Author: Brian Beyer

In yet another attempt at destabilizing Iran, Hillary Clinton will soon announce a decision by US State Department on whether or not to remove Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), or “the people’s holy warriors,” from its terrorism registry. Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), cautioned that doing so “would allow the Mujahedin to receive US funding and become a powerful force in support of war with Iran, just like the Iraqi exiles who deceived us into war with Iraq did.”

In an age where the word terrorism or bomb is enough to get you arrested and thrown out of the airport, why are American officials and policy wonks pressing for the removal of MEK from terror watch list? They, just like the Taliban and the Contras, are valuable pawns, or so they think,  in the quest for American dominance of the Middle East. MEK is so highly valued by the war-with-Iran crowd because they were the group that “revealed” the Natanz nuclear site and brought to light documents concerning the Iranian nuclear program in 2002. As Gareth Porter argued, the documents provided by MEK and their political extension, the National Council of Resistance in Iran, were fabricated:

The German source said he did not know whether the documents were authentic or not. However, CIA analysts, and European and IAEA officials who were given access to the laptop documents in 2005 were very sceptical about their authenticity.

The Guardian’s Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA official as saying there is “doubt over the provenance of the computer”.

A senior European diplomat who had examined the documents was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005 as saying, “I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt.”

Scott Ritter, the former U.S. military intelligence officer who was chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an interview that the CIA has the capability test the authenticity of laptop documents through forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created.

The fact that the agency could not rule out the possibility of fabrication, according to Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to do such tests or that the tests had revealed fraud.

Additionally, MEK’s “discovery” of the Natanz site was doubted by many keen observers of Iranian politics who noted the groups friendly relationship with Israel, as well as their lack of key posts in government positions that would have made any relevant information hard to come by.

Since 2002, new information has emerged indicating that the MEK did not obtain the 2002 data on Natanz itself but received it from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Yossi Melman and Meier Javadanfar, who co-authored a book on the Iranian nuclear programme last year, write that they were told by “very senior Israeli Intelligence officials” in late 2006 that Israeli intelligence had known about Natanz for a full year before the Iranian group’s press conference. They explained that they had chosen not to reveal it to the public “because of safety concerns for the sources that provided the information”.

…

Israel has maintained a relationship with the MEK since the late 1990s, according to Bruck, including assistance to the organisation in beaming broadcasts by the NCRI from Paris into Iran. An Israeli diplomat confirmed that Israel had found the MEK “useful”, Bruck reported, but the official declined to elaborate.

Not only can MEK not be trusted as an objective source of information, but the violence carried out against Americans in the past by this terrorist group should give great pause to anyone, especially members of government, considering supporting this group. Additionally, the bipolar nature of American-MEK relations, from the worst of enemies to best of friends and back again, gives absolutely zero assurance that this group would be conducive to American interests even in the near future.

While the War Party is hoping that MEK will be a valuable propaganda tool in initiating an attack on Iran, they ought not fool themselves into thinking that MEK will bring about regime change internally. Universally hated in Iran for siding with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war, Iranians have little tolerance for this troublemaking group.

It’s best the US just stayed out of the whole brouhaha.

Now that America will soon start its “withdrawal” of troops from Afghanistan, the brainiacs over at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, have developed Nexus 7, which, “aims to tap that data [“exabytes” collected by American troops during the war] to find out more about the U.S.’ alleged friends: the people of Afghanistan, and how they interact with their government and with one another.” Much of this data also comes from America’s amorphous and ever growing intelligence apparatus:

On the military’s classified network, however, Darpa technologists pitch Nexus 7 as far-reaching and revolutionary, culling “hundreds of existing data sources from multiple Agencies and Services” to produce “population-centric, cultural intelligence.”

They boast of Nexus 7’s ties to special operations and to America’s most secretive surveillance groups, and its sophisticated tools to “perform automated cross-correlation and analysis of massive, sparse datasets — recomputing stability indicators within minutes of new data updates.”

In practice, that means Nexus 7 culls the vast U.S. spy apparatus to figure out which communities in Afghanistan are falling apart and which are stabilizing; which are loyal to the government in Kabul and which are falling under the influence of the militants.

As if this does not sound frightening enough, tracking the movements and actions of an entire nation some 7,000 miles away, someone with intimate knowledge of the project ominously asked, “Let’s take that God’s-eye view…Instead of tracking a car, why not track all cars?” Such a mindset is a cause for great concern. Following the deadliest month for Afghan civilians in the history of the decade long war, has American imperialism become so cold and calculated that the Afghan people are not only shown a disregard for life, but their liberties as well? And if this project can be done halfway across the world, how much longer until Americans are mere cogs in a “population centric” model?

Just another sign of imperialistic indulgence, Nexus 7 does such things as gathering data on “exotic vegetables — those grown outside a particular district that have to be transported further at greater risk in order to be sold in that district — can be a useful telltale marker.” In the progressive spirit of new-American nation building and counterinsurgency tactics, “old-school metrics like body counts” were being focused on too much, said Major General Michael Flynn. A better indication of hatred for an occupying force, and therefore stability, than the price of exotic vegetables would be the number of innocent civilians killed. Amazingly, seeing one’s friends and family blown to unrecognizable bits is not conducive to stability. Yet such statements are not all that shocking coming from a man responsible for sending boatloads of innocent Afghans to Guantanamo Bay while maintaining that “we were sending the right folks” despite being proven otherwise.

The problem with Nexus 7, besides the premise of the decade long occupation itself, is that it is quantitative in nature. Then again, this problem seems to be permeating the social sciences everywhere: whether it be “forecasting” the American economy 10 years from now or predicting the Congressional breakdown in 25 years. People are not static: their thoughts and opinions, motivations and actions, desires and wants, are constantly changing. All it takes is one black swan to make a complete mockery of the modern day School of Quantification of the Cogs. Perhaps what is most frightening about all things quantitative is that the human element of just about everything disappears. It’s no longer about helping the devastated Afghan community, but about ensuring a quality cost-benefit analysis.

This is precisely why the Nexus 7 project is flawed at it’s core: if it can’t be neatly plotted on a graph, out the window it goes, no matter how valuable the information:

Step one was to dive into SIGACTS, the military database that contained accounts of nearly every firefight American troops fought. (The information later formed the bedrock of WikiLeaks’ “war logs.”)

Drizzled between the gun battles were occasional accounts of villages stabilized and town elders met. But, written as random notes, the accounts were hard to insert into a database. There was nothing consistent, nothing you could plot as a trend over time.

“These were intelligence reports, not measurable data,” the source says. “The population-centric information wasn’t to be found there.”

These “technogeeks” and the military-intelligence establishment’s disregard for the basic dignity of the Afghan population can effectively be summed up in a self-addressed question and answer,

Why bother holing Nexus 7 up at a stateside test bed, one person familiar with Nexus 7 asks, “when you can give it to a company in Afghanistan and get 1,000 times the number of observations? It’s not like these are weapons. If it doesn’t work, the worst that happens is it doesn’t work.”

How empowering it must be for the Afghan people to have the all encompassing “God’s eye-view” watch everything that they do, from vegetable prices to car routes to meetings with tribal elders. But if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Data must be collected at any and all costs for a science fair winner on steroids that just happened to tickle DARPA’s fancy. Any dissent from the Afghan people will promptly be ignored, unless it is quantifiable, of course.

Perhaps desperate for some accomplishment, the military-intelligence establishment is making a last ditch effort at turning around the war in Afghanistan. Rather than acknowledging the difficulty, if not impossibility, of turning a country stuck light years in the past into a thriving Western democracy hostile to al-Qaeda, the blame has been laid on human intelligence. And while the intelligence community’s performance in Afghanistan has been lackluster, a computerized model will not do much better. Like all hubristic empires on their way out, hope still remains:

“If you get transparency [Nexus 7], you don’t need boots on the ground.”

But you will need some drones in the sky.

 

The security situation in northern Nigeria continues to deteriorate as Boko Haram steps up its attacks. Boko Haram is a militant, Islamist group calling for the imposition of Shariah law. The name, Boko Haram, translates into “Western education is a sin.” The name comes from the fierce opposition that Boko Haram members have to western education, which they see as corrupting Nigeria.

With the hot, Nigerian summer has come a new barrage of attacks. The governor of Borno state, Kashim Shettima, has pled with the radical sect to stop its assault,

“Once again, I wish to beseech my brothers in the Jama’atul ahlul sunnah lidda’awati wal jihad to lay down their arms and come and dialogue with us, for indeed this is the only way we can move our beleaguered state forward.”

As a result of Boko Haram’s attacks on anything from churches to restaurants to police and government offices, thousands are fleeing the northern city of Maiduguri out of fear for their lives. Boko Haram is not the only culprit, however. The infamous Joint Task Force, a part of the Nigerian security apparatus, has been accused of waging a brutal and irresponsible crackdown on Boko Haram. The Task Force has shown very little restraint or professionalism, which has resulted in countless incidents of random killings, rapes, and detention without cause.

While Boko Haram has limited itself to attacking northern Nigeria, the possibility remains that the group could attack central and southern Nigeria, which is home to a majority of the country’s Christians, in order to fulfill its plan of ousting any western influence. The prospect of inter-religious conflict looms large, especially when considering the carnage left behind from the 2010 Jos riots.

Additionally, Nigeria is consistently the fourth or fifth largest importer of crude to the United States. The security situation is undoubtedly being watched closely by the United States because of the sheer volume of oil Nigeria provides the United States, and any attack on oil infrastructure is likely to warrant some type of response. As of now, however, Boko Haram has been unwilling to attack anywhere near the Niger Delta, which is where all of the oil is located.

America has seen what happens when an oil producing country is “disturbed” by Muslim radicals. Could Nigeria be just another front in the multifaceted War-on-a-war-tactic? Only time will tell.

 

Decorated CIA operative with extensive contacts in the Middle East, Robert Baer, declares:

There is almost “near certainty” that Netanyahu is “planning an attack [on Iran] … and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he’s also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict”, Baer explained.

It makes sense, from a strategic standpoint, that Israel would want to attack Iran before the Palestinian statehood vote. This would provide Israel with a huge distraction and more time to delay the crucial vote. Additionally, there is the whole transition period between Gates and Panetta as Secretary of Defense. Now that Gates has left his post as Secretary of Defense, some are worried that his influence of steering Obama and Bush away from attacking Iran could evaporate:

Masters asked Baer why the US military is not mobilising to stop this war from happening. Baer responded that the military is opposed, as is former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who used his influence to thwart an Israeli attack during the Bush and Obama administrations. But he’s gone now and “there is a warning order inside the Pentagon” to prepare for war.

What’s even more frightening is that Baer sees the influential Iranian Revolutionary Guard as welcoming an attack by Israel and the United States in order to divert Iranian’s attention away from domestic problems:

It should be noted that the Iranian regime is quite capable of triggering a war with the United States through some combination of colossal stupidity and sheer hatred. In fact, as Baer explained, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard would welcome a war. They are “paranoid”. They are “worried about … what’s happening to their country economically, in terms of the oil embargo and other sanctions”. And they are worried about a population that increasingly despises the regime.

They need an external enemy. Because we are leaving Iraq, it’s Israel. But in order to make this threat believable, they would love an attack on their nuclear facilities, love to go to war in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and hit us where they could. Their defense is asymmetrical. We can take out all of their armored units. It’s of little difference to them, same with their surface-to-air missile sites. It would make little difference because they would use terrorism. They would do serious damage to our fleet in the Gulf. The frightening and enlightening article can be read in full here.

Glenn Greenwald yet again dismantles the lies and smears that were used against Bradley Manning by Adrian Lamo and Wired magazine. This must read piece really questions the journalistic integrity of Wired as well as the honesty of Lamo, both of which are being used to phonily solidify a case against Manning:

Yesterday — more than a full year after it first released selected portions of purported chat logsbetween Bradley Manning and government informant Adrian Lamo (representing roughly 25% of the logs) —Wired finally publishedthe full logs (with a few redactions).  From the start, Wired had the full chat logs and was under no constraints from its source (Lamo) about what it could publish; it was free to publish all of it but chose on its own to withhold most of what it received.

Last June — roughly a week after Wired‘s publication of the handpicked portions — I reviewed the long and complex history between Lamo and WiredEditor Kevin Poulsen, documented the multiple, serious inconsistencies in Lamo’s public claims (including ones in a lengthyinterview with me), and argued that Wired should “either publish all of the chat logs, or be far more diligent about withholding only those parts which truly pertain only to Manning’s private and personal matters and/or which would reveal national security secrets.”  Six months later, in December, I documented that numerous media reports about Manning and WikiLeaks were based on Lamo’s claims about what Manning told him in these chats — claims that could not be verified or disputed because Wired continued to conceal the relevant parts of the chat logs — and again called for “as much pressure as possible be applied to Wired to release those chat logs or, at the very least, to release the portions about which Lamo is making public claims or, in the alternative, confirm that they do not exist.”

Read the full piece here.

While you’re at it, do your part to free Bradley Manning.

 

A new expose from the Nation by Jeremy Scahill detailing the CIA’s same, old dirty tricks is certainly troubling. Candidate Obama assured the American public that extrajudicial actions by the CIA and Defense Department were a thing of the past. Transparency, much like hope and change, were buzz words that were constantly used to show everybody that the era of Bush was over. A new ethical era was to take hold in the White House, and would be anchored by Nancy Pelosi’s vow to oversee a Congress of integrity.

Just as Obama campaigned to make the most sweeping changes when it came to the realm of foreign policy (Guantanamo Bay, ending the war in Iraq, ending torture, etc.), it was in foreign policy that he became the most like Bush. In fact, many would argue that Obama has not only continued many of Bush’s odious practices, but has institutionalized all of these practices because of his refusal to change course.

While the secret prison that was discussed in length surely was troubling, it almost seems like the least of worries when compared to some of the statements made by officials concerning future plans for Somalia. And yes, that comparison still holds for a prison “infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes” that result in prisoners getting “rashes” prompting them to “scratch themselves incessantly.” These prisoners, who like at other covert rendition sites run a high chance of being completely innocent, “described the cells as windowless and the air thick, moist and disgusting.” Additionally, torture and perpetual interrogation are commonplace. Again, I don’t wish to trivialize the significance of yet another secret prison site, but there are much more troublesome plans in the future for Somalia:

During his confirmation hearings in June to become the head of the US Special Operations Command, Vice Admiral William McRaven said, “From my standpoint as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard” at Somalia. McRaven said that in order to expand successful “kinetic strikes” there, the United States will have to increase its use of drones as well as on-the-ground intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations. “Any expansion of manpower is going to have to come with a commensurate expansion of the enablers,” McRaven declared. The expanding US counterterrorism program in Mogadishu appears to be part of that effort.

The neverending “War on Terror” knows no bounds or limitations. Wherever and whenever, if there is even so much as a perceived threat, then a new theatre in the war could be opened. Al-Shabaab is currently the aggressor du jour, competing for the spotlight with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

And just like enhanced interrogation was the Newspeak of yesteryear, so today is “kinetic.” No, drone strikes that kill dozens is not indicative of a war. Nor are recon missions and surveillance. It’s just the new style of diplomacy, albeit bloody, messy and in the dark.

What’s even more frightening is that McRaven is already talking about bringing in more diplomats (read: special ops, surveillance, and all different kinds of boots on the ground). The only way that such an operation would ever be able to take off, naturally, is with a little kickback to the military industrial complex in the form of “enablers.”

Later on, if a Congressional hearing is ever scheduled to review the covert operations in Somalia (don’t hold your breath), the chickenhawks and policymakers can use justification by quoting Abdulkadir Moallin Noor, the minister of state for the presidency, “We need more; otherwise, the terrorists will take over the country.” I hate to break it to Noor, but the 30 square miles that the Somali “government” controls in Mogadishu is hardly what I would call a sterling record.

It is this statement from Noor that succinctly summarizes everything that is wrong with American foreign policy. Surely, Al Shabaab is dangerous to Somalis. It would be foolish to deny that their hardline Islamism and ruthless attacks on innocent civilians is problematic. But why should the US be concerned? Why should more money be poured into a far off land only to achieve minimal, if any results?

The American public will continue to hear the trite justification that Somalia is becoming a safe haven for terrorists or that terrorism, no matter where, must be fought at all cost. But before the United States begins yet another doomed military adventure, Washington ought to remember that Al-Shabaab has only once launched an attack outside of Somalia.

The target: Uganda. The justification: foreign intervention.