Thursday, November 28, 2013

Republicans: CIA nominee involved in Benghazi talking points

Republicans: CIA nominee involved in Benghazi talking points

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President Obama's pick to head the CIA was involved in crafting controversial talking points about last year's attack in Benghazi, Republicans said Tuesday after viewing intelligence documents.
Lawmakers had vowed to block John Brennan's nomination unless they got to see internal communications about how to describe the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Several said the email chain of several pages, which they'd been seeking for months, doesn't change how they plan to vote either way.
“Brennan was involved,” Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said after the briefing. “It's pretty obvious what happened.”
“At the end of the day it should have been pretty easy to determine who made the changes and what changes were made.”
He described an “extensive, bureaucratic and frankly unnecessary process” that led to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations publicly linking the attack to a peaceful protest gone awry. Republicans have accused the White House of twisting the talking points to avoid harming Obama's national security reputation ahead of the November elections.
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the panel's chairwoman, said Brennan's involvement was “small” and should play no part in his confirmation. The committee is scheduled to vote Thursday now that members have seen the documents.Several lawmakers said they still had concerns.
“It did not alleviate my concerns,” said Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), who has said he'd vote against Brennan because of accusations that he leaked damaging national security information to the media.
“I wouldn't use the word alleviate,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “I think it raises other questions with regard to process. But we may have more to say about that in the next couple days.”
“I still have many concerns and believe there's still gaps in the information,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
“The information today is unrelated to my personal decision on Brennan,” she said. She is expected to vote to confirm.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said he didn't think the administration misled anyone with its talking points but that many other questions about the events of last September remain.
“We've got a lot more documents and requests to be fulfilled,” he said. “It answers a lot, if not all, of the questions that the committee from an oversight standpoint. This only related to talking points and there's a tremendous amount more documents that deal with the days leading up to and the day preceding Benghazi.”
Jeremy Herb contributed

Congressman: CIA suspends Benghazi survivor over refusal to sign NDA

Congressman: CIA suspends Benghazi survivor over refusal to sign NDA

posted at 12:41 pm on September 17, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

CIA Director John Brennan assured Congress last week that the agency was not forcing survivors of the Benghazi attack a year ago to sign non-disclosure agreements or take polygraphs.  In a handwritten addendum to a letter sent to the House Intelligence Committee, Brennan assured chair Mike Rogers that “I will not tolerate any effort to prevent our intelligence oversight committee from doing their jobs,” and in the body of the letter stated that “I am unaware of any officer who has been threatened with reprisals.” Rogers announced his plan to proceed with subpoenas for the survivors in order to finally get their testimony — more than a year later.
But did Brennan tell the truth? Rep. Frank Wolf says one survivor claims to have been suspended from the CIA for refusing to sign the NDA (via The Right Scoop):
A CIA employee who refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement barring him from discussing the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, has been suspended as a result and forced to hire legal counsel, according to a top House lawmaker.
Rep. Frank Wolf (R., Va.) revealed at an event on Monday that his office was anonymously informed about the CIA employee, who is purportedly facing an internal backlash after refusing to sign a legal document barring him from publicly or privately discussing events surrounding the Benghazi attack.
The revelation comes about a month after several media outlets reported that CIA employees with knowledge of the terror attack had been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA) and submit to regular polygraph tests.
“The reports on the NDA are accurate. We’re getting people who call,” Wolf said Monday during an event marking the launch of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, a panel of former military and intelligence officials who are investigating unanswered questions surrounding the Benghazi incident. …
“I called the law firm and spoke with CIA employee’s attorney who confirmed that her client is having an issue with the agency and the firm is trying to address it,” Wolf said. “Based on my past experiences with the CIA, which is headquartered in my congressional district, I am not at all confident that these efforts will be successful.”
The NDA issue is a curious one, in part because it involves CIA agents who already are bound by clearance requirements to keep classified data to themselves.  The clearance doesn’t prevent cleared personnel from briefing Congress in matters of whistleblowing and oversight, but then again, neither would NDAs — once a subpoena is issued, anyway.  An NDA can’t prevent Congress from conducting its constitutional duty for oversight any more than it can keep a witness to a crime from testifying in court.
Assuming that the CIA is doing this — and we’ve heard from multiple sources that they have — why bother?  Apparently they are intent on using every technique to bluster witnesses into silence, no matter how weak those techniques might be.  If that’s the case, what benefit does the CIA have in keeping silent on Benghazi?  The agency has leaked quite a bit of information on the subject already in its immediate aftermath after State tried shifting the blame onto Langley in the aftermath of the attack (after the YouTube video excuse collapsed, anyway).  Most of the focus for the failure has been on State and the White House, with some left over for the Pentagon over the lack of military response to rescue the remnants during the second attack wave.  If that was the whole story, one might expect the CIA to make sure Congress knew it.  What may have changed their minds?

NARRATIVE SUMMARIES OF REASONS FOR LISTING QE.M.136.13. MUHAMMAD JAMAL NETWORK (MJN)

NARRATIVE SUMMARIES OF REASONS FOR LISTING

QE.M.136.13. MUHAMMAD JAMAL NETWORK (MJN)
Date on which the narrative summary became available on the Committee’s website: 21 October 2013
The Muhammad Jamal Network (MJN) was listed on 21 October 2013 pursuant to paragraphs 2 and 3 of resolution 2083 (2012) as being associated with Al-Qaida for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf of, or in support of”, “supplying, selling or transferring arms and related materiel to”, and “recruiting for; or otherwise supporting acts or activities of” Al-Qaida (QE.A.4.01), Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (QE.A.129.10.) and The Organization of Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (QE.T.14.01.).  MJN is controlled by Muhammad Jamal Abd-Al Rahim Ahmad Al-Kashif (QI.A.318.13).
Additional information
Egyptian Muhammad Muhammad Jamal Abd-Al Rahim Ahmad Al-Kashif formed the MJN after his release from prison in 2011 and established multiple terrorist training camps in Egypt and Libya.  AQAP (QE.A.129.10.) has provided funding to the MJN.
Muhammad Jamal was most recently arrested by Egyptian authorities in November 2012.  His confiscated computer contained letters to Al-Qaida leader Aiman Muhammed Rabi al-Zawahiri (QI.A.6.01.) in which Muhammad Jamal described MJN’s activities as including acquiring weapons, conducting training, and establishing terrorist groups in the Sinai, and in which he asked Al-Zawahiri for assistance. Al-Zawahiri reportedly gave Jamal the go-ahead to launch terrorist attacks in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere.
Muhammad Jamal has used the Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) network to smuggle fighters into MJN training camps.  Suicide bombers are being trained at MJN training camps, and Muhammad Jamal has established links with violent extremists in Europe.  Muhammad Jamal set up a training camp in Libya where Libyan and foreign violent extremists were trained.  Some of the attackers of the U.S. Mission in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 have been identified as associates of Muhammad Jamal, and some of the Benghazi attackers reportedly trained at MJN camps in Libya.
Before he was arrested in November 2012, Muhammad Jamal was the leader of the Nasr City Cell (the Cell), whose members have been accused of plotting terrorist attacks inside Egypt.  Raids against the Cell in October 2012 recovered a large amount of weapons, explosives, and related material.
MJN is connected to Al-Qaida senior leaders, including Aiman al-Zawahiri, and AQAP leaders Nasir ‘abd-al-Karim ‘Abdullah al-Wahishi (QI.A.274.10.) and Qasim Yahya Mahdi al-Rimi (QI.A.282.10.). MJN is also connected to The Organization of Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.
Related listed individuals and entities
Aiman Muhammed Rabi al-Zawahiri (QI.A.6.01), listed on 25 January 2001
Nasir ‘abd-al-Karim ‘Abdullah al-Wahishi (QI.A.274.10.), listed on 19 January 2010
Qasim Yahya Mahdi al-Rimi (QI.A.282.10.), listed on 11 May 2010
Muhammad Jamal Abd-Al Rahim Ahmad Al-Kashif (QE.A.318.13), listed on 21 October 2013
Al-Qaida (QE.A.4.01.), listed on 6 October 2001
Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (QE.A.129.10.), listed on 19 January 2010
Egyptian Islamic Jihad (QE.A.3.01.), listed on 6 October 2001
The Organization of Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (QE.T.14.01.), listed on 6 October 2001

Terrorist Designations of the Muhammad Jamal Network and Muhammad Jamal

Terrorist Designations of the Muhammad Jamal Network and Muhammad Jamal


Media Note
Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
October 7, 2013


The Department of State has designated the Muhammad Jamal Network (MJN) and founder, Muhammad Jamal, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, which targets terrorists and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism.
Muhammad Jamal journeyed to Afghanistan in the late 1980s where he trained with al-Qa’ida (AQ) and learned how to construct bombs. Upon returning to Egypt in the 1990s, Muhammad Jamal became a top military commander and head of the operational wing of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), then headed by AQ leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Jamal has been arrested multiple times by Egyptian authorities for terrorist activities and was incarcerated for years in Egypt. Muhammad Jamal has developed connections with al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), AQ senior leadership, and al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leadership including Nasir 'Abd-al-Karim 'Abdullah al-Wahishi and Qasim Yahya Mahdi al-Rimi.
Jamal formed the MJN after his release from Egyptian prison in 2011 and established several terrorist training camps in Egypt and Libya. AQAP has provided funding to the MJN and Jamal has used the AQAP network to smuggle fighters into training camps. Suicide bombers have trained at MJN training camps, and Jamal established links with terrorists in Europe. 
Jamal was re-arrested by Egyptian authorities in November 2012. His confiscated computer contained letters to al-Zawahiri in which Jamal asked for assistance and described MJN’s activities, including acquiring weapons, conducting terrorist training, and establishing terrorist groups in the Sinai.


PRN: 2013/1233

Just How Serious Is Obama's Crackdown on Media Leaks?

Just How Serious Is Obama's Crackdown on Media Leaks?

Takepart.com

David E. Sanger has the kind of establishment journalism credentials that exude authority. In a three-decade-long career at the New York Times, he’s reported from New York, Tokyo and Washington, and he’s now the paper’s chief Washington correspondent. He’s been a member of reporting teams that have won two Pulitzer Prizes. He’s written two well-received books, and he’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group. He has taught at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is a regular, reasonable, bespectacled, and somewhat avuncular presence on the Sunday morning network television news and interview shows.
In June 2012, the New York Times published a Sanger story revealing that President Obama had ordered accelerated attacks on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities via a cyberweapon with the futuristic name Stuxnet. This act of journalism put Sanger’s sources in the crosshairs of the Obama administration’s Justice Department.
In a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post, former Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr. described the outsized governmental response to Sanger’s story. Federal investigators, Downie cites Sanger as saying, questioned scores of government officials who were identified, through phone, text, and email records, as having had contact with Sanger. Sanger also told Downie that the White House chief of staff sent out a memo instructing executive branch employees to retain email from the respected Times scribe. Longtime sources quickly went silent.
“They tell me: ‘David, I love you, but don’t e-mail me,” Downie quoted Sanger as saying. “Let’s don’t chat until this blows over.’ ”
Sanger told Downie something else, too: “This is most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”
As US news media and transparency nonprofits tell the tale, the Obama administration has waged an unprecedented legal war against national security whistleblowers and the reporters they spill their secrets to. Even beyond the highly publicized Bradley/Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden cases, media advocates note, the Obama administration has pursued a record number of criminal prosecutions against alleged leakers of classified material. In doing so, they say, the federal government has repeatedly overreached in dealing with reporters, and not just Sanger: It secretly seized months of phone records associated with Associated Press bureaus and journalists; it obtained emails of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen via a search warrant based on claims he was a co-conspirator, rather than a reporter doing his job; and it attempted to force star New York Times national security reporter James Risen to testify about his sources in a leak case. Echoing Sanger, media advocates complain that the Obama administration has frightened sources inside the federal government so badly that they won’t engage in even routine electronic contact with reporters. There can be a plaintive tone to these criticisms, which often point out that Obama has overseen more leak prosecutions than George W. Bush, the supposed epitome of executive secrecy and national security overreach (and the first president to deal with leaks in the new technological era).
The Obama administration, in its defense, insists that it has taken a reasoned course in responding to leaks that have done real, serious harm to the country’s counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering efforts. The Justice Department says it does not go after whistleblowers within the government who proceed through proper channels—such as a complaint to an Inspector General, an official with wide latitude to police behavior within an executive agency—but it does vigorously prosecute federal employees who illegally take it upon themselves to publicize classified information. (Which would describe Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, even though it likely hastened American withdrawal from Vietnam.) And, the department says, it balances First Amendment concerns with national security and law enforcement interests whenever it considers investigating leaks. These rejoinders also seem to contain wounded undertones, a kind of exasperation that anyone would think an administration headed by a former professor of constitutional law who’s committed to transparency might blithely trample on press freedom.
If the debate over leaking and its prosecution has been fiercely argued, the argument has also included elements of political theater. The realities of national-security leaking are more nuanced and ambiguous than the black-and-white, press-freedom-versus-national-security drama presented by both sides.
For all the claims that the Obama administration is on a leak prosecution crusade, the uptick in leak cases during the Obama administration is relatively small in absolute terms, and it has occurred within a larger context. In this administration, as in previous presidencies, government officials who leak classified information are very rarely prosecuted, and journalists who receive the leaks have a remarkable degree of insulation from legal consequences, due at least in part to one underlying reality: Leaking is extraordinarily useful to the president and his staff.
David Pozen, a Columbia Law School associate professor who has studied what he calls the “intricate ecosystem” of leaking, describes the situation this way in a forthcoming Harvard Law Review article: “The great secret about the laws against leaking is that they have never been used in a manner designed to stop leaking — and that their implementation threatens not just gauzy democratic ideals but practical bureaucratic imperatives, not just individual whistleblowers but the institution of the presidency.”
Government officials leak constantly, on authorized, semi-authorized, and unauthorized bases. They leak to affect policy, to test public reaction to policy changes under consideration, to communicate among executive agencies and with foreign governments, to settle grudges, to bolster their egos, to inform reporters and to butter them up, and, occasionally, to actually blow the whistle on governmental abuses. The programmatic prosecution of leakers would, Pozen says, restrict all of those activities and more, and make governing immeasurably more difficult for any president.
So the relevant question may not be whether the Obama administration is frenetically focused on waging legal war against leaks. It may be more important to ask whether the climate of the ecosystem that has long protected leakers and national security reporters is changing, whether the Obama anti-leaking crusade is a temporary aberration that will soon fade—or the first dangerous step in a progression of ever-more-rigorous crackdowns to come.
The routine use of email, text and instant-messaging services, and cell phones, along with the proliferation of surveillance cameras and turnstiles that track people in federal buildings, has made it far easier than in decades past for investigators to gather electronic communication records and other evidence that can be used to build criminal cases against leakers, observers of the Obama leak uproar have noted. Meanwhile, a new breed of low-level, large-scale digital leaker – Manning, for example, who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents through Wikileaks in 2010 – has raised the possibility of leaks that are enormously threatening to national security and, ergo, enormously concerning to a commander-in-chief.
Despite these changes in the classified information environment, Pozen told TakePart that he believes the self-regulating features of the leak ecosystem will continue to work as they have for decades, greatly limiting legal action against government officials who reveal classified information. “But,” he admits, “I can’t rule out that we may really be heading into a new order.”
The Espionage Act of 1917 was passed shortly after the United States entered World War I, forbidding Americans from engaging in activities that might support enemy military operations. Amended several times since, it has been used to prosecute everyone from Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, convicted and imprisoned for making a pro-Socialist, anti-war speech, to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were found guilty and sentenced to death in 1951 for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
Through American history, presidents and other national security leaders have railed about leaks of classified information to the press, but only on rare occasions – the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 being one – has the government tried to use the Espionage Act to target the media directly over such leaks. And no journalist has been charged under it. More recently, the government has used the act (often these two sections) to prosecute public employees who leak classified information to the media.
The Obama administration’s eight leak prosecutions of government officials under the Espionage Act represent an increase over historical levels. In all preceding administrations, it's been widely reported, the Espionage Act was used to bring just three cases against public officials for providing classified information to the media. But of the eight Obama-era cases, two originated during the Bush administration, and two – against Manning and Snowden – seem, for strategic reasons alone, all but unavoidable, given the scale and importance of the secrets revealed. Thomas Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, says that given the pro-transparency pronouncements Obama made before and since he took office, it seems likely that leak prosecutions were pursued on a case-by-case basis, rather than as part of an overarching plan. “I don’t think he necessarily wants to be out on this limb,” Patterson says.
“So it’s kind of hard to imagine, if he’s doing it,” Patterson adds, “who might not be in the future.”
In August, a military judge sentenced Manning to 35 years in prison for leaking more than 700,000 government documents to Wikileaks. Snowden has taken asylum in Russia after leaking documents that detail massive National Security Agency electronic surveillance operations around the world; he’s been charged with three felonies. (The investigative site ProPublica has compiled information on Obama administration leak prosecutions here.)
And the eight prosecutions pursued during the Obama administration are a truly tiny total when compared to the vast amount of government leaking that takes place. Although definitive data are not available, officials have said that the Justice Department received about 50 criminal leak referrals a year in the late 1990s, and an average of 37 annually from 2005 to 2009, Pozen writes in his heavily footnoted paper. The referrals hardly tell the whole tale, he notes: “Looking at classified information disclosures specifically, a study by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence counted 147 separate instances in the nation’s eight leading newspapers in the first six months of 1986. The Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Commission claimed in its 2005 public report to have identified ‘hundreds of serious press leaks’ of classified information over the past decade.” In his paper, Pozen cites estimates of the indictment rate for leak-law violations at less than 0.3 percent over a roughly 30-year period ending in 2011. The rate during the Obama administration is difficult to state precisely, because data is not available for the entire Obama era. But extrapolating from previous statistics, the percentage of referrals that led to indictments in the Obama years is likely in the low single-digits; this would be higher than the historic rate, though still very low.
“For a crime that Presidents describe as a major threat to national security and good government,” Pozen writes, “the degree of ‘underenforcement’ is stunning.”
The leak cases prosecuted by the Obama administration are a varied lot, ranging from the very-hard-to-justify to the essentially-impossible-to-question. On the paper-thin end, Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency official, probably most closely matches the notion of the public-interest whistleblower that inhabits the public imagination. He was charged with 10 felony counts of violating the Espionage Act for speaking to a Baltimore Sun reporter about an NSA technology program that went vastly over budget and has since been cancelled as a boondoggle. But those charges were dropped just before trial in July 2011, when Drake was allowed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor for which he received a sentence of a year’s probation, plus community service. The judge in the case said [pdf] the Justice Department’s dragging-out of the four-year-long investigation “doesn’t pass the smell test.”
The Obama-era leaker at the other end of the sympathy scale would seem to be former FBI agent Donald Sachtleben, who agreed late in September to plead guilty to leaking information to the Associated Press that led to the unmasking of an undercover agent working for the United States inside al Qaeda. In a separate case, Sachtleben also pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child pornography. His total sentence, if a judge accepts the plea agreement, would be nearly 12 years in prison.
As unsympathetic as Sachtleben may be, his prosecution has created a flash point for the public relations inferno that now surrounds the Obama administration’s anti-leaking efforts. To acquire evidence against Sachtleben, federal investigators secretly seized two months’ worth of records relating to more than 20 telephone lines used by AP journalists. The phone records — obtained by a subpoena served without first notifying the wire service, as is customary — sparked an uproar in Congress and among media organizations and free press advocacy groups. The volume on that uproar was turned up not long afterward when the Washington Post revealed that during their investigation of apparent leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, federal investigators obtained phone and email records of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen. Some of those records were obtained by a search warrant that alleged there was probable cause to believe that a “national news reporter” (identified in news reports as Rosen) had violated a section of the Espionage Act relating to unauthorized disclosure of national defense information as an “aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator.”
The administration has since seemed to back away from its more aggressive stance on accessing records of journalists’ communications, with the Justice Department reviewing and revising its media policies. The new policies expand the department’s longstanding practice of not prosecuting journalists for newsgathering activity and of using subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to obtain media records only as “an extraordinary measure.” Under the new policy, the government would access media communications records only after review by a newly created News Media Review Committee and only after authorization by the attorney general. The administration has also thrown its support behind a shield law that aims to provide reporters with protection against having to reveal sources in court. Nevertheless, some media advocates feel the law would do little to protect national security reporters.
Notwithstanding evidence of administration backtracking and the relatively small number of prosecutions, many journalists and media advocates remain deeply wary of the administration’s approach to leak investigations. Lucy Dalglish, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, believes that the Obama administration is “incredibly disciplined” in terms of the information it provides the press, on- and off-record, and, at the same time, more dismissive of journalists than it should be.
Widespread email and cell phone use have made it relatively easy for the government to amass information on the electronic communications of government officials and, when it chooses, journalists, and the administration’s policy toward leaks and leakers is, she feels, “evolving into dangerous territory.” She acknowledges that the specter of leaks of large volumes of secrets from low- and mid-level sources, à la Manning and Snowden, puts the administration in a difficult position — one in which the White House could well be pining for the “quaint” days when national security leaks went to established media outlets that would listen to administration requests for restraint. Still, Dalglish says, through its leak investigations the administration is trying to frighten mid-level leakers, and that tack is making federal employees of all sorts reluctant to talk to the media. “They’ve even scared people in the National Park Service,” Dalglish said.
Downie, the former Washington Post executive editor, is now a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, and he has an even more dire view. “With the passage of the Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a vast expansion of intelligence agencies and their powers, the aggressive exploitation of intrusive digital surveillance capabilities, the excessive classification of public documents and officials’ sophisticated control of the news media’s access to the workings of government, journalists who cover national security are facing vast and unprecedented challenges in their efforts to hold the government accountable to its citizens,” Downie wrote in his Post opinion piece, which was based on a report he wrote for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “They find that government officials are increasingly fearful of talking to them, and they worry that their communications with sources can be monitored at any time.”
In response, Downie wrote, journalists are avoiding telephone conversations and email exchanges to protect government sources, and “a few” news organizations are using separate computer networks and other methods of evading government snooping, including encryption of electronic communications — perhaps foreshadowing a sort of digital communications arms race between the leak police and the press. For example, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has begun distributing open source software called SecureDrop that media organizations can use to provide security to sources who want submit digital documents that the government can’t intercept and decipher. The New Yorker is already using a version of the software for its Strongbox file submission site. At the very least, Beltway-area park benches and barstools are likely to get a workout under this new regime.
Steven Aftergood, director of the project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, provides a more modulated view. Although the moves are often overlooked, the Obama administration decided against pursuing two significant leak cases left over from the Bush administration, Aftergood notes. And the new Justice Department media policy does suggest some rethinking of the administration’s anti-leaking strategy, Aftergood says, particularly in a section that suggests intelligence agencies might address leaks through administrative sanctions – the withdrawal of security clearances from alleged leakers, for example – rather than relying on criminal prosecution. (Though Aftergood says it remains to be seen whether such rethinking will be applied.)
Even so, Aftergood expects the Obama administration to continue its vigorous legal pursuit of leakers: “I think there is a lot of momentum behind the current aggressive stance.”
Mark Zaid is a Washington, DC lawyer who worked with two government officials the Obama administration has prosecuted for alleged classified leaks: former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, charged with leaking information about CIA activity related to Iran’s nuclear program, and John Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism operative who pleaded guilty last October to leaking the identity of a former colleague to a reporter at ABC News. (A similar act by Bush administration officials resulted in widespread condemnation and the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.) Zaid says he has been involved in defending alleged leakers since the mid-1990s; his view of the Obama administration leak policies is markedly different than the view some journalists and press advocates have taken.
“I really don’t see this administration as more aggressive than others,” he said. The difference in numbers of prosecutions relates mostly to availability of evidence, he says; technological advances available to federal investigators have provided a wealth of information about leakers that was not possible to accrue in the past, helping them build strong, if circumstantial, cases against leakers.
Also, Zaid said, Justice Department lawyers push the legal envelope in regard to leaks and espionage prosecutions. In the Sterling case, for example, prosecutors have pursued a remarkably aggressive course against Times national security reporter James Risen, subpoenaing him to testify in the former CIA agent’s trial. A federal appellate court has ruled that Risen must indeed testify, a decision that, if it stands, could send him to jail for refusing to reveal his sources, potentially with ripple effects on a range of national security reporting.
But Zaid does not see this prosecutorial zeal as emanating from the Obama administration, and he considers the Obama administration’s pursuit of leakers as more an evolutionary than an extraordinary change, an extension of Bush administration policies, just as many Bush policies were extensions of Clinton-era practices. While he does not necessarily approve of the evolving increase in aggression with which leak cases are pursued, Zaid says, “I’m not surprised at anything they’re doing.” It’s a natural outgrowth of technology, circumstance, and the continuity of prosecutorial practice from administration to administration.
At the end of a lengthy interview, Zaid made an interesting, overarching point: There is a very small community of people who deal directly with classified leak cases, and none of the people in it is completely disinterested. Representatives of nonprofits that deal with First Amendment and free press issues can be “passionate to a fault,” he said, defending whistleblowers and their media partners wholesale, even if some of their behavior is not defensible. Whistleblowers can themselves “end up having blinders on,” making them unable to see the difference between the broader public interest and their own dedication to a cause or love of the limelight. That lawyers – in and out of the government — are vigorous advocates for their clients is, of course, a given.
So, when assessing the state of leak prosecution in the Obama era, Zaid suggested, one should remember a simple reality: “There’s a lot of agendas in this field.”
David Pozen spent months examining the complex world of national security leaking in Washington. The Columbia law professor interviewed a range of national security journalists and roughly two dozen current and former executive branch officials who have worked on top secret issues, and he analyzed a variety of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, all with the aim of understanding why it is that high federal officials so loudly decry the leaking of classified information, while being permissive about it.
Pozen’s description of the “intricate ecosystem” of leaking is layered, detailed, and difficult to summarize in a way that does justice to its depth. In essence, he contends that the executive branch has never seriously attempted to enforce leak laws because, among other reasons, leaking works enormously in favor of the president. The president's men (and women) use authorized leaks – what Pozen calls plants – in many ways that enhance their power. Unauthorized leaks tend to be tolerated because they show that not all reporting based on secret information is a government “plant” that the public can dismiss as official propaganda. If the government’s own leaking is to be viewed as legitimate, some seemingly unauthorized leaks must appear in the media.
Or, in Pozen’s construction, “Plants need to be watered with leaks.”
Meanwhile, he says, a host of government officials communicate with reporters on a semi-authorized middle ground. That is, superiors know that these officials are speaking with the media, but often do not know the precise substance of what is being conveyed. Pozen calls the classified leaks that happen in this intermediate realm “pleaks,” meaning they lie somewhere between leaks and plants. Any serious, programmatic attempt to enforce leaking laws would, first, tend to eliminate the leaks that are necessary to legitimize the government’s plants in the press. It could also wind up targeting pleaks and, inevitably, place executive branch officials who engaged in or allowed them at risk of prosecution.
Lest this talk of leaks, pleaks, and plants confuse rather than explain, here is Pozen’s own one-sentence summary of why leaking is so seldom punished: “Even though particular leaks may cause real damage, an accommodating approach to enforcement has…supported, rather than subverted, the government.”
Pozen is the first to acknowledge that he has not devised a unified field theory of the workings of the leak ecosystem. His analysis has, however, gained both public notice and appreciation inside the community that deals closely with leaking. It’s an analysis that acknowledges the rise of new factors that could push the Obama administration and future presidencies to intensify the legal pursuit of leakers – including a perception that the government is vulnerable to an increased number of threatening disclosures of classified data by lower-level employees with access to nonestablishment media outlets like Wikileaks. The Snowden affair, Pozen notes, has dramatically changed the secrecy debate within a matter of months.
After all, tens of thousands of lower-level federal employees have access to classified data of one sort or another, and technology enables their leaks. Daniel Ellsberg had to spend hours secretly photocopying the Pentagon Papers late at night; Snowden simply made digital copies of some of the NSA’s most intimate secrets from a file-sharing location on the agency’s internal computer network, to which he had access as an NSA contractor.
At base, Pozen’s assessment of the future of leak pursuit suggests that it will continue to be one of permissiveness and few prosecutions, because the leak ecosystem is resilient, and leaking is of enormous benefit to the president. “There is a strong basis for predicting that the current ‘leak panic’ will fade,” Pozen writes, “and that prosecutorial excess in this area ought to be self-correcting … History as well as theory is on the side of the leaker. Permissive neglect [toward leakers] has proven a remarkably resilient model over many decades in the face of great social, technological, journalistic, and bureaucratic change.”
Pozen acknowledges, however, that he cannot be sure the Obama anti-leaking crusade is a temporary aberration rather than a harbinger of increasingly harsh executive branch efforts to control classified information and frighten leakers. As he’s prepared his paper for publication, Pozen says, he’s described his views on leak prosecution to several national security reporters. And their response?
“They say,” he allows with a light chuckle, “‘I hope you’re right.’”
This content was created in partnership with our parent company Participant Media.
Original article from TakePart

Emails: White House, State Department coordinated with journalist on national security leaks

Emails: White House, State Department coordinated with journalist on national security leaks
Posted By Patrick Howley On 1:54 AM 10/23/2013 In | No Comments
White House and State Department officials cooperated extensively on background with a New York Times journalist during the period that he broke confidential national security information in a series of leaks that prompted outrage from lawmakers, according to unearthed 2011 and 2012 emails.
The nonprofit organization Freedom Watch, which obtained the internal State Department emails through a Freedom of Information Act request, believes that the Obama administration carried out the leaks to bolster a tough image for itself on Iran.
Then-Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Michael Hammer and other State Department employees arranged background interviews between New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger and State Department officials between December 2011 and March 2012 for Sanger’s 2012 book “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.”
Sanger’s book included leaks of confidential national security information, including details of the computer worm Stuxnet that was used in a cyberattack against Iran. Sanger linked the worm to a U.S.-Israeli intelligence operation called “Operation Olympic Games” in a June 2012 New York Times article.
White House officials, including then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, began cooperating with Sanger before December 12, 2011.
“Yes, WH is cooperating, he has spent time with Donilon, others. They know he is looking to meet up with HRC and support,” Hammer wrote to his colleague Phillippe Reines in a December 12, 2011 email with the subject line “RE: Sanger.”
“Madam President, over the past few months there has been a disturbing stream of articles in the media and common among them, they cite elite, classified, or highly sensitive information in what appears to be a broader effort by the administration to paint a portrait of the President of the United States as a strong leader on national security issues–information for which there is no legitimate reason whatsoever to believe should be in the public domain,” Sen. John McCain said, according to June 5, 2012 transcripts of the Senate record.
“What price did the administration apparently pay to proliferate such a Presidential persona-highly valued in an election year? Access. Access to senior administration officials who appear to have served as anonymous sources divulging extremely sensitive military and intelligence information and operations,” McCain said. “With the leaks that these articles were based on, our enemies now know much more than they did the day before they came out about important aspects of our Nation’s unconventional offensive capabilities and how we use them.”
State Department officials coordinated closely with Sanger in the months preceding McCain’s statement, according to emails and other documents obtained by Freedom Watch.
“Wendy- Sanger is writing a book on the Obama Admin’s foreign policy to be published this June. He has talked to scores of people, including the Secretary, Bill, Jake, Kurt, Bob Einhorn and over at NSC and other agencies. We have been cooperating with him on this project and the chats have all been on background with anything on the record to be approved by us,” Assistant Secretary Hammer wrote to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, a Hillary Clinton appointee, on March 2, 2012 in an email that included significant redactions. ”Shall we offer him a time upon your return?.”
Sanger provided the State Department a perfect opportunity to portray Obama and Clinton as taking a tough stance on Iran.
“Among other topics, in what he calls the realm of ‘surprises,’ he is exploring the steady strengthening of the sanctions regime on Iran to become one of the most rigorous ever,” Hammer wrote in a March 15 memo to the Under Secretary under the sub-headline “Background and objectives of the interview.”
The emails show interactions as early as December 2011, and a document obtained by Freedom Watch shows a Sanger meeting with State Department officials on December 20, 2011.
“On the Sec., she knows I’m writing the book, so at most I’ll just remind her that at some point soon I’d love to get this going. I’m with you– we want to do Jake, Burns, etc. first,” Sanger wrote to Hammer in an email on December 3, 2011 with the subject line “Re: coupla book things.”
“Uzra- as I mentioned, David Sanger of NYT, is writing a book on the Obama administration’s foreign policy. We are coordinating with NSS, who has already spent time with him and supports Sanger’s requests to Interview the Secretary, Bill and others. Before he sits down with the Secretary- probably in late January -we hope we might find time for him to talk with Bill,” Hammer wrote to Uzra Zeya, then chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, on December 15, 2011.
“We are having Sanger meet Jake and Kurt next week and Einhorn in early January. If Bill is willing, It would be super to schedule in early-to-mid January. The session would be on background as a Senior Administration official. Anything on the record would be subject to our approval. I think we would need a solid 45 minutes,” Hammer continued in his email to Zeya on December 15, 2011.
State Department officials appeared to exchange information of such a sensitive nature with Sanger that it raised concerns about what the New York Times would report.
“Assured me all is for book and while they will be reporting on Israel/Iran but what you said is “walled off” and not for their reporting,” Hammer wrote to Jacob Sullivan on December 21, 2011 in an email with the subject line “Sanger.”
The Sanger coordination appears to have been part of a larger strategy by the State Department to interact with handpicked journalists during the 2012 election cycle.
“I think we should do Tom Friedman next- problem with him is that often he is on travel but if we have a window we can check if he is around. Otherwise, maybe we could do a chat with Fred Hiatt and Jackson Diehl of WaPo or Jerry Seib of WSJ,” Hammer wrote to State Department special assistant Colleen Neville on December 15, 2011.
Hillary Clinton and State Department officials “intimately participated in leaking highly classified national security information concerning U.S. cyber warfare capabilities and sources and methods, war plans against Iran should their nuclear program have to be militarily removed, and other top secret information,” Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman told The Daily Caller.
“The reason for this was obviously to make President Obama and his administration look strong against terrorism in the lead up to the 2012 elections,” Klayman said.
“It is outrageous that low level leakers like Edward Snowden with regard to the NSA and Bradley Manning and Julian Assanage with regard to Wikileaks would be prosecuted or threatened with prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department when much more serious leaks by Obama and his administration go unaddressed by federal law enforcement authorities,” Klayman said.
Klayman also said that he believes Clinton and former National Security Advisor Donilon were complicit in leaking details of the Stuxnet worm, based on his review of the documents.
“Even for the Iranian scientists who get to work safely, life isn’t a lot easier. A confidential study circulating through America’s national laboratories estimates that the Stuxnet computer worm – the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed against another country’s infrastructure – slowed Iran’s nuclear progress by one to two years. Now it has run its course. But there is no reason to believe the attacks are over,” Sanger reported for the New York Times in November 2011.
Stuxnet “appears to have been a joint project of American and Israeli intelligence” Sanger in his November 6, 2011 article, calling Stuxnet “devilishly ingenious: it infected millions of computers, but did damage only when the code was transferred to special controllers that run centrifuges, which spin at supersonic speed when enriching uranium. When operators looked at their screens, everything looked normal. But downstairs in the plant, the centrifuges suddenly spun out of control and exploded, like small bombs. It took months for the Iranians to figure out what had happened.”
“In the latest of the recently published articles – published on June 1, 2012, just a few days ago – the New York Times documented in rich detail the President’s secret decision to accelerate cyber attacks on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities with a computer virus that came to be known as Stuxnet. The author of the article, Mr. David Sanger, clearly states that former and current American officials spoke to him but refused to do so on the record because the program is both highly classified and parts of it are ongoing…an operation that was clearly one of the most tightly held national security secrets in our country until now,” McCain said on June 5, 2012.
The State Department did not return a request for comment.
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WH national-security official fired for leaking inside info on Twitter

WH national-security official fired for leaking inside info on Twitter

posted at 10:41 am on October 23, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

Call this a tale of two very different leaks in the White House. Late yesterday, the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin reported that a national-security official in the Obama administration had been abruptly fired after discovering that he’d been tweeting pseudonymously for more than two years. Jofi Joseph turned out to be the mysterious NatSecWonk, which has criticized the White House on numerous occasions and leaked sensitive information:
Jofi Joseph, a director in the non-proliferation section of the National Security Staff at the White House, has been surreptitiously tweeting under the moniker @natsecwonk, a Twitter feed famous inside Washington policy circles since it began in February, 2011 until it was shut down last week. Two administration officials confirmed that the mystery tweeter was Joseph, who has also worked at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Joe Biden. Until recently, he was part of the administration’s team working on negotiations with Iran.
During his time tweeting under the @natsecwonk name, Joseph openly criticized the policies of his White House bosses and often insulted their intellect and appearance. At different times, he insulted or criticized several top White House and State Department officials, including former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Secretary of State John Kerry, and many many others.
The Daily Beast saved a long record of @natsecwonk’s tweets prior to the shutting down of his Twitter feed.
“I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me,” he once tweeted.
“Was Huma Abedin wearing beer goggles the night she met Anthony Wiener? Almost as bad a pairing as Samantha Powers and Cass Sunstein ….,” he tweeted on another occasion, insulting a top Clinton aide, a then Congressman, and two White House senior officials in one tweet.
Looks like the “vacuous wonk” won in this case. Joseph also spent considerable time ripping Republicans, including my good friend John Noonan (by going after his weight? Weak, dude), but the newsmaking tweets were the barbs aimed internally.  Rogin notes that the identity of NatSecWonk surprised many in the foreign-policy community, because Joseph wasn’t just a low-level clerk.  He had been a fairly significant figure in the Obama administration, demonstrated by his new assignment on Iran, plus his wife Carolyn Leddy “is a well-respected professional staffer on the Republican side of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” according to Rogin.
That’s what happens when leaks make the White House look bad.  But just as with any other administration, this White House has no trouble leaking information to make itself look good.  Freedom Watch filed a FOIA request to determine just how much cooperation the White House gave New York Times reporter David Sanger for his work on his reporting on Stuxnet, and the answer is — a lot.  Patrick Howley at the Daily Caller notes that the Stuxnet story played a lot better for Barack Obama:
White House and State Department officials cooperated extensively on background with a New York Times journalist during the period that he broke confidential national security information in a series of leaks that prompted outrage from lawmakers, according to unearthed 2011 and 2012 emails.
The nonprofit organization Freedom Watch, which obtained the internal State Department emails through a Freedom of Information Act request, believes that the Obama administration carried out the leaks to bolster a tough image for itself on Iran.
Then-Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Michael Hammer and other State Department employees arranged background interviews between New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger and State Department officials between December 2011 and March 2012 for Sanger’s 2012 book “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.”
Sanger’s book included leaks of confidential national security information, including details of the computer worm Stuxnet that was used in a cyberattack against Iran. Sanger linked the worm to a U.S.-Israeli intelligence operation called “Operation Olympic Games” in a June 2012 New York Times article.
White House officials, including then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, began cooperating with Sanger before December 12, 2011.
“Yes, WH is cooperating, he has spent time with Donilon, others. They know he is looking to meet up with HRC and support,” Hammer wrote to his colleague Phillippe Reines in a December 12, 2011 email with the subject line “RE: Sanger.”
Something tells me that heads won’t be rolling for these self-serving leaks.  Congress may look into whether the White House exposed classified material in an attempt to make Obama look tough on Iran as the 2012 elections approached, but don’t expect much to come from it.  They have enough to investigate as it is now.

Idaho lawmakers aware that there is interest at the state level in amending U.S. Constitution

Idaho lawmakers aware that there is interest at the state level in amending U.S. Constitution

Burgoyne 2Rep. Grant Burgoyne, D-Boise, is in favor of amending the Constitution but not for the reasons state Rep. Chris Kapenga of Wisconsin favors.
State legislators from across the country will soon be gathering in northern Virginia to discuss the possibility of amending the U.S. Constitution. Some legislators in Idaho report that they’re aware of increased discussion about such an undertaking.
“I definitely heard about this idea, yes,” said Rep. Steven Harris, R-Meridian. Harris told IdahoReporter.com that he frequently receives email from constituents, many of whom reference “The Liberty Amendments,” a book from author and constitutional scholar Mark Levin. “People seem to be motivated by the book, but I get plenty of messages in all directions on this issue. Some that favor, and others that oppose the idea of amending the U.S. Constitution.”
Levin’s book details a specific section of the U.S. Constitution that he believes puts a check on big government. Article V provides two paths to amending the Constitution. One is through two-thirds of both chambers of the U.S. Congress, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states. The other begins at the state level, where two-thirds of all the legislatures ask Congress to call “a convention for proposing amendments.”
In the latter scenario, states would send delegates to this convention to propose amendments to the Constitution. Then, three-fourths of the states would have to ratify any amendments approved by the convention, either by a vote of the legislatures or through special ratifying conventions.
As a precursor to a “convention for proposing amendments,” Wisconsin state Rep. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, has undertaken the task of organizing a meeting of state legislators from across the nation for next weekend.
“On Dec. 7, we’ll be gathering at Mount Vernon, the home of President George Washington,” he explained, adding his intent for next month’s meeting is to “start a movement of the states that would give voters hope that the government still gets its power from them, and not the other way around.”
Kapenga said that the U.S. Constitution stipulates that there be a balance between the powers of the individual state governments and the federal government. “Few will deny that the balance of power has shifted significantly toward the federal government over the course of time,” he explained. “We have a broken system that transcends political parties and voters are frustrated.”
According to Kapenga, every elected member of every state legislature in the country received an email invitation to next month’s meeting at Mount Vernon. His goal is for each state to send a “bipartisan delegation” of three individuals. Harris says he doesn’t recall receiving an invitation, but finds the process to be intriguing.
Similarly, Sen. John Goedde, R-Coeur d’Alene, told IdahoReporter.com that he doesn’t recall receiving an invitation to the December meeting, but acknowledged that constituents contact him about the constitutional amendment process.
“I wouldn’t say that I’ve gotten much in the way of original material about this,” Goedde said. “Usually people are cutting and pasting somebody else’s information about it. But I think it’s important to maintain the rights that are entailed in the U.S. Constitution. I think we do serve people better in Boise than my counterparts do from Washington, D.C.”
Rep. Grant Burgoyne, D-Boise, told IdahoReporter.com that he likes the idea of amending the U.S. Constitution, but not for the reasons that Kapenga suggests. “The dysfunction of the federal government is now so complete that our country faces some significant and very real dangers. For this reason I have come to favor an Article V constitutional convention.”
Burgoyne listed several types of amendments to the U.S. Constitution that he’d like to see: These include amendments to require balanced budgets except in times of war and other emergencies; a presidential line item budget veto; amendments recognizing the principle that it is not $1 one vote, but one person one vote; amendments to prevent the gerrymandering of congressional districts; and amendments to prevent political parties from exercising governmental-like powers to control voting and elections.
“I do not think that the relative constitutional powers of the states and the federal government are out of balance when the Constitution is properly read and applied,” Burgoyne said.
Kapenga says that about 90 state legislators have committed to attending next month’s meeting at Mount Vernon, and he is still hoping for more. He was uncertain, however, whether or not any Idaho legislators will be attending.
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Israel detains «spy» Iranian eve of Netanyahu's talks with Obama on policy spiritual «mellifluous»


Israel detains «spy» Iranian eve of Netanyahu's talks with Obama on policy spiritual «mellifluous»
Israeli source: his arrest is evidence that Tehran does not fit the words with actions
Tel Aviv - London: «Middle East»
Israel unveiled yesterday revealed the arrest of a Belgian citizen of Iranian origin on suspicion of spying for Iran, saying that he took photographs of the U.S. Embassy and that he had planned to establish business relations in the Jewish state as a cover for espionage.
He said the Internal Security Agency in Israel's Shin Bet said Ali Mansouri, in his mid fifties was arrested on 11 September at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, while he was returning to Europe. The disclosure of his arrest coincided with the beginning of the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the United States, where the Iranian nuclear program tops summit agenda. Western nations suspect and Israel that Iran is trying to possession of nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, which Tehran denies. The Shin Bet said that Mansouri was born in Iran was not legally be named in Belgium to Alex Le Mans, and the Belgian used his passport to enter Israel. The device that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard recruited as a spy, and that he had visited Israel twice before his arrest, the first in July 2012 and the second in January (January 2013).
The man who won back its origins to Iran Belgian nationality in 2006 after marrying a woman descended from Belgium divorced later. He visited Iran several times for his work, and recruited from the Iranian regime last year.
The Shin Bet says that he found the documents in possession of the man, including a number of images to different sites in Israel, including what interests «the attention of the Iranian intelligence», including one taken of the surface of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv from the balcony of a nearby high-rise building. The Shin Bet statement mentions the names of four senior Iranian officials say they spy agents. The statement said that Mansouri had planned to establish trade links with Israeli businessmen as a cover for intelligence gathering and «terrorist activities». It quoted Israeli security sources as saying that he had received a promise to get a million dollars for his services. He disclosed that the «Mansouri was being held on the basis of a court order, and that it would be tomorrow (today) in front of a judge in the hearing will consider the extension of the period of his incarceration». Has not been announced formal charges have yet.
A source close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the arrest of Iranian client «is a further evidence that the speech of Iran does not fit with its criminal acts». Israel Radio quoted him as saying «at a time when Iran condemns terrorism on U.S. territory, Tehran sent its agent to gather information in preparation to commit an attack against the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv».
The source said Netanyahu, who arrived in New York earlier in the «will reveal the truth that hides behind the curtain smog launched by Iran during the last week». It is scheduled to meet with Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday, and will deliver a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations tomorrow (Tuesday) in a bid to counter what he described Netanyahu «happy talk» to head the new Iranian Hassan Rohani to reach an agreement with the West for the settlement of the nuclear issue. He said before leaving for New York that he will tell the truth «in front of a campaign courtship (spiritual) and smiles and sweet talk should provide the facts and telling the truth today is vital for the security and peace of the world and the state of Israel», as reported by AFP. Netanyahu was alluding to this diplomatic campaign launched by the Iranian president at the United Nations and his telephone conversation with the U.S. president in the first contact at this level since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The media reported that Netanyahu ordered his ministers not to make public statements in order to avoid criticism of President Obama.
In the meantime, he criticized Israeli President Shimon Peres tone «contempt» used against Obama in Israel and the United States on Iran. President Peres told Army Radio «We may agree or disagree (with the Americans), but I do not like the tone of this contempt. The others have minds to think about, too, and not only are we ». He said Peres «must Nthadt and try to influence them» any Americans.
It came while threatened and former Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman Iran indirectly military strike on its nuclear facilities to the lines of what happened with the Iraqi nuclear reactor early eighties of the last century. He wrote the leader of the party «Israel Beiteinu» extreme right-wing yesterday on his social networking site «Facebook»: «It is good to remember that in the case of Israel, the Iraqi nuclear reactor was the only country which has warned moved effectively». He continued, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Israeli Knesset and security by saying «look back clear we were right». Israeli jets destroyed the reactor in 1981 (July) Iraqi nuclear southeast of the capital Baghdad, and was operated on this site several research reactors since the sixties.

Obama defends Iran nuclear deal

Obama defends Iran nuclear deal

Last Updated: Monday, November 25 / تشرين الثاني, 2013, 23:45 GMT
Obama's campaign is exposed to criticism from Republicans after the conclusion of the agreement Iran's nuclear
Defended U.S. President Barack Obama on the nuclear agreement concluded by the major powers with Iran, stressing that "there are still some obstacles, however, strict dialects not guarantee the security of the United States."
Under the agreement, Tehran agreed to stop some uranium enrichment activities for a period of six months, compared to alleviate some of the international sanctions imposed on it.
It was on this agreement Trehaa globally, however, Israel and Western powers described the agreement with Tehran as a "historic mistake."

Criticism

Republicans criticized Obama for agreeing to the deal and described it as "very soft" and threatened to impose "sanctions."
Obama said during his participation in the effectiveness of in San Francisco that "significant challenges remain, however, we can not stand against the diplomatic option, and we can not exclude a diplomatic solution to the problems faced by the world."
Obama added, "we can not close the door to diplomacy, and we can not exclude the peaceful solutions to the problems of the world," adding that "in the coming months, we will continue our diplomatic efforts with the aim of reaching a final solution that addresses the threat of Iran's nuclear program."
The U.S. president "if Iran seized this opportunity and decided to join the international community, then we can start to put an end to the uncertainty existed since long years between our two countries."

Welcome and positive

It was announced by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius that "the EU will raise the first of its sanctions imposed on Iran," in December, "in the form of a" limited and specific and irreversible. "
Saudi Arabia welcomed Monday cautiously Geneva agreement, saying he could be a "first step towards a comprehensive solution" to the Iranian nuclear program if the "available good intentions."
The Jordanian government said that "the agreement reached by Iran with the countries of the six group is the" first step in the right direction. "

Militia in Benghazi Flees After Deadly Gun Battle

Militia in Benghazi Flees After Deadly Gun Battle

Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters
A Libyan Army member as fighting flared on Monday with an Islamist militia tied to the killing of an American ambassador.
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CAIRO — A militia in Benghazi, Libya, tied to the killing of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens fled its headquarters on Monday after an hourslong gun battle with a local military unit, a potential turning point in a continuing struggle between Islamists and their foes for control of the city.
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Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters
Libyan army troops during clashes with Ansar al-Shariah, a local hard-line Islamist group, on Monday in Benghazi.
At least nine people were killed and more than 50 were wounded, health officials said, as the battle flared out across Benghazi, beginning before dawn. Stores and schools were closed. The local authorities advised residents to stay in their homes and avoid the streets. And by late afternoon, the militia, Ansar al-Shariah, appeared to have disappeared underground. Photographs circulated over the Internet that appeared to show its headquarters emptied and smoking, with the wreckage of a burned-out car sitting outside.
The melee followed the deaths of more than 40 people in a similar battle in Tripoli this month, when militiamen from the coastal city of Misurata opened fire on civilians protesting their continued presence in the city. Both battles come during the run-up to another attempt to elect a constitutional assembly that might relieve the expiring transitional Parliament and lay the foundations for a new national government two years after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
It was unclear how the fighting in Benghazi began, but animosity between the two camps had been building for months.
Ansar al-Shariah, the most extreme of Benghazi’s well-known Islamist militias, has been a target of suspicion and resentment at least since some of its fighters were seen participating in the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi last year that killed Mr. Stevens and three other Americans. (In a statement read over local television the next day, its leaders denied playing any role in the assault but at the same time lauded it. )
Ansar al-Shariah rejects the transitional Libyan government as insufficiently theocratic. It maintains its own armed brigade outside of government control. Its fighters retained control of a strategic checkpoint on the coastal road toward Tripoli, but also guarded a local hospital. Its opponent in the battle was a former army unit known locally as special forces, which defected from Colonel Qaddafi’s forces at the start of the uprising against him.
Before they defected, soldiers from the special forces had helped carry out Colonel Qaddafi’s crackdowns on Libya’s Islamists, instilling a mutual distrust. During the fight against the colonel, Islamists were blamed for the assassination of the special forces’ leader, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, and they are presumed to be responsible for a long series of assassinations of former Qaddafi security officers since then.
Other Benghazi residents, caught in the crossfire, grew increasingly resentful of the Islamist militias’ dominance of their city — especially after the attack on the American Mission. And the special forces have stepped forward to try to retake control of the streets, positioning themselves as saviors. By Monday afternoon, their forces occupied highly visible checkpoints around the city, including a Western entrance to Benghazi previously controlled by Ansar al-Shariah.
In a local television interview, a man who identified himself as a member of an allied group of the same name in the coastal city of Derna, which is a hotbed of Islamist militancy, accused the special forces of having started the fight by attacking a checkpoint controlled by Ansar al-Shariah. “They are the ones responsible for all that spilled blood since they attacked us,” said the man, Mahmoud al-Barrasi. He also faulted the military units for having failed to stop the United States from abducting from Tripoli a man suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda, Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known as Abu Anas al-Libi, a few weeks ago.
“All this army deployment? Why didn’t they deploy when the Christians attacked our country and kidnapped Abu Anas?” Mr. Barrasi said. “Our role models are those who want Allah’s Shariah, like Sheikh Osama bin Laden.”
Prime Minister Ali Zeidan of Libya flew to Benghazi with a delegation of cabinet officials to meet with local leaders about the unrest.
The fighting in Tripoli that started on Nov. 15 was another flare-up of public hostility to the fractious former rebel militias that have dominated the country, albeit without the same ideological divide.
A cluster of militias from Misurata began shooting at civilian demonstrators demanding an end to the militias’ dominance. In the aftermath, residents called for a three-day general strike to demand that the Misuratans and other militias withdraw from the city, and many appear to have complied.
In an appearance in London over the weekend with Mr. Zeidan, Secretary of State John Kerry called the situation “a moment of opportunity where there’s a great deal of economic challenge, there’s a great deal of security challenge.”
Mr. Kerry said that the Libyan prime minister had described “a transformation that he believes is beginning to take place and could take place because the people of Libya have spoken out and pushed back against the militias.”
Suliman Ali Zway and Osama al-Fitory contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

Suspect in Libya Attack, in Plain Sight, Scoffs at U.S.

Suspect in Libya Attack, in Plain Sight, Scoffs at U.S.

BENGHAZI, Libya — Witnesses and the authorities have called Ahmed Abu Khattala one of the ringleaders of the Sept. 11 attack on the American diplomatic mission here. But just days after President Obama reasserted his vow to bring those responsible to justice, Mr. Abu Khattala spent two leisurely hours on Thursday evening at a crowded luxury hotel, sipping a strawberry frappe on a patio and scoffing at the threats coming from the American and Libyan governments.
Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters

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Libya’s fledgling national army is a “national chicken,” Mr. Abu Khattala said, using an Arabic rhyme. Asked who should take responsibility for apprehending the mission’s attackers, he smirked at the idea that the weak Libyan government could possibly do it. And he accused the leaders of the United States of “playing with the emotions of the American people” and “using the consulate attack just to gather votes for their elections.”
Mr. Abu Khattala’s defiance — no authority has even questioned him about the attack, he said, and he has no plans to go into hiding — offered insight into the shadowy landscape of the self-formed militias that have come to constitute the only source of social order in Libya since the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
A few, like the militia group Ansar al-Shariah that is linked to Mr. Abu Khattala and that officials in Washington and Tripoli agree was behind the attack, have embraced an extremist ideology hostile to the West and nursed ambitions to extend it over Libya. But also troubling to the United States is the evident tolerance shown by other militias allied with the government, which have so far declined to take any action against suspects in the Benghazi attack.
Although Mr. Abu Khattala said he was not a member of Al Qaeda, he declared he would be proud to be associated with Al Qaeda’s puritanical zeal for Islamic law. And he said that the United States had its own foreign policy to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Why is the United States always trying to impose its ideology on everyone else?” he asked. “Why is it always trying to use force to implement its agendas?”
Owing in part to the inability of either the Libyans or the Americans to mount a serious investigation, American dissections of the assault on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi have become muddled in a political debate over the identities and motivations of the attackers. Some Republicans have charged that the Obama administration initially sought to obscure a possible connection to Al Qaeda in order to protect its claim to have brought the group to its knees.
Mr. Abu Khattala, 41, wearing a red fez and sandals, added his own spin. Contradicting the accounts of many witnesses and the most recent account of the Obama administration, he contended that the attack had grown out of a peaceful protest against a video made in the United States that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and Islam.
He also said that guards inside the compound — Libyan or American, he was not sure — had shot first at the demonstrators, provoking them. And he asserted, without providing evidence, that the attackers had found weapons, including explosives and guns mounted with silencers, inside the American compound.
Although Mr. Abu Khattala’s exact role remains unclear, witnesses have said they saw him directing other fighters that night. Libyan officials have singled him out, and officials in Washington say they are examining his role.
But Mr. Abu Khattala insisted that he had not been part of the aggression at the American compound. He said he had arrived just as the gunfire was beginning to crackle and had sought to break up a traffic jam around the demonstration. After fleeing for a time, he said, he entered the compound at the end of the battle because he was asked to help try to rescue four Libyan guards working for the Americans who were trapped inside. Although the attackers had set fire to the main building, Mr. Abu Khattala said he had not noticed anything burning.
At the same time, he expressed a notable absence of remorse over the assault, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador. “I did not know him,” he said.
He pointedly declined to condemn the idea that the demolition of a diplomatic mission was an appropriate response to such a video. “From a religious point of view, it is hard to say whether it is good or bad,” he said.
In Washington, a Republican member of the House committee investigating the attack scoffed at Mr. Abu Khattala’s account. “It just sounds fishy to say you are on the scene and not participating,” said Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican. “It was pitch black at 9:40 at night.”
Mr. Abu Khattala contended that the United States had ulterior motives for helping Libyans during their revolution, and he asserted that it was already meddling in Libya’s planned constitution, even though the recently elected Parliament had not yet begun to discuss it.
He also said he opposed democracy as contrary to Islamic law, and he called those who supported secular constitutions “apostates,” using the terminology Islamist radicals apply to fellow Muslims who are said to disqualify themselves from the faith by collaborating with corrupt governments.
He argued that Islamists like those in the Muslim Brotherhood who embraced elections committed a “mix up” of Western and Islamic systems. And he acknowledged that his opposition to elections had been a point of dispute between his followers and the other Libyan militia leaders, most of whom had protected and celebrated the vote.
Still, he said, “we have a very good relationship” with the leaders of Benghazi’s largest militias — which constitute the only security force for the government — from their days fighting together on the front lines of the revolt against Colonel Qaddafi. He even pointedly named two senior leaders of those big brigades, whom he said he had seen outside the mission on the night of the attack.
Witnesses, Benghazi residents and Western news reports, including those in The New York Times, have described Mr. Abu Khattala as a leader of Ansar al-Shariah, whose trucks and fighters were seen attacking the mission. Mr. Abu Khattala praised the group’s members as “good people with good goals, which are trying to implement Islamic law,” and he insisted their network of popular support was vastly underestimated by other brigade leaders who said the group had fewer than 200 fighters.
“It is bigger than a brigade,” he said. “It is a movement.”
Mr. Abu Khattala said he was close to the group but was not an official part of it. Instead, he said, he was still the commander of an Islamist brigade, Abu Obaida ibn al-Jarrah. Some of its members joined Ansar al-Shariah, but Mr. Abu Khattala said that even though his brigade had disbanded he could still call it together. “If the individuals are there, the brigade is there,” he said.
During the revolt, the brigade was accused of killing a top general who had defected to the rebels, Abdul Fattah Younes. Mr. Abu Khatalla acknowledged that the general had died in the brigade headquarters, but declined to discuss it further.
Almost all Libyans are Muslims, alcohol is banned, polygamy is legal, almost every woman wears an Islamic head-covering. But all of that still fell short, he said, of true Islamic law.

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 19, 2012

An earlier version of this article misidentified the beverage that Ahmed Abu Khattala was drinking at the hotel. It was a strawberry frappe, not mango juice, which is what he had ordered.