NSA Insiders reveal what went wrong.

In a memo to President Obama, former National Security Agency insiders William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe explain how NSA leaders botched intelligence collection and analysis before 9/11, covered up the mistakes, and violated the constitutional rights of the American people, all while wasting billions of dollars and misleading the public.

January 7, 2014

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Former NSA Senior Executives/Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Input for Your Decisions on NSA

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Official Washington – from Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein to NSA Director Keith Alexander to former Vice President Dick Cheney to former FBI Director Robert Mueller – has been speaking from the same set of NSA talking points acquired recently via a Freedom of Information request. It is an artful list, much of it designed to mislead. Take this one, for example:

– NSA AND ITS PARTNERS MUST MAKE SURE WE CONNECT THE DOTS SO THAT THE NATION IS NEVER ATTACKED AGAIN LIKE I WAS ON 9/11

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 2, Senator Feinstein showed her hand when she said: “I will do everything I can to prevent this [NSA’s bulk] program from being canceled.” Declaring that 9/11 “can never be allowed to happen in the United States of America again,” Feinstein claimed that intelligence officials did not have enough information to prevent the terrorist attacks.

Mr. President, we trust you are aware that the lack-of-enough-intelligence argument is dead wrong. Feinstein’s next dubious premise – that bulk collection is needed to prevent another 9/11 – is unproven and highly unlikely (not to mention its implications for the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment).

Given the closed circle surrounding you, we are allowing for the possibility that the smell from these rotting red herrings has not yet reached you – even though your own Review Group has found, for example, that NSA’s bulk collection has thwarted exactly zero terrorist plots.

The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.

We prepared this Memorandum in an effort to ensure that you have a fuller picture as you grapple with what to do about NSA. What follows is just the tip of an iceberg of essential background information – much of it hidden until now – that goes to the core of serious issues now front and center.

The drafting process sparked lively discussion of the relative merits of your Review Group’s recommendations. We have developed very specific comments on those recommendations. We look forward to an opportunity to bring them to your attention.

_________

Introduction

We write you with a sense of urgency looking toward your upcoming decisions regarding the activities of the National Security Agency. We the undersigned (William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe) worked with NSA for a total of 144 years, most of them at senior levels. Our mission required the highest technical skills to keep the country safe from foreign enemies, while protecting the privacy rights of U.S. citizens under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

For us, the 21st Century arrived with serious management and technical shortcomings at NSA in meeting the huge challenges posed by the digital and Internet age and the huge problems accompanying the transition from a Cold War footing over 40 years to an increasingly complex world with many asymmetric threats.

NSA management’s reaction in this environment not only opened the door to the attacks of 9/11 but led to violation of what had been the “First Commandment” at NSA; namely, “Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans Without a Court Warrant.” Under the circumstances, three of us (Binney, Loomis, and Wiebe) left; Drake had just come on board in hopes of playing a constructive role in addressing the challenges at NSA.

We all share an acute sense of regret for NSA’s demonstrable culpability for what happened on 9/11, and – for those of us working there before the terrorist attacks – a remorse for not having been able to stop them. We tried; but it is hard to escape a nagging regret that, somehow, we should have tried harder.

We were there; we know what happened. And we know how what happened has been successfully covered up – until now. Calamities like this tend to happen again if there is no accountability for what happened before. You need the unvarnished truth. The flood of revelations now in the public domain frees us to address facts and events formerly hidden behind a convenient, cover-up classification regime. We feel bound by the solemn oath we took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to make truths known to you that you may find as unconscionable as we do.

Why do we still care? Because we have consciences; because the oath we took has no expiration date; because we know – as few others do – how critically important it is for our country to have a well functioning, Constitution-abiding National Security Agency; and because we know how that ship can be steered back on course at that important place of work by improving its ability to find terrorists and other criminals in massive amounts of data, while protecting the right to privacy and citizen sovereignty.

Getting in the Door

It comes to us as no surprise that there is strong resistance on the part of the Establishment when it comes to giving us a hearing – a shunning of the very people who know what happened and how to take steps to prevent it from happening again.

Our predicament calls to mind that of our colleague veteran intelligence professionals, who were ignored by Official Washington and an obsequious media, when we knew that fraudulent (not mistaken) intelligence was being used to “justify” the launching of an aggressive war on Iraq 11 years ago. Establishment Washington barred the doors in 2002-2003. Just five years later our own clearances were taken away.

Now, once again the voices of seasoned intelligence professionals are being muted, in favor of a closed group of officials with huge incentive to cover up their failure to keep America safe and their playing fast and loose with the Fourth Amendment.

Mr. President, we have given up hope that your palace guard will let us in. Our chances of reaching you seem far better via this Memorandum, the 28th of its kind issued since early 2003, prepared at the behest of the Steering Group of our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). If this gets past your in-box protectors, we encourage you to pay more heed to it than your predecessor did to VIPS’ warnings in the months before the attack on Iraq.

In one limited sense, we are better off than our colleagues 11 years ago. This time, mainstream media have been unable to ignore the documentary evidence of rank dishonesty on the part of senior NSA and other intelligence officials. This time the media has come to us, seeking our views. This time we can comment rather freely on matters that until now were hidden under TOP SECRET stamps.

On December 26, for example, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy front-page article, quoting NSA’s former Senior Technical Director William Binney (undersigned) and former chief of NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center Edward Loomis (undersigned) warning that NSA is drowning in useless data lacking adequate privacy provisions, to the point where it cannot conduct effective terrorist-related surveillance and analysis.

A recently disclosed internal NSA briefing document corroborates the drowning, with the embarrassing admission, in bureaucratize, that NSA collection has been “outpacing” NSA’s ability to ingest, process, and store data – let alone analyze the take.

54 Now Down to Zero ‘Thwarts’

It is not difficult to connect NSA’s collect-everything approach with one principal finding of the Review Group you appointed to look into NSA programs; namely, that exactly zero terrorist plots have been prevented by NSA’s bulk trawling for telephone call records. One Review Group member, your former Chicago law professor colleague, Geoffrey Stone, has confessed to being “absolutely” surprised at the group’s finding of zero. Clearly, the statements of top NSA officials left Stone wholly unprepared for the truth. More

 

The Forgotten War:12 Years In Afghanistan Down The Memory Hole

Will the U.S. still be meddling in Afghanistan 30 years from now? If history is any guide, the answer is yes. And if history is any guide, three decades from now most Americans will have only the haziest idea why.

Since the 1950s, the U.S. has been trying to mold that remote land to its own desires, first through an aid “war” in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union; then, starting as the 1970s ended, an increasingly bitter and brutally hot proxy war with the Soviets meant to pay them back for supporting America’s enemies during the war in Vietnam. One bad war leads to another.

From then until the early 1990s, Washington put weapons in the hands of Islamic fundamentalist extremists of all sorts -- thought to be natural, devoutly religious allies in the war against “godless communism” -- gloated over the Red Army’s defeat and the surprising implosion of the Soviet empire, and then experienced its own catastrophic blowback from Afghanistan on September 11, 2001. After 50 years of scheming behind the scenes, the U.S. put boots on the ground in 2001 and now, 12 years later, is still fighting there -- against some Afghans on behalf of other Afghans while training Afghan troops to take over and fight their countrymen, and others, on their own.

Through it all, the U.S. has always claimed to have the best interests of Afghans at heart -- waving at various opportune moments the bright flags of modernization, democracy, education, or the rights of women. Yet today, how many Afghans would choose to roll back the clock to 1950, before the Americans ever dropped in? After 12 years of direct combat, after 35 years of arming and funding one faction or another, after 60 years of trying to remake Afghanistan to serve American aims, what has it all meant? If we ever knew, we’ve forgotten. Weary of official reports of progress, Americans tuned out long ago.

Back in 1991, as Steve Coll reports in Ghost Wars, an unnamed CIA agent mentioned the war in Afghanistan to President George H.W. Bush. Not long before, he had okayed the shipment of Iraqi weaponry captured in the first Gulf War -- worth $30 million -- to multiple factions of Islamist extremists then battling each other and probably using those secondhand Iraqi arms to destroy Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. Still, Bush seemed puzzled by the CIA man’s question about the war. He reportedly asked, “Is that thing still going on?”

Such forgetfulness about wars has, it seems, become an all-American skill. Certainly, the country has had little trouble forgetting the war in Iraq, and why should Afghanistan be any different? Sure, the exit from that country is going to take more time and effort. No seacoast, no ships, bad roads, high tolls, IEDs. Trucking stuff out is problematic; flying it out, wildly expensive, especially since a lot of the things are really, really big. Take MRAPs, for example -- that’s Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles -- 11,000 of them, weighing 14 tons or more apiece. For that workhorse transport plane, the C-17, a full load of MRAPs numbers only four.

The equipment inventory keeps changing, but estimates run to 100,000 shipping containers and about 50,000 vehicles to be removed by the end of 2014, adding up to more than $36 billion worth of equipment now classified as “retrograde.” The estimated shipping bill has quickly risen to $6 billion, and like the overall cost of the war, it is sure to keep rising.

Seven billion dollars worth of equipment -- about 20% of what the U.S. sent in to that distant land -- is simply being torn up, chopped down, split, shredded, stomped, and, when possible, sold off for scrap at pennies a pound. Toughest to break up are the weighty MRAPs. Introduced in 2007 at a cost of $1 million apiece to counteract deadly roadside bombs, they were later discovered to be no better at protecting American soldiers than the cheaper vehicles they replaced. Of the 11,000 shipped to Afghanistan, 2,000 are on the chopping block, leaving a mere 9,000 to be flown to Kuwait, four at a time, and shipped home or “repositioned” elsewhere to await some future enemy.

The military is not exaggerating when it calls this colossal destruction of surplus equipment historic. A disposal effort on this scale is unprecedented in the annals of the Pentagon. The centerpiece of this demolition derby may be the brand-new, 64,000-square-foot, $34-million, state-of-the art command center completed in Helmand Province just as most U.S. troops left, and now likely to be demolished. Or the new $45 million facility in Kandahar built as a repair center for armored vehicles, now used for their demolition, and probably destined to follow them. Taxpayers may one day want to ask some questions about such profligate and historic waste, but it’s sure to keep arms manufacturers happy, resupplying the military until we can get ourselves into another full-scale war.

So this exit is a really big job, and that’s without even mentioning the paperwork. All those exit plans, all the documents to be filed with the Afghan government for permission to export our own equipment, all the fines assessed for missing customs forms (already running to $70 million), all the export fees to be paid, and the bribes to be offered, and the protection money to be slipped to the Taliban so our enemies won’t shoot at the stuff being trucked out. All that takes time.

But when it comes right down to it, the United States has a surefire way of ending a war, no matter when it actually ends (or doesn’t). When we say it’s over, it’s over.

Enduring Operation Enduring Freedom

As it happens, things probably won’t be quite so decisively “over” for everybody. More

 

Professor Paul Jackson: The unintended consequences of foreign intervention

After the horrors of the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, there will be inevitable questions about the nature of Islamic terrorism in East Africa. However, the attack itself is part of an on-going conflict in Kenya that in turn is part of a bigger regional conflagration based on Somalia. In fact the attack on the mall can be traced back to an international intervention that produced a number of unintended consequences, one of which has been the transformation of the group that perpetrated the attack, Al-Shabaab.

Kenyan troops at Westgate Mall

In fact the continued fighting in Somalia and the relative success of the African Union forces against Al-Shabaab fighters may have made the situation less stable and more dangerous for a number of reasons, not least because the movement may have splintered in to a number of cells capable of perpetrating terrorist atrocities rather than holding territory.

What of Al-Shabaab itself? A rather shady organisation that grew out of the youth wing (‘shabaab’ means ‘youth’) of a wider organisation, al-Ittihad al-Islami, one of the Somali extremist groups that existed in the 1980s and 90s, al-Shabaab itself remained relatively unimportant until 2007 following the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian troops. At that time, al-Shabaab was serving as the military wing of a group known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which established a form of governance within Mogadishu and in parts of the countryside. Following the Ethiopian invasion, the ICU collapsed and al-Shabaab took up arms against the Ethiopian forces, retreating in to a swampy area in the South.

At this point, the movement runs a very conventional guerrilla war against the Ethiopians, at various times supported by the Eritreans in a proxy war against her Ethiopian rival. However, the growing prominence of al-Shabaab and its Islamic roots make it fertile ground for the growth of Al-Qaeda links, as part of a regional spread of Islamic radicalism from Yemen, into the Horn and down the East coast. The increased links are attended by a change in philosophy of violence and a move to the use of suicide bombing as a means of spreading terror at the same time as continuing its conventional warfare against international forces.

In 2008 al-Shabaab mounts a series of suicide bombings against government offices and international agencies as well as the Ethiopian consulate, stating that the attacks are retaliation against the international community for the invasion of Somalia. With the advent of AMISOM in Somalia and African Union troops from Uganda and Burundi, al-Shabaab widened its terrorist campaign and in 2010 mounted its first international attack against an Ethiopian restaurant and rugby club in Uganda.

The AMISOM forces have been very successful on the ground in Somalia and al-Shabaab does not control the same level of territory as they did in 2008. The Kenyan military incursion that started in 2011 has been particularly successful, with the effective Kenyan military pushing back the fighters significantly, including capturing one of al-Shabaab’s last strongholds, Kismayo, a key source of revenue. It was this that led al-Shabaab to call the Westgate attack revenge for Kenyan involvement in Somalia.

The horrific attack can therefore be traced right back to an international intervention in a regional conflict. Not only does this point to a close link between terrorism and more conventional warfare, but also to the transnational nature of much conflict within Africa. The purpose of the attack itself was clearly to send a signal to the Kenyans that they should not send troops to Somalia, and yet it was also a signal that the African Union Somali offensive was being successful.

Losing territory and increasingly unable to hold territory against troops, al-Shabaab has been forced to rethink its strategy. Unfortunately the most logical model for a new strategy is localised cells of terrorists, usually connected to the Somali diaspora, which is very developed following twenty years of conflict. There are approximately 250,000 Somalis in Nairobi alone, which could provide a fertile breeding ground for radicalism, let alone other groups in Uganda and Tanzania.

The blueprint for this type of incident was the Mumbai hotel attack of 2008, which showed the weakness of many public areas frequented by westerners and wealthy locals and was capable of provoking an over-reaction by security forces that could lead to further radicalisation. More

 

 

Whistleblower Reveals U.S. State Dept. Ships Arms Directly to al-Qaeda...

William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee started his career as a CIA contract pilot in the late 1950s, delivering guns and ammunition on behalf of the agency to Fidel Castro.

Plumlee confirmed that such arm deals are still common today, with the State Dept. shipping arms to al-Qaeda via the CIA.

During an interview with Alex Jones, Plumlee pointed out that Pat Smith, the mother of an information management officer also killed during the Benghazi attack, received little information from the Obama administration about her son’s murder.

“I began to wonder ‘why won’t they tell her anything?’” He asked. “Then a contact of mine in the Middle East, a high-ranking NATO official, mentioned to me that he had reports that the ambassador [J. Christopher Stevens] had been complaining about the dispatches and cables that he had got from the State Department about the weapons being received and [Islamic] radicals armed, including Stinger missiles.”

According to Plumlee, Steven was ordered to stand down after he asked the State Department what he should do about the American arm shipments to al-Qaeda.

“The ambassador and his people had written a series of field reports and cable dispatches advising our State Department that the rebel factions had been armed with U.S. weapons,” he said. “Now my contention is this: if that is the case, why is that classified as a national security matter?”

Plumlee mentioned that Steven’s field notes have not been released by the State Department.

These revelations suggest that after Stevens told the State Dept. that he did not want al-Qaeda receiving heat seeking missiles, he was killed in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi which was designed to take out witnesses to the arms transfer and to suppress Stevens’s reports.

The Obama administration then blamed the attack entirely on Islamic protestors enraged by the filmInnocence of Muslims while refusing to answer why U.S. special forces were ordered not to aid Stevens and others during the assault.

The missiles in question, as well as the other weapons given to al-Qaeda, were transported to Libya by C-130s under the Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) program, which operates within the State Department.

As explained by New York Times best-selling author and former journalist Jim Marrs, the DCS program oversees the shipment of U.S. weapons and training to countries around the world.

Through its own internal investigations, the State Dept. admitted that firearms supplied by the DCS have ended up in the hands of foreign enemies.

Tying it all together, Plumlee stated that the weapons given to al-Qaeda were “U.S. made weapons that came from the DCS program, illegally transported by C-130s” into countries such as Turkey and Jordan and were “dispatched from CIA safe houses to the Syrian rebels.”

As we have documented in the past, the Syrian rebels are predominantly al-Qaeda fighters who want to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in order to install an Islamic state in Syria. More

 

Top-secret US intelligence files show new levels of distrust of Pakistan

THE $52.6 billion US intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including Al Qaeda, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

Pakistani security outside the U.S. consulate in Lahore

No other nation draws as much scrutiny across so many categories of national security concern.
A 178-page summary of the US intelligence community’s “black budget” shows that the United States has ramped up its surveillance of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, cites previously undisclosed concerns about biological and chemical sites there, and details efforts to assess the loyalties of counterterrorism sources recruited by the CIA.
Pakistan appears at the top of charts listing critical US intelligence gaps. It is named as a target of newly formed analytic cells. And fears about the security of its nuclear programme are so pervasive that a budget section on containing the spread of illicit weapons divides the world into two categories: Pakistan and everybody else.
The disclosures — based on documents provided to The Washington Post by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden — expose broad new levels of US distrust in an already unsteady security partnership with Pakistan, a politically unstable country that faces rising Islamist militancy. They also reveal a more expansive effort to gather intelligence on Pakistan than US officials have disclosed.

The United States has delivered nearly $26 billion in aid to Pakistan over the past 12 years, aimed at stabilising the country and ensuring its cooperation in counterterrorism efforts. But with Osama bin Laden dead and Al Qaeda degraded, US spy agencies appear to be shifting their attention to dangers that have emerged beyond the patch of Pakistani territory patrolled by CIA drones.
“If the Americans are expanding their surveillance capabilities, it can only mean one thing,” said Husain Haqqani, who until 2011 served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. “The mistrust now exceeds the trust.”

Beyond the budget files, other classified documents provided to The Post expose fresh allegations of systemic human rights abuses in Pakistan. US spy agencies reported that high-ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officials had been aware of — and possibly ordered — an extensive campaign of extrajudicial killings targeting militants and other adversaries.
Public disclosure of those reports, based on communications intercepts from 2010 to 2012 and other intelligence, could have forced the Obama administration to sever aid to the Pakistani armed forces because of a US law that prohibits military assistance to human rights abusers. But the documents indicate that administration officials decided not to press the issue, in order to preserve an already frayed relationship with the Pakistanis.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council said the United States is “committed to a long-term partnership with Pakistan, and we remain fully engaged in building a relationship that is based on mutual interests and mutual respect.”
“We have an ongoing strategic dialogue that addresses in a realistic fashion many of the key issues between us, from border management to counterterrorism, from nuclear security to promoting trade and investment,” said the spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden. “The United States and Pakistan share a strategic interest in combating the challenging security issues in Pakistan, and we continue to work closely with Pakistan’s professional and dedicated security forces to do so.”
The Post agreed to withhold some details from the budget documents after consultations with US officials, who expressed concern about jeopardizing ongoing operations and sources.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Critical ‘intelligence gaps’

Stark assessments of Pakistan contained in the budget files seem at odds with the signals that US officials have conveyed in public, partly to avoid fanning Pakistani suspicions that the United States is laying contingency plans to swoop in and seize control of the country’s nuclear complex.
When Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. was asked during congressional testimony last year whether Pakistan had appropriate safeguards for its nuclear programme, he replied, “I’m reasonably confident they do.” Facing a similar question this year, Clapper declined to discuss the matter in open session.
But the classified budget overview he signed and submitted for fiscal 2013 warned that “knowledge of the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and associated material encompassed one of the most critical set of.
The budget documents do not break down expenditures by country or estimate how much the US government spends to spy on Pakistan. But the nation is at the centre of two categories — counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation — that dominate the black budget.
In their proposal for fiscal 2013, which ends Sept 30, US spy agencies sought $16.6 billion to fight Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups and asked for $6.86 billion to counter the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Together, the two categories accounted for nearly half of the US intelligence community’s budget request for this year.

Detailed spreadsheets contain dozens of line items that correspond to operations in Pakistan. The CIA, for example, was scheduled to spend $2.6 billion on “covert action” programmes around the world. Among the most expensive, according to current and former US intelligence officials, is the armed drone campaign against Al Qaeda fighters and other militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt.
US intelligence analysts “produced hundreds of detailed and timely reports on shipments and pending deliveries of suspect cargoes” to Pakistan, Syria and Iran. Multiple US agencies exploited the massive American security presence in Afghanistan — including a string of CIA bases and National Security Agency listening posts along the border mainly focused on militants — for broader intelligence on Pakistan.Anxiety over nuclear programme
After years of diplomatic conflict, significant sources of tension between the United States and Pakistan have begun to subside.
The pace of CIA drone strikes has plunged, and two years have passed since US leaders infuriated Islamabad by ordering the secret raid inside Pakistani territory that killed bin Laden.
Although Pakistani anger has abated, Haqqani said the fallout from the raid had broader consequences than widely understood.

“The discovery of bin Laden (in Pakistan) made the Americans think that the Pakistani state’s ability to know what happens within the country is a lot less than had been assumed,” said Haqqani, who is an international-relations professor at Boston University. That realisation may have ratcheted up a long-standing source of concern: Pakistan’s ability to safeguard its nuclear materials and components.
US intelligence agencies are focused on two particularly worrisome scenarios: the possibility that Pakistan’s nuclear facilities might come under attack by Islamist militants, as its army headquarters in Rawalpindi did in 2009, and even greater concern that Islamist militants might have penetrated the ranks of Pakistan’s military or intelligence services, putting them in a position to launch an insider attack or smuggle out nuclear material.
Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium. The country is estimated to have as many as 120 nuclear weapons, and the budget documents indicate that US intelligence agencies suspect that Pakistan is adding to that stockpile.
Little is known about how it moves materials among its facilities, an area that experts have cited as a potential vulnerability.
“Nobody knows how they truly do it,” said Feroz Khan, a retired Pakistani military officer and director of arms control who lectures at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “Vehicles move in a stealthy manner and move with security. But it’s not clear whether the cores are moved to the warheads or the warheads are moved to the core locations.”
Concerns persist that extremists could seize components of the stockpile or trigger a war with neighbouring India. Pakistan also has a track record of exporting nuclear technology to countries that are on Washington’s blacklist.
Pakistan has accepted some security training from the CIA, but US export restrictions and Pakistani suspicions have prevented the two countries from sharing the most sophisticated technology for safeguarding nuclear components.
US anxiety over Pakistan’s nuclear programme appears to be driven more by uncertainty about how it is run than specific intelligence indicating that its systems are vulnerable, according to the budget documents.
A lengthy section on counter-proliferation starts with a single goal: “Make Quantitative and Qualitative Progress against Pakistan Nuclear Gaps.” A table indicates that US spy agencies have identified at least six areas in which their understanding of Pakistan’s weapons programmes is deficient.
US agencies reported gaining valuable information through “extensive efforts to increase understanding of the transfer and storage of the associated materials.”
The budget describes the creation of a Pakistan WMD Analysis Cell to track movements of nuclear materials. Agencies, including the CIA and the Defence Department, were able “to develop and deploy a new compartmented collection capability” that delivered a “more comprehensive understanding of strategic weapons security in Pakistan.”
Even so, “the number of gaps associated with Pakistani nuclear security remains the same,” the document said, and “the questions associated with this intractable target are more complex.” The budget documents indicate that US intelligence agencies are also focused on the security of the nuclear programme in India, Pakistan’s arch-rival.

Other fields under scrutiny

US surveillance of Pakistan extends far beyond its nuclear programme. There are several references in the black budget to expanding US scrutiny of chemical and biological laboratories. The country is not thought to be running a rogue chemical or biological weapons programme, but US intelligence officials fear that Islamists could seize materials from government-run laboratories.
Even American interdiction operations targeting other countries have stumbled into connections with Pakistan. In one case, a US effort to block an Iranian shipment through a Turkish port “proved to be even more successful when aluminum powder destined for Pakistan was also discovered and detained,” according to the documents. Aluminum powder can be used to increase the power of explosives.
The budget documents don’t disclose CIA payments to its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, which former officials said has totalled tens of millions of dollars. The documents do show that the CIA has developed sophisticated means of assessing the loyalties of informants who have helped the agency find Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s tribal region.
Those measures, which The Post has agreed not to disclose, have allowed the CIA to “gain confidence in each asset’s authenticity, reliability and freedom from hostile control.”

Extrajudicial killings

Other classified documents given to The Post by Snowden reveal that US spy agencies for years reported that senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders were orchestrating a wave of extrajudicial killings of terrorism suspects and other militants.
In July 2011, an assessment of communications intercepts and other intelligence by the NSA concluded that the Pakistani military and intelligence services had continued over the preceding 16 months a pattern of lethally targeting perceived enemies without trial or due process. The killings, according to the NSA, occurred “with the knowledge, if not consent, of senior officers.”The NSA cited two senior Pakistani officials who “apparently ordered some of the killings or were at least aware of them,” read a summary of the top-secret NSA report, titled “Pakistan/Human Rights: Extrajudicial Killings Conducted With Consent of Senior Intelligence Officials.”
The report summary did not provide an estimate of how many people had been killed or their identities. But it generally described the targets as people whom the Pakistani security forces viewed as “undeniably linked to terrorist activity” or responsible for attacks on Pakistan’s armed forces.
The killings “seemed to serve the purpose of dispensing what the military considered swift justice,” the intelligence assessment stated. Pakistani authorities “were conscious of not arousing suspicions. The number of victims at a given time tended to be very small.
Furthermore, the military took care to make the deaths seem to occur in the course of counterinsurgency operations, from natural causes, or as the result of personal vendettas.”
Although Pakistan has been engaged for years in open warfare with Taliban factions and other domestic insurgents, the NSA placed the extrajudicial killings in a much darker category. Pakistani police forces “were reluctant to carry out the killings,” the report said.
The NSA compiled its report shortly after the public exposure of other alleged Pakistani atrocities.
In June 2010, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan charged that Pakistani forces had carried out more than 280 summary executions during an offensive against Taliban fighters and other militants, mostly in the Swat Valley. Five months later, a video surfaced on the Internet showing Pakistani soldiers executing six blindfolded men with their hands tied behind their backs.
An international outcry over the latter incident prompted the Obama administration to withhold aid — but only to a handful of low-level Pakistani army units thought to have been involved in such incidents.
At the time, Pakistani officials dismissed the video and other reports of summary executions as Taliban propaganda, but they later reversed course and launched an internal investigation. Pakistan’s military leaders insisted publicly that they had zero tolerance for such incidents.

Human rights abuses

It was not the first time that US officials sought to keep evidence of Pakistani human rights abuses out of the public eye.
A classified diplomatic cable, sent from the US Embassy in Islamabad to officials in Washington in September 2009, also raised concern about the extrajudicial killings of militants by Pakistani army units. But the cable — originally released in 2010 by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks — advised against public disclosure of the incidents, saying it was more important to maintain support for the Pakistani armed forces.
US intelligence officials have kept quiet about other signs of human rights abuses by the Pakistani military, even though their classified reporting on the subject underscores persistent concerns.
In September 2011, the summary of a top-secret report from a Defense Intelligence Agency task force cited the “systemic practice” of unlawful killings by Pakistani security forces in the tribal regions of western Pakistan.

Pakistan had recently passed a law allowing the military to detain insurgents indefinitely and make it easier to convict them in civilian courts. But the DIA concluded that because extrajudicial killings were “condoned by senior officials” in Pakistan’s security establishment, the new law was unlikely to significantly reduce the number of deaths.
Other US intelligence documents indicate that Pakistani officials weren’t targeting just suspected insurgents Plot to kill Asma JahangirIn May 2012, US intelligence agencies discovered evidence of Pakistani officers plotting to “eliminate” a prominent human rights activist, Asma Jahangir, according to the summary of a top-secret DIA report. Jahangir had been a leading public critic of the ISI for years.
The DIA report did not identify which officers were plotting to kill Jahangir, but it said the plan “included either tasking militants to kill her in India or tasking militants or criminals to kill her in Pakistan.”
The US agency said it did not know whether the ISI had given approval for the plot to proceed. Although the report speculated that the ISI was motivated to kill Jahangir “to quiet public criticism of the military,” the DIA noted that such a plot “would result in international and domestic backlash as ISI is already under significant criticism for intimidation and extra-judicial killings.”
News of the alleged plot became public a few weeks later when Jahangir gave a round of interviews to journalists, revealing that she had learned that Pakistani intelligence officials had marked her for death. The plot was never carried out. More

 

 

 

The Struggle for Yemen and the Challenge of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

Authored by Dr. W. Andrew Terrill.

In recent years, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been widely recognized as a more dangerous regional and international terrorist organization than the original al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden until his death in 2011.

In 2010-11, AQAP was able to present a strong challenge to Yemen's government by capturing and retaining large areas in the southern part of the country. Yemen's new reform President defeated AQAP and recaptured areas under their control in 2012, but the terrorists remain an extremely dangerous force seeking to reassert themselves at this time of transition in Yemen.

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John Brennan dismisses drone 'critics' who dismiss him right back

In his first media interview this year, CIA Director John Brennan dismissed civilian critics of his agency's drone program who "talk about these issues very callously" and "are not part of it." But what about drone critics inside the administration?

John Brennan

In its July issue, GQ magazine asked Brennan if the CIA's drone program is creating more terrorists than it's killing off. It mentioned that some view the program as "mowing the lawn," a quote that was relayed to the magazine by the Brookings Institution's Peter Singer (who, full disclosure, works with FP's Noah Shachtman in his capacity as a non-resident fellow at the think tank).

In response, Brennan dismissed the notion of "mowing the lawn" and where it was coming from. "There are a lot of people who talk about these issues very callously, on the outside. Because they're not a part of it," he said. "If we don't arrest the growth of Al Qaeda in a Yemen, or a Mali, or a Somalia, or whatever else, that cancer is going to overtake the body politic in the country, and then we're going to have a situation that we're not going to be able to address."

Responding to the charge that he's an outsider and therefore can't understand the nature of the program, Singer tells Killer Apps that the "mowing the lawn" quote doesn't even come from him.

"The quote on ‘mowing the lawn' is not me but Bruce Riedel, a 30 year veteran of the CIA, who served on the NSC for 4 presidents and led Obama's first Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review," Singer said. It is here. I've referenced it a number of times, as Bruce encapsulates it well, but I can't take credit for it."

"I very much understand the perspective of the ‘outside-inside' dynamic that is referenced, but in this case it is not only ‘outsiders' who have expressed concerns about the risk of an over reliance on targeted killing becoming ‘self-perpetuating, yielding undeniable short-term results that may obscure long-term costs,'" he said. He went on to list a who's who of official statements from national security insiders.

"Among the ‘insiders' who have expressed the very same concerns are the President of the United States (Obama in his 2013 NDU speech), the highest ranking US Military officer (Admiral Mullen speech at 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival), the former US Military commander in Afghanistan (General McChrystal's January 2013 interview with Reuters), the former Director of National Intelligence (Dennis Blair's 2011 New York Times op-ed on the topic," he said. "The list could go on and on."

Just a little food for thought the next time someone dismisses the remarks of drone critic "outsiders."

(As an aside, Singer emphasized that he himself isn't a critic of targeted killings, but has been concerned by how the drone program has been conducted on transparency and legal grounds.)

"I've been calling for a more strategic, more long-term, and more transparent approach. That course correction is now taking place -- and the irony is that Mr. Brennan played a key role in that shift." More

Deal or no deal? - Negotiating with insurgents

April 19, 2009 marked a watershed in the Pakistani military establishment's unrealistic view of Islamist militant groups. The then general officer commanding, Major General Ejaz Awan, and his troops had convinced the aging Maulana Sufi Muhammad to denounce suicide bombings at a public rally in the heart of Mingora, the administrative headquarter of Swat valley.

Live on private TV channels, and facing thousands of people at the Grassy Ground, Sufi did not condemned violence, but declared Western-style democracy, the Pakistani parliament, the Supreme Court and the state un-Islamic, and thus turned the tables on the army. It was an utter shock to the military establishment which had hoped to take the sting out of Mullah Fazlullah's terror campaign by having his father-in-law speak against violence by Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in the valley.

All this happened in the context of the second peace deal in the area on February 19, 2009, which had taken place with mutual agreement between the Awami National Party and the General Headquarters, as yet another attempt to wrest Swat back from the TTP. But between February 19 and April 19, the TTP had ambushed or robbed dozens of military convoys, snatched government vehicles, practically run or occupied government offices, and sat in courts. The TTP had also ruthlessly executed three Pakistan Army commandos caught from the mountains between Swat and Buner.

This prompted a meeting at the GHQ on April 25, wherein the alarmed top brass decided to go for the kill. "When you raise a puppy, it becomes a member of the family, but when it develops rabies, it becomes an enemy, and that is the time to cull it," Gen Awan had remarked when reminded of the unholy nexus that had existed between some Taliban factions and the security apparatus.

The army seemed to have learned its first lesson the hard way. The eventual May 7 invasion of TTP strongholds in the Swat valley practically ended the peace deal and gradually took Swat to where it is today.

Similarly, the September 5, 2006 agreement in North Waziristan town had apparently ended hostilities between the Pakistani military and TTP rebels linked to the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda in the region. But the killing of about 50 soldiers and paramilitary men in an ambush in North Waziristan practically broke that truce.

Signed by representatives of all the tribes and the representatives of the Haqqanis, the 16-point agreement obligated the government to stop air and ground attacks against militants in Waziristan. In return, the militants agreed to cease cross-border movement into and out of Afghanistan, and to expel foreigners from North Waziristan, but "those who cannot leave will be allowed to live peacefully, respecting the law of the land and the agreement".

But until the suspension of the agreement in September 2007, following the ambush of a Pakistan Army convoy (as well as several other attacks), militants kept crossing the border, facilitating the passage of foreign fighters to Afghanistan via Waziristan, and hardly stopped the terrorist training camps being run in the mountainous Shawaal, Ladha and Makeen regions.

Whether a peace agreement with a non-state actor - whose rationale for rebelling against the state lies across the border or rests in a trans-national militant ideology - is worth pursuing requires a critical look at three such deals - in Shakai (South Waziristan), Miranshah (North Waziristan) and Swat.

Firstly, without a doubt, the TTP and its associates used the peace deals in Swat and North Waziristan as a cover to exploit the porous and compromised governance and security structures and continue their terrorist activities on both sides of the border. At least another four major peace deals between 2004 and 2009 had also fallen flat because of an inherent message of weakness from the panicked state and its institutions.

Secondly, the May 2004 Shakai Agreement - signed under a blitz of cameras by Naik Mohammad Wazir and General Safdar Hussein, filled up non-state actors with a sense of power, a larger-than-life stature. Under the FCR, a low-ranking official would simply summon a wayward tribesman and discuss with him the issue. In this case, a major general went to Naik Mohammad's home to sign the deal. The general, in fact, violated the "rules" that govern life in FATA, and ended up glorifying what the likes of Naik Mohammad did or do to the state.

Thirdly, almost all of the dozen or so peace deals or arrangements resulted in the release of scores of alleged fighters, and mobilized tens of millions in compensation given to people identified by the militants as the "victims of conflict." The insurgents succeeded in projecting the state as an aggressor, although the state institutions were only doing their duty under the constitution.

Lessons from the insurgencies currently raging in India, or those in Sri Lanka and Ireland, are very instructive in this regard. Most Indian and Sri Lankan security experts advise against approaching talks with non-state rebels from a position of weakness. A military solution is a must before going for any political solution, and that policy should be based on the understanding of the root cause of insurgencies. This is what a group of experts recommended after a debate on the "Counter Insurgency Operations in North East India: Operations without a policy", held at The Terrorism and Internal Security Cluster of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) on March 21, 2011. They also recommended that security forces fighting at the ground level should be given independence for taking decisions to curb the insurgency.

Writing for Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College (SSI), Durga Madhab (John) Mitra argues that careful consideration should be given to the likely outcome of governmental efforts, particularly in the areas already dominated by insurgents and in the areas inhabited by relatively isolated tribes. Outside influences inciting the insurgency should be denied access to vulnerable areas by construction of physical barriers, Mitra says.

Speaking of the lessons learned from the conflict in Ireland, Jonathan Powell, the author of Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, and former chief of staff to premier Tony Blair, considers talks with "insurgents" as an absolutely essentials means for peace but also underlines the need for military pressure. If there is a political problem at the root of the conflict, then there has to be a political solution. That is not to say that security measures have no place. On the contrary, they are essential. Without security pressure downwards, insurgents will find life comfortable and have no incentive to make the tough decisions necessary for peace. But security pressure by itself without offering a political way out will simply cause the insurgents to fight to the last man. Powell also advises (probably the publicity-hungry Pakistani leadership) to maintain absolute secrecy while talking - directly or indirectly - to groups challenging the state. He cautions not to project breakthrough agreements as peace deals (the way Pakistani leadership touted all deals as the end, though they were only means to the end). More

Negotiating with insurgents can only be successful if both parties understand that they are negotiating from a level surface, and that has to be The Rule of Law. If the home territory of the insurgents is governed by some other rule of law (i.e. Tribal law or Sharia), then the negotiations will suffer. It is also necessary for both parties to know, at the start, the consequences under the law.

Sun Tzu stated in The Art of War

"The smartest strategy in war is the one that allows you to achieve your objectives without having to fight."

Sun Tzu believed that to win a battle by actually fighting is not the most desirable method. Avoiding war and achieving what one needs is clearly superior to a battle. The most desirable form of generalship is to get the enemy to surrender and incorporate the enemy forces into ones own.

To achieve ones own objectives in a conflict situation one has to communicate with the opponent. Communication may take different forms; it may be involve deception, show of force, involve other parties or involve negotiations with the opponent. The goal of such negotiations is to present the opponent with alternatives that are inferior to the opponent's surrender and the terms of surrender that the opponent would accept. Editor