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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
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?
QE.M.136.13. MUHAMMAD JAMAL NETWORK (MJN) Date on which the narrative summary became available onthe 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
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.
Just How Serious Is Obama's Crackdown on Media Leaks?
By John Mecklin | Takepart.com
October 25, 2013 1:15 PM
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, Ã 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
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. Follow Patrick 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.
Rep.
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.
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.
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. "
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.
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.
A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 2013, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Militia in Benghazi Flees After Deadly Gun Battle.
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.
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.
