend more, relax in Mykonos—in other words, be more Mediterranean. That’s a lot to expect, since the German people have been convinced by the current crisis that laxity is the road to ruin.

As 2012 beckons, it seems increasingly likely that the euro zone is headed for a crackup. Stephen A. King, the chief global economist of HSBC (HBC), believes that the only solution for Europe is for creditors and debtors to focus on their mutual interest in healthy economic growth. A pro-growth consensus would break down the inhibitions against aggressive fiscal and monetary stimulus. Yet nothing of the sort will happen, King says, until it’s blatantly obvious that only dramatic action will prevent a breakup of the common currency. “The world has to go crazy before you can do crazy things,” he concludes. “That’s what the Fed waited for, and that’s what the ECB will have to wait for.” Stand back from the operating table—here comes the defibrillator.