Friday, February 14, 2014

Beyoncé, Jay-Z Cuba travel documents released by Treasury Department

 

Beyoncé, Jay-Z Cuba travel documents released by Treasury Department

Knowles-Carter family trip approved as educational exchange


FOI Requests:
While Jay-Z and Beyoncé were accused of — and admired for — appearing above the law by spending their wedding anniversary in Cuba, it turns out they file the same paperwork as the rest of us.
Word of a Knowles-Carter wedding anniversary vacation instantly sparked speculation about whether the trip was legal, given travel restrictions placed on the communist country by the U.S. government. According to documents released by the Treasury Department to MuckRock user CJ Ciaramella, the April trip was a carefully structured educational exchange that stayed in line with permitted travel.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z traveled under the license of the Sir John Soane Museum Foundation, whose Cuba travel license renewal is included among the responsive documents.
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Included in the license renewal application is an itinerary from an earlier trip, letters stating the continued mission of the Soane Museum Foundation and Marazul travel agency forms submitted on behalf of Jay-Z, Beyoncé and their parents. Forms presumably submitted for Knowles-Carter children are redacted.
Four of the 32 pages of responsive records to Ciaramella's request were withheld in their entirety, with the Treasury Department citing privacy exemptions.
Want to know whether your favorite pop star's travels are violating trade regulations? Register for a MuckRock account today and file a public public records request, starting at just $20 for five requests.
 

Feds issue guidance to banks for new marijuana industry

Feds issue guidance to banks for new marijuana industry

Tyler Williams of Blanchester, Ohio selects marijuana strains to purchase at the 3-D Denver Discrete Dispensary on January 1, 2014 in Denver, Colo. the day  recreational sales of the drug became legal in the state Theo Stroomer, Getty Images
Updated 3:42 p.m. EST

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The federal government took a step Friday toward normalizing marijuana sales in states where the drug is legal, announcing new guidance that would allow banks to “provide services to marijuana related businesses.”
The move, announced by Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is a part of the U.S. Treasury, will “promote greater financial transparency in the marijuana industry and mitigate the dangers associated with conducting an all-cash business.”
Voters in Colorado and Washington State legalized marijuana for recreational purposes last year, but because of concern about federal banking laws, many financial institutions have declined to do business with the growing industry. The memo, which serves as an official acknowledgement of the legitimacy of marijuana retailers by an agency that investigates financial crimes, may help increase the availability of banking options for marijuana business owners.
The FinCEN memo encourages banks to verify and review a potential client's license to operate, engage in "ongoing monitoring of publicly available sources for adverse information about the business and related activities," and offers examples of "red flags" that the business may be involved in illegal activity.
The Department of Justice issued a separate memo to all U.S. Attorneys clarifying the department's "enforcement priorities" regarding marijuana. The list of eight priorities includes "preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors," "preventing violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana," and "preventing revenue from the sale of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs, and cartels."
But judging by today's statement from Frank Keating, the president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, the new guidance is no panacea.
“While we appreciate the efforts by the Department of Justice and FinCEN, guidance or regulation doesn’t alter the underlying challenge for banks," stated Keating. "As it stands, possession or distribution of marijuana violates federal law, and banks that provide support for those activities face the risk of prosecution and assorted sanctions.”

русские документы подтверждают Обама направил Обама использовал Beyonce и поездки Jay-Z на Кубу, чтобы настроить Куба с ядерной войны руководителей

русские документы подтверждают Обама направил Обама использовал Beyonce и поездки Jay-Z на Кубу, чтобы настроить Куба с ядерной войны руководителей

The trip to Cuba Beyoncé and Jay-Z was part of an educational exchange

The trip to Cuba Beyoncé and Jay-Z was part of an educational exchange

Beyonce and Jay-Z during his trip to Cuba in early April.
Photo: AP Images
The controversial trip to Cuba that made ​​Beyonce and Jay-Z last week had been approved by the Treasury Department of the United States because it was an "educational trip", officials of that governmental entity.
"We understand that the community in question went to Cuba for educational exchange organized by a body approved by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury Department (OFAC, for its acronym in English) to sponsor and organize group programs promote contact with the Cuban people, "a letter issued Tuesday by Alastair M. Fitzpayne, deputy secretary of the Treasury for legislative affairs.
The document was addressed to the Republican congressman from Florida Mario Diaz-Balart, who had asked to OFAC-body to monitor compliance with trade and financial sanctions with other countries to investigate whether the couple had the necessary authorization to stay four days in Havana with their mothers, several assistants and bodyguards.
"The tourism industry in Cuba is totally controlled by the state, so the U.S. dollars spent on Cuban tourism directly feed the machinery of oppression that brutally represses the Cuban people," Diaz-Balart had claimed in a letter.
The truth is that the laws and regulations of the U.S. embargo prohibits Cuba tourist travel, but allow certain categories such as humanitarian, religious and educational travel (also known as travel from town to town, and the most controversial of these categories) . During his term, President George W. Bush eliminated this category to complaints that he was being abused for tourist excursions. However, President Barack Obama reinstated as a way to increase contacts between the two nations.
The Reuters news agency reported that the trip, which was attended by 12 people, was organized by the Academic Arrangements Abroad, an agency nonprofit based in New York who has orchestrated numerous tours to Cuba for U.S. organizations, including the Museum of Metropolitan Art.
OFAC requires participants on these trips with "a full-time schedule of educational exchange activities that will result in meaningful interaction between the travelers and individuals in U.S. Cuba," says the letter signed by Fitzpayne, reports El Nuevo Herald. But travelers also "can not participate in educational activities in their spare time."
However, the explanation by the OFAC does not convince some activists and political representatives, such as Cuban dela lawmaker Ros-Lehtinen, who insists in a statement that the journey of the artist couple had tourism.
"If tourism activities undertaken by Beyonce and Jay-Z in Cuba is classified as an educational exchange trip, then it is clear that the Obama administration is not serious about denying the Castro regime's economic lifeline that extends tourism States, "Ros-Lehtinen said, according to ABC. He added that the trip "was not even disguised as a cultural program.

Beyonce and Jay-Z's Trip to Cuba Was Legal, Treasury Department Says

PHOTO: Beyonce and her husband, rapper Jay-Z, hold hands as they tour Old Havana, Cuba, April 4, 2013.
The mystery of whether Beyonce and Jay-Z's wedding anniversary trip to Cuba was legal has been solved. The Treasury Department says the power couple's trip to Cuba was authorized under a licensed program that encourages "meaningful contacts" with the Cuban people.
The acknowledgment was made in Treasury Department letters sent Tuesday to Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican Florida lawmakers who had asked the department if the trip had violated the embargo against Cuba and was licensed. A copy of the letter to Diaz-Balart was obtained by ABC News, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen's office released a copy of the letter sent to her.
U.S. law prevents Americans from traveling to Cuba unless they do so under a general, religious or "people-to-people" license. Trips for tourism are not allowed.
Beyonce and Jay-Z spent their fifth wedding anniversary visiting Cuba. They were photographed in the streets of Old Havana and having a meal at a well known restaurant raising questions if their trip was nothing more than a tourist visit and whether they had entered legally.
"It is our understanding that the travelers in question traveled to Cuba pursuant to an educational exchange trip organized by a group authorized by OFAC to sponsor and organize programs to promote people-to-people contact in Cuba" says the letter from Alastair M. Fitzpayne, the Treasury Department's Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs.
OFAC is the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control that enforces sanctions against Cuba and also supervises the program that grants "people-to-people" licenses to groups that bring Americans to Cuba for "meaningful interaction with the Cuban people."
The "people-to-people" license program was halted under President George W. Bush but restarted by the Obama administration in 2011. Since then, more than 220 licenses have been granted to organizations that are then authorized to bring American citizens to Cuba. Cuban-Americans are allowed re-entry into Cuba as part of a family reunification program.
Licensed groups must provide itineraries of trip schedules to OFAC showing "a full-time schedule of education exchange activities" for such meaningful interactions. But that doesn't mean American visitors can't have some fun in Cuba, according to the letter "travelers pursuing a full-time schedule of educational exchange activities may engage in non-educational activities off-hours."
In a statement released Tuesday evening, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen did not seem satisfied with the Treasury Department's answer.
"That was a wedding anniversary vacation that was not even disguised as a cultural program," she said.
Ros-Lehtinen said that if the pair's "tourist activities" are classified as an educational exchange trip, "then it is clear that the Obama Administration is not serious about denying the Castro regime an economic lifeline that US tourism will extend to it." She added, "As more human rights activists engage in hunger strikes, I don't think they will see any evidence of how this scam endeavor will help them become independent of the regime."

Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished

Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished

Video: Post reporter Barton Gellman discusses how his exclusive interview with Edward Snowden came about and whether the former NSA contractor would ever want to return to the United States.
MOSCOW — The familiar voice on the hotel room phone did not waste words.
“What time does your clock say, exactly?” he asked.



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He checked the reply against his watch and described a place to meet.
“I’ll see you there,” he said.
Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed hour, alone, blending into a light crowd of locals and tourists. He cocked his arm for a handshake, then turned his shoulder to indicate a path. Before long he had guided his visitor to a secure space out of public view.
During more than 14 hours of interviews, the first he has conducted in person since arriving here in June, Snowden did not part the curtains or step outside. Russia granted him temporary asylum on Aug. 1, but Snowden remains a target of surpassing interest to the intelligence services whose secrets he spilled on an epic scale.
Late this spring, Snowden supplied three journalists, including this one, with caches of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor. Dozens of revelations followed, and then hundreds, as news organizations around the world picked up the story. Congress pressed for explanations, new evidence revived old lawsuits and the Obama administration was obliged to declassify thousands of pages it had fought for years to conceal.
Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. One of the leaked presentation slides described the agency’s “collection philosophy” as “Order one of everything off the menu.”
Six months after the first revelations appeared in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Snowden agreed to reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his choice. He was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken conversation, fueled by burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastry.
Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia. But he consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he exposed.
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”
‘Going in blind’
Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate.
Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act of transgression against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would have to bypass security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with journalists and provide them with enough proof to tell the stories.
The NSA’s business is “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf.
“You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.
“But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”
By his own terms, Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition. The NSA, accustomed to watching without being watched, faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever.
The cascading effects have made themselves felt in Congress, the courts, popular culture, Silicon Valley and world capitals. The basic structure of the Internet itself is now in question, as Brazil and members of the European Union consider measures to keep their data away from U.S. territory and U.S. technology giants including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo take extraordinary steps to block the collection of data by their government.
For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden’s motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.
On Dec. 16, in a lawsuit that could not have gone forward without the disclosures made possible by Snowden, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon described the NSA’s capabilities as “almost Orwellian” and said its bulk collection of U.S. domestic telephone records was probably unconstitutional.
The next day, in the Roosevelt Room, an unusual delegation of executives from old telephone companies and young Internet firms told President Obama that the NSA’s intrusion into their networks was a threat to the U.S. information economy. The following day, an advisory panel appointed by Obama recommended substantial new restrictions on the NSA, including an end to the domestic call-records program.
“This week is a turning point,” said the Government Accountability Project’s Jesselyn Radack, who is one of Snowden’s legal advisers. “It has been just a cascade.”
‘They elected me’
On June 22, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint charging Snowden with espionage and felony theft of government property. It was a dry enumeration of statutes, without a trace of the anger pulsing through Snowden’s former precincts.
In the intelligence and national security establishments, Snowden is widely viewed as a reckless saboteur, and journalists abetting him little less so.
At the Aspen Security Forum in July, a four-star military officer known for his even keel seethed through one meeting alongside a reporter he knew to be in contact with Snowden. Before walking away, he turned and pointed a finger.
“We didn’t have another 9/11,” he said angrily, because intelligence enabled warfighters to find the enemy first. “Until you’ve got to pull the trigger, until you’ve had to bury your people, you don’t have a clue.”
It is commonly said of Snowden that he broke an oath of secrecy, a turn of phrase that captures a sense of betrayal. NSA Director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., among many others, have used that formula.
In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the ­classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.
“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”
People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.
“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”
What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on that responsibility?
“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”
He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.
Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”
“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual — that I’m uniquely qualified, an angel descending from the heavens — as that they put it on someone, somewhere,” he said. “You have the capability, and you realize every other [person] sitting around the table has the same capability but they don’t do it. So somebody has to be the first.”
‘Front-page test’
Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people — deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and “incidentally,” when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.
But Snowden also said acceptance of the agency’s operations was not universal. He began to test that proposition more than a year ago, he said, in periodic conversations with co-workers and superiors that foreshadowed his emerging plan.
Beginning in October 2012, he said, he brought his misgivings to two superiors in the NSA’s Technology Directorate and two more in the NSA Threat Operations Center’s regional base in Hawaii. For each of them, and 15 other co-workers, Snowden said he opened a data query tool called BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which used color-coded “heat maps” to depict the volume of data ingested by NSA taps.
His colleagues were often “astonished to learn we are collecting more in the United States on Americans than we are on Russians in Russia,” he said. Many of them were troubled, he said, and several said they did not want to know any more.
“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’ ” he said. He noted that critics have accused him of bypassing internal channels of dissent. “How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?” he said.
By last December, Snowden was contacting reporters, although he had not yet passed along any classified information. He continued to give his colleagues the “front-page test,” he said, until April.
Asked about those conversations, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines sent a prepared statement to The Post: “After extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.”
Snowden recounted another set of conversations that he said took place three years earlier, when he was sent by the NSA’s Technology Directorate to support operations at a listening post in Japan. As a system administrator, he had full access to security and auditing controls. He said he saw serious flaws with information security.
“I actually recommended they move to two-man control for administrative access back in 2009,” he said, first to his supervisor in Japan and then to the directorate’s chief of operations in the Pacific. “Sure, a whistleblower could use these things, but so could a spy.”
That precaution, which requires a second set of credentials to perform risky operations such as copying files onto a removable drive, has been among the principal security responses to the Snowden affair.
Vines, the NSA spokeswoman, said there was no record of those conversations, either.
U.S. ‘would cease to exist’
Just before releasing the documents this spring, Snowden made a final review of the risks. He had overcome what he described at the time as a “selfish fear” of the consequences for himself.
“I said to you the only fear [left] is apathy — that people won’t care, that they won’t want change,” he recalled this month.
The documents leaked by Snowden compelled attention because they revealed to Americans a history they did not know they had.
Internal briefing documents reveled in the “Golden Age of Electronic Surveillance.” Brawny cover names such as MUSCULAR, TUMULT and TURMOIL boasted of the agency’s prowess.
With assistance from private communications firms, the NSA had learned to capture enormous flows of data at the speed of light from fiber-optic cables that carried Internet and telephone traffic over continents and under seas. According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds,” had an official seal that might have been parody: an eagle with all the world’s cables in its grasp.
Each year, NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of e-mail address books, hundreds of billions of cellphone location records and trillions of domestic call logs.
Most of that data, by definition and intent, belonged to ordinary people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage capacity and processing tools enabled the NSA to use the information to map human relationships on a planetary scale. Only this way, its leadership believed, could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known intelligence targets.
In the view of the NSA, signals intelligence, or electronic eavesdropping, was a matter of life and death, “without which America would cease to exist as we know it,” according to an internal presentation in the first week of October 2001 as the agency ramped up its response to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
With stakes such as those, there was no capability the NSA believed it should leave on the table. The agency followed orders from President George W. Bush to begin domestic collection without authority from Congress and the courts. When the NSA won those authorities later, some of them under secret interpretations of laws passed by Congress between 2007 and 2012, the Obama administration went further still.
Using PRISM, the cover name for collection of user data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and five other U.S.-based companies, the NSA could obtain all communications to or from any specified target. The companies had no choice but to comply with the government's request for data.
But the NSA could not use PRISM, which was overseen once a year by the surveillance court, for the collection of virtually all data handled by those companies. To widen its access, it teamed up with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to break into the private fiber-optic links that connected Google and Yahoo data centers around the world.
That operation, which used the cover name MUSCULAR, tapped into U.S. company data from outside U.S. territory. The NSA, therefore, believed it did not need permission from Congress or judicial oversight. Data from hundreds of millions of U.S. accounts flowed over those Google and Yahoo links, but classified rules allowed the NSA to presume that data ingested overseas belonged to foreigners.
‘Persistent threat’
Disclosure of the MUSCULAR project enraged and galvanized U.S. technology executives. They believed the NSA had lawful access to their front doors — and had broken down the back doors anyway.
Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith took to his company’s blog and called the NSA an “advanced persistent threat” — the worst of all fighting words in U.S. cybersecurity circles, generally reserved for Chinese state-sponsored hackers and sophisticated criminal enterprises.
“For the industry as a whole, it caused everyone to ask whether we knew as much as we thought,” Smith recalled in an interview. “It underscored the fact that while people were confident that the U.S. government was complying with U.S. laws for activity within U.S. territory, perhaps there were things going on outside the United States . . . that made this bigger and more complicated and more disconcerting than we knew.”
They wondered, he said, whether the NSA was “collecting proprietary information from the companies themselves.”
Led by Google and then Yahoo, one company after another announced expensive plans to encrypt its data traffic over tens of thousands of miles of cable. It was a direct — in some cases, explicit — blow to NSA collection of user data in bulk. If the NSA wanted the information, it would have to request it or circumvent the encryption one target at a time.
As these projects are completed, the Internet will become a less friendly place for the NSA to work. The agency can still collect data from virtually anyone, but collecting from everyone will be harder.
The industry’s response, Smith acknowledged, was driven by a business threat. U.S. companies could not afford to be seen as candy stores for U.S. intelligence. But the principle of the thing, Smith said, “is fundamentally about ensuring that customer data is turned over to governments pursuant to valid legal orders and in accordance with constitutional principles.”
‘Warheads on foreheads’
Snowden has focused on much the same point from the beginning: Individual targeting would cure most of what he believes is wrong with the NSA.
Six months ago, a reporter asked him by encrypted e-mail why Americans would want the NSA to give up bulk data collection if that would limit a useful intelligence tool.
“I believe the cost of frank public debate about the powers of our government is less than the danger posed by allowing these powers to continue growing in secret,” he replied, calling them “a direct threat to democratic governance.”
In the Moscow interview, Snowden said, “What the government wants is something they never had before,” adding: “They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?”
Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”
“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.
Technology, of course, has enabled a great deal of consumer surveillance by private companies, as well. The difference with the NSA’s possession of the data, Snowden said, is that government has the power to take away life or freedom.
At the NSA, he said, “there are people in the office who joke about, ‘We put warheads on foreheads.’ Twitter doesn’t put warheads on foreheads.”
Privacy, as Snowden sees it, is a universal right, applicable to American and foreign surveillance alike.
“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”
‘Everybody knows’
On June 29, Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counter­terrorism coordinator, awoke to a report in Der Spiegel that U.S. intelligence had broken into E.U. offices, including his, to implant surveillance devices.
The 56-year-old Belgian, whose work is often classified, did not consider himself naive. But he took the news personally, and more so when he heard unofficial explanations from Washington.
“ ‘Everybody knows. Everybody does’ — Keith Alexander said that,” de Kerchove said in an interview. “I don’t like the idea that the NSA will put bugs in my office. No. I don’t like it. No. Between allies? No. I’m surprised that people find that noble.”
Comparable reactions, expressed less politely in private, accompanied revelations that the NSA had tapped the cellphones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The blowback roiled relations with both allies, among others. Rousseff canceled a state dinner with Obama in September.
When it comes to spying on allies, by Snowden’s lights, the news is not always about the target.
“It’s the deception of the government that’s revealed,” Snowden said, noting that the Obama administration offered false public assurances after the initial reports about NSA surveillance in Germany “The U.S. government said: ‘We follow German laws in Germany. We never target German citizens.’ And then the story comes out and it’s: ‘What are you talking about? You’re spying on the chancellor.’ You just lied to the entire country, in front of Congress.”
In private, U.S. intelligence officials still maintain that spying among friends is routine for all concerned, but they are giving greater weight to the risk of getting caught.
“There are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback,” Clapper told a House panel in October.
‘They will make mistakes’
U.S. officials say it is obvious that Snowden’s disclosures will do grave harm to intelligence gathering, exposing methods that adversaries will learn to avoid.
“We’re seeing al-Qaeda and related groups start to look for ways to adjust how they communicate,” said Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former general counsel at the NSA.
Other officials, who declined to speak on the record about particulars, said they had watched some of their surveillance targets, in effect, changing channels. That evidence can be read another way, they acknowledged, given that the NSA managed to monitor the shift.
Clapper has said repeatedly in public that the leaks did great damage, but in private he has taken a more nuanced stance. A review of early damage assessments in previous espionage cases, he said in one closed-door briefing this fall, found that dire forecasts of harm were seldom borne out.
“People must communicate,” he said, according to one participant who described the confidential meeting on the condition of anonymity. “They will make mistakes, and we will exploit them.”
According to senior intelligence officials, two uncertainties feed their greatest concerns. One is whether Russia or China managed to take the Snowden archive from his computer, a worst-case assumption for which three officials acknowledged there is no evidence.
In a previous assignment, Snowden taught U.S. intelligence personnel how to operate securely in a “high-threat digital environment,” using a training scenario in which China was the designated threat. He declined to discuss the whereabouts of the files, but he said that he is confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong. And he said he did not bring them to Russia.
“There’s nothing on it,” he said, turning his laptop screen toward his visitor. “My hard drive is completely blank.”
The other big question is how many documents Snowden took. The NSA’s incoming deputy director, Rick Ledgett, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently that the number may approach 1.7 million, a huge and unexplained spike over previous estimates. Ledgett said he would favor trying to negotiate an amnesty with Snowden in exchange for “assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured.”
Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, later dismissed the possibility.
“The government knows where to find us if they want to have a productive conversation about resolutions that don’t involve Edward Snowden behind bars,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ben Wizner, the central figure on Snowden’s legal team.
Some news accounts have quoted U.S. government officials as saying Snowden has arranged for the automated release of sensitive documents if he is arrested or harmed. There are strong reasons to doubt that, beginning with Snowden’s insistence, to this reporter and others, that he does not want the documents published in bulk.
If Snowden were fool enough to rig a “dead man’s switch,” confidants said, he would be inviting anyone who wants the documents to kill him.
Asked about such a mechanism in the Moscow interview, Snowden made a face and declined to reply. Later, he sent an encrypted message. “That sounds more like a suicide switch,” he wrote. “It wouldn’t make sense.”
‘It’s not about me’
By temperament and circumstance, Snowden is a reticent man, reluctant to discuss details about his personal life.
Over two days his guard never dropped, but he allowed a few fragments to emerge. He is an “ascetic,” he said. He lives off ramen noodles and chips. He has visitors, and many of them bring books. The books pile up, unread. The Internet is an endless library and a window on the progress of his cause.
“It has always been really difficult to get me to leave the house,” he said. “I just don’t have a lot of needs. . . . Occasionally there’s things to go do, things to go see, people to meet, tasks to accomplish. But it’s really got to be goal-oriented, you know. Otherwise, as long as I can sit down and think and write and talk to somebody, that’s more meaningful to me than going out and looking at landmarks.”
In hope of keeping focus on the NSA, Snowden has ignored attacks on himself.
“Let them say what they want,” he said. “It’s not about me.”
Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden predicted that Snowden will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, like other “defectors.” To this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has.
But Snowden knows his presence here is easy ammunition for critics. He did not choose refuge in Moscow as a final destination. He said that once the U.S. government voided his passport as he tried to change planes en route to Latin America, he had no other choice.
It would be odd if Russian authorities did not keep an eye on him, but no retinue accompanied Snowden and his visitor saw no one else nearby. Snowden neither tried to communicate furtively nor asked that his visitor do so. He has had continuous Internet access and has talked to his attorneys and to journalists daily, from his first day in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo airport.
“There is no evidence at all for the claim that I have loyalties to Russia or China or any country other than the United States,” he said. “I have no relationship with the Russian government. I have not entered into any agreements with them.”
“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I defected from the government to the public.”

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Timeline of Military-Intelligence Operation: U.S. Had Planned Syrian Civilian Catastrophe Since 2007

Timeline of Military-Intelligence Operation: U.S. Had Planned Syrian Civilian Catastrophe Since 2007

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Mideast Syria
NBC News’ report, “‘The great tragedy of this century’: More than 2 million refugees forced out of Syria,” stated:
More than 2 million Syrians have poured into neighboring countries as refugees, the United Nations revealed on Tuesday.
Around 5,000 people per day are fleeing the three-year conflict, which the U.N. says has already claimed over 100,000 lives.
“Syria has become the great tragedy of this century — a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history,” said António Guterres,  the U.N.’s high commissioner responsible for refugees.
But, while the UN and nations across the West feign shock over the growing humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in and around Syria, the goal of a violent sectarian conflict and its predictable, catastrophic results along with calls to literally “bleed” Syria have been the underlying strategy of special interests in the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and their regional partners since at least 2007.
A Timeline: How the Syrian Conflict Really Unfolded
Western media networks have ensured that a singular narrative of “pro-democracy” uprisings turning violent in the face of brutal oppression by the Syrian government after the so-called “Arab Spring” is disseminated across the public. In reality, “pro-democracy” protesters served as a tenuous smokescreen behind which armed foreign-backed extremists took to the streets and countrysides of Syria to execute a sectarian bloodbath years in the making. Here is a timeline that illuminates the true cause of Syria’s current conflict and the foreign interests, not the Syrian government, responsible for the tens of thousands dead and millions displaced during the conflict.
1991: Paul Wolfowitz, then Undersecretary of Defense, tells US Army General Wesley Clark that the US has 5-10 years to “clean up those old Soviet client regimes, Syria, Iran, Iraq, before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” Fora.TV: Wesley Clark at the Commonwealth Club of California, October 3, 2007.
2001: A classified plot is revealed to US Army General Wesley Clark that the US plans to attack and destroy the governments of 7 nations: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Fora.TV: Wesley Clark at the Commonwealth Club of California, October 3, 2007.
2002: US Under Secretary of State John Bolton declares Syria a member of the “Axis of Evil” and warned that “the US would take action.” BBC: “US Expands ‘Axis of Evil’” May 6, 2002.
2005: US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy organizes and implements the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon directly aimed at undermining Syrian-Iranian influence in Lebanon in favor of Western-backed proxies, most notably Saad Hariri’s political faction. Counterpunch: “Faking the Case Against Syria,” by Trish Schuh November 19-20, 2005.
Image: Via Color Revolutions and Geopolitics: “As illustrated by the images above, Lebanon’s so-called [2005] Cedar Revolution was an expensive, highly-professional production.” (click image to enlarge) 
….
2005: Ziad Abdel Nour, an associate of Bush Administration advisers, policy makers, and media including Neo-Conservatives Paula Dobriansky, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Joseph Farah (World Net Daily), Clifford May, and Daniel Nassif of US State Department-funded Al Hurra and Radio Sawa, admits: “Both the Syrian and Lebanese regimes will be changed- whether they like it or not- whether it’s going to be a military coup or something else… and we are working on it. We know already exactly who’s going to be the replacements. We’re working on it with the Bush administration.” Counterpunch: “Faking the Case Against Syria,” by Trish Schuh November 19-20, 2005.
2006: Israel attempts, and fails, to destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon after a prolonged aerial bombard that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. CNN: “UN: Hezbollah and Israel agree on Monday cease-fire,” August 13, 2006.
2007: Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker reveals that US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Hariri in Lebanon as well as the Syrian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood were assembling, arming, training, and heavily funding a sectarian extremists front, many of whom had direct ties to Al Qaeda, to unleash in both Lebanon and Syria. The goal was to create and exploit a sectarian divide between Sunni and Shi’ia Muslims. Hersh interviewed intelligence officers who expressed concerns over the “cataclysmic conflict” that would result, and the need to protect ethnic minorities from sectarian atrocities. The report indicated that extremists would be logistically staged in northern Lebanon where they would be able to cross back and forth into Syria. New Yorker: “The Redirection,” by Seymour Hersh, March 5, 2007.2008: The US State Department begins training, funding, networking, and equipping “activists” through its “Alliance for Youth Movements” where the future protest leaders of the “Arab Spring,” including Egypt’s “April 6 Movement” were brought to New York, London, and Mexico, before being trained by US-funded CANVAS in Serbia, and then returning home to begin preparations for 2011. Land Destroyer: “2011 – Year of the Dupe,” December 24, 2011.
2009: The Brookings Institution published a report titled, “Which Path to Persia?” (.pdf), which admits that the Bush Administration “evicted” Syria from Lebanon without building up a strong Lebanese government to replace it (p. 34), that Israel struck a “nascent” Syrian nuclear program, and states the importance of neutralizing Syrian influence before any attack on Iran can be carried out (p. 109).  The report then goes on to describe in detail the use of listed terrorist organizations against the government of Iran, in particular the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) (p. 126) and Baluch insurgents in Pakistan (p.132). Brookings Institution: “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran,” June 2009.
2009-2010: In an April 2011 AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, admitted that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to admit that the US (emphasis added) “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” AFP: “US Trains Activists to Evade Security Forces,” April 8, 2011.
2011: Posner’s US trained, funded, and equipped activists return to their respective countries across the Arab World to begin their “ripple effect.” Protests, vandalism , and arson sweep across Syria and “rooftop snipers” begin attacking both protesters and Syrian security forces, just as Western-backed movements were documented doing in Bangkok, Thailand one year earlier. With a similar gambit already unfolding in Libya, US senators begin threatening Syria with long planned and sought after military intervention. Land Destroyer: “Syria: Intervention Inevitable,” April 29, 2011.
http://libya360.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/sirte-after-nato-bombardments.jpg
Image: Real genocidal atrocities during the “Arab Spring” occurred at the hands of NATO and its proxy sectarian terrorists. Pictured is Sirte, Libya, after NATO-armed rebels surrounded it, cut off power, water, food, and emergency aid, and allowed NATO to bombard it with daily airstrikes before a final orgy of death and destruction left its streets and facades crumbling. This is the “civilian protection” the UN and its enforcement arm NATO plan on bringing to Syria.
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2012: With NATO’s Libyan intervention resulting in a weak US-backed Tripoli client-regime, perpetual infighting, nationwide genocide, and the succession of Benghazi in the east, the NATO-backed Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), listed by the US State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (listed #27) begins mobilizing weapons, cash, and fighters to begin destabilizing Syria. Headed by LIFG’s Abdul Hakim Belhaj, this would be the first confirmed presence of Al Qaeda in Syria, flush with NATO weapons and cash. The Washington Post would confirm, just as stated by Hersh in 2007, that the US and Saudi Arabia were arming the sectarian extremists, now labeled the “Free Syrian Army.” The Post also admits that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, as stated in Hersh’s 2007 report, was also involved in arming and backing extremist fighters. Land Destroyer: “US Officially Arming Extremists in Syria,” May 16, 2012.

Image: Brookings Institution’s Middle East Memo #21 “Assessing Options for Regime Change (.pdf),” makes no secret that the humanitarian “responsibility to protect” is but a pretext for long-planned regime change.
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2012: The US policy think-tank Brookings Institution in its Middle East Memo #21Assessing Options for Regime Change (.pdf),” admits that it does not seek any negotiated ceasefire under the UN’s “Kofi Annan peace plan” that leaves Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power and would rather arm militants, even with the knowledge they will never succeed, to “bleed” the government, “keeping a regional adversary weak, while avoiding the costs of direct intervention.” This reveals that US policy does not view US interference in Syria as a moral imperative predicated on defending human rights, but rather using this false predication to couch aspirations of regional hegemony. Land Destroyer: “US Brookings Wants to “Bleed” Syria to Death,” May 28, 2012.
And, just this year, it was revealed that despite the West’s feigned military and political paralysis regarding the Syrian conflict, the US and Great Britain have been covertly funding and arming sectarian extremists to the tune of billions of dollars and arming them with literally thousands of tons of weaponry. Despite claims of “carefully vetting” “moderate” militant factions, the prominence of Al Qaeda-linked extremist groups indicates that the majority of Western support, laundered through Qatar and Saudi Arabia, is being purposefully put into the hands of the very sectarian extremists identified in Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article, “The Redirection.”
US Created and is Now Using Syrian Catastrophe to Justify Intervention
The non-debate taking place now to justify US military intervention in a conflict they themselves started and have intentionally perpetuated, is whether chemical weapons were used in Damascus on August 21, 2013 – not even “who” deployed them. The weakness of the US’ argument has seen an unprecedented backlash across both the world’s populations and the global diplomatic community. And despite only 9% of the American public supporting a military intervention in Syria, Congress appears poised to not only green-light “limited strikes,” but may approve of a wider military escalation.
In Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redirection,” Robert Baer, a former CIA agent in Lebanon, warned of the sectarian bloodbath the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia were planning to unleash. He stated:
“we’ve got Sunni Arabs preparing for cataclysmic conflict, and we will need somebody to protect the Christians in Lebanon. It used to be the French and the United States who would do it, and now it’s going to be Nasrallah and the Shiites”
Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, also featured in Hersh’s report, would in turn also warn of an imminent and spreading sectarian war purposefully stoked by the West:
Nasrallah said he believed that President Bush’s goal was “the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war—there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.”
He went on, “I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’ ”
Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.”
It would be difficult for anyone to look across the scarred landscape of today’s Syria and not see that this horrific conspiracy was realized in full. The Western media is now acquainting the public with the possibility of a partitioned Syria, echoing the warnings of Nasrallah years ago. The goals of a US military strike would be to “degrade” the capabilities of the Syrian government, while bolstering the terrorist legions still operating within and along Syria’s borders.
What we are witnessing in Syria today is the direct result of a documented conspiracy, not by a “brutal Syrian regime” “oppressing” its own people, but of a US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia radicalizing, arming, and unleashing a sectarian tidal wave they knew well ahead of time would cause atrocities, genocide, mass displacements and even the geopolitical partitioning of Syria and beyond. The intentional destabilization of the region is meant to weaken Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Iraq – and even Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and others – to accomplish what the depleted, impotent US and Israeli forces could not achieve. Military intervention now seeks to tip the balance of an already teetering region.
The attacks on Syria are not humanitarian by any measure. They are simply the latest stage of a long-running plan to divide and destroy the region, leaving the West the sole regional hegemonic power.

Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction

Lecture #743 on Missile Defense
May 6, 2002

Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction

Thank you for asking me here to the Heritage Foundation. I'm pleased to be able to speak to you today about the Bush Administration's efforts to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The spread of weapons of mass destruction to state sponsors of terrorism and terrorist groups is, in my estimation, the gravest security threat we now face. States engaging in this behavior--some of them parties to international treaties prohibiting such activities--must be held accountable and must know that only by renouncing terrorism and verifiably forsaking WMD can they rejoin the community of nations.

The New Security Environment

Eight months into the war on terror, the United States and its partners have made great strides. We have helped the Afghan people overthrow an oppressive, terrorist-harboring regime in Afghanistan; foiled terrorist plots in places such as Germany, Yemen, Spain, and Singapore; and stanched the flow of funds that allowed al-Qaeda's schemes to come to fruition. We have captured the number three man in al-Qaeda and will bring him to justice. And this is just the beginning.
The attacks of September 11 reinforced with blinding clarity the need to be steadfast in the face of emerging threats to our security. The international security environment has changed, and our greatest threat comes not from the specter of nuclear war between two superpowers, as it did during the Cold War, but from transnational terrorist cells that will strike without warning using weapons of mass destruction. Every nation--not just the United States--has had to reassess its security situation and to decide where it stands on the war on terrorism.
In the context of this new international security situation, we are working hard to create a comprehensive security strategy with Russia, a plan President Bush calls the New Strategic Framework. The New Strategic Framework involves reducing offensive nuclear weapons, creating limited defensive systems that deter the threat of missile attacks, strengthening nonproliferation and counterproliferation measures, and cooperating with Russia to combat terrorism. It is based on the premise that the more cooperative post-Cold War relationship between Russia and the United States makes new approaches to these issues possible.
Accordingly, President Bush has announced that the United States will reduce its strategic nuclear force to a total of between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads over the next 10 years. President Putin has made a similarly bold and historic decision with respect to Russian strategic nuclear forces.
In preparation for the summit meeting in Moscow and St. Petersburg later this month, we have been working closely with the Russians to embody the reductions in offensive warheads into a legally binding document that will outlast the administrations of both Presidents. We are also working to draft a political declaration on the New Strategic Framework that would cover the issues of strategic offensive and defensive systems, nonproliferation and counterproliferation. We are optimistic that we will have agreement in time for the summit in Moscow, May 23 to 25.
Strengthening the U.S.-Russian relationship has been a priority of the Bush Administration, even prior to the September 11 attacks. In the current security climate, cooperation with Russia becomes even more important so that we can work together to combat terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, which threaten both our countries.

Preventing Terrorism's Next Wave

President Bush believes it is critical not to underestimate the threat from terrorist groups and rogue states intent on obtaining weapons of mass destruction. As he said on the six-month anniversary of the attacks, "Every nation in our coalition must take seriously the growing threat of terror on a catastrophic scale--terror armed with biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons." We must not doubt for a moment the possible catastrophic consequences of terrorists or their rogue state sponsors who are willing to use disease as a weapon to spread chemical agents to inflict pain and death, or to send suicide-bound adherents armed with radiological weapons on missions of mass murder.
Every nation must commit itself to preventing the acquisition of such weapons by state sponsors of terrorism or terrorist groups. As President Bush said:
Our lives, our way of life, and our every hope for the world depend on a single commitment: The authors of mass murder must be defeated, and never allowed to gain or use the weapons of mass destruction.
To this end, we use a variety of methods to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction, including export controls, missile defense, arms control, nonproliferation, and counter-proliferation measures.
In the past, the United States relied principally on passive measures to stem proliferation. Arms control and nonproliferation regimes, export controls, and diplomatic overtures were the primary tools used in this fight. But September 11, the subsequent anthrax attacks, and our discoveries regarding al-Qaeda and its WMD aspirations have required the U.S to complement these more traditional strategies with a new approach. The Bush Administration is committed to combating the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, missiles, and related equipment, and is determined to prevent the use of these deadly weapons against our citizens, troops, allies, and friends. While diplomatic efforts and multilateral regimes will remain important to our efforts, we also intend to complement this approach with other measures as we work both in concert with likeminded nations and on our own to prevent terrorists and terrorist regimes from acquiring or using WMD. In the past, we looked at proliferation and terrorism as entirely separate issues. As Secretary Powell said in his Senate testimony April 24,
There are terrorists in the world who would like nothing better than to get their hands on and use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. So there is a definite link between terrorism and WMD. Not to recognize that link would be foolhardy to the extreme.
America is determined to prevent the next wave of terror. States that sponsor terror and pursue WMD must stop. States that renounce terror and abandon WMD can become part of our effort. But those that do not can expect to become our targets. This means directing firm international condemnation toward states that shelter--and in some cases directly sponsor--terrorists within their borders. It means uncovering their activities that may be in violation of international treaties. It means having a direct dialogue with the rest of the world about what is at stake. It means taking action against proliferators, middlemen, and weapons brokers by exposing them, sanctioning their behavior, and working with other countries to prosecute them or otherwise bring a halt to their activities. It means taking law-enforcement action against suspect shipments, front companies, and financial institutions that launder proliferators' funds. And it requires, above all, effective use, improvement, and enforcement of the multilateral tools at our disposal--both arms control and nonproliferation treaties and export control regimes.

The Problem of Noncompliance

Multilateral agreements are important to our nonproliferation arsenal. This Administration strongly supports treaties such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Biological Weapons Convention. But in order to be effective and provide the assurances they are designed to bring, they must be carefully and universally adhered to by all signatories. Therefore, strict compliance with existing treaties remains a major goal of our arms control policy.
This has been our aim in particular with the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). In 1969, President Nixon announced that the United States would unilaterally renounce biological weapons. The U.S. example was soon followed by other countries, and by 1972 the BWC was opened for signature. This international treaty, to which more than 140 countries are parties, prohibits the development, production, stockpiling, acquisition, or retention of biological and toxin weapons.
While the vast majority of the BWC's parties have conscientiously met their commitments, the United States is extremely concerned that several states are conducting offensive biological weapons programs while publicly avowing compliance with the agreement. To expose some of these violators to the international community, last November, I named publicly several states the U.S. government knows to be producing biological warfare agents in violation of the BWC.
Foremost is Iraq. Although it became a signatory to the BWC in 1972 and became a State Party in 1991, Iraq has developed, produced, and stockpiled biological warfare agents and weapons. The United States strongly suspects that Iraq has taken advantage of more than three years of no UN inspections to improve all phases of its offensive BW program. Iraq also has developed, produced, and stockpiled chemical weapons, and has shown a continuing interest in developing nuclear weapons and longer range missiles.
Next is North Korea. North Korea has a dedicated, national-level effort to achieve a BW capability and has developed and produced, and may have weaponized, BW agents in violation of the Convention. Despite the fact that its citizens are starving, the leadership in Pyongyang has spent large sums of money to acquire the resources, including a biotechnology infrastructure, capable of producing infectious agents, toxins, and other crude biological weapons. It likely has the capability to produce sufficient quantities of biological agents for military purposes within weeks of deciding to do so, and has a variety of means at its disposal for delivering these deadly weapons.
In January, I also named North Korea and Iraq for their covert nuclear weapons programs in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. This year, North Korea did not meet congressional certification requirements because of its continued lack of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, its failure to make any progress toward implementing the North-South Joint Denuclearization Declaration as called for under the Agreed Framework, and for proliferating long-range ballistic missiles. Finally, we believe that North Korea has a sizeable stockpile of chemical weapons and can manufacture all manner of CW agents.
Then comes Iran. Iran's biological weapons program began during the Iran-Iraq war and accelerated after Tehran learned how far along Saddam Hussein had progressed in his own program. The Iranians have all of the necessary pharmaceutical expertise, as well as the commercial infrastructure needed to produce--and hide--a biological warfare program. The United States believes Iran probably has produced and weaponized BW agents in violation of the Convention. Again, Iran's BW program is complemented by an even more aggressive chemical warfare program, Iran's ongoing interest in nuclear weapons, and its aggressive ballistic missile research, development, and flight testing regimen.
President Bush named these three countries in his State of the Union address earlier this year as the world's most dangerous proliferators. "States like these, and their terrorist allies," he said, "constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger."

Trouble Ahead

Beyond the axis of evil, there are other rogue states intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction--particularly biological weapons. Given our vulnerability to attack from biological agents, as evidenced recently in the anthrax releases, it is important to carefully assess and respond to potential proliferators. Today, I want to discuss three other state sponsors of terrorism that are pursuing or that have the potential to pursue weapons of mass destruction or have the capability to do so in violation of their treaty obligations. While we will continue to use diplomatic efforts and multilateral regimes with these countries, it is important to review the challenges we face and to underline the issues that these states must address. As the President has said,
America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security. We'll be deliberate. Yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer.
First, Libya. There is no doubt that Libya continues its longstanding pursuit of nuclear weapons. We believe that since the suspension of UN sanctions against Libya in 1999, Libya has been able to increase its access to dual use nuclear technologies. Although Libya would need significant foreign assistance to acquire a nuclear weapon, Tripoli's nuclear infrastructure enhancement remains of concern. Qaddafi hinted at this in a recent (25 March) interview with Al-Jazirah when he said, "We demanded the dismantling of the weapons of mass destruction that the Israelis have; we must continue to demand that. Otherwise, the Arabs will have the right to possess that weapon."
Among its weapons of mass destruction programs, Libya--which is not a party to the CWC--continues its goal of reestablishing its offensive chemical weapons ability, as well as pursuing an indigenous chemical warfare production capability. Libya has produced at least 100 tons of different kinds of chemical weapons, using its Rabta facility. That facility closed down after it was subject to media scrutiny, but then reopened as a pharmaceutical plant in 1995. Although production of chemical agents reportedly has been halted, CW production at Rabta cannot be ruled out. It remains heavily dependent on foreign suppliers for precursor chemicals, technical expertise, and other key chemical warfare-related equipment. Following the suspension of UN sanctions in April 1999, Libya has reestablished contacts with illicit foreign sources of expertise, parts, and precursor chemicals in the Middle East, Asia, and Western Europe.
Conversely, Libya has publicly indicated its intent to join the CWC. While our perceptions of Libya would not change overnight, such a move could be positive. Under the CWC, Libya would be required to declare and destroy all chemical weapons production facilities and stockpiles, make declarations about any dual use chemical industry, undertake not to research or produce any chemical weapons, and not to export certain chemicals to countries that have not signed the CWC. Libya would also be subject to challenge inspections of any facility, declared or not.
Significantly for predictive purposes, Libya became a State Party to the BWC in January 1982, but the U.S. believes that Libya has continued its biological warfare program. Although its program is in the research and development stage, Libya may be capable of producing small quantities of biological agent. Libya's BW program has been hindered, in part, by the country's poor scientific and technological base, equipment shortages, and a lack of skilled personnel, as well as by UN sanctions in place from 1992 to 1999.
Libya is also continuing its efforts to obtain ballistic missile-related equipment, materials, technology, and expertise from foreign sources. Outside assistance--particularly Serbian, Indian, North Korean, and Chinese--is critical to its ballistic missile development programs, and the suspension of UN sanctions in 1999 has allowed Tripoli to expand its procurement effort. Libya's current capability probably remains limited to its SCUD B missiles; but with continued foreign assistance, it may achieve an MRBM capability--a long desired goal--or extended-range SCUD capability.
Although Libya is one of seven countries on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror,1 the U.S. has noted recent positive steps by the Libyan government that we hope indicate that Tripoli wishes to rejoin the community of civilized states. In 1999, Libya turned over two Libyans wanted in connection with the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, for trial in the Netherlands. In 2001, it condemned the September 11 attacks publicly and signed the 12 terrorist conventions listed in UN Security Council Resolution 1273. And, as I have already mentioned, Libya has also announced its intention to accede to CWC.
However, as I have also said, words are not enough. The key is to see clear, hard evidence that Libya will, in fact, live up to the public standards it has set for itself. Libya can make a positive gesture in this regard by fulfilling its obligations under WMD treaties and becoming a party to the CWC. Moreover, Libya must honor the relevant UN Security Council Resolutions relating to the resolution of Pan Am 103, arguably the worst air terrorist disaster prior to September 11. Libya has yet to comply fully with these resolutions, which include accepting responsibility and paying compensation. It is past time that Libya did this.
The United States also knows that Syria has long had a chemical warfare program. It has a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin and is engaged in research and development of the more toxic and persistent nerve agent VX. Although Damascus currently is dependent on foreign sources for key elements of its chemical warfare program, including precursor chemicals and key production equipment, we are concerned about Syrian advances in its indigenous CW infrastructure which would significantly increase the independence of its CW program. We think that Syria has a variety of aerial bombs and SCUD warheads, which are potential means of delivery of deadly agents capable of striking neighboring countries.
Syria, which has signed but not ratified the BWC, is pursuing the development of biological weapons and is able to produce at least small amounts of biological warfare agents. While we believe Syria would need foreign assistance to launch a large-scale biological weapons program right now, it may obtain such assistance by the end of this decade.
Syria has a combined total of several hundred SCUD B, SCUD C and SS-21 SRBMs, It is pursuing both solid- and liquid-propellant missile programs and relies extensively on foreign assistance in these endeavors. North Korean and Russian entities have been involved in aiding Syria's ballistic missile development. All of Syria's missiles are mobile and can reach much of Israel, Jordan, and Turkey from launch sites well within the country.
In addition to Libya and Syria, there is a threat coming from another BWC signatory, and one that lies just 90 miles from the U.S. mainland--namely, Cuba. This totalitarian state has long been a violator of human rights. The State Department said last year in its Annual Report on Human Rights Practices that
the Government continued to violate systematically the fundamental civil and political rights of its citizens. Citizens do not have the right to change their government peacefully. Prisoners died in jail due to lack of medical care. Members of the security forces and prison officials continued to beat and otherwise abuse detainees and prisoners.... The Government denied its citizens the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and association.
Havana has long provided safe haven for terrorists, earning it a place on the State Department's list of terrorist-sponsoring states. The country is known to be harboring terrorists from Colombia, Spain, and fugitives from the United States. We know that Cuba is collaborating with other state sponsors of terror.
Castro has repeatedly denounced the U.S. war on terrorism. He continues to view terror as a legitimate tactic to further revolutionary objectives. Last year, Castro visited Iran, Syria, and Libya--all designees on the same list of terrorist-sponsoring states. At Tehran University, these were his words: "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up."
But Cuba's threat to our security often has been underplayed. An official U.S. government report in 1998 concluded that Cuba did not represent a significant military threat to the United States or the region. It went only so far as to say that "Cuba has a limited capacity to engage in some military and intelligence activities which could pose a danger to U.S. citizens under some circumstances." However, then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen tried to add some balance to this report by expressing in the preface his serious concerns about Cuba's intelligence activities against the United States and its human rights practices. Most notably, he said, "I remain concerned about Cuba's potential to develop and produce biological agents, given its biotechnology infrastructure...."
Why was the 1998 report on Cuba so unbalanced? Why did it underplay the threat Cuba posed to the United States? A major reason is Cuba's aggressive intelligence operations against the United States, which included recruiting the Defense Intelligence Agency's senior Cuba analyst, Ana Belen Montes, to spy for Cuba. Montes not only had a hand in drafting the 1998 Cuba report, but also passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana. Montes was arrested last fall and pleaded guilty to espionage on March 19.
For four decades, Cuba has maintained a well-developed and sophisticated biomedical industry, supported until 1990 by the Soviet Union. This industry is one of the most advanced in Latin America and leads in the production of pharmaceuticals and vaccines that are sold worldwide. Analysts and Cuban defectors have long cast suspicion on the activities conducted in these biomedical facilities.
Here is what we now know: The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are concerned that such technology could support BW programs in those states. We call on Cuba to cease all BW-applicable cooperation with rogue states and to fully comply with all of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.

Conclusion

America is leading in the fight to root out and destroy terror. Our goals are to stop the development of weapons of mass destruction and insure compliance with existing arms control and nonproliferation treaties and commitments, which the Bush Administration strongly supports, but experience has shown that treaties and agreements are an insufficient check against state sponsors of terrorism. Noncompliance can undermine the efficacy and legitimacy of these treaties and regimes. After all, any nation ready to violate one agreement is perfectly capable of violating another, denying its actual behavior all the while.
And so I close with four fundamental conclusions. First, that global terrorism has changed the nature of the threat we face. Keeping WMD out of terrorist hands must be a core element of our nonproliferation strategy.
Second, the Administration supports an international dialogue on weapons of mass destruction and encourages countries to educate their publics on the WMD threat. We must not shy away from truth telling.
Third, the Administration will not assume that because a country's formal subscription to UN counterterrorism conventions or its membership in multilateral regimes necessarily constitutes an accurate reading of its intentions. We call on Libya, Cuba, and Syria to live up to the agreements they have signed. We will watch closely their actions, not simply listen to their words. Working with our allies, we will expose those countries that do not live up to their commitments.
Finally, the United States will continue to exercise strong leadership in multilateral forums and will take whatever steps are necessary to protect and defend our interests and eliminate the terrorist threat.
Thank you.
The Honorable John R. Bolton is Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

1. Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000, U.S. Department of State, April 30, 2001.