How Hezbollah Trained an Operative to Spy on Israeli Tourists

 

by Sebastian Rotella

ProPublica, April 26, 2013, 1:58 p.m.

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Hossam Yaakoub, right, a Lebanese-Swedish operative, is escorted by police as he arrives at the court in Limassol on March 21, 2013. (Yiannis Kourtoglou/AFP/Getty Images)

A rare inside look at Hezbollah during a recent terror trial in Cyprus portrayed a militant group with the prowess of an intelligence service: meticulous overseas reconnaissance, Western operatives with elaborate covers, training at secret bases where recruits and instructors wear masks for maximum security.

And the conviction last month of a confessed Hezbollah operative for doing terrorist surveillance of Israeli tourists has heated up a debate that continues to divide the West: Whether the European Union, like the United States and Israel, should designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

In a report to be published by a West Point think tank next week, a former U.S. counterterror official argues that the Cyprus case and an attack on Israelis in Bulgaria last year show that Hezbollah has returned to aggressive operations on European soil. Western counterterror agencies largely share that analysis, which has spurred a proposal by Britain for the European Union to designate Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist organization.

“In Cyprus you have a case that underwent full judicial scrutiny, and a conviction in a European court,” said Matthew Levitt, the report’s author, a former top Treasury Department intelligence official who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “You have all this evidence. You have a European Hezbollah operative who was also doing courier work across Europe. What else do they need?”

Decisions in the 27-nation European Union move slowly through a bureaucratic labyrinth, especially on diplomatically sensitive questions. But the current debate departs from traditional European reluctance to confront a militant group that is a powerhouse in the government and on the streets of Lebanon.

In Paris, Berlin and other capitals, the terrorist activity and Hezbollah’s military support for the Assad regime in Syria’s civil war have challenged a strategy of maintaining cordial relations with Hezbollah to prevent retaliation and preserve diplomatic leverage.

“It has been and will be the most serious discussion on Hezbollah they’ve had,” said a U.S. counterterror official who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. “Stability in Lebanon has been one of the main European arguments for not designating Hezbollah. But when they see what Hezbollah is doing Syria, which is exacerbating instability there and creating spillover into Lebanon, causing instability there as well, it changes this perspective.”

On July 18 last year, the bombing of an airport bus carrying Israeli tourists at the Bulgarian beach resort of Burgas killed six people. Investigators said they identified two alleged Hezbollah operatives as suspects, although little evidence has been made public.

The court verdict in Cyprus carries more weight in the legalistic European Union. There are also parallels between the Burgas bombing and the surveillance and potential targets described by Hossam Yaakoub, the Lebanese-Swedish operative whom police in Cyprus arrested days before the attack in Bulgaria. His statements are extraordinary because of the wealth of detailed revelations about the inner workings of Hezbollah.

“The case provides unique insights into how (Hezbollah) recruits and trains new operatives,” Levitt writes in a case study of the Cyprus trial that will appear Monday in the CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point.

The military think tank provided ProPublica with an advance copy of the article, “Hizb Allah Resurrected: the Party of God Returns to Tradecraft.” ProPublica separately obtained the 26 pages of depositions that Yaakoub, 24, gave Cypriot police.

During the past decade, arrests, raids and infiltration by spy agencies have produced a great deal of information about the operations, training camps and leadership of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In contrast, Hezbollah remains a secretive, disciplined militant group with worldwide reach and a vast war chest. Iran, a close ally, provides arms, funds, training and strategic direction. Hezbollah’s paramilitary operations, social welfare work and political power have won a formidable reputation in the Arab world and beyond. It is a militant group that increasingly resembles a state entity.

“I believe in the armed struggle of Hezbollah until the liberation of Lebanon,” Yaakoub told his interrogators, according to the Cypriot police depositions. “Hezbollah is the political party, which supports the people of Lebanon and fights for the rights of our country … Although I believe in the armed struggle for the liberation of Lebanon from Israel, I am not in favor of the terrorist attacks against innocent people. For me, war and terrorism are two different things.”

A three-judge panel in Cyprus nonetheless found that Yaakoub was preparing the terrain to attack Israeli tourists and other Jews on the island as part of Hezbollah’s holy war. The Cypriot police presumably received a tip about him from Israeli intelligence, Levitt said, and followed him as he documented and photographed flights arriving from Israel, buses transporting Israeli tourists, kosher restaurants and other potential targets.

Step-by-Step Training

After his arrest last July 7, Yaakoub reacted with the practiced cool of a well-trained operative, according to the depositions. He denied everything. He explained that he was traveling with a Swedish passport because his family had moved to Sweden six months after he was born and he had lived there until he was 14. He described himself as a Beirut-based trader in souvenirs, clothes and other merchandise. He backed up his story with company documents and names of local clients.

As police confronted him with detailed evidence, however, his resistance began to crumble. During an interrogation that began after midnight a week after his arrest, he admitted the truth: “I am an active member of the Hezbollah for about four years now. I was recruited by a Lebanese called Reda in 2007… He told me that he needed me for the secret mission of Hezbollah … my secret mission would be surveillance and undercover activities.”

Yaakoub fits a classic profile, according to Levitt and other experts. Hezbollah takes advantage of the global Lebanese diaspora to recruit operatives with Western passports. Bulgarian authorities, for instance, are seeking two Lebanese suspects who traveled with authentic Australian and Canadian passports — and fake U.S. driver licenses — in the airport bus bombing last year.

Canadians, Swedes and Colombians of Lebanese descent have allegedly taken part in past plots. And Yaakoub told police he trained in Lebanon alongside a fighter who spoke English with an American accent, according to the deposition.

The training began with five to seven months of lessons in tradecraft in Beirut from an instructor named Yousef. He taught the recruit about cover stories and clandestine operations, sending him at one point to deliver an envelope to a man in Istanbul. Next came military training with pistols, rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and C-4 explosives at secret camps in south Lebanon. The sessions were designed for maximum operational security.

“They took me from different spots in Beirut, using closed vans so I could not see,” Yaakoub said, according to the deposition. “Each training group consisted of 10-13 people. Both the trainees and instructors wore hoods, so they could not recognize each other. We had individual tents and exercises were performed in a separate place. It was forbidden to see each other.”

Soon Hezbollah chiefs sent Yaakoub on courier missions to the French city of Lyon and to Amsterdam, where he thought he recognized the voice of his contact as one of his masked classmates from Beirut. The deployment of Yaakoub in Europe coincides with a dangerous strategic shift by Hezbollah, experts say.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Hezbollah and Iran conducted bombings, kidnappings and hijackings on Israeli, American and European targets from Argentina to Lebanon to France, inflicting hundreds of casualties. In the early 2000s, the group curtailed operations outside the Middle East theater, focusing on its struggle with Israel.

In 2010, however, leaders of Hezbollah and Iran launched an aggressive new terror campaign. They wanted to retaliate against Israel for the assassinations of Hezbollah warlord Imad Mughniyeh in 2008 and of Iranian nuclear scientists in subsequent years, according to Western counterterror officials.

“Even before the Burgas attack, we were growing concerned about what Hezbollah is doing around the world,” the U.S. counterterror official said. “They are plotting in a way we hadn’t seen since the 1990s. There is certainly a feeling that Iran and Hezbollah have ramped up their networks.”

Reactivating Terror Wing

Iran and Hezbollah decided on a new offensive in which the Quds Force, the external operations wing of Iran’s intelligence service, would hit hard targets such as Israeli and Saudi diplomats, according to Levitt’s article. Hezbollah, meanwhile, would focus on Israeli tourists and other soft targets, Levitt asserts, citing information from U.S., Israeli and European security agencies.

As a result, Hezbollah revamped the Islamic Jihad Organization, its international terrorist wing, according to Levitt.

“New operatives were recruited from the elite of (Hezbollah’s) military wing for intelligence and operational training, while existing IJO operatives were moved into new positions,” the article says. “At the same time, the IJO invested in the development of capabilities and tradecraft that had withered since the 2001 decision to rein in operations.”

The past two years have brought a spate of attacks and plots. The Iranian security forces are accused in cases including the assassination of a Saudi diplomat in Pakistan, a bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat in India and a foiled plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C.

Alleged Hezbollah plots have been discovered as well. In January of last year, Thai police found a warehouse full of bomb-making chemicals for an alleged plot against Israeli targets. The chief suspect in that case resembles Yaakoub: an accused Hezbollah operative with dual Lebanese and Swedish citizenship.

Meanwhile, Yaakoub did patient undercover work in Cyprus, according to his confession and evidence at his trial. Hezbollah provided expense money and a salary of $600 a month. He burnished his cover story by registering his import-export firm, looking into acquiring a warehouse, meeting with clients and, on his handler’s advice, developing a social life on the island.

Acting on instructions from Beirut, he watched Israeli tourists arrive on flights and charted their movements on airport buses and at hotels, using codes to disguise his notes and communicate with fellow operatives, according to his confession.

The surveillance takes on ominous significance in light of the Burgas attack, in which a young man with a backpack bomb blew up a bus as it picked up Israeli tourists at the airport. The attacker died in the blast. European investigators believe he was not a suicide bomber, but rather a dupe or the victim of a premature explosion. Hezbollah has denied any role in Burgas.

Yaakoub’s reconnaissance featured very specific tasks for reasons that are not yet clear. He identified Internet cafes for his handlers. He obtained three SIM cards for mobile phones. He meticulously studied an area behind a hospital, taking photos and drawing a map.

“I am not aware of the organization’s objectives on the matter, nor do I know why they sent me to this mission,” he told interrogators, according to the deposition. Despite his confessions, he refused to accept that he was involved in terrorism, declaring:

“It was just collecting information about the Jews, and that is what my organization is doing everywhere in the world.”

Reaction in Europe

The conviction of Yaakoub adds to mounting evidence of Hezbollah activity across Europe. And it creates a headache for the European Union. Most governments in Europe have a markedly different view of Hezbollah than Israel or the United States, which see it as a terrorist organization pure and simple. Only the Netherlands agrees with that assessment. Britain has designated Hezbollah’s military wing as a terror organization, but not the political leadership.

The motives of other European governments vary. Especially on the left, sectors of European political parties and public opinion tend to see Hezbollah more favorably than Americans do. They accept the view that it is a resistance movement, not a terrorist organization.

Nations such as Spain and Italy are also reluctant to confront the group because they have military peacekeeping contingents in Lebanon that are vulnerable to retaliation. In addition, key European powers such as France and Germany described their relationships with Hezbollah on pragmatic grounds.

French officials assert that if they designated Hezbollah as a terrorist group, it would cut them off diplomatically from a powerful force in Lebanon and the Middle East. Tensions between Hezbollah and Europe could further destabilize the conflict-ridden political environment in Lebanon, the argument goes.

The common wisdom has begun to change because of increasing exasperation with Hezbollah’s actions in Europe, signs of involvement in crime and corruption, and its military role in Syria, experts say. Earlier this year, British diplomats began to push their proposal that the EU label Hezbollah’s military wing a terrorist group.

This would curtail funding and political support for the group in Europe, but maintain a channel for dialogue, British officials say. U.S. officials and experts think there is no distinction between Hezbollah’s political and military leadership, but they think the proposal would be powerful and timely.

“It would send a strong message,” Levitt said.

The discussions about the proposal have intensified in the European Union in recent weeks, according to U.S. and European officials. Political and economic crises in Bulgaria and Cyprus have complicated matters, however, because those countries were taking a lead role along with Britain.

“We have been pretty active on this issue,” a senior British diplomat said. “We are keen to do it. But it is a slow process.”

The Boston Bombing was an All-American Spectacle

RIL 24, 2013

 

The Tale of a Neatly Scripted Tragedy

 

by RUTH FOWLER

I’ve been loathe to contribute to the ever-increasing canon of American experts who feel that their unique and exceptional opinion about the Boston Marathon Bombers is important and worthy enough to merit yet another shittily written blog post or op-ed. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre,” says Kurt Vonnegut, obviously with his fellow Americans in mind. Ranging from amateur sleuths taking time out from their regular routine of avoiding chemtrails and beating off their smart meter-induced chlamydia to bestow upon us pearls of expert wisdom, to outraged (Irish?!) nationalists who think the biggest tragedy of this whole event is that two Chechens were “given everything by America – and [yet] repaid them in bombs”, as if America is renowned for its benevolent, Santa Claus-like international presence and foreign policy, a generous, jolly immigration system, it’s incomparable human rights record, an abundance of healthcare for all, its leading role in public education and a wonderfully compassionate welfare system which cares for the poor, the diseased, the marginalized and the vulnerable in society etc etc.

I could trawl the internet endlessly for the numerous examples of American idiocy emerging from the bombing and the identification of the alleged perpetrators as Chechen-American brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but I think the most important observation we can draw from this whole episode is that, as Obama pointed out in his remarks at the victims memorial service, the spectacularly racist, blithely ignorant and brutal spirit of this country remains undimmed and undaunted. Boston PD continued to act like any other police force in America: they puffed up with pride everytime the TV cameras were on them, took the unprecedented move of shutting down an entire city to find the suspects, and then exchanged gleeful emails of Tamarlane’s horrendously butchered body once they’d messily disposed of him. The Islamophobic hate crimes have been well underway for several days now: from the twitter rantings of angry conservative twat Erik Rush urging us to ‘Kill all Muslims’, to an attack on a Palestinian-American Doctor, while on twitter ‘Czechoslovakia’ was briefly trending as Americans struggled to locate Chechnya on the map and Chechens on the racial spectrum. The foiled Toronto plot, attributed to (Shiite) Iranians, with their well-know links and affinity with the (Sunni) Al Qaeda (All Muslims are the same! yes, that was sarcasm) was followed by speculation that the explosion in the Texan Fertilizer Plant was obviously a further attack on America by Muslims. … Perhaps my favorite piece of idiocy emerging from this whole kaboodle is Amanda Palmer’s appalling poem to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: never one to miss a chance for self-promotion, we can only eagerly await the album which will be forthcoming from their edited exchange of prison correspondence set to dreary piano music, released thanks to crowd-source funding from Kickstarter.

Despite the fact the majority of this country seems happy in persisting with a neatly scripted tragedy, there have been some wonderful articles examining precisely what’s wrong with the aftermath of this tragedy. It’s probably worth reiterating, at this point, for the assholes out there, that criticizing the handling of the bombing by the media, the government and the state does not necessarily imply “understanding” the motivation of the Tsarnaev brothers, and certainly not “excusing” an act of brutal terrorism. It can be hard for the mentally challenged American to comprehend that criticism of one’s own country – including its President, its government, its police state and its media – is actually the most patriotic and nationalistic act of accountability one can do. Al Jazeera’s wonderful piece ‘The Wrong Kind of Caucasian’,examining the elision of the brother’s American upbringing and nationality by the media’s overwhelming obsession with their ethnic and religious roots is well worth a read and is a brilliant illustration of the ‘second class’ nature of 1st generation immigrants who are always considered by their ethnicity first, their ‘Americanness’ second – particularly if, like Dzhokhar, they are newly minted Americans, with non-American immediate family. Leslie Savan writes a quick but thorough blog post over at The Nation on how the brothers’ religion will dominate the national discourse and provide a safe, comprehensive, digestible political narrative for the American Racist. This theme is continued over at The Daily Beast where Charles King observes:

The Tsarnaev brothers will forever be the poster children for a particularly American fear, reflected in everything from blockbuster films to popular fiction: that the English-speaking, dark-haired young men with unpronounceable names, who wear baseball caps, win scholarships, and garner wrestling trophies, are also the ones who could blow you up.

Mia Mckenzie over at Black Girl Dangerous points out that the emphasis on white suffering is creating a generation of POC who are unable to find sufficient empathy for the bombing victims. They are numb, nullified to the suffering of white children prioritized by the media at the expense of the nameless and faceless children of color who never even make it into the news. This is further exemplified byRichard Kim’s insightful blog on The Nation, which points out that we glorify the deaths and victims of terrorist attacks almost as if they were celebrities, whereas the fourteen people – eleven of whom were first responders – who lost their lives in a workplace accident Texas remain unnamed and unknown. Texas is sad, but accidents happen. Get over it.

What’s interesting to me is not how extreme, how radical, how Islamic and how Chechen the Tsarnaev Brothers and the bombing is – but how American. This is a country where the President can pick up a Nobel Peace Prize one day, and the next go back to being Commander in Chief of a CIA led covert war in Pakistan, dropping Hellfire Missiles from MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers on the heads of women, children and elders in an attempt to target unspecific ‘military age’ males who may or may not have some vague connection to militant groups who may or may not pose a threat to the US. Then there’s the ‘less secret’drone program carried out by the USAF in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia. The President has already made clear he will use drones against American citizens if they are Muslim – ie, if they are not ‘real’ Americans.

The message seems clear: if you have an American passport, but criticize America, you are not American and therefore the constitution doesn’t apply to you. As a new citizen, ironically naturalized on September 11th 2012, Dzokhar is rarely referred to simply as ‘an American’ because the root of his ‘evil’ must, it is assumed, belong to some far off distant bloodthirsty land, a land of hate and brutality. A land, perhaps, which would fabricate the existence of WMD in order to justify an invasion and a war. A land which would mechanically and efficiently take out all militants and extremists, whether they posed a valid threat to America or not, in an assembly-line manner, shipping USAF pilots into small dark trailers in the Nevada and New Mexico desert to exterminate distant humans via remote control as if they were merely mosquitoes. A land which systematically denies both citizens and non-citizens alike the right to a fair trial – whether that be through detaining them indefinitely without trial or killing them before they ever get a chance to take the stand – like Awlaki, like Chris Dorner, like Tamarlan Tsarnaev. A land which hands out guns which are specifically designed to kill other human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible. A land which is well known for CIA-funded military dictatorships which have led to millions of deaths and destabilized whole continents, encouraging the rise of extremist and militant groups which usually teeter out of US control and result in more carnage. A land which spends an inordinate amount of time, energy and money onentrapment techniques designed to tease disgruntled radicals into full blown terrorists. A land which breeds white males who like to shoot up kids in schools or folks at movie theaters and who are forgiven as ‘mentally ill’ or ‘disturbed’ – but never described, most truthfully, as simply ‘American’.

The Boston Bombing was – is – American. Let us never forget that.

Ruth Fowler is a journalist and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. She’s the author of Girl Undressed. She can be followed on Twitter at @fowlerruth.

Is America a Drama Queen Nation?

  NEWS & POLITICS  

The Smirking Chimp / By Stephen Pizzo

 

Has catastrophe become a kind of emotional catnip for us? You know, the kind of stuff we love to hate?

April 23, 2013 |  

Is it too soon to ask this question?

Or is it about time someone did?

I don't know. You tell me.

I fear we have become addicted to this stuff; the drama, the pathos, the tragedy. the tears, the latest villain(s), the newly-minted heroes, the fear?

We've not only become attracted to catastrophe and chaos, but we've created 24/7/365 communication empires ready, posed, even eager to deliver the goods when the worst happens.

So I ask, has catastrophe become a kind of emotional catnip for us? You know, the kind of stuff we love to hate?

Whether it's school children mowed down by a crazed gunman, a bombing, even a fertilizer plant leveling half an American town, we no longer just shake our heads in disgust and disbelief and then go on with life. No, we don't. That was so last century. That's not enough today.

When one of these kind of events happen now an entire industry swings into action. News becomes reality TV - for real -- unscripted, unpredictable, unfolding as we breathlessly watch. And watch we will, because there's no escape. CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC, radio, internet, it's everywhere, all the time.

If the catastrophe de jut unfolds too slowly, talking heads, whose job becomes filling 24 hours of airtime with words, morph into Dr. Phil's, delving into psychoanalysis and, when that thread runs out, they start to channel Johnny Carson's "Carnac the Magnificent."

Once the dust settles, after the action is over, the drama queens come out by the thousands. They show up by the hundreds, either at the scene of the crime or, if they can't get near that, they set up impromptu "memorials," for the victims.

I know I am supposed to view all that kind of stuff as the the better side of human nature. And, who knows, maybe it is, but I am not entirely convinced. The memorials, piled high with Teddy Bears and flowers and personal little nicknacks, left by sobbing, full-figured women often with young children in tow... it all strikes me as way too much Oprah and one last squeezing of the grapes of infectious drama. And a desire to be part of the latest drama.

Look, I know this may make me sound like just a heartless, grouchy old fart. And, who knows, I may be just that. I'd be the last to know, if so. But, ever since 9/11, and maybe even before that, we've been on a trajectory, an upward one.

Be it the media or law enforcement, the whole thing seems to me to have snowballed into something ominous and unhealthy. Local police have become less and less "cops" and more like soldiers, armed to the teeth, covered in body armor driving around our cities in armored SUVs and carrying the kinds of weapons once reserved for war zones.

So, as of a few minutes before writing this, the latest drama was coming to an end. The two guys who set off the Boston bombs had been neutralized -- which is a good thing.

But everyone had to get a piece of that action .. they made sure of it. A 20-something and his 19-year old brother were the perps. And it took a nation to do it: FBI, ATF, CIA, local, county and state police agencies, the National Guard, and of course, Homeland Security was there to make sure the barn door was closed afterwards.

Back in the old days local and state police, with assistance from the FBI, would have sufficed. But no longer. Since 9/11 we've spent billions fitting out the nation's first responders with some very expensive and exotic stuff, from hazmat suits to crowd suppression gear, to robots.... and, when shit tinally hits the fan everyone wants in on it. It's not just big entertainment, but big business too. A recent study reported that, while incomes had fallen over the last ten years in most cities, those cities with the largest Homeland Security-related industries have prospered.

Look, I am happy these two Boston characters are no longer walking around free. But, thanks to all of what I just wrote above, the way we now go about all this simply encourages the next drama. When everyone gets what they want, they want more of it. Those two nuts in Boston got precisely what they wanted --- attention, and tons of it.

And the first responders got what they wanted - a few days of adrenaline pumping high drama during which they got to drag out all that fancy gear Homeland Security gave them after 9/11.

I'd prefer to see a more mature response, that everyone just dial it back a bit to life's inevitable disasters. When you have billions of souls on a tiny planet, a certain percentage of those folk will be homicidal nuts. Some will be saints. But most of us will be neither. But we are sentenced to serve whatever time we have on this planet together, like it or not. Most of us will never hurt another person. But that minority of nuts will continue doing just that. And the more souls on the planet the more of these kind of things are going to happen.

Which is why I believe it's high time we take a long hard look at how we are now responding to these inevitable events. If we allow catastrophe to become an industry, cultivated by law enforcement and "entertainmentized" by media, then that's what we're gonna get more of.. more live car chases, more TV coverage of the hunt for the latest bad guy(s).

We are creating a kind of perpetual feedback loop; bad guys want big-time attention and an over-eager media supplies it. Law enforcement craves action, and the bad guys gladly provide it. Afterward the media lionizes the first responders.

Then the closing scene: a sad parade of women bearing stuffed animals and flowers with their puzzled children in tow, preparing the next generation of drama seekers.

It's all become quite the show. And it all makes me very uneasy.
_______

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

The Official Tsarnaev Story Makes No Sense

By Craig Murray

April 23, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - There are gaping holes in the official story of the Boston bombings.

 

We are asked to believe that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was identified by the Russian government as an extremist Dagestani or Chechen Islamist terrorist, and they were so concerned about it that in late 2010 they asked the US government to take action. At that time, the US and Russia did not normally have a security cooperation relationship over the Caucasus, particularly following the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. For the Russians to ask the Americans for assistance, Tsarnaev must have been high on their list of worries.

In early 2011 the FBI interview Tsarnaev and trawl his papers and computers but apparently – remarkably for somebody allegedly radicalised by internet – the habitually paranoid FBI find nothing of concern.

So far, so weird. But now this gets utterly incredible. In 2012 Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who is of such concern to Russian security, is able to fly to Russia and pass through the airport security checks of the world’s most thoroughly and brutally efficient security services without being picked up. He is then able to proceed to Dagestan – right at the heart of the world’s heaviest military occupation and the world’s most far reaching secret police surveillance – again without being intercepted, and he is able there to go through some form of terror training or further Islamist indoctrination. He then flies out again without any intervention by the Russian security services.

That is the official story and I have no doubt it did not happen. I know Russia and I know the Russian security services. Whatever else they may be, they are extremely well-equipped, experienced and efficient and embedded into a social fabric accustomed to cooperation with their mastery. This scenario is simply impossible in the real world.

We have, by the official account, the involvement of the two Tsarnaev brothers, the FBI and the Russian security services. The FBI have a massive recent record of running agent provocateur operations to entrap gullible Muslims into terrorism. The Russian security services have form on false flag Chechen bombings. Where the truth lies may be difficult to dig out. But the above official version is not true.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

Boston Overkill

APRIL 23, 2013

Absurd Machinations

 

by ANDREW LEVINE

For anyone who watched the World Trade Center collapse on television in the days after September 11, 2001, the repetitive display of pictures of the terror attack on the Boston Marathon was déja vu all over again.

Not having been there, I can’t judge the mood, but reports of the demonstrations after the capture of nineteen year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were disturbingly familiar too.  The chant – “USA, USA” – recalled the reaction to the news that Barack Obama’s assassins had finally gotten to Osama Bin Laden and dumped his body into the sea – in time for the upcoming elections.

Perhaps the comparison is unfair.  As in New York and Washington after 9/11, the crowd was surely expressing solidarity with the victims and also relief that the ordeal was finally over.  Civic pride, an estimable virtue, was on display too.

And even if the demonstrations had a jingoistic tinge, people cooped up inside all day watching Wolff Blitzer can justifiably plead mitigating circumstances.  It requires fortitude to endure mindless commentary masquerading as journalism – cable news, in other words — and not run amok.

Greek tragedies, those of Aeschylus especially, recount the (fragile) triumph of civilization over primitive longings for revenge.  This is the basis for the rule of law and the monumental advances that follow from it.

Too bad for us, and for the world, that, under the leadership of our two twenty-first century Presidents, the Lesser Evil one especially, we Americans seem to be abandoning lessons learned nearly two and a half millennia ago.

It isn’t just the rule of law that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have put in jeopardy.  Under their leadership, ours is becoming a “civilization” that, without shame, uses revenge as a pretext for war.

This is how Bush got the Afghanistan War going in 2001, and it is how a “bipartisan” consensus has kept it alive to this day.  Even as the anti-war movement grew, and as Democrats set out to capitalize on war weariness in time for the 2004 elections, liberal Democrats like Howard Dean had no problem with that Bush war; it was only the one in Iraq that they found objectionable.

Obama agreed even as he encouraged the idea that he was the peace candidate in 2008.  Then, upon assuming office, he put the demonstrably pointless and already lost Afghanistan War on the front burner – hardly pausing even to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace (seriously!).

Like other revenge-minded Democrats, it was only the Iraq War that Obama thought “dumb” – not that he did much to stop it in or out of office.  Instead he repackaged it enough to convince a gullible public and the “forward leaning” pundits of MSNBC that America’s role in it was over.  By then, faking an exit had long been a Republican objective too.  Still, it took Obama several years to pull it off.

He was right, though, to see a difference in the way the Bush Administration promoted its two wars.  Afghanistan was about revenge.  In pressing for the Iraq War, deeper – paradoxically, more “civilized” — pathologies were at work.

Dysfunctional Bush family dynamics had a lot to do with it, as did Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s neoconservative proclivities.  And, of course, there was the curse that has afflicted our republic for the past six decades; the relentless call of the military-industrial and (lately) national security state apparatus.

Liberal Democrats only came on board later – reluctantly.  And they jumped ship just as soon as they could — once it became clear that “the mission,” whatever it was, was definitely not, and never would be, “accomplished.”

Needless to say, that didn’t stop them from enabling Bush’s and Cheney’s predations in Iraq.  How could it, given their imperialist genes?   Hegemons, like playground bullies, cannot permit insubordination.

And neither can they let political violence perpetrated by non-state actors seem effective.   This is why they cannot help but wage what Bush called a War on Terror.

By this, they don’t mean state terror; that, in fact, is their own stock-in-trade.  They make no secret of it.  Recall how proud George Bush was of the “shock and awe” with which he launched the assault on Iraq.

Neither do they mean the terror that transpired during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, or, to cite another example, the kind of terror that Stalin imposed on the Soviet Union in the mid 1930s and again early in the Cold War.

Imperial hegemons hardly mind when governments terrorize their own populations, though ours sometimes does find the screeds of “humanitarian interveners” useful.  When governments of client states terrorize their citizenry, they don’t mind at all.

What hegemons will not tolerate is non-state violence directed at them, or at the regimes they support in client states.  That is what they use the word “terrorism” to denounce.

But they really can’t have their way, not for long anyway, because when there are no more effective outlets for resistance, as there usually are not, domineering state policies breed terrorists.

In short, imperialism puts domestic populations at risk.  Paradoxically, our media and our political leaders currently find it expedient to exaggerate the extent of the danger, even as they disavow their role in causing it.

No one yet knows what role, if any, the reality behind the exaggerations played in the Boston Marathon bombing.  What is clear is just that because hegemons will not, of their own volition, promote justice and dignity for the peoples they dominate, and because “homeland security” is impossible to guarantee, atrocities like the one in Boston are bound to happen.

When they do, the terrorists must be made to pay; on this, all strategists agree.  They agree too that terrorists must never be allowed to think that they have won.

Implementing the first of these imperatives is easy because it accords with the instinct for revenge.   Implementing the second is hard; it requires determination to overcome a natural propensity to succumb to fright.

This is why, in European countries that have also had to deal with imperial blowback, and in Israel, where a large segment of the dominant population regards justice and dignity for indigenous Palestinians as an “existential threat,” and in states with separatist movements that have taken violent turns, it is well understood that, when terrorists strike, no matter how great the fear, it is crucial to restore normalcy as quickly as circumstances permit.

This is why the events in Boston – not the bombing itself, but the reaction to it  — were so patently absurd.

An entire metropolis in lockdown?  Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of militarized police arrayed against a lone wounded kid who, it turns out, was bleeding almost to death under a tarp covering a boat in someone’s driveway?

Austerity got left behind.  Millions for the illusion of “homeland security,” not one penny for anything that actually makes people better off!

The absurdity is all the more remarkable because our securers of the homeland are not beyond learning from foreign police.  They surely got advice from the Israelis and from Britain and other European countries about how to fashion a surveillance state that seldom discomfits theHerrenvolk and that therefore only rarely elicits complaints.

Indeed, one of the more disconcerting aspects of the coverage of the events in Boston was what it revealed about how pervasive surveillance has now become in the Land of the Free.

Privacy was once an American’s birthright, and its protection used to be a source of national pride.  Since 9/11, largely outside public view and therefore with hardly any significant opposition, that priceless part of our heritage has all but faded into oblivion.

The level of surveillance in Boston was doubtless more intrusive than viewers were shown.  We do now know that Lord and Taylor doesn’t just look out for shoplifters; its cameras observed the entire area around their store.  But then the area was flooded with cameras, every place of business seemed to have some; and there were surely other ways that privacy was invaded too.  We haven’t a clue, for example, about the information the authorities get from their (presumably not-yet-weaponized) drones.

Maybe, at first, the disproportionate response was just a case of erring on the side of caution: arguably, before they killed “suspect number one,” the police weren’t sure what they were up against.  Maybe it really did make sense, in those circumstances, to call upon all the forces of heaven and earth.

But by the time it came down just to finding the one wounded kid, it ought to have dawned on them that they were overdoing it – by orders of magnitude.  Instead, they ratcheted up the overkill.

The disproportion was so flagrant that even the talking heads on the cable channels had to acknowledge it.  And so viewers were told repeatedly that Watertown and surrounding areas had been put into what was, for all practical purposes, a state of siege because the authorities are first and foremost dedicated to saving innocent lives.

Really?  How, then, do they account for their easy tolerance of gun violence and environmental perils?   For that matter, why don’t they drastically lower speed limits?   It would be annoying, especially to Boston drivers, but it would save lives.  And it would not be nearly as inconvenient as “sheltering” an entire metropolitan area “in place.”

And, of course, there is also the point that the networks and cable channels including MSNBC, the ostensibly liberal one, systematically evade: that, for our authorities, some innocent lives are more important than others.  The important ones can mainly be found within our borders.  Throughout the Middle East (except for Israel), but also in Africa, central Asia, and on the Indian sub-continent, they are rarer than snowstorms in July.

On this, Obama’s double standard is appalling and so is his hypocrisy.   Is there anyone currently engaged in deploying lethal force who is responsible for as much killing and maiming as he?  In comparison, the Tsarnaev brothers are small potatoes.  And yet, from Newtown to Watertown, he emotes with consummate self-righteousness.

With Obama, it always seems as if it can’t get worse, and then it does.  But Boston last week was over the top.

Can any sense be made of it?

Perhaps the ambitions of some of the principals, Governor Deval Patrick for example, explains it in part.  And there is, of course, Obama’s interest in seeming strong, and the FBI’s in seeming competent.  Both would have suffered had anything untoward happened that greater diligence might have avoided.  But self-serving opportunism is not the whole story.

Islamophobia was surely a factor too.  Even before anyone knew who the perpetrators were, terror “experts” like Steven Emerson were on television stirring it up.  No doubt, islamophobes were praying for a boost to their cause, just as fervently as I was hoping that the bombers would turn out to be pot-bellied NRA fundamentalists or militant Dispensationalists awaiting Armageddon.

As it turns out, the islamophobes’ hopes now seem to rest just on the deceased older brother.  As far as anyone knows, that isn’t much to build on.  His uncle put the point succinctly last week: the boy was a “loser.”

Maybe the massive response was intended to revive fear now that it is flagging, and now that the color-coded danger level days of the early Bush years are fading into memory.  But that nonsense was mainly about stifling the peace movement and scaring people away from protesting the loss of rights and liberties legislated in the still very much with us Patriot Act.

Once Obama became President, however, all that became unnecessary.  His election effectively gutted the peace movement and muted liberal dissent.   Because so many were so determined for so long to cut the man endless slack, we now have more war and less freedom even than we did under George W. Bush.

Obama is not and never has been just a passive beneficiary of liberal gullibility and naivety.  At key moments, he has actively pushed America rightward.  Thus it is entirely true to form that he now seems determined not to let the Boston bombing go without gaining some policy advantage from it.

Lindsey Graham and John McCain and other leaders of the risible Right have called for treating the surviving Tsarnaev brother as an “enemy combatant” – denying him legal protections that were unassailable in the pre-Bush-Obama days.

Characteristically, the Obama Administration, already thinking along those lines, proposes, in effect, to meet Republican reactionaries halfway – by questioning Tsarnaev extensively before reading him his Miranda rights.

In this instance, Obama seems to be up to more than just his usual “compromising” for pusillanimity’s sake.

Indeed, what he has in mind is even worse than in the old story where the townsfolk scream: “string him up,” and the sheriff then quells the mob by saying: “no, we’ll give him a fair trial and then we’ll string him up.”  Sheriff Obama is willing, even eager, to loosen up on the fair trial part too.

Apparently, Attorney General Eric Holder has a quasi-justification at the ready.  He wants to appeal to a 1988 Supreme Court decision that established a very narrow “public safety exception” to the 1966 Miranda rule.

As everyone who watches television knows, Miranda requires that anyone arrested be told that they have a right to remain silent and also a right to an attorney, and that if they cannot afford one, one will be appointed for them.

According to legal experts, “Mirandization,” as we now call it, can be delayed for up to forty-eight hours, but only when there is an urgent need to obtain information about impending dangers.

As Glenn Greenwald points out in The Guardian, the Obama Administration has been using “national security” to go after Miranda rights for some time.  Since Democrats were the ones doing it, liberals haven’t shown much concern; indeed, few have even noticed, though the Administration’s machinations have been reported in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and, more extensively, by Greenwald and others, Justin Elliott especially, in Salon.

How pathetic that, for this, the country fell into a rapt fascination, a TV news obsession, similar to the one set off by the slow moving car-chase between O.J. Simpson and the LA police.  The difference is that the car chase had more entertainment value, and did no serious political harm.

Back then, the authorities were less reckless too, and more respectful of longstanding and well established Constitutional rights.  Nowadays, we only see that on Law and Order reruns or on Criminal Minds.  For aesthetic reasons or perhaps thanks to budget constraints, the SWAT assaults on those shows are less disproportionate too, and executed with greater panache.

Reality used to be stranger than fiction; now it is just less salutary and more absurd.

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

America’s Dark Post-9/11 Bargain: we traded “rights” for security.

america’By Andrew O'Hehir

 

 

Why did the Boston marathon story drive the whole country nuts? Because we traded rights for "security," and didn't get either.

Investigators in white jumpsuits work the crime scene on Boylston Street following a bomb attack at the Boston Marathon.
Photo Credit: AFP

April 21, 2013 |  

To put it mildly, this has been a bad week for democracy and a worse one for public discourse. In the minutes and hours after the bombs went off in Boston last Monday, marathon runners, first responders and many ordinary citizens responded to a chaotic situation with great courage and generosity, not knowing whether they might be putting their own lives at risk. Since then, though, it’s mostly been a massive and disheartening national freakout, with pundits, politicians, major news outlets and the self-appointed sleuths of the Internet – in fact, nearly everyone besides those directly affected by the attack – heaping disgrace upon themselves.

We’ve seen the most famous TV network in the news business repeatedly botch basic facts, while one of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers misreported the number of people killed, launched a wave of hysteria over a “Saudi national” who turned out to have nothing to do with the crime, and then published a cover photo suggesting that two other guys (also innocent) might be the bombers. We’ve seen the vaunted crowd-sourcing capability of Reddit degenerate into self-reinforcing mass delusion, in which a bunch of people whose law-enforcement expertise consisted of massive doses of “CSI” convinced themselves that a missing college student was one of the bombing suspects. (He wasn’t – and with that young man’s fate still unknown, how does his family feel today?)

We’ve watched elected officials and political commentators struggle to twist every nubbin of news or rumor toward some perceived short-term tactical advantage. It was as if the only real importance of this horrific but modestly scaled terrorist attack lay in how it could prove the essential rightness of one’s existing worldview, and — of course! — how it would play in the 2014 midterms. On the right, people were sure the Boston bombings were part of a massive jihadi plot – no doubt one linked to al-Qaida and Iran and Saddam Hussein and all the other landmarks in the connect-the-dots paranoid worldview of Islamophobia. (In fact, many people are still convinced of that.) On the left we heard a lot of theories about Patriots’ Day and Waco and Oklahoma City, along with the argument that it would be better for global peace if the bombers turned out to bewhite Americans rather than foreign Muslims. (I sympathize with the underlying point David Sirota was making there, by the way, but the way it was phrased was deliberately inflammatory.)

How long did it take conservative pundits and politicians, after the bombing suspects were identified as Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, immigrant brothers of Chechen heritage born in Kyrgyzstan, to seize on that fact as a reason to walk back the supposed Republican change of heart on immigration reform? Was it even five minutes? Never mind that the young men in question came here as war refugees in childhood, one was an American citizen and the other a legal resident, and we still have no idea what role their religion and national background may or may not have played in motivating the crime. It’s hard to imagine what possible immigration laws could have categorically excluded them, short of a magic anti-Muslim force field. And don’t even get me started on the irrelevant but unavoidable fact that the shameless, butt-licking lackeys of the Senate’s Republican caucus (with a few Democrats along for the ride) took advantage of the post-Boston confusion to do Wayne LaPierre’s bidding and kill a modest gun-reform bill supported by nearly the entire American public.

I might have assumed, in other circumstances, that the Family Research Council’s press release suggesting that the Boston bombings were caused by abortion, “sexual liberalism” and hostility to religion was actually an Onion article. Or that right-wing pundit Pat Dollard’s now-famous tweet (“GEORGE BUSH KEPT US SAFE FOR 8 YEARS”) came from some Brooklyn hipster’s parody account. But nothing, it seems, is too painful or stupid or wrong for this particular week. There are many reasons why this happened: A terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon is a big news story by any measure, and this news story happened in a disordered media climate that’s changing so fast no one can keep up with it. Our political culture is so fundamentally broken and divided that people on all sides seized on the story as a weapon and a symbol long before we had any idea who was behind the crime. (It would be almost too perfect if the loaded question of whether the Boston bombings were foreign or domestic terrorism turns out not to have a clear answer, as now seems possible: A little bit of both, but not quite either.)

But I think the real reason why this gruesome but small-scale attack sent the whole country into such an incoherent panic lies a little deeper than that. As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, by the way, I’m aware that the trauma felt by people in and around Boston, whether or not they were directly affected, is real and likely to last quite a while. What I’m talking about is the media spectacle of fear and unreason delivered via TV, news sites and social media, the nationwide hysteria that made a vicious act apparently perpetrated by two losers with backpack bombs seem like an “existential threat” (to borrow a little bogus “Homeland”-speak) to the most powerful nation in the world.

Because it was, in a way. In America after 9/11, we made a deal with the devil, or with Dick Cheney, which is much the same thing. We agreed to give up most of our enumerated rights and civil liberties (except for the sacrosanct Second Amendment, of course) in exchange for a lot of hyper-patriotic tough talk, the promise of “security” and the freedom to go on sitting on our asses and consuming whatever the hell we wanted to. Don’t look the other way and tell me that you signed a petition or voted for John Kerry or whatever. The fact is that whatever dignified private opinions you and I may hold, we did not do enough to stop it, and our constitutional rights are now deemed to be partial or provisional rather than absolute, do not necessarily apply to everyone, and can be revoked by the government at any time.

The supposed tradeoff for that sacrifice was that we would be protected, at least for a while, from the political violence and terrorism and low-level warfare that is nearly an everyday occurrence in many parts of the world. According to the Afghan government, for example, a NATO air attack on April 6 killed 17 civilians in Kunar province, 12 of them children. We’ve heard almost nothing about that on this side of the world, partly because the United States military has not yet admitted that it even happened. But it’s not entirely fair to suggest that Americans think one kid killed by a bomb in Boston is worth more than 12 kids killed in Afghanistan. It’s more that we live in a profoundly asymmetrical world, and the dead child in Boston is surprising in a way any number of dead children in Afghanistan, horrifyingly enough, are not. He lived in a protected zone, after all, a place that was supposed to be sealed off from history, isolated from the blood and turmoil of the world. But of course that was a lie.

We are supposed to be protected, and then something like Boston comes along, a small-minded and bloody attack that appears to have been conducted by a couple of guys flying under the radar of law enforcement or national intelligence, pursuing some obscure agenda we will probably never understand. (We have recently learned that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his family were interviewed by the FBI in 2011, apparently at the request of Russian intelligence, and agents found “no derogatory information.” Is that the right’s new Benghazi I smell?) Not only does it conjure up all the leftover post-traumatic jitters from 9/11 – which for many of us will be there for the rest of our lives – it also makes clear that our Faustian bargain was completely bogus, and the devil never intended to hold up his end of the deal. We surrendered our rights to a government of war criminals, who promised us certainty and security in a world that offers none. We should have known better, and in fact we did. At the literal birth moment of American democracy, Benjamin Franklin summed it up in a single sentence: “Those who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

FBI BOSTON BOMBER SUSPECTS