« November 2003 |
Main
| January 2004 »
December 31, 2003
Spies warned of US invasion plans
Breaking News - powered by Press Association#3
British spy chiefs secretly warned that the United States would be prepared to invade Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to seize their oilfields following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, it was disclosed. Files released to the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) under the 30 year rule show the intelligence agencies believed the US was ready to take military action to prevent further disruption to their oil supplies. It followed the decision in October 1973 by the Arab nations to slash oil production - sending prices rocketing - while imposing a complete embargo on the Americans over their support for Israel.
December 31, 2003 at 09:34 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Putin faces glamorous rival for presidency
From Jeremy Page in Moscow
HER Japanese ancestry, glamorous looks and feminist views make Irina Khakamada an unconventional, and some say unrealistic, rival to Vladimir Putin as President of Russia.
But the self-made businesswoman and admirer of Margaret Thatcher has emerged as the new face of the Russian opposition with a dramatic last-minute announcement that she will stand in next year’s election as an independent candidate.
“I have chosen the way of the samurai,” Mrs Khakamada, 48, the daughter of a Russian mother and a Japanese communist who emigrated to the Soviet Union, said. “I made a decision to get the ball rolling.”
Her announcement, less than 48 hours before today’s deadline for registration, came after Mr Putin’s most prominent rivals, the Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov and ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said they would not stand. Their parties both nominated relative unknowns.
With approval ratings at about 80 per cent, Mr Putin still looks certain to win an easy second term in March, but Mrs Khakamada will enliven an election that was starting to look too much like a one-horse race, even for the Kremlin’s comfort.
Critics have already accused ex-KGB hardliners in the Kremlin of stage-managing parliamentary elections last month, in which Mr Putin’s supporters won a two-thirds majority and crushed the liberal opposition.
The President’s supporters say that he will use his mandate to root out corruption, streamline the bureaucracy and push forward economic reforms, but the lack of a credible rival stoked fears that Russia was slipping back to its authoritarian past.
“It is no secret that until now candidates put forward were rather colourless individuals, unknown to the masses and not popular among voters, so incapable of offering competition to the No 1 candidate,” Valeri Fedorov, the director-general of the VTsIOM polling agency, said. “Irina Khakamada represents a lucky exception.”
An economist by training, she made a name as Russia’s leading businesswoman after founding a computer software company in the late 1980s. In 1993, she joined parliament, where she promoted small businesses and women’s rights and helped to push through reformist legislation.
She is a co-leader of the liberal Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS) party, which won only two parliamentary seats last month, compared to 31 held before the poll.
Disheartened and divided by their dismal performance, SPS and another liberal party, Yabloko, failed to agree on a joint candidate for the presidency and were considering telling supporters to boycott the election.
Mrs Khakamada, a mother of two children and a former deputy speaker of parliament, argued, however, that a boycott would further undermine democracy.
“Attempts to create the appearance that the elections are unjust are possible only with a unified opposition front,” she said. “If the opposition is fractured, it is necessary for (liberals) also to put up a candidate.”
An election commission official said that Mrs Khakamada had not yet registered but was expected to have done so before today’s deadline.
Her decision to stand took many in her own party by surprise. An SPS spokeswoman said it was unexpected. A fellow party leader called it an “exotic step”.
Yuliy Nisnevich, a leading party member, said: “I believe it is an utterly emotional decision, which cannot unite liberal voters, and politically pointless to boot.”
A senior Kremlin insider, by contrast, welcomed her candidacy. “She is one of the most worthy politicians of our country,” Andrei Illarionov, an economic adviser to Mr Putin, said. “I think she made the right step and she did this at a time when the male population of the SPS had hidden like cowards.”
Some analysts say that the Kremlin was looking for a candidate such as Ms Khakamada to avoid an election boycott or too low a turnout to make the result valid.
Even though she is sanctioned by the Kremlin, however, Mrs Khakamada is likely to become Mr Putin’s most vocal and eloquent critic and a new driving force in the demoralised opposition.
“The President personifies the whole system of power,” she said. “I would like to present an alternative, in which the authorities are effective and respond to the people’s interests.”
December 31, 2003 at 09:31 PM in Russia | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
UK feared Americans would invade Gulf during 1973 oil crisis
Heath feared US planned to invade Gulf
Owen Bowcott
Thursday January 1, 2004
The Guardian
Ted Heath's government feared - at the height of the 1973 oil crisis - that the White House was planning to invade Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to secure fuel supplies, according to Downing Street files released today.
Suspicions about Richard Nixon's administration as it struggled to shake free from the Watergate scandal, the documents show, were reinforced when the prime minister was only belatedly informed of a worldwide nuclear alert declared by the US.
The files, handed over to the National Archive in Kew under the 30-year rule, expose a disturbing and acrimonious episode in "the special relationship" between London and Washington.
In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war, America blamed Britain for failing to open its military bases. The defeated Arab nations then imposed an oil embargo on the west.
The US defence secretary, James Schlesinger, told Britain's ambassador in Washington, Lord Cromer, "it was no longer obvious to him that the US could not use force".
Schlesinger had already clashed with Lord Carrington, the British defence secretary. The ambassador's interview was no more amicable. "Couthness is not Schlesinger's strong point," he said in a cable to London. "One or two of his remarks bordered on the offensive."
But it was the substance of Schlesinger's remarks which set alarm bells ringing. "[One] outcome of the Middle East crisis," he told Lord Cromer, "was the [sight] of industrialised nations being continuously submitted to [the] whims of under-populated, under-developed countries, particularly [those in the] Middle East.
"Schlesinger did not draw any specific conclusion from this but the unspoken assumption came through ... that it might not ... be possible to rule out a more direct application of military force".
A week later, in mid-November, Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state, warned that if the Arab oil embargo continued unreasonably and in definitely, America would have to decide what counter-measures were necessary.
In the grip of an international security crisis, Heath commissioned a report - titled Middle East: Possible Use of Force by the United States - from Percy Cradock of the joint intelligence committee.
The 22-page survey, delivered to the prime minister in December, warned that the most likely US military action was the seizure of oil-producing areas. Such a move might be triggered by a resumption of the Arab/Israeli war and protracted oil sanctions.
"The United States might consider it could not tolerate a situation in which the US and its allies were at the mercy of a small group of unreasonable countries. We believe the American preference would be for a rapid operation conducted by themselves to seize oilfields ... The force required for the initial operation would be of the order of two brigades, one for Saudi operation, one for Kuwait and possibly a third for Abu Dhabi.
"The build-up would require the presence of a substantial US naval force in the Indian Ocean, considerably more than the present force. After the initial assaults ... two [extra] divisions could be flown in from the USA."
British bases such as that at Diego Garcia would probably have to be used, Cradock observed. The Russians might well fly troops into the region to defend the Arabs. US/Soviet confrontations were unlikely but could not be ruled out.
"The greatest risk of such confrontations in the Gulf would probably arise in Kuwait where the Iraqis, with Soviet backing, might be tempted to intervene." Nato allies, including Britain, would be pressed to provide political and military support.
During the Yom Kippur war, in October 1973, Schlesinger had told Carrington that: "The Americans had paid Ł14m for facilities in Diego Garcia and might be expected to be allowed to use them."
But it was the full-scale nuclear alert - declared on October 25 that year, supposedly in response to Soviet fleet movements in the eastern Mediterranean - which most infuriated Ted Heath.
The prime minister, the documents reveal, only learnt about it from news agency reports while in the Commons.
"Personally," he told his private secretary Lord Bridges, "I fail to see how any initiative, threatened or real, by the Soviet leadership required such a worldwide nuclear alert.
"We have to face the fact that the American action has done immense harm, both to this country and worldwide.
December 31, 2003 at 09:26 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Khadr denies `spy' deal
TheStar.com - Khadr denies `spy' deal
Didn't lead U.S. to father, contacts
Canadian released from Guantanamo
MICHELLE SHEPHARD
STAFF REPORTER
Abdurahman Khadr was released from the American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in return for his co-operation in leading U.S. intelligence officers to his father and associates, according to Canadian government sources.
U.S. intelligence says Ahmed Said Khadr has Al Qaeda connections and raises funds for the terrorist network; they have been searching for him since 2001.
Sources told the Star the deal was made with Abdurahman Khadr, 21, without the knowledge of the Canadian government, but Khadr did not uphold his side of the agreement.
Last night, Khadr vehemently denied these claims and said U.S. authorities told him he was released because they had no evidence linking him to any terrorist activity.
"There was no deal," he said of the allegation he was supposed to lead the Americans to his father.
"Why are they saying this now? If they say it's true, why didn't they come forward with this when I first came back (to Canada)?"
The story of Khadr's release made national headlines last month when his grandmother and Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati held a news conference to say the young Canadian citizen was stranded abroad and had been denied Canadian assistance in Pakistan and Turkey when he tried to return home.
Canadian officials said at the time that if he was turned away from the embassies in Islamabad or Ankara, it was by local guards, not embassy officials.
One week after the news conference, Khadr arrived in Toronto, accompanied by an embassy official from Sarajevo.
He said American authorities had dropped him in Afghanistan where they left him without money or identification, and he was left to make his way through three countries before arriving in Sarajevo.
Khadr also admitted, upon his return, that he had trained at an "Al Qaeda-related" camp as a teenager.
And he told reporters that he believed his father was dead, killed at the beginning of October.
"Do you think I could lead them to my father when he was killed on Oct. 2?" Khadr said yesterday.
"I was released by mid-October. There was no deal (with American authorities)."
The Pentagon, however, has said Khadr was released in July, not October, a discrepancy that has never been resolved.
Pakistani authorities have never confirmed the death of Khadr's father — known as "Al Kanadi," the Canadian — or that of his 14-year-old brother, Karim, both rumoured to have been killed in October.
A spokesperson with the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa said yesterday Canada has not received official confirmation of the elder Khadr's death.
In an effort to determine if the two are dead or are being detained, Khadr's wife and daughter announced at an Islamabad press conference yesterday that they'd launched a lawsuit in Pakistan's Supreme Court seeking information on the men.
Lawyer Hashmat Ali Habib said he had filed the petition on behalf of Ahmed Said Khadr's wife Maha Elsamnah, of Scarborough, and his daughter Zaynab Khadr, 24, requesting that the women be allowed to meet their missing family members if they were being held, so they could arrange legal assistance.
But the news conference, at Habib's home in Islamabad, was interrupted by local officials and uniformed and plainclothes officers.
They halted the media briefing and began seizing microphones and documents from reporters.
"They came in and tried to persuade everyone to leave," Zaynab said in a telephone interview with the Star last night.
Reporters protesting the intrusion were told by Islamabad district administration official Asadullah Faiz:
"I have been sent by higher authorities to stop this press conference. We have secret information that there is some relation with Al Qaeda.
"This family and some other people living with the family have very close relations with Al Qaeda," Faiz said, adding that their lawyer was also considered a suspect.
Zaynab said yesterday her family has been wrongly accused.
Once authorities arrested her brothers, the female members of the Khadr family were forced to leave their home in Kabul and hide in the mountains in Pakistan, helped by local people who offered them shelter and food. "It's a really tough life," Zaynab said yesterday. "We're far from any civilization, away from electricity, water. We saw what happened to my dad and brothers, though, so it didn't seem like we had much choice."
Habib, the family lawyer, said yesterday that Khadr's father went missing in Pakistan's northwest in early October.
"It is not clear whether Ahmed Said Khadr and his son Abdul Karim, both Canadian Arab Muslims doing charity work in South Waziristan, were killed or arrested by authorities in an operation," Habib said yesterday.
On Oct. 2, eight people were killed when Pakistani commandos laid siege to a suspected Al Qaeda hideout in mud-walled tribal homes in the South Waziristan district bordering Afghanistan; 18 were arrested.
Pakistani, Canadian and U.S. officials claim they do not know the whereabouts of the elder Khadr and his youngest son.
One of the Khadr sons, 17-year-old Omar, is still being held at Guantanamo, accused of killing an American medic during a gun battle in Afghanistan.
December 31, 2003 at 05:15 AM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Syria 'made millions' selling arms to Iraq
By Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor
SENIOR figures in the Syrian regime were accused yesterday of making millions of pounds by illegally supplying Iraq with weapons in the run-up to the US-led invasion.
According to 800 pages of documents collected by German and American journalists from the offices of an Iraqi company in Baghdad, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was far more deeply involved in helping Saddam Hussein to break a United Nations arms embargo than was previously suspected.
The allegations are likely to increase pressure on a country already facing sanctions from Washington to force it to stop supporting militant groups, dismantle its chemical and biological weapons programmes and stop fighters crossing into Iraq to attack coalition troops.
The evidence against the Syrians is in contracts, shipping manifests and other commercial records found at the offices of the Al Bashair Trading Co, the largest of several front companies used by Iraq to circumvent more than a decade of UN sanctions.
The contracts include the sale of 1,000 Russian-built heavy machine guns and 20 million rounds of ammunition for assault rifles; 380 engines for SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles made by the Polish company Evax; telecommunications equipment used for air defence from the South Korean company Armitel; US-made surveillance equipment sold by the Russian company Millenium, and 20 tank barrels from STO in Slovenia.
The deals were made through SES International, a Syrian firm based in Damascus which is run by leading figures in the ruling Baath Party.
The documents, which were found by Stern magazine and translated by the Los Angeles Times, showed that SES International signed scores of contracts worth tens of millions of pounds for arms and defence equipment over the past three years. The general manager is Asef Isa Shaleesh, a cousin of President al-Assad. Another relative, Major General Dhu Himma Shaleesh, the head of the elite presidential security corps, is said to have held a stake.
According to the files, Mr Shaleesh made at least four visits to Baghdad between the summer of 2001 and 2002 and was involved in 50 arms deals.
The Foreign Ministry in Damascus said yesterday that it was aware of the allegations but did not want to comment. The issue is likely to be taken up by Margaret Scoby, the newly appointed US ambassador to Damascus.
December 31, 2003 at 04:42 AM in Syria | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Inside a group caught between three powers
Inside a group caught between three powers | csmonitor.com
Mujahideen-e Khalq, an Iraq-based group founded to fight Iran's regime, may be expelled from its base this week.
By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
TEHRAN, IRAN - The day Masumeh Roshan had been praying for finally came in late September, when the Iranian mother traveled to Iraq to visit her only son - a teenager she says was lured into ties with terrorism.
But the joyful reunion soon dissolved into tears at Ashraf Camp, where US troops are guarding some 3,800 militants of the Mujahideen-e Khalq Organization (MKO) - the only armed opposition to the ruling clerics of Iran.
Ms. Roshan's militant son, they said, could not leave.
The case of those holed up in Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad, remains a quirky piece of unfinished business left over from the American campaign to oust Saddam Hussein. It continues to leave a trail of broken lives.
Officially, both the US and Iran label the MKO a terrorist group. The US-appointed Iraq Governing Council concurs: Citing the "black history of this terrorist organization" and its years of working closely with Mr. Hussein, it has ordered the expulsion of the MKO from Iraq by the end of this year.
But the MKO's fate is unclear. While the Iraqis want it disbanded, the politically savvy group still has support among some congressmen and Pentagon officials, who see it as a potential tool against Iran, a country which President Bush calls part of an "axis of evil."
Some MKO tips have led to recent revelations about key aspects of Iran's clandestine nuclear program, though many others have proven unreliable. Long a diplomatic hot potato - which Tehran has offered to solve, by exchanging MKO militants for Al Qaeda players now in Iran - the MKO continues to complicate US-Iran-Iraq relations.
Lives on the line
But for those rank-and-file members trying to escape MKO control, resolving the status issue is an urgent need. Ms. Roshan says she hardly recognized the gaunt visage of her 17-year-old boy, Majid Amini, at Ashraf Camp.
"He pulled my ear to his lips, and said: 'Don't cry; be sure that I will come with you. I can't stay here; they are not human beings,' " Roshan recalls, trying to control her trembling voice.
But Mr. Amini - a Karate kid with an orange belt, who his parents say was recruited to join the MKO in Tehran with promises of completing two school grades in one year and gaining a place in college - was forced to remain behind.
"He took his uniform off, stamped on it, and shouted: 'I can't go back! My life will be in danger!' " Roshan recalls during an interview in Tehran. MKO officers and US troops insisted the young man stay, and Roshan climbed alone onto the bus home. "I was like a dead person," she says.
The voices of former MKO militants give a rare glimpse inside a group they say demands a cult-like control over members, practices Mao-style self-denunciations, and requires worship of husband-and-wife leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi.
Recruited from the United States and Europe, or even drawn directly from Iranians held in Iraqi prisoner-of-war camps and jails, the former fighters describe a high level of fear, and speak of their own awakening - and freedom from the MKO's grip - as if it's an epiphany.
The US State Department lists the MKO as a terrorist group that conducted assassinations against American citizens in the 1970s - and was behind bombings and killings of hundreds of members of the Iranian regime starting in the early 1980s.
By one count, after the recent invasion of Iraq, the MKO surrendered to US troops 300 tanks, 250 armored personnel carriers, 250 artillery pieces, and 10,000 small arms. Still, the group is reported to be able to continue antiregime broadcasts into Iran.
The Pentagon - after bombing MKO camps in Iraq in the first stages of the invasion - quickly worked out a truce with the group some civilian hawks in the Pentagon believe should be supported and turned into a US tool of opposition against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Militants who were once ready to die for the MKO, however, now have some advice for those who may want to apply the Afghan model to Iran by using the Mujahideen in the same way the Northern Alliance was used against the Taliban.
"I don't think the US can take advantage of this group," says Arash Sametipour, a former MKO militant recruited in the US. He survived his own attempts to kill himself with cyanide capsules and a hand grenade that blew away his right hand after botching an assassination attempt in Tehran in early 2000.
"When we were on clean-up duty [at Ashraf Camp], at 7 a.m. they played songs with words like 'At the end of the street, the Mujahideen is waiting - Yankee get out!' " recalls Mr. Sametipour, who speaks rapid-fire English with an American accent. He remains in prison in Iran, where he was made available at the request of the Monitor. "This organization does not like the US. It is a mixture of Mao and Marxism, and [leader Massoud] Rajavi acts like Stalin."
Ostensibly under US guard, the MKO still keeps its small arms. US officials said in November they were being screened for war crimes and terrorism. The Pentagon denies reports that the militants are able to freely roam or conduct attacks.
Reacting to the expulsion order earlier this month, the MKO claimed that the "vast majority of the Iraqi people" support their presence, and that the decision to shut them down "merely reflects the fantasies and illusions of the mullah's regime, which regards ... [us] as the biggest obstacle to its export of fundamentalism ... and theocratic dictatorship in Iraq."
MKO representatives could not be contacted for further comment. Both office and cellphone lines in Washington have been disconnected. The MKO office in Paris was unable to provide contact details for two senior officials it said were traveling in Europe.
Western diplomats and analysts agree that the MKO has very little support inside Iran itself. Though many Iranians take issue with their clerical rulers, MKO members are widely seen to be traitors, as they fought alongside Iraqi troops against Iran in the 1980s.
Most Iraqis, too, have little time for the MKO, which helped Hussein's security forces brutally put down the Kurdish uprising after the Gulf War in 1991, and helped Baghdad quell Shiite unrest in 1999. The group, however, said in a Dec. 11 statement that "throughout its 17 years in Iraq," it had "never" interfered in Iraq's internal affairs.
Last summer, the US State Department outlawed several MKO-affiliated groups in the US. In June, France arrested 150 activists, including self-declared "president-elect" Maryam Rajavi.
The crackdowns sparked some to publicly commit suicide by setting themselves alight - a type of protest that some suggest could be repeated if the MKO is forced out of Iraq.
Within days of the expulsion order, lawyers for the MKO - arguing that expulsion would violate the laws of war - are reported to have sent letters to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others, asking the Pentagon to overrule the move.
A senior Pentagon official told the Monitor Tuesday that the US was exploring the option of sending former MKO members to a country other than Iran.
"They ought to be vetted," he said, "and anyone who is a criminal deserves to be punished somehow. [But] they don't have to go back [to Iran]. If they are not guilty of crimes there are various places they could go."
Bargaining chip
The MKO has already turned into a bargaining chip, Tehran has floated a hand over of the MKO leadership by the US to Iran, in exchange for senior Al Qaeda leaders now in Iran. And the interim government in Iraq is not alone in trying to disband the MKO. Former members now back in Iran run an agency called the Nejat "Freedom" Committee, which aims to reunite hundreds of Iranian families with MKO militants.
An amnesty offer from President Mohamed Khatami - coupled with relatively soft treatment of recently captured MKO operatives and the expulsion deadline - is sparking new hope. In Geneva earlier this month, Mr. Khatami said Iran was ready to accept MKO fighters who "are in Iraq and regret" past acts. "We will welcome them and judge them according to the law," he said.
That's a sweeping change from the early 1980s and 1988, when the hunt for MKO sympathizers and other dissidents resulted in thousands of executions. In the early 1990s, Iranian intelligence agents were implicated in a series of assassinations of MKO chiefs across Europe.
"The first thing we must do is tell them: 'You are called terrorists all over the world, even by the US, and you can't go anywhere,'" says Hora Shalchi, a diminutive former operative who carried out two mortar attacks in Tehran and served prison time, before joining Nejat. "The only place you will be welcome is home, in Iran."
Nejat members and Camp Ashraf veterans - some still in prison in Iran - speak of a wish to "rescue" MKO members from the Iraq camps. Most activists, they contend, are "prisoners" of the organization with little access to news from the outside world, who are told they will be tortured and killed if they return to Iran.
But the message of a dozen former militants interviewed for this article - often for several hours each, half of them still imprisoned by Iran's Revolutionary Court - is that the MKO is no longer deemed a critical threat by the Iranian regime.
And so brutal treatment of the past has given way to a new strategy.
The path that led many away from the MKO is often similar to that of Ms. Shalchi, an unlikely woman attacker with brown eyes and carefully trimmed eyebrows.
She joined the MKO in 1996, because her parents were "loyal" supporters. She soon found herself at Camp Ashraf, as part of a special squad that she says trained in isolation for "terror operations."
Shalchi returned to Iran in the spring of 2001, crossing the border on foot "like a pregnant woman" with five 60mm mortar rounds, half a mortar launch tube, and a Colt .45 pistol tucked under her chador-and cyanide tablets ready under her tongue. Her female MKO teammate carried three more mortars, and the other half of the launch tube.
Their target was a sprawling military base in Tehran. In the getaway car, unaware of the operation, were Shalchi's parents, her young brother, and a girl.
"I was so brainwashed, I took my 6-year-old daughter with me," Shalchi recalls. "I didn't think that she could be the first person to be hurt."
With hands shaking nervously, Shalchi blasted the mortars, but missed the target. The young women were then chased down by a crowd. Shalchi fired her gun to scare off a young man, and found out later she had wounded him in the shoulder.
Echoing the experience of several captured MKO fighters, her first doubts came in Tehran. "We were told [by the MKO]: 'Any bullet you shoot, [Iranians] will applaud you. All of the people really support you,' " Shalchi says. "But we weren't accepted by anybody. There was no support. They told us a lot of lies."
Then, back in Iraq, Shalchi says her eyes were opened further. She was admonished for not killing the boy. "I was really surprised. I thought there was no reason to kill an ordinary person," Shalchi says. "Our objective was to fight the [Iranian] military forces."
Life is not easy in Camp Ashraf for militants who raise questions, a trait of those recruited in the US. Arash Sametipour - the failed assassin who tried to kill himself - traveled from the Northern Virginia Community College to Iraq, and suffered from the daily self-criticism.
"They beat me down so much, after six months it worked - I became MKO in my mind," says Sametipour, a baby-faced inmate wearing the baggy gray-blue garb of Iran's prisons, imprinted with the scales of justice. "When you face such an organization, you think: 'All the problems are myself; the organization is clean.' If you have a question, it has an answer, and it's only me who doesn't understand."
Sametipour expected to die in custody. But instead he was interrogated, and given prison time that he says includes newspapers, TV, and even a call home to his parents in the US.
"What I saw were very logical interrogations.... They did not look at us as enemies, but as people who need help," Sametipour says. "They told us: 'You are not a threat to our government.'"
From Boston to Iraq
Also arriving from America was Mohamed Akbarin, who had been hitchhiking around the US and studying mechanical engineering at Boston's Northeastern University, when he joined the MKO in the mid-1980s.
Because he spoke English, Mr. Akbarin was chosen as a helicopter pilot, helped orchestrate trips for foreign journalists, and later - after an unsuccessful escape attempt - spent time in Iraqi and MKO jails.
He will never forget one incident in the mid-1990s, that told him the reality of fear for some MKO cadres. "I know what happens when you say: 'I want to leave, ' " Akbarin says. One man was accused of trying to escape, and Akbarin saw him that day. "They found him, beat him up, and poured gas on him, as though they were going to burn him."
As an organizer of "guest" visits to Ashraf Camp, Akbarin says he saw deception tactics firsthand. When the MKO mounted large military parades, for example, Iraqi helicopters were used.
"We painted our symbol across Iraqi ones, and when it was done, we would wash it off or repaint it," Akbarin says. To boost troop strength, fighters - including him - would parade past two or three times.
Akbarin was not the only MKO fighter to notice the gap between fact and fiction. Babak Amin crossed to Iran in 2001 and carried out nine attacks aimed at disrupting Iran's elections.
Today Mr. Amin is serving a 10-year sentence in Tehran's Evin prison. But as he sent reports of his 2001 attacks back to Iraq using a satellite phone, he was surprised to see how embellished his exploits became on MKO websites.
In one case, he says he fired three small rifle grenades, which landed innocuously in the yard of a quasi-government building. On the Web, the attack was turned into a three-pronged attack with several groups of mujahideen, using RPGs and grenades.
In another case, Amin reported injuring one person during a shootout near the Defense Ministry. The MKO declared that 10 of Iran's security forces were killed.
"From the first day I came back to Iran after 15 years, we were facing exactly the opposite of what we were told by the [MKO]," says Amin, whose round face and moustache fit a European businessman more than a terrorist. "People are really brainwashed."
That was also the feeling of Mohsen Hashemi, even though he and his family had long supported the MKO and even produced three "martyrs" who died for the cause. Mr. Hashemi worked as an MKO agent in Iran for years.
But then he was brought to Iraq. As soon as he arrived, Hashemi was jailed for 2-1/2 months and doubts began to grow. Then he saw political videotapes in which, he says, MKO leader Rajavi "compared himself with Jesus and God, and claimed he was the 12th imam of Shiite Islam who had returned."
Hashemi says he finally had a breakdown after attending his first speech with Rajavi. He came out of the hall, "sat in the toilet and cried for 15 minutes," he says. "I realized I made such a mistake, to work so many years for this Dracula."
"The most important part of the organization has collapsed - all that is left is the fear," says Hashemi. "They are afraid to come back here."
• Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report from Washington
December 31, 2003 at 04:37 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Popular Putin still a cipher to Russians
ajc.com | News | Popular Putin still a cipher to Russians
Former KBG chief has 80% backing as election nears
By REBECCA SANTANA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has become famous for his Mona Lisa half-smile -- a slight lifting of the lips that never breaks into a grin and seems to mask some inner thoughts.
Even after his four years in office, many still wonder what's behind the smile. As his approval ratings hover at about 80 percent and he seeks a second term in the March 14 presidential election, they're also curious about what he has in store for the next four years.
Some see an authoritarian leader bent on consolidating power, silencing critics, plowing ahead with a vicious war in Russia's breakaway region of Chechnya, and essentially killing Russian democracy.
"He has no concept other than the absolutely unprincipled tactic: to stay in power at any costs," said Yelena Tregubova, who wrote a kiss-and-tell book about her years in the Kremlin press corps.
But others see a president who inherited a country in chaos from Boris Yeltsin, one with Chechen fighters on its southern border, crumbling infrastructure, a lower international reputation, and rich businessmen calling the shots. They believe Putin guided Russia to stability and will turn it into a prosperous democracy.
If Russia is becoming more democratic, it's surprising it is happening under the leadership of a man who worked in the KGB. Putin served for 16 years in the Russian intelligence agency and was so eager to join that, as recounted in his autobiography, "First Person," he volunteered while still in high school. He left the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed, working briefly as a taxi driver before moving into government work and rising to head the FSB, the successor to the KGB. After serving as prime minister, he became president when the ailing Yeltsin stepped down.
He won support with his tough stance on Chechnya, and fans say he stopped a full-scale war in the North Caucasus by Chechen fighters aided and funded by Islamic militants.
But four years later, the war is no closer to resolution. No major Chechen rebel leaders have been captured. And rebel-backed suicide bomb attacks, even in the heart of Moscow, have killed civilians.
One of Putin's first tasks as president was to consolidate power. Under Yeltsin, bosses of regional territories had become independent to the point of refusing to pay taxes to Moscow. Putin stripped away their immunity from prosecution and cut the old bosses out of the loop by creating seven supergovernors directly responsible to him.
He also began a crusade against so-called oligarchs, leading businessmen who became wealthy through murky privatization deals in the mid-'90s. During the Yeltsin years, they used money to wield political power. But under Putin most became law-abiding taxpayers. Those who didn't went into exile.
But this year, the anti-oligarch campaign took an alarming turn. The Kremlin launched an attack against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, who had been lauded for bringing his oil company, Yukos, up to Western standards of accountability and transparency and for helping Russia clean up its image abroad. He was arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud.
The arrest has worried international investors, who wonder whether there will be attacks on other businesses and oligarchs. It also provided Putin's critics with a perfect example of how, in their view, he uses the legal system and other "administrative resources" to crush political opposition. Khodorkovsky had been funding opposition parties.
Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, said Putin and his supporters saw Khodorkovsky as a threat to them and the country.
Describing the mind-set of Putin and his inner circle, Markov said they believe "this is a guy who is a problem for the country. These people took property, and now they want to take power and destroy our country."
The Russian president also sought to rein in the media, specifically by bringing all national TV stations under Kremlin control. The Chechen war, the Khodorkovsky campaign and Putin's political opponents are all taboo subjects on these stations.
"There is not a single chief editor left in Moscow who would refuse a telephone request by . . . presidential press secretary [Alexei] Gromov not to publish a story," Tregubova said.
But these criticisms don't seem to affect Putin's popularity with the people. Some have called him the "Teflon President" for his ability to emerge with his popularity intact from catastrophes such as the 2002 hostage crisis in Moscow, in which at least 129 people died during a bungled rescue, or the sinking of the Russian navy's Kursk submarine in 2000.
Putin has also been lucky. In 1998, before he came to office, oil prices hovered at around $13 a barrel. But for most of his term, prices have been in the high 20s.
For Russia, whose economy is based on oil and natural gas exports, this means that the government has been able to pay pensions and wages on time, as well as make loan payments to international creditors.
Economic analysts credit Putin with helping the economy along by passing much needed reforms such as allowing land to be bought and sold for the first time since the czars ruled.
With Putin almost sure to win a second term, Russians are wondering: What next?
Both his critics and his admirers agree that Putin would like to continue with his economic reforms, which are geared toward weaning the country off its dependence on revenues from oil and natural gas exports.
But to make Russia more efficient and investor-friendly -- not to mention a better place to live -- he'll face some big obstacles, such as ridding the country of corruption and creating independent rule of law.
On the question of strengthening democracy, the jury is still out.
December 31, 2003 at 03:09 AM in Russia | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Syria sold weapons to Saddam
Scotsman.com News - Top Stories - Syria sold weapons to Saddam
JASON BEATTIE
SYRIA repeatedly breached United Nations embargoes to supply Iraq with arms and military hardware in the run-up to the coalition's invasion in March, it was reported yesterday.
A Syrian company with close connections to the ruling regime in Damascus funnelled illicit components for surface-to-air missiles, telecommunications equipment and small arms to Saddam Hussein between 2002 and 2003, the Los Angeles Times has revealed.
The private firm SES International was the main channel for the movement of illegal arms to Baghdad.
The company signed contracts to supply millions of dollars in equipment to the Iraqi military, including machine guns and other light weaponry now being used in insurgent action against United States and British forces overseeing reconstruction work.
Last night, the Foreign Office gave warning that it was examining the evidence documented by the Los Angeles Times and was prepared to raise concerns with Syria if appropriate.
The documents unearthed in Iraq also reveal that senior officials in the Syrian government assisted SES in importing a ship full of hardware destined for the Iraqi military.
At the height of the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, accused the Syrian regime of allowing the shipment of night-vision goggles and other military supplies to Iraq.
At the time, the Syrians said Mr Rumsfeld’s remarks were unfounded and irresponsible. But files unearthed in the Baghdad office of the Al Bashair Trading Company reveal SES signed more than 50 contracts with Baghdad firms as Saddam desperately tried to reinforce his military operation ahead of the invasion.
Among the successful deals were the delivery of 1,000 heavy machine guns and up to 20 million bullets for assault rifles. The documents – 800 pages of signed contracts, export papers, bank deposits and minutes of meetings – offer proof for the first time of the relationship between several states and
the illegal arms trade.
Although there is no evidence of dealings in weapons of mass destruction,
the documents show how Syria, North Korea and Iraq were involved to differing extents in the illegal arms trade. Tony Blair argued that one of the main justifications for action in Iraq was the potentially catastrophic consequences of an alliance between rogue states with weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism.
The newspaper found that a Polish company signed four contracts with Iraq and successfully shipped hundreds of surface-to-air Volga/SA-2 missile engines to Baghdad through Syria.
In addition, a Russian company signed a Ł4.96 million contract in September 2002 to supply mostly US-made communications and surveillance gear to Iraq’s intelligence service.
The company’s general manager in Moscow later wrote to suggest "the preparation of a sham contract" to deceive weapons inspectors, documents show. And a Slovenian state owned company shipped 20 large battle-tank barrels identified as "steel tubes" to SES in February 2002. Overall, its secret contract called for delivering 175 tank barrels to Iraq. Two North Korean officials also met the head of Al Bashair at SES offices in Damascus month before the war to discuss Iraq’s payment of Ł5.63 million for "major components" for ballistic missiles. These revelations and others like them could place a question mark over Mr Blair’s approach to Syria. The Prime Minister has attempted to win round the Syrian president, Bashir Assad, through diplomacy, in contrast to the White House, which has taken a more aggressive approach. No-one from the Syrian embassy in London was available to comment.
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said any provision of military equipment to Iraq would be a serious breach of the sanctions regime. Syria should take seriously its responsibility that sanctions are not violated, the spokeswoman added, saying:
"We have raised previous violations of sanctions with the countries concerned and we will consider any evidence presented in this respect and raise concerns again if appropriate."
Sir Timothy Garden, from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, said the revelations of the illicit trading fitted with previous intelligence about the Syrian-Iraq axis.
"I would have expected there to have been trading relations [between Iraq and Syria] which were covert. There were both pariah regimes and they tend to operate together," he said. "It may be things were going without the Syrian government being directly involved but without it trying that much to stop it."
December 31, 2003 at 02:59 AM in Iraq, Syria | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Assassination emerges as al-Qaeda's new tactic
By Daniel McGrory
THE attempted murders of Pakistan's President and a Saudi general in the past week appear to show that al-Qaeda is turning to assassination as a key weapon, security chiefs believe.
While there are warnings of imminent attacks on aircraft and other elaborate terrorist plots that could kill hundreds, security chiefs believe that al-Qaeda is increasingly targeting specific figures.
The US authorities are investigating whether al-Qaeda had a hand in the two recent attempts to blow up Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator in Baghdad.
A roadside bomb was detonated as his convoy left Baghdad airport earlier this month. He revealed that it was the second attempt on his life.
President Musharraf escaped unhurt last week when suicide bombers in cars packed with explosives rammed his motorcade at a petrol station near his offices in Rawalpindi.
Fifteen people, including the two attackers and four policemen, were killed and 45 injured. It was the second attempt to kill the Pakistani leader in the past fortnight.
Military commanders in Islamabad have blamed al-Qaeda. The group has also been accused of being behind at least two recent attempts to murder President Karzai of Afghanistan.
It was only after another botched assassination, in Riyadh on Monday, that the Saudi authorities disclosed that the country’s top counter-terrorism official had been shot and wounded. Major-General Abdelaziz al-Huweirini, who is third in command of the Interior Ministry, is said to have been working closely with CIA agents in Riyadh, and was the target of an assassination attempt this month.
In Monday’s attack, the target, another senior figure in the Interior Ministry who is closely linked to the ruling Royal Family, had just left his car when the bomb exploded.
The device was not designed to cause indiscriminate deaths. Until now the preferred tactic for al-Qaeda militants has been to cause as many casualties as possible with a suicide attack on a spectacular target.
One Western intelligence official said: “Al-Qaeda tacticians realise that targeted assassination can seriously damage its opponents by removing key figures or making high-profile characters change their travel plans or their public appearances.”
With America facing a presidential election in 2004, the prospect of al-Qaeda killers operating in the US will cause further concern. Some of al-Qaeda’s western recruits, now in US custody, told how they were schooled in the tactics of how to assassinate public figures during their training at camps in Afghanistan.
Iraqi and US officials are investigating reports that al-Qaeda trained extremists helped to plan the bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy.
Turkish investigators are questioning extremists arrested after the bombing of the British Consulate in Istanbul last month after claims that al-Qaeda had a part in the attacks. One was directed at an office of Roger Short, the Consul-General, who was killed in the bombing.
December 31, 2003 at 02:57 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 30, 2003
UK's peak population is forecast to be 65m - but too few will be working
John Carvel, social affairs editor
Friday December 19, 2003
The Guardian
The UK population will increase more rapidly than previously expected and peak at more than 65 million in 2051, according to forecasts yesterday from the government.
But almost all the growth will be among older people and the working-age population will start to decline within the next 20 years, leaving the country increasingly dependent on immigrants to maintain its economic vitality.
The projections - based on higher estimates of life expectancy agreed by the four chief statisticians for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - were seized on by Beverley Hughes, the Home Office minister, as justification for a more welcoming approach to inward migration.
"Immigration is one part of ensuring the continued success of the UK economy and supporting an ageing population. No modern economy can afford to be anti-immigration," she said.
The UK population is predicted to increase by 5.6 million to 64.8 million in 2031. This is 1.2 million more than an estimate last year, which used preliminary information from the 2001 census.
The main reason for the change is a fresh assumption about future life expectancy, adding 18 months to previous estimates. It is now forecast that life expectancy by 2031 will rise to 81 years for men and 84.9 years for women.
More tentatively, the statisticians forecast that the UK population will continue to rise to 65.4 million in 2051, before declining gradually to 64.8 million in 2071.
But this overall picture masks different patterns in the constituent countries of the UK. The population of Scotland is expected to decline continuously from 5 million in 2002 to 4.5 million in 2041. The numbers in Wales and Northern Ireland are projected to peak in 2031 at 3.1 million and 1.8 million respectively. Implicit in these forecasts is a huge change in generational patterns. The number of children under 16 is projected to fall by 7.4% from 11.8 million in 2002 to just below 11 million in 2014. It will then rise slowly until the late 2020s when it looks likely to stabilise below 11.2 million.
The number of people of working age is projected to rise by 3.5% from 36.6 million in 2002 to 37.8 million in 2011. Allowing for the planned change in women's state pension age from 60 to 65 between 2010 and 2020, the working-age population will increase further to 39.4 million by 2021 and then start to fall. Unless more people stay in employment after the traditional retirement age, the country will lose about 1 million workers over the 10 years to 2031.
The number of people of state pensionable age is projected to increase by 11.9% from 10.9 million in 2002 to 12.2 million in 2011. Allowing for the change in women's state pension age, the pensionable population will then rise more slowly, reaching 12.7 million by 2021. Thereafter growth will accelerate and the number will reach 15.2 million by 2031, eventually peaking at more than 17 million in about 60 years' time.
These projections suggest a big change in the balance between generations. In 2002 there were about 850,000 more children than pensioners. From 2007 pensioners will be in the majority and by 2031 they will exceed the number of children by about 4 million.
Ms Hughes said: "These figures indicate that the UK population is not projected to increase indefinitely. Our policy of a regulated but flexible system of managed, legal migration is right. Industries like the food processing and hospitality sectors who cannot recruit resident workers need migrants to fill vacancies, whilst highly skilled migrants such as engineers and scientists bring new innovations and capital to the UK."
December 30, 2003 at 01:13 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
December 29, 2003
KGB influence still felt in Russia
KGB influence still felt in Russia | csmonitor.com
At all levels of the Russian government, former military and security agents hold key positions, bringing with them authoritarian methods, experts say.
By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
MOSCOW - Olga Kryshtanovskaya is a sociologist who dances with wolves. For more than a decade she's been Russia's premier expert on the political, business, and security elites.
But even Ms. Kryshtanovskaya says she's alarmed by her own recent findings. Since Vladimir Putin came to power four years ago, she's been tracking a dramatic influx into government of siloviki - people from the military, the former Soviet KGB, and other security services - bringing with them statist ideology, authoritarian methods, and a drill-sergeant's contempt for civilian sensibilities.
PUTIN POWER: Russian President Vladimir Putin was warmly greeted by officials in Moscow on the Day of Russia in June. Putin's government is filled with siloviki, or former military and security agents, dedicated to increasing state power.
MISHA JAPARIDZE/AP/FILE
"Whereas in the past people from security backgrounds generally did jobs connected with state security functions," Kryshtanovskaya says, "you now find them holding high office in just about every ministry and government agency."
While many experts are concerned at the Putin-era invasion of siloviki into the corridors of power, Kryshtanovskaya has generated hard data. By her tally, about 60 percent of the inner circle around Mr. Putin, himself a former KGB officer, are ex-military and security people. About a third of government functionaries are siloviki, as are 70 percent of the staffs working for the Kremlin's seven regional emissaries.
Moreover, Kryshtanovskaya says that security men are deliberately "parachuted" into high government posts in a manner that resembles the Stalinist system of assigning commissars, or party watchdogs, to keep tabs on professional managers whose political loyalties may be suspect. For instance, Justice Minister Yury Chaika has four deputies who are siloviki, Trade and Economic Development Minister German Greff has three, and Communications Minister Leonid Raimon has three. "Even the minister of press, Mikhail Lesin, has an FSB general as his deputy," she says. "Just about every cabinet minister has at least one."
This is not the first time Kryshtanovskaya, who founded the Elite Studies Unit at Russia's Institute of Sociology in 1991, has sounded the alarm about dangerous shifts at the summit of Russian society. A decade ago her data warned that former communist functionaries had moved into business, banking, and politics - a trend that she said could inhibit the growth of institutions of democracy and market economics. Now, she says, the flow of siloviki into government portends "the emergence of tough, authoritarian politics."
The policeman's hand is already being felt in the tightening grip on the media, the massive deployment of "administrative resources" to back pro-Kremlin parties in elections, and the recent arrest of "disloyal" oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Also, Russia's Education Ministry recently banned a previously approved history textbook because the latest update included an exercise asking students to debate whether Putin had established an authoritarian regime in Russia. In a meeting with historians, Putin defended the order, saying: "Textbooks ... must not provide grounds for new political infighting. They should provide historical facts and [inculcate] a sense of pride among the youth in their history and country."
Another indirect sign of the siloviki's rising influence is a campaign by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzkhov to evict hundreds of residents from two downtown areas to provide housing and office space for the FSB, the successor to the KGB. A Moscow government official, who asked not to be named, says the current, mainly elderly, tenants will be involuntarily relocated to the suburbs, and about 20 percent of the redeveloped properties - choice locations near FSB headquarters on Lubyanka Square - turned over to the security agency.
"The influx of siloviki into government has already had a negative impact on democracy," says Viktor Kremeniuk, deputy director of the Institute for USA-Canada Studies in Moscow. "These are people who feel that democratic rules and transparency interfere with their mission to restore order. They believe the country needs stability, which to them means fewer elections, less interference into state affairs from parliament and the media, and an end to divisive debates in society."
The siloviki share more than a background in security work. "They bring a mafia-like approach to government," says Mr. Kremeniuk. "They will deal only with their own kin in other branches of government. They have a sense of being selected; they are absolutely certain of their right to be in power.
They also have a common ideology, which some experts describe as statism. "When these guys speak of strengthening the state, they mean absolute loyalty of those below to their superiors," says Nikolai Petrov, an expert with the Carnegie Center, a think tank in Moscow. "They think individual interests are much less important than state interests."
Experts divide over whether the siloviki's rise was planned or incidental. Some say the age-old buddy system of Russian bureaucracy was the main engine. "Putin didn't have a wide circle of associates to draw on when he came to power, so he brought a couple of dozen of his old KGB colleagues into the Kremlin," says Kremeniuk. "They brought their friends, and they brought their friends, and so on."
Others argue that state institutions are simply responding to public demands for national renewal following years of social breakdown, lawlessness, and economic decline under former President Boris Yeltsin. "Putin's coming to power and his popularity can be explained by the fact that the population wants order," says Mikhail Lyubimov, a former KGB spy and author of popular espionage novels. The KGB and other security agencies are widely regarded as more disciplined, responsible, and less corrupt than other social groups.
This month's parliamentary elections, which returned a massive majority for pro-Kremlin and nationalist parties, are widely read by experts as an endorsement of Putin's course.
Where the trend leads is an open question, one that worries Kryshtanovskaya. "I am sure that Putin believes he can control the uses of authority, and slam on the brakes anytime he wants," she says. "But I fear the tendency to authoritarianism is a slippery slope, and once we are moving it will be impossible to stop."
December 29, 2003 at 10:09 PM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Trust me. They want us to be scared and nervous
Simon Jenkins
I am hoping for a fear-free Christmas. Last year was dreadful, literally. The Government had a war to promote and decided to scare me witless. This year it has less excuse. Tony Blair has toppled Saddam Hussein and owes the nation a “reassurance dividend”.
The American Government has taken a different view. On Sunday Washington’s director of homeland security, Tom Ridge, summoned a surprised media and announced “credible intelligence” of a “possible near-term” terrorist attack that could “either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11”. He even hinted at the hijacking of another plane. The threat from al-Qaeda was perhaps greater now than at any point since 2001. The threat also embraced America’s allies, which included Britain.
Mr Ridge said he was not asking Americans to alter their travel plans. Yet he raised the terror alert from yellow to orange, one stage below red. Not to be outdone, New York’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, rushed to the rostrum and repeated the words “major threat”, although he admitted that he knew of no specific attack aimed at New York City. He wanted New Yorkers to take comfort that they were so well protected.
How Americans or Britons are meant to take comfort from yet more mentions of al-Qaeda, terrorism, planes, airports and 9/11 is not clear. Mr Ridge gave no indication of how his dire warning should be used, beyond the policeman’s eternal demand for vigilance. He did not ban air travel or call for the public to stockpile dried milk or buy gas masks, as happened last year.
We are assured by those in the know that the threat from al-Qaeda is as great as ever. Sir John Stevens, the London Police Commissioner, said it was a quantum leap from what it was during the IRA campaign, which was itself murderous and horrible. Despite two bloody wars, tens of thousands of bombs and many thousands of corpses, the chief global terrorism culprit, Osama bin Laden, remains free and apparently operational. Yet there has been no outrage on British soil.
I regard this as good news. The Government regards it as bad, because it constantly tells us that Britain must be next. This time last year Downing Street was in a state of near hysteria. Frantic to boost the case for an Iraq war and find cover for the Cheriegate affair, Alastair Campbell orchestrated a blitz of media scares. Each weekend from November through the Christmas holiday and into January, the press was induced to lead on “Britain put on smallpox terror alert”, “ Killer anthrax threat to Britain”, “Gas horror on London Tube” and “Dirty bomb aimed at Christmas shoppers”.
The campaign was supplied with purple material by Sir David Omand, the Cabinet Office security co-ordinator, briefed by MI5 and MI6. As we now know from Hutton, both these organisations were under intense pressure from Downing Street to come up with hawkish material. Total rubbish about Saddam was peddled as high-grade intelligence. We have no way of knowing whether more sober minds were dealing with the al-Qaeda threat. The evidence so far is not encouraging.
The most bizarre threat was of smallpox. There was not a shred of intelligence that any enemy had quantities of smallpox, let alone in weapon form. Yet ministers in their Cobra bunker went berserk. They ordered 12 regional smallpox response groups across the nation. Seventy key workers were told to receive instant vaccination to be able to cope with millions of victims. An astonishing Ł100 million was found overnight to buy 50 million doses of vaccine. The ability of ministers to find huge amounts of money from nowhere under political duress never fails to impress me.
Smallpox was followed by an entire chemistry lab: by sarin, ricin, anthrax and, a Downing Street special, a “dirty bomb” to contaminate Christmas shoppers with radiation. The campaign reached its climax on February 11, when Mr Blair, “deep below Whitehall”, ordered tanks to encircle Heathrow to protect it from imminent assault. He claimed that al-Qaeda was racing through Hounslow in a white van packed with SAM missiles. Sir John Stevens gave his considered view that the whole of London was facing a dire terrorist threat. It cost London Ł1 million in cancelled flight bookings that weekend alone. I doubt if ministers gave that a second thought.
What is a sane citizen supposed to make of such apparent and blatant scaremongering? Since the dawn of time insecure governments have raised the spectre of a murky or convenient minority enemy to distract the public mind from more evident concerns. Stalin used the kulaks. Hitler used the Jews. Senator McCarthy used communists. The apartheid rulers of South Africa used schwarzgewaar, or fear of blacks. If the threat could be declared secret, and therefore undisclosable, so much the better.
A danger to national security from Muslim extremism cannot easily be disproved. Who can tell if last February’s tanks at Heathrow did not nip another Lockerbie in the bud? Who can tell if al-Qaeda’s war machine did not hear of John Prescott’s 12 regional centres and slink back home in fear? Who knows how many of the Muslims whom David Blunkett has dumped in jail without charge are, as he claims, dangerous terrorists?
I know that no bombs have exploded in Britain these past two years, and for that I must be glad. A serious price has been paid in public fear, anti-Muslim sentiment, loss of civil liberty and police overtime. Untold damage has been done to the tourist industry, Britain’s second biggest employer. But no outrage has occurred and, I repeat, I am glad.
My problem is that I have no way of assessing the risks against the costs. Democracy is not trusted with such a calculation. Am I more at danger from al-Qaeda than on a motorway or in a football crowd or climbing a mountain? These other risks I can assess for myself. In taking them I feel empowered and in partial control.
When government cries “terrorist!” it is accountable to none. It issues blood-curdling warnings and then says, trust us. Sir John is a dab hand at this game. He accompanies his regular threats with a comforting “people should not be alarmed”. Like the dictator Kim Il Sung, he wants the public ignorant but trusting of the powers that be. Mr Blunkett tells Britons to suspect foreigners with funny bags, to pay more taxes and to shut up about civil liberty.
The global security pundit John Steinbruner, of the University of Maryland, suggested on Monday that these scares were being used in America as insurance, to enable officials to claim “I told you so” should anything go wrong. Mr Ridge’s press conference offered the public no information that it could use for its own reassurance. He appeared merely to be covering his back.
As Professor Steinbruner pointed out, simply spreading fear under cover of vigilance plays the enemy’s game. “The whole point of terrorism is to induce victims to indulge in a self-destructive reaction,” he said. Terrorism is an auto-immune disease “designed to get the political system to damage itself”. It aims to erode the liberty of free societies by remote control.
This is what the War on Terror is now in real danger of achieving. I have no way of knowing whether this two-year war has been grossly overstated, whether it is supremely successful or whether it faces miserable defeat. All governments can say is give us more money and more power. Of course I want to be safer. I pay a fortune in taxes to that end. I might even accept some change in civil justice to enhance that safety, but only if convinced of the necessity. At Guantanamo Bay and Belmarsh prison I am not so convinced.
What I do not understand is how public officials spreading terror help to win this war. No practical advice was offered by Mr Ridge or Sir John. It seems that some al-Qaeda agent has merely to lift the phone to them and leave panic and spin to do the rest. It no longer takes a suicide attack to have the West quaking in its boots.
Britain has no mechanism for reviewing security scares to assess their validity or cost/benefit. The past two years have seen much loss of life and liberty in the cause of freeing me from fear. Yet London and Washington tell me I am less safe and therefore more afraid, which is just what bin Laden wants me to be.
This Christmas I shall cross my fingers and not believe any of them.
December 29, 2003 at 07:30 AM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Andrew Sullivan: If it didn't come true, you read it here first
December 28, 2003
It's well known that pundits are always right. We never get a thing wrong. Everything that happens is something we foresaw. That's why you spend good money to read our scintillating thoughts, after all.
If you’d read the prestigious New Yorker only a couple of weeks ago, for example, you would have been informed of the near-impossibility of finding Saddam Hussein in Iraq: “The taskforce’s search for Saddam was, from the beginning, daunting. According to Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector, it may have been fatally flawed as well. From 1994 to 1998, Ritter directed a special UN unit that eavesdropped on many of Saddam's private telephone communications.
“‘The high-profile guys around Saddam were the murafaqin, his most loyal companions, who could stand next to him carrying a gun,’ Ritter told me. ‘But now he’s gone to a different tier — the tribes. He has released the men from his most sensitive units and let them go back to their tribes, and we don’t know where they are . . .’ The taskforce, in any event, has shifted its focus from the hunt for Saddam as it is increasingly distracted by the spreading guerrilla war.”
Days later, a tribal ally betrayed Saddam and he is now the most famous captive in the world. The analysis? Courtesy of Seymour Hersh, one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of our time.
Or if you’d read the liberal American Prospect last summer you would have seen the prophetic words: “Every so often in life you have to go out on a limb. So here goes: Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be the next governor of California. What’s more, his loss will represent an important moment in a shift in American politics that has been in gestation for some time now — toward a politics in which voters make decisions more on the basis of their cultural affinities than in response to a candidate’s charisma or fame.” Oh well.
At least they got the war right. Here’s Simon Jenkins in The Times on March 28. The title of the piece was: Baghdad will be near impossible to conquer. Here’s the key paragraph:
“In Baghdad the coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Americans in Mogadishu and the Russians at Grozny. Hostile cities have ways of making life ghastly for aggressors. They are not like countryside. They seldom capitulate, least of all when their backs are to the wall.
“It took two years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall to the Vietcong. Kabul was ceded to the warlords only when the Taliban drove out of town. In the desert, armies fight armies. In cities, armies fight cities. The Iraqis were not stupid. They listened to western strategists musing about how a desert battle would be a pushover. Things would get ‘difficult’ only if Saddam played the cad and drew the Americans into Baghdad. Why should he do otherwise?”
So you can’t win them all. Robert Fisk, for one, is sometimes known to have let his disdain for the Americans overshadow the crimes of Arab tyrants like the great leader Saddam. Here he was, once again on the ball, fearlessly using his imagination in the thick of the Iraq war:
“Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have I seen the Iraqi army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are ‘degrading’ the country’s defences but there was little sign of that here on Wednesday.”
It’s worth remembering that Fisk is still published in semi-serious papers and magazines. A man who has got pretty much everything wrong about the Middle East, who spent much of this year writing complete gobbledegook about Iraq, is still a hero of the liberal journalistic class.
But Fisk was in good company this past year; 2003 was, perhaps, best remembered as the year of living erroneously. Even your humble correspondent, who predicted success in Iraq, a Schwarzenegger victory and a strong American economic recovery got a few things wrong. Yes, I thought there would be real, live actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Instead, we found merely the infrastructure, history, and plans for future development. Although the case for war rested on deeper foundations — namely, Saddam as the most dangerous weapon of them all — it behoves me to say I got it wrong.
So, of course, did the UN, Hans Blix, MI6, the French government, the CIA, The New York Times, the Democrats and — possibly — Saddam. Maybe his terrified underlings fibbed to him about what they had or didn’t have. Maybe he kept the lie going for fear of being revealed as a paper tyrant. All we know now is that he lost the bluff.
The biggest surprises? No one accurately foresaw the extraordinary rise of Howard Dean and the strength of his internet-based insurrection in the Democratic party. He remains the biggest domestic American story of the year.
No one predicted the amazing resilience of the American economy, powering back to an annual rate of 8.2% growth in the third quarter. Almost no one predicted the astonishing productivity gains either — gains that have kept the recovery relatively job-free but have brought the markets back to frothy exuberance.
Few foresaw the emergence of Schwarzenegger as the governor of the most populous state in America. Few would have predicted no large Al-Qaeda attacks in America. Few could have predicted that The New York Times would admit to having published dozens of fabricated stories by a young affirmative action product, Jayson Blair, in a scandal that helped bring down one of the most arrogant editors in that paper’s history. Or that in such a short time, Hillary Clinton would have emerged as a Democratic leader in her own right, swiftly out of the shadow of her presidential husband.
So, ahem, the predictions for 2004. Bush will be re-elected in a landslide, a revolution will topple the mullahs in Tehran, the Nasdaq will reach 2,500, and . . . oh, never mind.
You wouldn’t believe me anyway. And you shouldn’t. See you next year.
December 29, 2003 at 07:28 AM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Revealed: how MI6 sold the Iraq war
Nicholas Rufford
December 28, 2003
THE Secret Intelligence Service has run an operation to gain public support for sanctions and the use of military force in Iraq. The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
The revelation will create embarrassing questions for Tony Blair in the run-up to the publication of the report by Lord Hutton into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the government weapons expert.
A senior official admitted that MI6 had been at the heart of a campaign launched in the late 1990s to spread information about Saddam’s development of nerve agents and other weapons, but denied that it had planted misinformation. “There were things about Saddam’s regime and his weapons that the public needed to know,” said the official.
The admission followed claims by Scott Ritter, who led 14 inspection missions in Iraq, that MI6 had recruited him in 1997 to help with the propaganda effort. He described meetings where the senior officer and at least two other MI6 staff had discussed ways to manipulate intelligence material.
“The aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was,” Ritter said last week.
He said there was evidence that MI6 continued to use similar propaganda tactics up to the invasion of Iraq earlier this year. “Stories ran in the media about secret underground facilities in Iraq and ongoing programmes (to produce weapons of mass destruction),” said Ritter. “They were sourced to western intelligence and all of them were garbage.”
Kelly, himself a former United Nations weapons inspector and colleague of Ritter, might also have been used by MI6 to pass information to the media. “Kelly was a known and government-approved conduit with the media,” said Ritter.
Hutton’s report is expected to deliver a verdict next month on whether intelligence was misused in order to promote the case for going to war. Hutton heard evidence that Kelly was authorised by the Foreign Office to speak to journalists on Iraq. Kelly was in close touch with the “Rockingham cell”, a group of weapons experts that received MI6 intelligence.
Blair justified his backing for sanctions and for the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that intelligence reports showed Saddam was working to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The use of MI6 as a “back channel” for promoting the government’s policies on Iraq was never discovered during the Hutton inquiry and is likely to cause considerable disquiet among MPs.
A key figure in Operation Mass Appeal was Sir Derek Plumbly, then director of the Middle East department at the Foreign Office and now Britain’s ambassador to Egypt. Plumbly worked closely with MI6 to help to promote Britain’s Middle East policy.
The campaign was judged to be having a successful effect on public opinion. MI6 passed on intelligence that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction and rebuilding its arsenal.
Poland, India and South Africa were initially chosen as targets for the campaign because they were non-aligned UN countries not supporting the British and US position on sanctions. At the time, in 1997, Poland was also a member of the UN security council.
Ritter was a willing accomplice to the alleged propaganda effort when first approached by MI6’s station chief in New York. He obtained approval to co-operate from Richard Butler, then executive chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq Disarmament.
Ritter met MI6 to discuss Operation Mass Appeal at a lunch in London in June 1998 at which two men and a woman from MI6 were present. The Sunday Times is prevented by the Official Secrets Act from publishing their names.
Ritter had previously met the MI6 officer at Vauxhall Cross, the service’s London headquarters. He asked Ritter for information on Iraq that could be planted in newspapers in India, Poland and South Africa from where it would “feed back” to Britain and America.
Ritter opposed the Iraq war but this is the first time that he has named members of British intelligence as being involved in a propaganda campaign. He said he had decided to “name names” because he was frustrated at “an official cover-up” and the “misuse of intelligence”.
“What MI6 was determined to do by the selective use of intelligence was to give the impression that Saddam still had WMDs or was making them and thereby legitimise sanctions and military action against Iraq,” he said.
Recent reports suggest America has all but abandoned hopes of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, has resigned earlier than expected, frustrated that his resources have been diverted to tracking down insurgents.
December 29, 2003 at 07:26 AM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Blair 'broke promise' on terrorist suspects
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Daniel McGrory
THE ruins of the World Trade Centre were still burning when Tony Blair and David Blunkett appeared before the cameras to pledge that they would speed up the extradition of terrorist suspects sheltering in Britain.
However, not one has since been extradited from Britain, despite the repeated requests of more than a dozen friendly governments.
Ministers blame legal delays for the continuing failure to meet the Prime Minister’s promise. The cost to the taxpayer for legal aid runs to at least Ł7 million.
The case of one Saudi-born suspect, who is wanted by the United States for allegedly masterminding suicide bomb attacks, has cost more than Ł750,000. Some suspects have been fighting extradition from Britain for seven years.
On September 30, 2001, Mr Blair said that action would be taken within six weeks, adding: “We cannot have a situation in which it takes years to extradite people.”
The number of extradition requests that Britain has received has not been disclosed, but at least ten men are thought to be in custody.
Requests have come from close allies in the War on Terror including the United States, France, India, Pakistan, Russia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Turkey.
One diplomat in London, whose Government has been waiting six years for a suspect to be handed over for trial, said: “The system in the UK has now gone beyond farce. We keep being told the system will be revised, laws changed, but nothing happens.
“The frustration is that we are powerless to do anything. In the meantime, terrorist trials in my country are held up because key figures are stuck in Britain.”
Other countries complain that the British authorities have refused even to arrest some men whom they have identified as having terrorist links.
The list of suspects includes alleged fundraisers and those allegedly involved in recruiting suicide bombers as well as some of al-Qaeda’s most influential figures.
Three people on the wanted list are accused of playing pivotal roles in the lorry bomb attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 in which 231 people were killed.
The family of a girl aged 4, whose father was killed in the attack in Nairobi, has condemned Britain’s failure to extradite these suspects.
Kenneth Hobson, 27, was a US Army staff sergeant who died in the embassy shortly before his wife, Debra, learnt that she was pregnant with their second child.
Sergeant Hobson’s father said he was “totally annoyed” that the men had yet to face trial. “Nobody seems to care,” he added.
The US authorities point out that other suspects arrested in South Africa and Kenya were swiftly handed over to the FBI.
Others on the list are wanted over terrorist plots in Europe.
The Indian Government sent a security team to London this year with detailed dossiers on wanted men living in Britain who were allegedly linked to terrorist groups operating in Kashmir.
The visiting delegation was not permitted to question the men, or to see dossiers held by the British authorities. None of the men named in the dossier from Delhi has been arrested.
Moscow has said that supporters of Chechen rebels are in Britain.
Last month, Igor Ivanov, the Russian Foreign Minister, attacked a decision by Mr Blunkett, the Home Secretary, to grant political asylum to Ahmad Zakayev, a Chechen actor who is wanted by Moscow on terrorism charges including alleged links with the group who besieged a Moscow theatre last year.
Tunisian officials claim that many of the leaders of the banned al-Nahda party are living in Britain. Algeria has also handed over a list of wanted men.
Among the close allies who still have requests pending with the Home Office are the friendly governments that do not want to get involved in a public row with Britain. However, representations have been made to the Foreign Office for action to be taken early in the new year.
One senior diplomat said: “Of course we respect that the law has to take its course. But we are talking years in some cases and we are seeing wanted men able to avoid arrest, let alone extradition. This does not fit with Mr Blair’s pledge to end Britain’s reputation of being a haven for terrorists.”
New British extradition laws that come into force on January 1 apply only to countries in the EU and do not affect al-Qaeda suspects seized after the September 11 attacks.
The European arrest warrant is aimed at securing extraditions within 60 days, or a maximum 90 days with an appeal.
If a request is made to Britain, a judge has to rule whether “the right person has been arrested, the warrant has been correctly completed and the crime is an extradition offence”. Also there must be no bars to extradition, such as the double jeopardy rule. The suspect can appeal to the High Court, and in some circumstances the House of Lords, but the process must be completed within three months to cut costs.
The Home Office says that the average time to extradite someone is 18 months. It costs Ł125,000. Embassies ask why, therefore, it takes so long to process their requests.
Most of the high-profile cases have exhausted all the legal channels, including the House of Lords, and the files are back on Mr Blunkett’s desk. Under the present rules, the Home Secretary has to review the extradition requests again and allow the suspects’ legal teams to offer further defence.
A Home Office official said that it was “impossible to predict when the first suspect will be extradited”.
US officials suffered the indignity of seeing two high- profile cases thrown out by British judges this year for lack of satisfactory evidence.
The FBI says that it has at least five other requests pending.
December 29, 2003 at 07:23 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
For Global ID Systems, the Tried and True
Security Technology: For Global ID Systems, the Tried and True
By BARNABY J. FEDER
he Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks ignited interest in more precise ways to identify people, particularly in the field of biometrics, which makes use of distinctive body features. Among the biometric techniques that have been explored are scanning eyes for individualized features of the retina or iris, using cameras and computers to map the distances between parts of the face, and studying the patterns of voice or gait.
But as governments complete initial testing and begin putting into place new security systems at border crossings and at sites like airports and embassies, there is a clear winner among the competing biometric technologies: the old-fashioned fingerprint.
"They are looking for proven technology that's stable and familiar," said Dr. Joseph J. Atick, president and chief executive of Identix, a leading supplier of biometric technology. "It's not about technology. It's about lowering your deployment risk."
Today's fingerprint systems are not ones that Eliot Ness would recognize. Equipment from Identix and similar companies does away with messy ink in favor of digital records, created by software when fingers are pressed against an electronic pad or a sensitive photoplate.
As often as not, fingerprints are being paired with one of the newer biometrics identification techniques. The use of more than one method makes it harder for people to escape detection by disguising their fingerprints, and helps identify the 15 percent or so of people whose hands are so worn or scarred that prints are hard to capture.
The most frequent complement to fingerprinting is likely to be facial recognition, where early leaders like Identix and Viisage are now facing competition from start-ups like A4Vision, Geometrix and 3DBiometrics, which employ more detailed, three-dimensional images.
The Department of Homeland Security has decided to require fingerprints and facial images on the documents of all foreign nationals who come to the United States from the 27 nations that are exempt from visa requirements. Most of them are in Western Europe. The department's United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, known as U.S.-Visit, is to begin operating next month and go into effect in American airports during the year.
The State Department has begun using the same combination of technologies at more than 200 embassies, and the international standards-setting agency for airlines has adopted it as a voluntary worldwide standard. But work and testing continues on competing biometrics, like iris scanning, where the newest devices use invisible infrared light rather than the laser beams that made some users nervous.
A growing number of people will carry their identifying data on microchips in passports, employment ID cards or drivers' licenses in 2004, analysts say. But the data is useless unless the technologies and public records are integrated, a job that has become a fast-growing business for data processing giants like I.B.M., Unisys and Siemens. "The technology is advancing rapidly," said Ed Schaffner, director of positive ID and access control solutions at Unisys, who said that the first government agencies to adopt the technology would put their systems in place in 2004. "The big growth will be in 2005 and 2006," he said.
BARNABY J. FEDER
December 29, 2003 at 07:07 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
British airlines to get armed sky marshals
By David Charter and Elaine Monaghan in Washington
Pilots criticise guns on planes and threaten to boycott flights
ARMED sky marshals are being deployed on British flights for the first time following heightened fears of an airborne terrorist attack on the scale of September 11, ministers confirmed yesterday.
As a record 550,000 air passengers joined the new year getaway, the Government said that plain-clothes marshals were being deployed along with extra check-in surveillance after a dramatic increase in the state of alert in the US.
The plainclothes agents, likely to be armed with
low-velocity ammunition that should not break through the fuselage, would join transAtlantic flights and could patrol other routes to regions where al-Qaeda was particularly active such as the Middle East and East Africa, experts said last night.
Ministers said that the moves would make it safer to fly, but pilots described it as the worst thing the Government could have done and raised the prospect of a boycott of marshalled flights.
The British Airline Pilots Association said that it did not want guns on planes. Jim McAuslan, general secretary, said: “We believe this will do more harm than good.”
The Department for Transport refused to say whether marshals had begun work but its announcement with the Home Office was designed to send a message that British vigilance had increased. Plans to put marshalls on commercial aircraft were first announced last December.
Fears for airline safety have grown since the discovery of suspected shoe-bomb equipment in Gloucester last month and the charging of a man for possession of explosives.
Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, said: “Security is kept constantly under review and it is essential that we take all reasonable steps to deter terrorist activities.”
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, added: “The last few days have seen the United States increase their general threat and security levels and what we are proposing is a proportionate and appropriate level of response at a time when the threat to both our countries and around the world remains real and serious. The situation is not one where people should be afraid to fly.”
Professor Paul Wilkinson, from the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University, said the move was sensible given that al-Qaeda still planned to target civil aviation. Security at many airports were still not tight enough, making on-board security important, he said.
But David Learmount, of Flight International magazine, said of the air marshal plan: “Exactly what is going to be achieved by having someone on board which will mean there are two armed people? “Gunfight at the OK Corral straight down the aisle of an aircraft? I think it’s stupid.”
Patrick Mercer, the Tory Homeland Security spokesman, welcomed the move. Fears of an airborne attack on the Vatican over Christmas added to indications that terrorists were actively considering an airborne attack, he said.
He added: “Hand-in-hand with this has got to be a public information campaign to make sure that passengers are aware of what sky marshals are. If an armed person leaps up and makes themselves known as a marshal, who is to say a member of the public is not not going to have a go?”
The US raised security levels last week to high. Intercepted communications prompted Tom Ridge, the cabinet member for homeland security, to warn: “Extremists abroad were anticipating near-term attacks that they believe will rival — or exceed — the scope and impact of those we experienced in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania two years ago.”
Christopher Cox, the Californian Republican who chairs a congressional committee on homeland security, yesterday said that the elevated alert would last into the New Year. It was based on a sizeable “spike” in intelligence activity that did not name specific dates, times or places, but it included specific references to attempts to destroy targets in the US over the holidays.
The US started putting guards on flights in the 1970s to thwart hijackings to Cuba, and again in 1985 after TWA Flight 847 was hijacked. On El-Al, which has had guards for 30 years, marshals are seated anonymously with radio links so they can warn the flight deck of trouble. If the pilot receives a signal they have orders to roll and power-dive in a bid to overbalance anyone standing. Oxygen masks drop to the sky marshals’ seats only, giving them an extra edge.
December 29, 2003 at 12:36 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Memo Exacerbates Defense-CIA Strains
Memo Exacerbates Defense-CIA Strains (washingtonpost.com)
Clues on Al Qaeda-Hussein Ties at Issue
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 20, 2003; Page A34
A leaked top-secret memo that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith sent the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last month listing and analyzing raw intelligence reports on alleged connections between Iraq and al Qaeda has reopened a long-simmering behind-the-scenes battle between Pentagon and CIA officials.
At issue is whether Defense Department analysts, who Feith organized in October 2001, have uncovered evidence that may have been missed or ignored by CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies that proved a closer operational relationship between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam Hussein's government than believed.
The memo was put together in response to a request by the Senate committee chairman and vice chairman after Feith had told them in a closed hearing last July that intelligence reports discovered by his analysts "on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda were not reflected in finished intelligence products" put out by the CIA and other agencies, according to senior administration officials and congressional sources.
The Feith memo, sent Oct. 27 to Capitol Hill, was first disclosed in the current edition of the Weekly Standard.
The article, written by Stephen F. Hayes, contains a section titled "Summary of Body of Intelligence Reporting on Iraq-al Qaeda Contacts (1990-2003)." In it, Hayes wrote that there are 50 items that include intelligence reporting and Pentagon comments or analyses that show "an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq."
One senior administration official familiar with CIA intelligence said yesterday that some of the material in the Feith memo was used in the agency's prewar summary of the al Qaeda-Iraq connections that was in an Oct. 7, 2002, letter sent to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Graham made the letter public at that time.
In that letter CIA Director George J. Tenet reported about contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq going back a decade, "credible information" that there were discussions about giving the terrorists safe haven in Iraq, and "credible reporting" that al Qaeda sought help in acquiring chemical or biological weapons.
He added, however, that much of the material published by the Standard was raw intelligence reporting that in some cases "was questioned by other sources, comes from third countries that are not reliable or could not be verified."
A senior Pentagon official, seeking to defuse the differences with CIA, said yesterday that Feith was being responsive to the committee's questions but that "the U.S. government position on [the al Qaeda-Iraq connection] was articulated by George Tenet." He said the memo provided a list "and is not a new analysis or finding of any connection not previously existing." The CIA would not comment on the Standard article.
The CIA and the Senate committee have both asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak of the Feith memo. Yesterday, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the panel vice chairman, said, "This is an egregious leak of classified information that jeopardizes intelligence sources and risks damaging our ability to find and stop terrorists before they strike again."
Rockefeller also took issue with the Standard's assessment that the Feith memo proved a strong operational relationship existed between al Qaeda and Iraq before the war began last spring. "The intelligence community assessment was and continues to be that any connection between Iraq and al Qaeda is tenuous," Rockefeller said.
December 29, 2003 at 12:34 AM in CIA | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Joint Intelligence Center Is Urged
Joint Intelligence Center Is Urged (washingtonpost.com)
Rep. Wolf Says Information Should Be Shared Globally to Fight Terror
By Douglas Farah and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 21, 2003; Page A25
Lack of cooperation between the United States and its European allies has greatly hindered the war on terror, and some congressional leaders are asking the United States to take the lead in establishing a joint intelligence center modeled on NATO to share information on terrorist money and movements.
In a letter last week to Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) said that "it is critical for national law enforcement agencies to begin sharing law enforcement assets on a global basis, which does not currently exist. International cooperation and information sharing among law enforcement agencies is the next step in addressing terrorism."
Wolf, chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the FBI budget, said the formal coalition "would allow for the FBI and its counterparts around the world to work hand in hand and more easily share information about potential terrorists and terrorist threats."
Among the examples cited by Wolf and others are the failure to share international terrorist watch lists, separate files that are not shared on suspected terrorists and the lack of a common database on suspected terrorist financial entities and transactions.
The proposal advocated by Wolf, known as an FBI ally in Congress, comes at a time when the FBI continues to fend off suggestions from some politicians and policymakers that it should be stripped of its counterterrorism and counterintelligence duties, which would be transferred to a separate domestic intelligence agency akin to Britain's MI5.
An independent panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has signaled that it may suggest a similar reform. In an interview, Wolf said that despite his support of the FBI, he believes there should be a separate counterterrorism agency and expects it to be created eventually.
Wolf's proposal to establish a joint intelligence center, for which he has scheduled hearings in February, has gained some support among Democrats and Republicans. Congressional aides familiar with the concerns about U.S.-European intelligence sharing said that although many legislators are aware of the problem and want to take action, no consensus has emerged on a remedy.
Pasquale J. "Pat" D'Amuro, head of the FBI's New York Field Office and former chief of counterterrorism and counterintelligence at headquarters here, said relationships between U.S. and European intelligence agencies have improved dramatically since the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We've always had pretty good relationships with sharing in Europe," D'Amuro said. "If you're talking about the Brits, it's always been good with the Brits, and things have gotten much better with other countries over the last couple years."
Although the FBI has legal attachés in most European capitals to act as liaison officials, Wolf and congressional staff aides interested in the matter said the new alliance would take cooperation to an institutional, permanent level.
"If we don't take cooperation to the next level, we will remain vulnerable," said one congressional aide involved in promoting the proposal. "We don't want it to be in Interpol, because too many countries sit there and too much information can leak. We want something where the information we have can be permanently put together with what our European allies have. It works in the military and NATO; we should be able to make it work with law enforcement and the war on terror."
The assessment of U.S. officials that cooperation is free and constant was disputed by several European intelligence officials, who said that although the FBI and CIA request information from European allies, they seldom receive anything from the U.S. counterparts.
"If you call sharing a one-way street, then we share information," one official said. "They want what we have immediately, and demand it. But if we ask for something, it can take months before we even get an initial reply."
Another European source said that when pursuing an investigation into the possible al Qaeda use of diamonds to buy weapons, European police officials waited at least two months for clearance to visit the United States. The clearance was given only after the intervention of a senior U.S. official, who expedited the matter.
"It is a matter, in part, of culture," one European source said. "They believe strongly in the need-to-know operational function, and they usually believe we don't need to know."
But U.S. and European intelligence officials said they were not sure a new organization, with its inevitable bureaucracy, would improve the situation significantly.
One U.S. intelligence official said creation of the Department of Homeland Security and various task forces since the Sept. 11 attacks has produced too much confusion.
"We don't need any more . . . organizations being created," the official said. "It's already a nightmare what's been created now. What we need is to just continue to apply the pressure and keep focused on improving relationships."
But Wolf's letter said that approach was not enough.
"Terrorism is an international problem," it said. "The international community cannot successfully stem the tide of terrorism without cooperating in the area of law enforcement."
December 29, 2003 at 12:33 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
CIA Poised to Quiz Hussein
CIA Poised to Quiz Hussein (washingtonpost.com)
Rumsfeld Says Agency To Control Interrogations
By Dana Priest and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 17, 2003; Page A01
The CIA, whose interrogation of al Qaeda leaders has produced a flow of useful information, will take the lead in questioning Saddam Hussein, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.
U.S. officials said that, as expected, the former Iraqi leader has been uncooperative during early questioning and has not provided truthful information about the Iraqi insurgency or weapons of mass destruction.
Rumsfeld, who described Hussein as "resigned," said he asked CIA Director George J. Tenet to take responsibility for the interrogation because the agency has "the people who have competence in that area; they have professionals in that area." The CIA, he said, "will be the regulator over the interrogations -- who will do it, the questions that'll get posed, the management of the information that flows from those interrogations."
The CIA team of operations officers, polygraphers and psychiatrists has put together a loose interrogation plan -- a playbook of sorts -- approved by headquarters that will help guide them in the months ahead, government sources said. It contains "what buttons to push," one U.S. official said, as well as a detailed, extensive list of questions, backed up with what is known to be true about each subject area. CIA interrogators will be joined by debriefers from the Defense Intelligence Agency and FBI agents who recently arrived in Iraq mainly to aid in bombing and other crime scene investigations.
The interrogation of Hussein offers the United States a tremendous opportunity and challenge. U.S. officials hope to extract information to help them defeat insurgents in Iraq. A document found when Hussein was captured has already proven useful, officials said.
The questioners will also focus on broader concerns. Some defense officials, in particular, believe Hussein has information on international terrorist organizations.
Complicating the interrogation is the prospect of a trial for Hussein. U.S. officials and others said pressure to begin legal proceedings could force interrogators to move more quickly than they think is prudent.
Experts on intelligence interrogations said giving the CIA the lead reflects the wide range of information the United States hopes to get from Hussein, and that it extends beyond information useful to the military in Iraq.
CIA experts, Rumsfeld said, "know the needs we have in terms of counterterrorism, they know the threads that have to come up through the needle head." He said turning the questioning over to the agency was "a three-minute decision, and the first two were for coffee."
John Rothrock, a former combat interrogator for the Air Force who later quizzed Soviet defectors for the CIA, said that the interrogation likely would follow a prescribed course that has been discussed and even practiced for months.
It would likely begin with a set of "control questions" for which -- unbeknownst to Hussein -- U.S. officials already have determined correct answers, he said. This would enable the interrogation team to begin to assess whether any apparent attempts at cooperation are genuine.
At the same time, a government psychiatrist would be brought in to update and refine the CIA's profile of Hussein. This would be based not only on observing his interactions with his captors but also on covert observations and even physiological data, such as sleep patterns, Rothrock said.
Over the course of the interrogation, two or three different questioners would likely employ different strategies, Rothrock said, including "good cop-bad cop" double teaming. Another approach would be to have someone appear to come from an entirely different background, probably acting as if he had higher rank and almost certainly an Arabic speaker, who would address Hussein directly and express disagreement with the U.S. position.
"It is essential to shake his confidence and make him dependent on at least one person," a former senior CIA official said.
It will be essential in the early sessions to establish for Hussein that his interrogators do not see him as the imprisoned president of Iraq, Rothrock added. "You're going to be playing his game if you treat him as a head of state," he said.
Part of the CIA's repertoire for disorienting a prisoner is known as a "false flag" operation that uses fake decor and disguises designed to deceive the captive into thinking he is in another country, or is reading a newspaper in which his top lieutenants are reported to have already betrayed him.
When CIA spy Aldrich H. Ames, who provided secrets to the Soviets for years, was captured, he was whisked to an FBI room filled with photographs of his house, his contacts, his code names, to make him believe authorities already knew the answers to his questions, so that lies would only hurt his chances to avoid the death penalty.
Jerrold M. Post, a former Hussein profiler for the CIA and now a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, said his advice is that "interrogators now should play to his swollen ego, and get him to boast about how he fooled the [United Nations] inspectors," Post said. Or, he said, they might try to get Hussein to talk about "how recently he fooled the whole world into thinking he had weapons while now they are wondering where they are."
The prospect of a trial, Post said, could provide Hussein with "a potential for graymail," or trying to gain leniency or some other edge by threatening to make public secret or embarrassing information.
With the United States having supported Hussein in the 1980s with seed strains for biological weapons and intelligence to help fight Iran, "he has plenty of dirty linen to wash in public, including beyond the U.S. -- the countries that were busy courting him such as France and Russia," Post said.
Staff writers Walter Pincus and Robin Wright contributed to this report.
December 29, 2003 at 12:31 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
'Belgrano' ordered to attack British ships on day before sinking, secret report reveals
New official history may finally settle controversy over destruction of Argentine warship with loss of 323 lives
By Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor
28 December 2003
The Argentine cruiserGeneral Belgrano was ordered to attack the British fleet the day before she was sunk at the start of the Falklands War, according to secret intelligence reports that are soon to be released.
The sinking of the Belgrano is one of the greatest controversies in modern British military history. The cruiser was outside a 200-mile exclusion zone and sailing away from the British fleet when it was torpedoed, with the loss of 323 lives, by the submarine HMS Conqueror on 2 May, 1982.
A new official history of the war will claim that, according to previously undisclosed intelligence material, the Belgrano was under orders to attack the British navy. Opponents of the war accused Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister, of ordering the sinking of the Belgrano although it did not pose a threat at the time. Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, led a ferocious attack on Mrs Thatcher, accusing her of misleading the House of Commons.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, the author of the official history to be published next year, told The Independent on Sunday: "The intercept confirms that the Belgrano was under orders to attack on May 1. It does nothing to confirm the contentions of Mr Dalyell and broadly supports what was said by the government at the time."
Professor Freedman's book exonerates Lady Thatcher, who consistently argued that the warship posed a threat to the Task Force. Signals intelligence intercepted by GCHQ, the security services' eavesdropping centre at Cheltenham, the day before Conqueror fired its torpedoes at the Belgrano, showed that the warship was under orders to attack. It is unusual for such raw intelligence material to be published.
The official history will also contain an account of a near-mutiny by members of the special forces. The commander of the SAS "B" unit refused an order to carry out a search-and-destroy operation of missile bases on the Argentinian mainland because, he claimed, it amounted to a "suicide mission".
Tony Blair commissioned Professor Freedman, director of war studies at King's College London, to write the official account in July 1997. The publication has been repeatedly delayed by rows over what can be included. Intelligence chiefs have now relented on the question of whether the key intercept could be made public. Officials at GCHQ were said to be worried that doing so could set a precedent and give away operational secrets.
Officials and ministers have always insisted that, far from heading home, the Belgrano was sailing west to a point outside the exclusion zone from which it was to attack.
Earlier this year the ship's captain, Hector Bonzo, admitted that the Belgrano's decision to sail away from the Task Force on the morning of 2 May was only a temporary manoeuvre.
"Our mission ... wasn't just to cruise around on patrol but to attack,'' Captain Bonzo said in a television interview in May. "When they gave us the authorisation to use our weapons, if necessary, we had to be prepared to attack. Our people were completely trained. I would say we were anxious to pull the trigger.''
In 1994 the Argentine government dropped its claim that the sinking of the Belgrano was a war crime, its defence ministry conceding that it was "a legal act of war''.
Last night Mr Dalyell insisted that questions still remained unanswered about the sinking of the Belgrano. "I find it extremely odd that this has popped up now after all these years when they could have easily produced it at the end of the war," he said. "I will read the full account with interest."
Sir John Nott, the Defence Secretary at the time, hinted at the existence of the intercept in his recently published memoirs. Senior ministers were "aware" that the ship was being organised in a "pincer movement'' at the time of the attack. Last night Sir John said he stood by the decision to sink the ship. "I remain astonished to this day that anyone should consider the momentary compass bearing of the Belgrano's passage to be of any consequence whatever," he said. "Any ship can turn about in an instant."
Despite the fact that the intercept supports the official position, a Foreign Office official said that Professor Freedman had faced deep opposition within Whitehall to the decision to publish it: "It has been a long haul, but we are confident that it will be published next year. You have got to remember that the Falklands was only 20 years ago, so a lot of the operational stuff is still sensitive.''
December 29, 2003 at 12:25 AM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
British planes are to carry armed guards after new alert
By Ben Russell and David Usborne in New York
29 December 2003
Armed undercover sky marshals are to be deployed on British airliners to counter heightened fears of terrorist attacks, the Government announced yesterday.
Highly trained police marks-men with special low-velocity weapons will be on undisclosed British flights to combat hijackers and other terrorists. Other possible measures include changes to screening at airports, improving the protection of airliners on the ground and security systems to prevent hijacks.
A joint statement by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, and Alistair Darling, the Secretary of State for Transport, said the "responsible and prudent" tightening of security was in response to the increased state of terrorist alert in the United States. The Foreign Office also warned yesterday that terrorists could be in the final stages of planning an atrocity in Saudi Arabia.
The airline industry is sceptical about the benefits of marshals. There are no details on how many will be introduced, nor on which flights, nor whether airlines would be asked to contribute towards their cost. Airline pilots said marshals would make aircraft less safe and some captains might refuse to fly unless they knew whether armed police were on board.
America has been on a heightened state of vigilance for possible terrorist attacks for a week since Washington increased its national alert to "code Orange". Officials have pointed to increased intelligence "chatter" pointing to a renewed assault by al-Qa'ida, possibly even more devastating than the 11 September attacks. Fighters have been patrolling the skies above major cities and Washington also announced it was monitoring 30 cities for release of biological, chemical or radiological agents.
Proposals for sky marshals were announced a year ago, but the Department of Transport declined to give details and major airlines refuse to comment on issues of security. Mr Blunkett said: "I can assure the travelling public that if we believed it was not safe for them to travel or fly, we would say so. What we are proposing are some sensible additional security measures. Our police and security services are already operating at the highest levels of vigilance and doing everything possible to ensure the safety of our citizens at home and aboard. Public safety remains our number one priority."
Airline pilots warned that airport security on the ground remained dangerously lax. They demanded that pilots be told if an armed guard boarded the