Posts by thedailyjournalist:

Prohibition of Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices in the Collection of Consumer Debts

October 16th, 2013

By CFPB.

Under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (DoddFrank Act), all covered persons or service providers are legally required to refrain from committing unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (collectively, UDAAPs) in violation of the Act. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB or Bureau) is issuing this bulletin to clarify the contours of that obligation in the context of collecting consumer debts.

This bulletin describes certain acts or practices related to the collection of consumer debt that could, depending on the facts and circumstances, constitute UDAAPs prohibited by the Dodd-Frank Act. Whether conduct like that described in this bulletin constitutes a UDAAP may depend on additional facts and analysis. The examples described in this bulletin are not exhaustive of all potential UDAAPs. The Bureau may closely review any covered person or service provider’s consumer debt collection efforts for potential violations of Federal consumer financial laws.

A. Background

UDAAPs can cause significant financial injury to consumers, erode consumer confidence, and undermine fair competition in the financial marketplace. Original creditors and other covered persons and service providers under the Dodd-Frank Act involved in collecting debt related to any consumer financial product or service are subject to the prohibition against UDAAPs in the Dodd-Frank Act.

In addition to the prohibition of UDAAPs under the Dodd-Frank Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) also makes it illegal for a person defined as a “debt collector” from engaging in conduct “the natural consequence of which is to harass,
oppress, or abuse any person in connection with the collection of a debt,”2 to “use any false, deceptive, or misleading representation or means in connection with the collection of any debt,”3 or to “use any unfair or unconscionable means to collect or attempt to collect any debt.”

The FDCPA generally applies to third-party debt collectors, such as collection agencies, debt purchasers, and attorneys who are regularly engaged in debt collection.5 All parties covered by the FDCPA must comply with any obligations they have under the FDCPA, in addition to any obligations to refrain from UDAAPs in violation of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Although the FDCPA’s definition of “debt collector” does not include some persons who collect consumer debt, all covered persons and service providers must refrain from committing UDAAPs in violation of the Dodd-Frank Act.

B. Summary of Applicable Standards for UDAAPs

1. Unfair Acts or Practices

The Dodd-Frank Act prohibits conduct that constitutes an unfair act or practice. An act or practice is unfair when:

(1) It causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers;
(2) The injury is not reasonably avoidable by consumers; and
(3) The injury is not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition.7

A “substantial injury” typically takes the form of monetary harm, such as fees or costs paid by consumers because of the unfair act or practice. However, the injury does not have to be monetary.8 Although emotional impact and other subjective types of harm will not ordinarily amount to substantial injury, in certain circumstances emotional impacts may amount to or contribute to substantial injury.

In addition, actual injury is not required; a significant risk of concrete harm is sufficient.

An injury is not reasonably avoidable by consumers when an act or practice interferes with or hinders a consumer’s ability to make informed decisions or take action to avoid that injury.11 Injury caused by transactions that occur without a consumer’s knowledge or consent is not reasonably avoidable. Injuries that can only be avoided by spending large amounts of money or other significant resources also may not be reasonably avoidable. Finally, an act or practice is not unfair if the injury it causes or is likely to cause is outweighed by its consumer or competitive benefits. Established public policy may be considered with all other evidence to determine whether an act or practice is unfair, but may not serve as the primary basis for such determination.

2. Deceptive Acts or Practices

The Dodd-Frank Act also prohibits conduct that constitutes a deceptive act or practice. An act or practice is deceptive when:

(1) The act or practice misleads or is likely to mislead the consumer;
(2)The consumer’s interpretation is reasonable under the circumstances; and
(3)The misleading act or practice is material.16

To determine whether an act or practice has actually misled or is likely to mislead a consumer, the totality of the circumstances is considered. Deceptive acts or practices can take the form of a representation or omission.18 The Bureau also looks at implied representations, including any implications that statements about the consumer’s debt can be supported. Ensuring that claims are supported before they are made will minimize the risk of omitting material information and/or making false statements that could mislead consumers.

To determine if the consumer’s interpretation of the information was reasonable under the circumstances when representations target a specific audience, such as older Americans or financially distressed consumers, the communication may be considered from the perspective of a reasonable member of the target audience. A statement or information can be misleading even if not all consumers, or not all consumers in the targeted group, would be misled, so long as a significant minority would be misled.

Likewise, if a representation conveys more than one meaning to reasonable consumers, one of which is false, the speaker may still be liable for the misleading interpretation.21 Material information is information that is likely to affect a consumer’s choice of, or conduct regarding, the product or service.

Information that is likely important to consumers is material. Sometimes, a person may make a disclosure or other qualifying statement that might prevent consumers from being misled by a representation or omission that, on its own, would be deceptive. The Bureau looks to the following factors in assessing whether the disclosure or other qualifying statement is adequate to prevent the deception: whether the disclosure is prominent enough for a consumer to notice; whether the information is presented in a clear and easy to understand format; the placement of the information; and the proximity of the information to the other claims it qualifies.

3. Abusive Acts or Practices

The Dodd-Frank Act also prohibits conduct that constitutes an abusive act or practice. An act or practice is abusive when it:

(1) Materially interferes with the ability of a consumer to understand a term or condition of a consumer financial product or service; or

(2)Takes unreasonable advantage of –

(A) a consumer’s lack of understanding of the material risks, costs, or conditions of the product or service;

(B) a consumer’s inability to protect his or her interests in selecting or using a consumer financial product or service; or

It is important to note that, although abusive acts or practices may also be unfair or deceptive, each of these prohibitions are separate and distinct, and are governed by separate legal standards.

C. Examples of Unfair, Deceptive and/or Abusive Acts or Practices Depending on the facts and circumstances, the following non exhaustive list of examples of conduct related to the collection of consumer debt could constitute UDAAPs. Accordingly, the Bureau will be watching these practices closely.
 Collecting or assessing a debt and/or any additional amounts in connection with a debt (including interest, fees, and charges) not expressly authorized by the agreement creating the debt or permitted by law.

 Failing to post payments timely or properly or to credit a consumer’s account with payments that the consumer submitted on time and then charging late fees to that consumer.

 Taking possession of property without the legal right to do so.

 Revealing the consumer’s debt, without the consumer’s consent, to the consumer’s employer and/or co-workers.

 Falsely representing the character, amount, or legal status of the debt.

 Misrepresenting that a debt collection communication is from an attorney.

 Misrepresenting that a communication is from a government source or that the source of the communication is affiliated with the
government.

 Misrepresenting whether information about a payment or nonpayment would be furnished to a credit reporting agency.29

 Misrepresenting to consumers that their debts would be waived or forgiven if they accepted a settlement offer, when the company does not, in fact, forgive or waive the debt.

 Threatening any action that is not intended or the covered person or service provider does not have the authorization to pursue, including false threats of lawsuits, arrest, prosecution, or imprisonment for non-payment of a debt.

Again, the obligation to avoid UDAAPs under the Dodd-Frank Act is in addition to any obligations that may arise under the FDCPA. Original creditors and other covered persons and service providers involved in collecting debt related to any consumer financial product or service are subject to the prohibition against UDAAPs in the Dodd-Frank Act. The CFPB will continue to review closely the practices of those engaged in the collection of consumer debts for potential UDAAPs, including the practices described above. The Bureau will use all appropriate tools to assess whether supervisory, enforcement, or other actions may be necessary.

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Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace

October 14th, 2013

By Nicolas Christin.

“Silk Road anonymous marketplace was shut down on the end of September 2013. The FBI have arrested a man they believe to be the mastermind behind the biggest online illegal drug website that have ever existed and the site has been shut down. The site was apparently only shut down due to the arrest and not because of the system security. It is believed the mastermind known as Dread Pirate Roberts slipped up while posting programming questions on forums not being anonymous. I am not going to name the accused because i believe in “innocent until proven guilty” but you can find names and photos on the net easily. He is being charged with drug charges and possibly murder for hire charges among others. If you try to visit the silk road you will see this screen.”

Introduction.

“More brazen than anything else by light-years” is how U.S. Senator Charles Schumer characterized Silk Road [5], an online anonymous marketplace. While a bit of a hyperbole, this sentiment is characteristic of a certain nervousness among political leaders when it comes to anonymous networks. The relativelyrecent development of usable interfaces to anonymous networks, such as the “Tor browser bundle,” has indeed made it extremely easy for anybody to browse the Internet anonymously, regardless of their technical background.

In turn, anonymous online markets have emerged, making it quite difﬁcult for law enforcement to identify buyers and sellers. As a result, these anonymous online markets very often specialize in “black market” goods, such as pornography, weapons or narcotics. Silk Road is one such anonymous online market. It is not the only one – others, such as Black Market Reloaded [3], the Armory [1], or the General Store [7] are or have been offering similar services – but it gained fame after an article posted on Gawker [10], which resulted in it being noticed by congressional leaders, who demanded prompt action be taken.

It is also reportedly very large, with estimates mentioned in the Silk Road online forum [6] ranging between 30,000 and 150,000 active customers. The site has a professional, if minimalist, look, and appears to offer a variety of goods (e.g., books, digital goods, digital currency…), but seems to have a clear focus on drugs. Not only do most items listed appear to be controlled substances, but the screenshot also shows the site advertising a sale campaign for April 20 – also known as “Pot day” due to the North American slang for cannabis (four-twenty).

In this paper, we try to provide a scientiﬁc characterization of the Silk Road marketplace, by gathering a 2 set of controlled measurements over roughly six months (February 3, 2012 – July 24, 2012), and analyzing them. Speciﬁcally, we offer the following contributions. We devise a (simple) collection methodology to obtain publicly available Silk Road market data.

We use the data collected to characterize the items being sold on Silk Road and the seller population. We describe how items sold and seller population have evolved over time. Using (mandatory) buyer feedback reports as a proxy for sales, we characterize sales volumes over our measurement interval. We provide an estimate of the daily dollar amount of sales conducted on Silk Road, and use this estimate to infer the amount collected in commission by Silk Road operators.

While we cannot estimate the number of buyers with the dataset we collect, we show that Silk Road is a relatively signiﬁcant market, with a few hundred sellers, and monthly total revenue of about USD 1.2 million. We also show that Silk Road appears to be growing over time, albeit not at the exponential rate that is claimed in forums [6].

The rest of this paper is structured as follows. We start by describing how Silk Road operates in Section 2. We then explain how we gather our measurements in Section 3. We report on our measurements analysis in Section 4, before turning to economic implications in Section 5. We discuss our ﬁndings, reﬂect on possible intervention policies, and ethical considerations in Section 6, outline related work in Section 7,and conclude in Section 8.

2 Silk Road overview

Silk Road is an online anonymous marketplace that started its operations in February 2011 [6]. Silk Roadis not, itself, a shop. Instead, it provides infrastructure for sellers and buyers to conduct transactions in an online environment. In this respect, Silk Road is more similar to Craigslist, eBay or the Amazon Marketplace than to Amazon.com. The major difference between Silk Road and these other marketplaces is that Silk Road focuses on ensuring, as much as possible, anonymity of both sellers and buyers. In this section, we summarize the major features of Silk Road through a description of the steps involved in a typical transaction: accessing Silk Road, making a purchase, and getting the goods delivered.

Accessing Silk Road. Suppose that Bob (B), a prospective buyer, wants to access the Silk Road marketplace (SR). Bob will ﬁrst need to install a Tor client on his machine, or use a web proxy to the Tor network (e.g. http://tor2web.org) as Silk Road runs only as a Tor hidden service [11]. That is, instead of having a DNS name mapping to a known IP address, Silk Road uses a URL based on the pseudo-top level domain. onion, that can only be resolved through Tor. At a high level, when Bob’s client attempts to contact the Silk Road server URL (http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion at the time of this writing), Tor nodes set up a rendez-vous point inside the Tor network so that the client and server can communicate with each other while maintaining their IP addresses unknown from observers and from each other.

Once connected to the Silk Road website, Bob will need to create an account. The process is simple and merely involves registering a user name, password, withdrawal PIN, and answering a CAPTCHA. After this registration, Bob is presented with the Silk Road front page (see Figure 1) from where he can access all of Silk Road’s public listings.

Public and stealth listings. Silk Road places relatively few restrictions on the types of goods sellers can offer. From the Silk Road sellers’ guide [5], “Do not list anything who’s (sic) purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen items or info, stolen credit cards, counterfeit currency, personal info, assassinations, and weapons of any kind. Do not list anything related to pedophilia.”

Conspicuously absent from the list of prohibited items are prescription drugs and narcotics, as well as adult pornography and fake identiﬁcation documents (e.g., counterfeit driver’s licenses). Weapons and ammunition used to be allowed until March 4, 2012, when they were transferred to a sister site called The Armory [1], which operated with an infrastructure similar to that of Silk Road. Interestingly, the Armory closed in August 2012 reportedly due to a lack of business [6].

Not all of the Silk Road listings are public. Silk Road supports stealth listings, which are not linked from the rest of Silk Road, and are thus only accessible by buyers who have been given their URL. Stealth listings are frequently used for custom listings directed at speciﬁc customers, and established through out-of-band mechanisms (e.g., private messaging between seller and buyer). Sellers may further operate in stealth mode,meaning that their seller page and all the pages of the items they have for sale are not linked from other Silk Road pages.

While Silk Road is open to anybody, stealth mode allows sellers with an established customer base to operate their business as invitation-only. Making a purchase. After having perused the items available for sale on Silk Road, Bob decides to make a purchase from Sarah (S), a seller. While Tor ensures communication anonymity, Silk Road needs to also preserve payment anonymity.

To that effect, Silk Road only supports Bitcoin (BTC, [30]) as a trading currency. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, distributed payment system that offers its participants to engage in veriﬁable transactions without the need for a central third-party. Bob thus needs to ﬁrst procure Bitcoins, which he can do from the many online exchanges such as Mt.Gox [4]. Once Bob has Bitcoins, and decides to purchase the item from Sarah, instead of paying Sarah directly, Bob places the corresponding amount in escrow with Silk Road. Effectively, B pays SR, not S.

The escrow mechanism allows the market operator to accurately compute their commission fees, and to resolve disputes between sellers and buyers. Silk Road mandates all sellers and buyers use the escrow system. Failure to do so is punishable by expulsion from the marketplace [5].

Finalizing. Once the purchase has been made, Sarah must ship it to Bob. Thus, Sarah needs a physical address where to send the item. To preserve anonymity, Silk Road recommends to use delivery addresses that are distinct from the buyer’s residence. For instance, Bob could have the item delivered at Patsy’s house, or to a post-ofﬁce box. Once Sarah has marked the item as shipped, Bob’s delivery address is erased from all records. Once the item reaches its destination, Bob ﬁnalizes the purchase, that is, he tells Silk Road to release the funds held in escrow to Sarah (i.e., SR now pays S), and leaves feedback about Sarah. Finalizing is mandatory: if Bob forgets to do so, Silk Road will automatically ﬁnalize pending orders after a set amount of time.

Sellers with more than 35 successful transactions and who have been active for over a month are allowed to ask their buyers to ﬁnalize early; that is, to release payment and leave feedback before they actually receive the item. Due to the potential for abuse, Silk Road discourages ﬁnalizing early in general, and prohibits it for new sellers.

Finally, Silk Road enhances transaction anonymity by providing “tumbler” services that consist of inserting several dummy, single-use intermediaries between a payer and a payee. That is, instead of having a payment correspond to a simple transaction chain B → SR → S, the payment goes through a longer chainB → I1 → . . . → In → S where (I1, . . . In) are one-time-use intermediaries.

Collection methodology

We next turn to describing how we collected measurements of the Silk Road marketplace. We ﬁrst brieﬂy explain our crawling mechanism, before outlining some of the challenges we faced with data collection. We then discuss in detail the data that we gathered.

3.1 Crawling mechanism

We registered an account on Silk Road in November 2011, and started with a few test crawls. We immediately noticed that Silk Road relies on authentication cookies that can be reused for up to a week without having to re-authenticate through the login prompt of the website. Provided we can manually refresh the authentication cookie at least once per week, this allows us to bypass the CAPTCHA mechanism and automate our crawls.

We conducted a near-comprehensive crawl of the site on November 29, 2011,1 using HTTrack [34]. Speciﬁcally, we crawled all “item,” “user” (i.e., seller) and “category” webpages. The complete crawl completed in about 48 hours and corresponded to approximately 244 MB of data, including 124 MB of images.

Starting on February 3, 2012, and until July 24, 2012, we attempted to perform daily crawls of the website. We noticed that early in 2012, Silk Road had moved to inlining images as base64 tags in each webpage. This considerably slowed down crawls. Using an incremental mode, that is, ignoring pages that had not changed from one crawl to the next, each of these crawls ran, on average, for about 14 hours.

The fastest crawl completed in slightly over 3 hours; the slowest took almost 30 hours, which resulted in the following daily crawl to be canceled. To avoid confusion between the time a crawl started, and the time a speciﬁc page was visited, we recorded separate timestamps upon each visit to a given page.

3.2 Challenges

Kanich et al. [15] emphasize the importance of ensuring that the target of a measurement experiment is not aware of the measurement being conducted. Otherwise, the measurement target could modify their behavior, which would taint the measurements. We thus waited for a few days after the November crawl to see if the full crawl had been noticed. Perusing the Silk Road forums [6], we found no mention of the operators noticing us; our account was still valid and no one contacted us to inquire about our browsing activities.

We concluded that we either had not been detected, or that the operators did not view our activities as threatening. We spent some additional effort making our measurements as difﬁcult to detect as possible. Since all Silk Road trafﬁc is anonymized over Tor, there is no risk that our IP address could be blacklisted. However, an identical Tor circuit (on our side) could be repeatedly used if our crawler keeps the same socket open; this in turn could reveal our activities if the Silk Road operators monitor the list of Tor circuits they are running, and realize that a ﬁxed Tor rendez-vous point is constantly being used.

We addressed this potential issue by ensuring that all circuits, including active circuits, are periodically discarded and new circuits are built. To further (slightly) obfuscate our activities, instead of always starting at the same time, we started each crawl at a random time between 10pm and 1am UTC. Despite all of these precautions, we had to discard some of our data. On March 7, 2012 a number of changes were implemented to Silk Road to prevent proﬁling of the site [6].

Whether this was due to Silk Road operators noticing our crawls or to other activity is unclear. URL structure changed: item and users, instead of being referenced by a linearly increasing numeric identiﬁer, became unique hashes. Fortunately, these hashes initially simply consisted of a substring of the MD5 hash of the numeric identiﬁer, making All dates and times are expressed in Universal Time Coordinates (UTC).

Each item page contains seller, price, and shipping information, as well as buyer feedback on the item. it easy to map them to the original identiﬁers.2 More problematically, feedback data, which is crucial to estimating the volume of sales became aggregated and feedback timestamps disappeared. That is, instead of having, for an item G sold by S a list of n feedback messages corresponding to n purchases of G along with the associated timestamps, Silk Road switched to presenting a list of 20 feedback messages, undated, across all the items sold by S. In other words, feedback data became completely useless.

Thankfully, due to very strong pushback from buyers who argued that per-item feedback was necessary to have conﬁ- dence in purchases [6], Silk Road operators reverted to timestamped, per-item feedback on March 12, 2012. Nevertheless, we had to discard all feedback data collected between March 7, 2012 and March 12, 2012. Finally, in several instances, Silk Road went down for maintenance, or authentication was unsuccessful (e.g., because we had not refreshed the authentication cookie in time), leading to a few sporadic days of missing data.

The largest gaps are two eight-day gaps between April 10, 2012 and April 17, 2012 due to an accidental suspension of the collection infrastructure; and between July 12, 2012 and July 19,2012, due to an accidental deletion of the authentication cookie.

To read more about this report please go to: http://cryptome.org/2013/10/silk-road-travel.pdf

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The Emergence of Sendero Luminoso

October 6th, 2013

By Major Michael L. Burgoyne, U.S. Army.

FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER a powerful rebellion spread fear and destruction throughout the nation of Peru, the commanding general of the Peruvian Army, Otto Guibovich, provided the ominous warning: “If we don’t do something they will grow and we will realize we have our own FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia).”

Sendero Luminoso (SL) conducted a violent campaign of rural guerrilla war and urban terrorism from 1980 to 1995; however, its growth and expansion seemed to vanish in an instant with the capture of its leader, Abimael Guzmán. The rapid disintegration of SL was cited as an example of successful counterinsurgency, but now rising casualties and violence caused by the formerly dormant group have called those conclusions into question.

While the importance of the capture of SL’s leadership is incontrovertible, recent events indicate that the underlying problems that fueled the Sendero insurgency remain. The Peruvian government must use a combination of enemy- and population-focused strategies to defeat SL and produce lasting stability.

The Emergence of Sendero Luminoso

The environment that spawned SL is similar to that which produced numerous other insurgencies. Like other nations in Latin America, Peru had acknowledged the need to conduct land reform. In the 1960s, it began an extensive program to redistribute land to peasants from the previous hacienda system.

The Peruvian highlands, however, did not receive much support from these initiatives. The government largely neglected the Ayacucho Department, which would become the heart of the insurgency. By 1980, the annual per capita income there was as low as $60, and three of its provinces were among the poorest 15 percent in the nation.

Additionally, Ayacucho contained a majority indigenous population that had never fully integrated with Peru’s coastal regions, and its inhabitants maintained the use of their native Quechuan language. The disconnected, impoverished region suffered under an antiquated social-economic structure and was ripe for revolution.

Revolutionary action sprang from the Communist Party. A splintering of the Communist Party of Peru in the 1960s gave birth to the Communist Party of Peru in the Shining Path of Mariátegui (Sendero Luminoso in Spanish). Its leader, Abimael Guzmán, was a devout follower of Mao Tse-Tung and his philosophies of guerrilla warfare. Mao’s highly inﬂuential book, On Guerrilla Warfare, set the tone for the beginnings of SL. Mao advised that “success largely depends upon powerful political leaders who work unceasingly to bring about internal uniﬁcation.”

Shining Path began this process of uniﬁcation at the University of Huamanga, in the city of Ayacucho, where Guzmán was a professor. Guzmán and other members of SL were able to dominate the faculty and student organizations of the university during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

During this time, they indoctrinated the largely indigenous student body with a Maoist ideology that highlighted the vast disparity of wealth in Peru. In 1974, SL lost control of the university, but it had already succeeded in creating a “revolutionary consciousness” in the population of Ayacucho.

Other Latin American communist movements followed Che Guevara’s focomethod and brought their ideologies to rural areas. Guzmán’s followers were not foreigners or crusading children from the urban middle class, they were a part of the impoverished rural population already.

Sendero Luminoso did not need to build bonds with the population; they were the population.Having created a powerful support base among the people, Guzmán organized them for active insurgency. Mao Tse-Tung devoted a considerable amount of time in his writing to “organization for guerrilla warfare,” and provides explicit instructions to aid “students who have no knowledge of military affairs.”

Mao provides a description of a highly structured organization with clear command and control mechanisms. Following this example, highly organized Sendero units functioned autonomously at the tactical level. All elements operated under the direction of the “central committee” and Guzmán himself.

The intense devotion of its followers and its hierarchical organization enabled Shining Path to launch a devastating campaign of violence and terrorism against the Peruvian government. However, Shining Path’s structure also proved to be a key vulnerability.

Smothering the Shining Path

The Peruvian government was in an outstanding position to defeat an insurgency when SL began to form. While Ayacucho was a poor and neglected region, a large portion of the country had been satisﬁed with land reforms and changes in the former hacienda system. Additionally, 1980 marked a return to free elections for Peru, which included participation by Marxist political parties.

Under these conditions, Shining Path had difﬁculty expanding its brand of communist ideology outside of its cultivated support base in Ayacucho.Sendero Luminoso did not need to build bonds with the population; they were the population. In the beginning, like many governments facing domestic threats, the Peruvian government failed to recognize the seriousness of the situation and struggled with the challenges of counterinsurgency warfare.

After some early setbacks, the Peruvian military initiated a more balanced counterinsurgency approach by integrating lethal military action with population security and development. Sendero aided the new strategy by inﬂicting intense violence and abuse on many Peruvian villages. The government integrated many villages into a local security program called Rondas Campesinas. Under this system, villagers were armed and given authority to defend their villages from SL inﬂuence.

At the time of Guzmán’s capture, Sendero was already reeling under the effects of the new strategies. However, instead of attempting to return to the countryside and win back the population, Guzmán shifted his efforts to Peru’s capital city, Lima, to try a shortcut to victory. Guzmán believed that Peru’s government had been sufﬁciently weakened, and that extensive terrorist attacks would cause a mass exodus of rich and powerful Limeños with their ﬁnancial resources.

This would cause a run on the banks, economic collapse, and a call for foreign intervention. Shining Path could take up the banner of a nationalist movement against foreign intruders and regain widespread popular support.On 12 September 1992, Guzmán was captured along with several other SL leaders in a raid by DINCOTE (Dirección Contra Terrorismo), an elite group of Peruvian national police that had received extensive support and training from the United States.

Following his capture, Guzmán made statements in support of a cessation of hostilities with the government. The importance of Guzmán’s capture cannot be overstated. Sendero’s highly structured organization was thrown into chaos. In the 18 months after his arrest, 3,600 Shining Path guerrillas turned themselves in or were captured, and political violence decreased rapidly.

Shining Path was reduced to a minor nuisance and was believed to be utterly defeated, until recently. In the aftermath of Sendero’s disintegration, the Peruvian government began to dismantle its intelligence agencies in response to accounts of atrocities by some of their operational units. The Barrios Altos massacre by the Grupo Colina, a group backed by now-jailed Vladimiro Montesinos, former head of SIN (Sistema de Inteligencia Nacional), the Peruvian state intelligence organization, proved to be the most powerful motivation for a weakening of agencies once seen as essential in the ﬁght against SL. In addition, the focus on development in disconnected regions of the country lost urgency with the rapid decline of violence.

Sendero Luminoso’s Return

Today, after a period of relative calm, there are concerns about a resurgent SL growing in power and inﬂuence in Huallaga and the Valley of the Apurimac and Ene Rivers (Valle de los Rios Apurimac Eneabbreviated as VRAE). On 9 April 2009, Shining Path guerrillas ambushed two Peruvian army patrols in the VRAE, leaving 15 dead.18 On the morning of 2 August 2009, a reported group of 50 insurgents attacked a ﬁxed police outpost in San Jose de Secce, leaving three police and two civilians dead.

On the afternoon of 2 September 2009, long-range ﬁre brought down a Peruvian helicopter on a mission to evacuate three soldiers wounded during a ﬁreﬁght with SL forces in the VRAE. The crash left two dead and one severely wounded.20 Such attacks indicate a more sophisticated level of operations and are a troubling sign for the region.

Perhaps most disturbing is the change in strategy being employed by SL. Following its collapse in the 1990s, SL conducted a 5-year study of its failure and codiﬁed its ﬁndings in a 45-page summary that became Sendero’s new strategy. Within the document, SL renounces many of its former practices including extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, blackmail, and occupying homes.

Shining Path concluded that violence against the population was the critical failure of the rebellion. It is now reportedly providing potable water, building sports ﬁelds, and painting schools to garner popular support.Victor Quispe Palomino, the leader of the VRAE elements of SL, stated that SL would not target transnational businesses or nongovernmental organizations but rather only the “armed forces, police, and those that take part in the so-called ﬁght against terrorism and narco-trafﬁcking.”

Such statements by SL leaders and large-scale attacks on army and police units indicate that the belief that SL had transformed into little more than a security element for cocaine production was incorrect.

Shining Path remains a communist insurgent organization and has now adopted a FARC-like strategy in which it uses proﬁts from narco-trafﬁcking to fund purchases of equipment and supplies, pays its ﬁghters, and gains the support of the population.The reason Shining Path is gaining traction once again in Huallaga and the VRAE is the same reason Guzmán was able to develop the organization in the 1970s.

These regions remain disconnected and disenfranchised, making them vulnerable to criminal and insurgent inﬂuence. Despite the lessons of the 1980s and 1990s, in Huancavelica, Ayacucho, and Apurimac, the average income remains from 60 to 89 percent below the poverty line. Security in the city of Ayacucho has improved, but economic activity remains a challenge due to limited connections with major economic hubs like Pisco, Cuzco, and Lima.

Roads and infrastructure linking the poor highlands with the more prosperous coast remain in disrepair or are nonexistent. Lima, with its population of more than seven million, continues to dominate the national government’s resources and focus.The lack of legal economic opportunities has led to continued production of coca. Peru remains the number two producer of cocaine in the world and, according to the United Nations World Drug Report, production has increased for the last four years.

The explosive combination of poverty, lack of government presence, and coca production makes the region fertile ground for Sendero. Occurring in parallel with the continued poverty and coca production in the VRAE and Huallaga is the reduction of pressure by security forces. The degradation of the Peruvian intelligence community and lack of attention to the maintenance of military and police units has reduced their ability to destroy the remaining Sendero elements.

Furthermore, unutilized Rondas Campesinas units are now apathetic to counter Sendero’s resurgence. Their leaders worry about the marginalization of Rondas Campesinas, who are not part of the security plan as they were in the 1990s. In addition, the national government has not provided medical beneﬁts and beneﬁts for widows and orphaned children as it promised during the terrorist crisis decided not to participate in an annual parade in 2009 because they were angry at the way the government treated them and because Shining Path had co-opted some of them.

Many of the commanders are coca farmers who joined Rondas Campesinas units due to the violence brought by SL. Now with Sendero’s change in strategy, they are less inclined to ﬁght in support of an unappreciative government. Currently, SL does not represent a threat to the Peruvian state as it did in the 1990s. However, the Peruvian government is recognizing that SL remains a problem.

Following the recent attacks on military and police units, the government has begun increasing troop strength in the regions. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has shown some success with its alternative development program. Between 2002 and 2009, USAID invested more than $110 million and completed 703 public works projects and 54,976 productive projects.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the program is that it uses a multipronged approach to strengthen government, provide infrastructure, increase access to markets, and increase access to health care. Peru’s Plan VRAE and Plan Huallaga, like USAID, are designed as interagency efforts. It remains to be seen if Peru will be able to manage a relentless pursuit of armed insurgents while extending the beneﬁts of societal inclusion.

Lessons

The story of Peru’s ﬁght against SL is signiﬁcant for the United States in the current “era of persistent conﬂict.” The Sendero insurgency was and is a symptom of social inequity and lack of opportunity. Peru did not effectively address these underlying conditions after its defeat of Sendero in the 1990s. As the United States withdraws from Iraq and transfers control to Iraqi forces, it must be cognizant of latent dangers.

Security gains are not ends in themselves. Depending on the region, underlying conditions for instability could include the lack of freedom of religion, and effective economic opportunity, and access to political power. Although the disengagement of foreign troops will remove one irritant, the legitimacy of the elected Iraqi government will be paramount.

Equally important will be the ﬁnal eradication of hard-line Islamists who are similar in many ways to the dedicated Maoists of Sendero. Iraq shares one additional parallel with Peru: local security forces, the Sons of Iraq, have been critical to achieving security, like Rondas Campesinas. It will be essential for the Iraqi government to follow through on its promises and integrate these forces into government security forces or into civil society.

This same strategy is applicable to Colombia as well. As Colombia consolidates its gains against the FARC, a transition to government services in formerly lawless areas must occur. Colombia, however, may provide a roadmap for post-conﬂict consolidation. Colombia has developed the Policy for the Consolidation of Democratic Security (Política de Consolidación de la Seguridad Democrática).

The U.S. “Colombian Strategic Development Initiative” supports this policy. Both plans focus on delivering enduring economic opportunity and government services to formerly lawless or FARC-controlled regions. Both plans shift resources from the primarily security-heavy efforts of the last decade, while maintaining extremely successful and unrelenting intelligence-based targeting of the FARC leadership.

With continued U.S. support and Colombian political will, Colombia could prove to be an example of successful government consolidation following an internal conﬂict. America’s support in Colombia and Iraq will be critical in the success of her allies. Follow-through is essential in the ﬁnal phases of a government victory. The U.S. should heed the lessons of Peru’s long ﬁght against its internal enemies.

Peru’s success in the 1990s using targeting and a whole-of-government approach has not proven to be permanent. A failure to persist with the beneﬁts of government services and a lack of pressure by security forces has allowed SL to regroup. To achieve a lasting victory, the government must address the social foundations of insurgency, the intransigent insurgent leadership, and the support of the population from which the insurgents obtain their intelligence, anonymity, and logistical support.

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Foreign spies stealing US economic secrets in Cyberspace

October 3rd, 2013

By the Office of The National Counter-Intelligence executive.

Executive Summary

Foreign economic collection and industrial espionage against the United States represent significant and growing threats to the nation’s prosperity and security. Cyberspace—where most business activity and development of new ideas now takes place—amplifies these threats by making it possible for malicious actors, whether they are corrupted insiders or foreign intelligence services (FIS), to quickly steal and transfer massive quantities of data while remaining anonymous and hard to detect.

US Technologies and Trade Secrets at Risk in Cyberspace

Foreign collectors of sensitive economic information are able to operate in cyberspace with relatively little risk of detection by their private sector targets. The proliferation of malicious software, prevalence of cyber tool sharing, use of hackers as proxies, and routing of operations through third countries make it difficult to attribute responsibility for computer network intrusions. Cyber tools have enhanced the economic espionage threat, and the Intelligence Community (IC) judges the use of such tools is already a larger threat than more traditional espionage methods.

Economic espionage inflicts costs on companies that range from loss of unique intellectual property to outlays for remediation, but no reliable estimates of the monetary value of these costs exist. Many companies are unaware when their sensitive data is pilfered, and those that find out are often reluctant to report the loss, fearing potential damage to their reputation with investors, customers, and employees. Moreover, victims of trade secret theft use different methods to estimate their losses; some base estimates on the actual costs of developing the stolen information, while others project the loss of future revenues and profits.

Pervasive Threat from Adversaries and Partners

Sensitive US economic information and technology are targeted by the intelligence services, private sector companies, academic and research institutions, and citizens of dozens of countries.

• Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage. US private sector firms and cybersecurity specialists have reported an onslaught of computer network intrusions that have originated in China, but the IC cannot confirm who was responsible.

• Russia’s intelligence services are conducting a range of activities to collect economic information and technology from US targets.

• Some US allies and partners use their broad access to US institutions to acquire sensitive US economic and technology information, primarily through aggressive elicitation and other human intelligence (HUMINT)
tactics. Some of these states have advanced cyber capabilities.

Outlook

Because the United States is a leader in the development of new technologies and a central player in global
financial and trade networks, foreign attempts to collect US technological and economic information will continue
at a high level and will represent a growing and persistent threat to US economic security. The nature of the cyber
threat will evolve with continuing technological advances in the global information environment.

• Over the next several years, the proliferation of portable devices that connect to the Internet and other
networks will continue to create new opportunities for malicious actors to conduct espionage. The trend in
both commercial and government organizations toward the pooling of information processing and storage will
present even greater challenges to preserving the security and integrity of sensitive information.

• The US workforce will experience a cultural shift that places greater value on access to information and less emphasis on privacy or data protection. At the same time, deepening globalization of economic activities will make national boundaries less of a deterrent to economic espionage than ever.

We judge that the governments of China and Russia will remain aggressive and capable collectors of sensitive US
economic information and technologies, particularly in cyberspace.The relative threat to sensitive US economic information and technologies from a number of countries may change in response to international economic and political developments.

One or more fast-growing regional powers may judge that changes in its economic and political interests merit the risk of aggressive cyber and other espionage against US technologies and economic information.

Although foreign collectors will remain interested in all aspects of US economic activity and technology, we judge that the greatest interest may be in the following areas:

• Information and communications technology (ICT), which forms the backbone of nearly every other technology.

• Business information that pertains to supplies of scarce natural resources or that provides foreign actors an edge in negotiations with US businesses or the US Government.

• Military technologies, particularly marine systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and other aerospace/ aeronautic technologies.

• Civilian and dual-use technologies in sectors likely to experience fast growth, such as clean energy and health care/pharmaceuticals.

Cyberspace provides relatively small-scale actors an opportunity to become players in economic espionage. Underresourced governments or corporations could build relationships with hackers to develop customized malware or remote-access exploits to steal sensitive US economic or technology information, just as certain FIS have already done.

Similarly, political or social activists may use the tools of economic espionage against US companies, agencies, or other entities, with disgruntled insiders leaking information about corporate trade secrets or critical US technology to “hacktivist” groups like WikiLeaks.

US Technologies and Trade Secrets at Risk in Cyberspace

The pace of foreign economic collection and industrial espionage activities against major US corporations and US Government agencies is accelerating. FIS, corporations, and private individuals increased their efforts in 2009-2011
to steal proprietary technologies, which cost millions of dollars to develop and represented tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in potential profits.

The computer networks of a broad array of US Government agencies, private companies, universities, and other institutions—all holding large volumes of sensitive economic information—were targeted by cyber espionage; much of this activity appears to have originated in China.

Increasingly, economic collection and industrial espionage occur in cyberspace, reflecting dramatic technological, economic, and social changes that have taken place in recent years in the ways that economic, scientific, and other sensitive information is created, used, and stored. Today, nearly all business records, research results, and other sensitive economic data are digitized and accessible on networks worldwide.

Cyber collection can take many forms, including: simple visits to a US company’s website for the collection of openly available information; a corporate insider’s downloading of proprietary information onto a thumb drive at the behest of a foreign rival; or intrusions launched by FIS or other actors against the computer networks of a private company, federal agency, or an individual.

The Appeal of Collecting in Cyberspace

Cyberspace is a unique complement to the espionage environment because it provides foreign collectors with relative anonymity, facilitates the transfer of a vast amount of information, and makes it more difficult for victims and governments to assign blame by masking geographic locations.

Security and attribution. Collectors operating in a cyber environment can collect economic information with less risk of detection. This is particularly true for remote computer network exploitation (CNE). Foreign collectors take advantage of the fact that it is difficult to detect and to attribute responsibility for these operations.

There is increasing similarity between the tools, tactics, and techniques used by various actors, which reduces the reliability of using these factors to identify those responsible for computer network intrusions.

• The proliferation of malicious software (malware) presents opportunities for intelligence services and other actors to launch operations with limited resources and without developing unique tools that can be associated with them.

• Hacker websites are prevalent across the Internet, and tool sharing is common, causing intrusions by unrelated actors to exhibit similar technical characteristics.

• FIS and other foreign entities have used independent hackers at times to augment their capabilities and act as proxies for intrusions, thereby providing plausible deniability.

• Many actors route operations through computers in third countries or physically operate from third countries to obscure the origin of their activity.Another factor adding to the challenge of attribution is the diverging perspectives of the actual targets of economic espionage in cyberspace.

• At a conference sponsored by ONCIX in November 2010, US private industry representatives said they saw little difference between cybercrime—for example, identity theft or the misappropriation of intellectual property such as the counterfeiting of commercial video or audio recordings—and the collection of economic or technology information by intelligence services or other foreign entities.

Private sector organizations are often less concerned with attribution and focus instead on damage control and prevention; moreover, few companies have the ability to identify cyber intruders.

• US Government law enforcement and intelligence agencies, on the other hand, seek to establish attribution as part of their mission to counter FIS and other clandestine information collectors. They, unlike companies, also have the intelligence collection authorities and capabilities needed to break multiple layers of cover and to establish attribution where possible.

Cyberspace also offers greater security to the perpetrator in cases involving insiders. Although audits or similar cyber security measures may flag illicit information downloads from a corporate network, a malicious actor can quickly and safely transfer a data set once it is copied. A physical meeting is unnecessary between the corrupted insider and the persons or organizations the information is being collected for, reducing the risk of detection.

Faster and cheaper. Cyberspace makes possible the near instantaneous transfer of enormous quantities of economic and other information. Until fairly recently, economic espionage often required that insiders pass large volumes of documents to their handlers in physical form—a lengthy process of collection, collation, transportation, and exploitation.

• Dongfan Chung was an engineer with Rockwell and Boeing who worked on the B-1 bomber, space shuttle, and other projects and was sentenced in early 2010 to 15 years in prison for economic espionage on behalf of the Chinese aviation industry. At the time of his arrest, 250,000 pages of sensitive documents were found in his house. This is suggestive of the volume of information Chung could have passed to his handlers between 1979 and 2006.

The logistics of handling the physical volume of these documents—which would fill nearly four 4-drawer filing cabinets—would have required considerable attention from Chung and his handlers. With current technology, all the data in the documents hidden in Chung’s house would fit onto one inexpensive CD.

Extra-territoriality. In addition to the problem of attribution, it often is difficult to establish the geographic location of an act of economic espionage that takes place in cyberspace. Uncertainty about the physical location of the act provides cover for the perpetrators and complicates efforts by US Government law enforcement or intelligence agencies to respond.

Non-Cyber Methods of Economic Espionage

Although this assessment focuses on the use of cyber tools and the cyber environment in foreign efforts to collect sensitive US economic information and technologies, a variety of other methods also remain in use.

Requests for Information (RFI). Foreign collectors make unsolicited direct and indirect requests for information via personal contacts, telephone, e-mail, fax, and other forms of communication and often seek classified, sensitive, or export-controlled information.

Solicitation or Marketing of Services. Foreign companies seek entrée into US firms and other targeted institutions by pursuing business relationships that provide access to sensitive or classified information, technologies, or projects. Conferences, Conventions, and Trade Shows. These public venues offer opportunities for foreign adversaries to gain access to US information and experts in dual-use and sensitive technologies.

Official Foreign Visitors and Exploitation of Joint Research. Foreign government organizations, including intelligence services, use official visits to US Government and cleared defense contractor facilities, as well as joint research projects between foreign and US entities, to target and collect information.

Foreign Targeting of US Visitors Overseas. Whether traveling for business or personal reasons, US travelers overseas—business people, US Government employees, and contractors—are routinely targeted by foreign collectors, especial especially if they are assessed a Chung was prosecuted only for possession of these documents with the intent to benefit the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for China.

He was not charged with communication of this information to the PRC or any other foreign entity. On average, one page of typed text holds 2 kilobytes (KB) of data; thus, 250,000 pages x 2 KB/page = 500,000 KB, or 488 megabytes (MB). A data CD with a capacity of 700 MB retails for $0.75, and a flashdrive with a capacity of 4 gigabytes costs about $13.00. as having access to some sensitive information.

Some US allies engage in this practice, as do less friendly powers such as Russia and China. Targeting takes many forms: exploitation of electronic media and devices, surreptitious entry into hotel rooms, aggressive surveillance, and attempts to set up sexual or romantic entanglements.

Open Source Information. Foreign collectors are aware that much US economic and technological information is available in professional journals, social networking and other public websites, and the media.

Large but Uncertain Costs

Losses of sensitive economic information and technologies to foreign entities represent significant costs to US national security. The illicit transfer of technology with military applications to a hostile state such as Iran or North Korea could endanger the lives of US and allied military personnel. The collection of confidential US Government economic information—whether by a potential adversary or a current ally—could undercut US ability to develop and enact policies in areas ranging from climate change negotiations to reform of financial market regulations.

The theft of trade secrets from US companies by foreign economic rivals undermines the corporate sector’s ability to create jobs, generate revenues, foster innovation, and lay the economic foundation for prosperity and national security. Data on the effects of the theft of trade secrets and other sensitive information are incomplete, however, according to an ONCIX-sponsored survey of academic literature on the costs of economic espionage.

• Many victims of economic espionage are unaware of the crime until years after loss of the information.

• Even when a company knows its sensitive information has been stolen by an insider or that its computer networks have been penetrated, it may choose not to report the event to the FBI or other law enforcement agencies. No legal requirement to report a loss of sensitive information or a remote computer intrusion exists, and announcing a security breach of this kind could tarnish a company’s reputation and endanger its relationships with investors, bankers, suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders.

• A company also may not want to publicly accuse a corporate rival or foreign government of stealing its secrets from fear of offending potential customers or business partners.

• Finally, it is inherently difficult to assign an economic value to some types of information that are subject to theft. It would, for example, be nearly impossible to estimate the monetary value of talking points for a meeting between officials from a US company and foreign counterparts.

The Cost of Economic Espionage to One Company

Data exist in some specific cases on the damage that economic espionage or theft of trade secrets has inflicted on individual companies. For example, an employee of Valspar Corporation unlawfully downloaded proprietary paint formulas valued at $20 million, which he intended to take to a new job in China, according to press reports.

This theft represented about one-eighth of Valspar’s reported profits in 2009, the year the employee was arrested.
Even in those cases where a company recognizes it has been victimized by economic espionage and reports the incident, calculation of losses is challenging and can produce ambiguous results. Different methods can be used that yield divergent estimates, which adds to the difficulty of meaningfully comparing cases or aggregating estimated losses.

• An executive from a major industrial company told ONCIX representatives in late 2010 that his company has used historical costs—tallying salaries, supplies, utilities, and similar direct expenses—to estimate losses from cases of attempted theft of its trade secrets. This method has the advantage of using known and objective data, but it underestimates the extent of losses in many cases because it does not capture the effect of lost intellectual property on future sales and profits.

• Harm is calculated in US civil court cases involving the theft of trade secrets by measuring the “lost profits” or “reasonable royalty” that a company is unable to earn because of the theft. Although this method requires subjective assumptions about market share, profitability, and similar factors, it does offer a more complete calculation of the cost than relying strictly on historical accounting data.

• Estimates from academic literature on the losses from economic espionage range so widely as to be meaningless—from $2 billion to $400 billion or more a year—reflecting the scarcity of data and the variety of methods used to calculate losses.

To read more information about this great report please go to : http://www.ncix.gov/publications/reports/fecie_all/Foreign_Economic_Collection_2011.pdf

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Irans new President: Fulfilling Promises

October 1st, 2013

By Iran Human Rights.

During his 2013 presidential campaign, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani promised to uphold the “rightsof the people” enumerated in the country’s constitution. Millions of his supporters demanded social and political rights, including the release of political prisoners from prison and house arrest. In this paper, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran addresses the ongoing human rights violations occurring under the purview of nine ministries that are under the authority of the president, and provides recommendations he can implement to put an end to these violations.

It also notes the executive powers and areas that are under the president’s direct control, and the immediate measures he can take to address rights violations. While the document is by no means comprehensive, the Campaign offers it as a starting point for Rouhani to begin fulfilling his campaign promises to reinstate the rule of law in Iran. Although Iran’s executive branch is limited in scope, the ministries under its purview are responsible for a wide range of human rights violations.

The president therefore is empowered to prevent and stop these violations. Rouhani pledged to uphold the Iranian constitution at his inauguration; hence he should immediately implement changes to amend harmful policies, monitor the performance of officials within his administration, and uphold the mechanisms guaranteeing the implementation of the Iranian constitution. A number of Iranian institutions outside of the executive branch—including the Revolutionary Guards Intelligence Organization (IRGC), the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), and the Judiciary—have become safe harbors for human rights violators.

However, as head of the executive branch and principal enforcer of the constitution, the president has the authority to hold these state institutions accountable by investigating and formally noting any violations of the rights guaranteed by the Iranian constitution. He can also introduce legislation and issue directives regarding government practices, affording him significant ability to affect the state of human rights in Iran.

The Campaign welcomes the election of Hassan Rouhani, the only candidate to raise issues of human rights and the rights of the people, and entreats him to heed the voices raised during his campaign, engage with the Iranian and international human rights communities who work to protect the rights of the Iranian people, and use all the tools at his disposal to fulfill his campaign promises.

Introduction

A Human Rights Roadmap for Iran’s New President 7 During Rouhani’s election campaign he made several promises to respect human rights and uphold the “rights of the people.” Below is a selection of quotes from his campaign appearances.

April 11, 2013

“All Iranian people should feel there is justice. Justice means equal opportunity. All ethnicities, all religions, even religious minorities, must feel justice.”

“Long live citizenship rights!”

May 27, 2013

“Justice means that anyone who wants to speak in a society should be able to come out, speak their mind, criticize and critique without hesitation and stammering.”

June 4, 2013

“In the future cabinet, in all social areas, discrimination among men and women will be eliminated.”

“All people of Iran must feel justice and justice means equal opportunity.”

June 8, 2013

“If I am bestowed with the responsibility, I will return dignity back to the university and students.”[After the audience chants “Political prisoners must be freed”]

“Why political prisoners? We must do something for all these prisoners to be released.”

“With the help of the country’s hard-working police, I will do something to establish real security on all streets, so that our girls can feel safe on the streets. I shall not allow an anonymous force to ask anyone questions.”

“I will draft [a law based on] chapter three of the [Iranian] constitution, ‘The Rights of the People.’ I shall send it to the Parliament and will present it to the nation as law.”

“In citizenship rights, the Kurds, the Fars, the Baluchis, the Turkman, and the Arabs are equal.”

“Those who have been dismissed from the university because of expressing their opinions must return.”

June 10, 2013

“I will implement Article 15 of the [Iranian] constitution. It is the people’s right to be able to decide about their mother tongue.”

“I will draft and implement citizenship rights. In citizenship rights there is no minority and majority. Kurd, Azeri, Turkman, Baluch, Lur, Arab, and Fars will all be equal.”

“In the Wisdom and Hope government, a professor will no longer be dismissed for a criticism.”

“In the Wisdom and Hope government, the stars will only be in the Iranian sky. We will not have ‘starred’ students.”

In this report, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran highlights human rights violations occurring under the purview of nine Iranian government ministries that report directly to the Iranian president. The new administration, led by President Hassan Rouhani, has the authority to stop and prevent these violations, and the report provides specific, actionable recommendations aimed at stemming the violations.

In addition to the activities of the ministries under executive control, the president of Iran also has specific powers and areas under his direct control that afford him significant ability to affect the state of human rights in Iran. For example, the president can introduce legislation to Parliament, issue executive orders regarding government practices, and, as the chief enforcer of the Iranian constitution, hold state institutions accountable to the law by monitoring and noting violations of the Iranian constitution by state institutions. In this section, actions that President Hassan Rouhani can take directly and immediately to fulfill his campaign pledges to uphold the rights of the Iranian people are highlighted.

Citizenship rights

The Fourth Development Plan, which was adopted as the state’s comprehensive guiding plan by the government and Parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2002, includes a requirement that the executive branch introduce and the Parliament pass legislation detailing the specific rights of Iranian citizens. The purpose of this legislation is to gather and detail in domestic law the various rights enumerated in the country’s constitution and to incorporate into such legislation the Iranian government’s obligations under international human rights conventions to which it is a party.

However, this aspect of the state’s Development Plan has never been implemented. In 2005, then-President Khatami introduced to the Parliament such mandated legislation, which included a “Citizen’s Rights Bill,” legislation on “Privacy Rights,” and a “Freedom of Press and Access to Government Information Law,” but Parliament failed to debate and vote on any of these legislations. At present, Iranian rights are codified only in the constitution, and only in the most general terms, with no specific delineation or definition of these rights.

President Rouhani can and should re-introduce and actively pursue the passage of these three mandated legislations in the Iranian Parliament so that the rights of Iranians are specifically codified and legally binding, and are in accordance with international human rights law. He should use all the powers of his presidency to ensure that these laws are debated, voted on, and passed in the Parliament, assigning this issue the prioritization it must have, given the widespread and systematic abuse of rights in Iran that are ostensibly protected by the Iranian constitution.

The Political Crimes Bill

Given the Iranian president’s ability to introduce legislation and his capacity to use the powers of his office to lead and persuade on legislative issues, Rouhani can and should actively push for the passage in the Iranian Parliament of a Political Crimes Bill. This bill would clearly delineate those political activities that are legal in Iran, and those that are not. Importantly, these delineations would be in full accordance with international human rights laws, including those that guarantee the freedoms of speech and association and freedom of the press.

This would not only protect internationally accepted norms of political activity inside Iran, it would also prevent the Iranian authorities from arresting and imprisoning Iranian citizens arbitrarily on vague “national security” charges.A Political Crimes Bill was originally introduced to Parliament under the reformist Khatami administration, but it has languished unapproved since then. Decades after the Islamic Revolution, there is still no definition of a “political crime” in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and hundreds of people are imprisoned each year in Iran for their peaceful social and political activism.

In addition, Article 168 of the Iranian constitution states that “political and press offenses will be tried openly and in the presence of a jury, in courts of justice.” However, with political crimes left undefined, individuals arrested and imprisoned for their journalistic activities or in relation to their political activities under vague national security charges are rarely tried in open courts or in the presence of a jury.The new President should re-introduce a Political Crimes Bill, ensure that the definition of a “political crime” is based on the constitution and complies with Iran’s international obligations in this area, and use his full capabilities to have this law approved in the Iranian Parliament.

Fulfilling Promises

Abuses by herasat offices (local state intelligence bureaus) Herasat offices are found in state institutions and universities throughout Iran, and are comprised of representatives of the Ministry of Intelligence who monitor such institutions in order to ensure continued fealty to the Islamic Republic and “prevent penetration” of any state institution by those deemed disloyal to the regime. They are found in every government office, in state-owned enterprises throughout the Iranian economy, in the state-run media, and in all of the universities, where they conduct surveillance, monitor private communications, act as informants, and influence hiring and firing practices.

Members of the herasat harass, intimidate, and engage in widespread human rights abuses, and, in particular, violate Article 23 of the Iranian constitution, which states that “the investigation of an individual’s beliefs is forbidden, and no one may be molested or taken to task simply for holding a certain belief.” For example, the herasat offices in Iranian universities play a major role in the suspension and expulsion of students who engage in political or religious activities with which the herasat disapproves, or who dress or engage in conduct with which they disapprove.

Herasat offices have deprived hundreds of Iranian students of their right to education because of those individuals’ legal political activities and the expression of their opinions. President Rouhani must review and evaluate the policies and actions of the herasat, ensure that its members do not continue to engage in the systematic violations of human rights, and, if they do violate the laws, that they not enjoy immunity from legal and criminal accountability. Additionally, the president must create effective legal and oversight mechanisms to ensure that the employment and/or dismissal of students, professors, or employees is not based on an individual’s beliefs.

In addition, according to Article 127 of the Iranian constitution, the president may, in special circumstances, appoint one or more special representatives with specific powers. It is incumbent upon President Rouhani, given his role as the principal enforcer of the Iranian constitution, to assign a special representative to review the herasat’s activities, report directly to the president on the use or misuse of its powers and any violations, make specific recommendations aimed at reigning in the abuses committed by the herasat, and follow through on the implementation of these recommendations.

Notices of constitutional violations

According to Article 113 of the Iranian constitution, the president of Iran is the highest official in the country after the Supreme Leader, and he is responsible for implementing the constitution. As the principle enforcer of the constitution, President Rouhani has not only the right but the responsibility to defend the rights contained therein and serve official notice to any branch, body, or institution of the government that has carried out practices in violation of the constitution. Such constitutional notices (formal presidential notifications of constitutional violations) are a vital mechanism to check constitutional abuses, drawing public attention to and calling on violating organizations to cease their violations.

For example, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Broadcasting organization (IRIB) routinely broadcasts show trials and forced confessions of prisoners that have been elicited through torture, and produces documentaries that have defamed, libeled, and facilitated the illegal prosecution of Iranian citizens, without extending them an opportunity to defend themselves. This is a clear case where it is incumbent upon the president to serve a constitutional notice to IRIB that t hey are violating the constitutional rights of Iran citizens contained in Article 37 (which states that innocence is to be presumed, and no one is to be held guilty of a charge unless his or her guilt has been established by a competent court) and Article 38 (which states that all forms of torture for the purpose of extracting confession or acquiring information is forbidden), and that they must cease this practice.

The continued house arrest of political opposition figures Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Zahra Rahnavard, who were never charged nor convicted in a court of law, is also in clear violation of the Iranian constitution. Article 34 states that all citizens have a right of access to competent courts, and Article 37 states that innocence is presumed until guilt has been established by a competent court. President Rouhani should issue a constitutional notice regarding the illegality of their arrest, publicly demand their release, and use all the powers of his office to put an end to such practices.

The president can and must launch investigations into all allegations of abuses and issue constitutional notices to any state organization that is violating the constitutional rights of Iranians. Moreover, he must demand that such organizations respond to the allegations and cease the violations, and inform the public of the results of such investigations, thereby fulfilling his responsibility to defend the constitution.

Free speech

Many journalists and publications have faced lawsuits, arrests, detentions, shutdowns, and bans on publishing by officials for criticizing government organizations, particularly in recent years. This is in direct violation of the Iranian constitution, which states in Article 24, “Publications and the press have freedom of expression except when it is detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam or the rights of the public.”

The Iranian president can use his authority to issue directives to all ministries under the executive branch to discourage government officials from filing lawsuits against newspapers for their criticism, and can use his office to encourage them to respond to the criticism rather than persecuting the critics.

Women’s rights

According to Article 20 of the Iranian constitution, “All citizens of the country, both men and women, equally enjoy the protection of the law and enjoy all human, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, in conformity with Islamic criteria.” Yet in practice and in law in Iran, women face severe discrimination in such areas as education, employment, state benefits, family law, and court proceedings. President Rouhani should fulfill his campaign pledges to uphold the rights of women and present legislation to Parliament that directly addresses discrimination against women in Iran.

For example, he can remove restrictions on the enrollment of female students in academic disciplines that have been imposed in recent years by the Ministry of Science, and issue an executive order to the Ministry of Science to end segregation policies that lead to discrimination against female students inside Iranian universities. The president should also present bills which end discriminatory divorce laws and address all other discriminatory aspects of family law in Iran. He should introduce legislation that makes women equal to men under the law.

Extending public health insurance and state services to unemployed female heads of households is also a critical need of women in Iran.12 Fulfilling Promises In addition, the lack of female participation in high-level government positions (including the president’s own cabinet, which does not have a single female minister) is an issue that should be addressed. President Rouhani should actively promote the participation of women in senior government positions who will effectively pursue anti-discriminatory policies.

Discrimination in government employment practices

The government is a major employer in Iran, and as such, government hiring practices have a huge impact on the country. At present, there is severe religious and ethnic discrimination in government hiring practices in Iran. Religious discrimination most pointedly affects Baha’is and Christian converts: Iranian Baha’is are completely denied government employment, and converted Christians have to hide their faith or they will be expelled from government employment.

In addition, ethnic Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis face significant discrimination in state hiring practices. Provincial and local level government offices rarely hire citizens indigenous to the province in management and high-level positions, and these communities are thus cut off from an important source of employment as well as decision-making capabilities on the local governmental level. The Iranian president can take direct action to address this discrimination, issuing an executive order forbidding discrimination against religious or ethnic minorities in Iranian government hiring.

In addition, he can explicitly institute anti-discrimination government hiring codes. Moreover, the president’s Minister of the Interior appoints provincial governors, and thus the president can direct them to increase the hiring of local ethnicities in management positions, particularly in Kurdistan, Baluchistan, and Khuzestan.

The encouragement of government transparency

At present in Iran there is a glaring lack of government transparency and a severe lack of reliable and timely government statistics.This dearth of information leads to a lack of government accountability and facilitates government inaction. Inaccurate or nonexistent information on such areas as the state of the country’s economy, corruption, and substance abuse and other public health issues impedes the government’s ability to address the country’s social and economic ills.

The president can and should develop policies to provide citizens, journalists, and academics with full access to unclassified government information, documents, and publications. He can issue directives requiring state organizations and units to provide regular, accurate, and timely information and statistics to the public on the activities of the government and on the state of the country. He should also require public access to transcripts of public sessions of all decision-making centers under his administration.

Arbitrary arrests, false accusations, and harassment

The Ministry of Intelligence is directly involved in imposing illegal and arbitrary restrictions on the activities of political parties and independent non-governmental organizations. There are hundreds of cases of arbitrary arrests of organization members every year, false accusations against them, and a pattern of illegal interference with the Judiciary in order to stop the activities of independent organizations. The Ministry of Intelligence engages in a pattern of arbitrary arrests of journalists and activists, silencing critics and independent media and associations.

The Ministry regularly summons individuals to their offices and threatens them without any legal justification. These pervasive attacks on dissidents and media professionals have created an atmosphere of censorship and repression, and have had a chilling effect on the exercise of freedom of expression and association.

In addition, the Ministry of Intelligence has a record of mounting false cases against activists, journalists, artists, and academics. These false accusations interrupt their work, discredit them, and often lead to their arrest. While many of the accused are eventually acquitted of their charges when their cases are finally heard in court, they are often detained for years before their cases are reviewed.

Harassment of family members of critics and dissidents

The Ministry also harasses, interrogates, and arrests family members of critics and dissidents. In 2012 14 Fulfilling Promises and 2013, for example, family members of journalists working for news agencies outside of Iran, such as BBC Persian and Radio Farda, were repeatedly harassed and arrested.

Torture, ill-treatment, and forced confessions

The Ministry of Intelligence operates various detention centers throughout Iran. Scores of human rights violations have been documented in these centers, including ill-treatment of detainees, physical and psychological torture, and denial of access to counsel or family, all in violation of Iranian and international law. Many detainees have been forced under torture to issue false confessions. According to the March 2013 report of the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, 78% of witnesses he interviewed reported having been tortured.

In the case of political prisoners, it is the Ministry of Intelligence that makes arrests, detains prisoners in dedicated prison wards without oversight from the Judiciary, and mounts preliminary investigations before releasing them to the Judiciary. There is a consistent pattern of torture of political prisoners, especially during the initial days of their detention, often in solitary confinement and during interrogations, aimed at extracting false confessions.

Many prisoners, such as the human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, have reported that their interrogators from the Ministry of Intelligence informed them of their sentences before their trials, raising concerns about the independence of the judges in charge of political prisoners’ cases.

In addition to detention centers, the Ministry of Intelligence also operates certain prison wards without the oversight of the Iranian Judiciary, in which there is a documented a pattern of ill-treatment. For example, seven Dervish lawyers being held at the Intelligence Ministry’s Ward 209 at Evin Prison have not had access to light in months and have developed consequent illnesses. Furthermore, the Ministry of Intelligence systematically violates due process. Detainees are routinely denied access to lawyers and are often denied knowledge of the charges against them.

Invasion of privacy through monitoring

The Ministry of Intelligence actively invades the privacy of Iranian citizens by tapping their phones, reading their text messages, and monitoring their Internet use. These monitoring mechanisms are often used to detain activists as well as denying them freedoms of expression and assembly in their private spheres.

Censorship of newspapers prior to publication

Without any authority for censorship or review, the Ministry of Intelligence routinely threatens editors, journalists, publishers, and other media professionals with arrest or closure of their publications in order to censor content prior to the publication of the news.A Human Rights Roadmap for Iran’s New President.

Interference in universities

In direct violation of the Iranian constitution, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence has banned hundreds of Iranian youth from pursuing higher education because of their political or religious activities. The Ministry interferes in university admissions, “stars” students (marking their educational transcripts to prevent enrollment in any Iranian university), and sits on the disciplinary committees of various universities.

The Ministry also interferes with the independence of universities by establishing security offices at universities and arresting and detaining student activists who are then charged with various national security related crimes.

Persecution of religious and ethnic minorities

During the last eight years, the Ministry of Intelligence has increased its persecution of religious minorities, including Christian Protestants, Dervishes, and Baha’is. Houses of worship are routinely shut down and leaders of religious communities are frequently monitored, harassed, and detained. For example, in May 2012, the oldest Persian-language Protestant Christian church in Iran, the Central Assemblies of God, was closed due to pressure from intelligence forces.

The Ministry of Intelligence has also engaged in the prolonged harassment and persecution of ethnic minorities, such as Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, and Azeris. As with religious minorities, leaders of these communities are often monitored, harassed, and detained; use of their language is restricted; and university enrollment and business permits are frequently denied. For example, for more than three decades the Iranian government has persecuted Kurdish people for practicing their customs, with the police and the Ministry of Intelligence routinely arresting Kurdish citizens for observing their ethnic celebrations.

Recommendations for the Ministry of Intelligence:

– Remove the Ministry of Intelligence from universities, and end their intimidation and silencing of student activists, religious minorities, and students with independent political convictions.

– Remove the Ministry of Intelligence from prisons.

– Hold the Intelligence Ministry accountable for its interference in the affairs of the Judiciary. Restore the independence of the Judiciary.

– Prevent torture, and hold accountable those who employ the practice.

– Stop televising coerced confessions.

– Stop the abuse of national security charges against activists, artists, students, and religious and ethnic minorities.

– Respect and implement the Citizens’ Rights Bill of 2004.

– Put an end to the Ministry’s illegal interference with political groups and parties.

– Sign and ratify the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (United Nations Convention against Torture).

– End the persecution of religious minorities.

– Respect the rights of ethnic minorities to follow their traditions, protected by Articles 19 and 20 of the Iranian constitution. Stop harassing and persecuting ethnic minorities.

To keep reading this great report go to: http://www.iranhumanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/Fulfilling-Promises-English-web.pdf

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The Islamic Situation in Kazakhstan

September 28th, 2013

By Prof. Dr. Saniya Edelbay.

Abstract.

In modern Kazakhstan Islam is one of the factors of cultural self-identification, of the search for spiritual identity. We observe a growing complexity of the inner-islamic situation as well as the growth of religious feelings amongst the population and its influence on the situation of foreign missionaries and preachers.

Is there today such a thing as “Kazakh Islam”?

At the moment an explosion of islamization can be observed in Kazakhstan. A spiritual leadership of Kazakh’s Muslims has been established. The religious pilgrimage to Mecca becomes more and more popular. There is a growing number of mosques, Islamic schools and Medresse, academies and institutes, as well as of Islamic print products in Kazakhstan.

The activity of 15 terrorist organizations identifying themselves as Islamic has been outlawed. Islamic fundamentalism has not gained wide support, however a trend towards a politicization of Islam can be observed.

Despite a growing the religiousness amongst the population, particularly with the youth, the majority has a fragmentary knowledge of Islam. Kazakhstan, Religion, Islam, Tengrianism, Shamanism, Kazakh traditions Since its introduction in Kazakhstan, Islam plays a very important role in the formation of Kazakh ethnic culture and national consciousness.

In contemporary Kazakhstan Islam is an important factor in shaping cultural selfidentification and spiritual identity. Being one of the forms of ethnic identity, Islam participates in ethnic consolidation. The majority of Kazakh Muslims belong to the Turkic peoples who strive for mutual closeness as well as proximity with Turkic nations from abroad. Islam is the most widely-spread religion among the Kazakh population.

Muslims of 24 nationalities constitute 70% of the population of Kazakhstan (11 million people). The majority of the Islamic population of Kazakhstan are the Kazakhs which account for 65% of the total population. The second major Muslim population are the Uzbeks. Next come the Uigurs, the Tatars, the Kirghiz, the Bashkir, the Tajiks, the Azerbaijani, the Dugans, the Turks, the Chechen and the Ingush. The Muslim community of Kazakhstan is composed not only of the native population, but also of the migrants from Muslim countries. Most of these migrants are Sunni Muslims.

Religious leaders take measures in order to unite the Muslims of Central Asia so as to resolve the pressing social problems and to fight the negative developments of public life as well as the expansion of radical parties and movements.

At the moment, one can witness the increase in growth of the process of Islamisation and rapid increase of religious feeling in the population of Kazakhstan. The current religious situation becomes more acute due to the activity of foreign missionaries and preachers and the influence of religion on the consciousness of the young. One can also notice the expansion in the field of activities of Islam and the complication of the religious factor within the Islamic structures. This matter, however, concerns not only the threat of religious fundamentalism and extremism.

The infiltration and proliferation of radical religious trends and the increase in armed incidents and actions constitute the reality of life in today’s Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan even was included by the Ministry of national safety of the USA in the list of the dangerous countries posing terrorist threat.

We mostly talk about the considerable change in the status of the Muslim community (Ummah) of Kazakhstan. The differences in the varieties of the Kazakhs’ perceptions of Islam – in other words the questioning of whether Kazakhstan should adopt a more “traditional” or “non-conventional” type of Islam – carries the threat of intraethnic divisions and oppositions. This difference in perception accounts for the increase in conflictual situations within the community between the urban (rejecting traditions) and the rural (orthodox) Muslims.

There are cases when representatives of non-traditional Islam use violence against traditionally conservative rural Muslims. The question of Kazakh religious identity is a cause for fierce debates. The range of opinions on this issue is extremely broad. Whether the Kazakhs are Muslims or whether it is the ancestral rituals of Tengrianism with elements of Shamanism which are inherent to them, are also questions that are present in the daily lives of the Kazakhs.

The current complexity of the religious situation is characterized not only by the problematic of the growing religiosity of the population or the conflicts between traditional Islam and the fundamental radical trends. The crucial question concerns the growing contradiction between traditional practices of the Kazakh people and the current process of Islamisation or between the general canons of Islam and particular Kazakh traditions. There exists a plurality of opinions concerning the history of Islam in Kazakhstan.

Indeed, the religious situation on the territory of modern Kazakhstan has, at all times, distinguished itself by its complexity. In the first centuries of our era, the most widespread religions were Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, as well as various Christian trends.

Starting in the southern regions, the dissemination of Islam in the territories of modern Kazakhstan dates back to the seventh century and continued for several centuries. The history of proliferation of Islam in Kazakhstan during the Middle Ages is long and rather specific. Originally, Islam took its roots among the sedentary populations of Semirechye (Zhetysu) and Syr-Darya. It is a known fact that already in the tenth century, Islam was already practiced in the Karahanid Empire in Semirechye.

A mark of that period – the tractate of Yusuf Balasaghuni (1015-1016), “Kutagu Billig” (“Fertile Knowledge”), reflects Muslim ideology. Islam did not spread as quickly amongst the nomads as it did amongst the sedentary populations of the Turkic nations. According to Gumilev, the consolidation of Islam in a nomadic society is characterized by its complexity and proliferation of any religion requires freedom of spiritual space. Tengrianist (Tengri – a sky cult) Shamanism was the traditional religion of the nomadic Turkomen.

There also existed worships of the spirit of the earth (Zherana) and the spirit of water (Sou-ana), as well as cults of fire and cattle. Islam coexisted well with local religions and continued to spread through the next centuries. We can speak about syncretism of Islamic elements and local pagan religions.

A special role in propagation of Islam among Turkis-nomads was played by the Sufi clergy. The founder of the Sufi order – Khoja Akhmet Yassawy (1103-1166/67) is considered by the Turkis Muslims to be the second sacred leader after Prophet Mohammed, and the city of Turkestan in the south of Kazakhstan where he preached – minor Mecca. His well known work “Hikmet” (“Knowledge”) written in Turkic (Chagatai) language belongs to thecommon spiritual inheritance of all Turkic nations. Even now the Turkic peoples can read “Hikmet” in the original.

In 1996 the text was published in Kazakh. The spiritual development of Muslims of the Central Asia that followed was closely connected with the traditions of Sufism. The process of strengthening Islamic positions began when Berke Khan of the Golden Horde (1255-1266) and Uzbek Khan (Ozbek Khan) (1312-1340) were Islamized. Islam grew stronger in the XIV century under Timur.

The active role in Islam proliferation on the territory of Kazakhstan is attributed to missionaries from Arab countries. Later the strengthening of the position of Islam was reinforced as a result of the activity of Tatar mullahs, which were sent to Kazakhstan on personal command of Russian empress Catherine II.

According to the Russian orientalist R.G. Landa ” During the conquest (and long before it)Tatars, knowing languages of the Central Asia and culture of Islam played an important role of intermediaries, interpreters, pathfinders, “guides” and advisers of the Russian merchants and government officials, teachers, mullahs and experts of local customs” .

Islam was well-rooted among the Kazakh nobles – khans and sultans. Common people either continued to profess ancient pre-Islamic beliefs and officiate ancient ceremonies, or took to syncretism of Islamic elements and preIslamic traditions. In the evidence of observers, travelers, scientists, and officials who depicted the everyday life of the Kazakhs, one can find records showing that they were not very religious. Compared to the sedentary population of Central Asia, for example the Uzbeks, Kazakhs were not as religious throughout their history.

In his book “The Description of the Kirghiz-kajsach or the Kirghiz-kajsac hords and steppes” Russian researcher Levshin writes that when questioned about their confession the Kazakhs answer: “I don’t know”. This gives the author the opportunity to state that “it is difficult to decide what the Kirghiz (the former name for Kazakhs –E.S.) are – Mohammedans, maniheyans, or pagans.”

He writes that Islam for the Kazakhs is intertwined with ancient pagan cults. They do not pray, do not exercise Muslim ceremonies (fasting) and “Islamism” persists only thanks to Central Asian and Tatar mullahs. Kazakh ethnographer of the nineteenth century, Chokan Valihanov, wrote: “Muslimism has not yet become our second nature. It threatens to separate people in the future”.

Climate and geographical conditions (immensity of the territory) created objective difficulties for the expansion of Islam. The specificity of everyday life of the Kazakhs (life in yurts, seasonal migrations) also made it difficult to celebrate religious ceremonies (for example, namaz and other Islamic norms).

The Kazakhs were free from religious fanaticism. Kazakh religious tolerance helped peaceful coexistence of various religions. In several regions Christianity kept its influence for centuries. For example, Nestorianism was recognized among the Naimans, who moved at the end of the twelfth – the beginning of the thirteenth centuries from the Central Asia to East Kazakhstan and Semirechye.

Though nomadic life made it difficult for Islam to prosper among the Kazakhs, little by little Islam, with its monotheism and simple ceremonies, substituted polytheistic religions. In the course of Islamisation many customs and traditional Kazakh religious perceptions (worship of the spirits of the ancestors and holy sites) took new Islamic forms.

Moderate Islam of Sunni orientation of Hanafi Mazhab (Muslim school of law) currently prevails in Kazakhstan. Compared to other four schools of Islam it has moderate views, tolerance for dissentients and a ratheruncomplicated religious service. A moderate unorthodox trend of Islam – Sufism – is widely spread in the south of Kazakhstan, where it adapted to the nomadic life of local Turkic population. Islam did not play any important role in the political life of the Kazakh society before the Revolution; it had the form of moderate “household” Islam. It was important in everyday life of the people. Local clergy served the common needs of the Kazakhs.

During the Soviet period, the religious situation is characterized by a weakening of the position of Islam as a result of the policy of state atheism. Repressive actions were taken against Muslim clergy, many mosques were closed and destroyed. It was only in 1943 that Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan renewed its activity. Popular Islam, however, remained as means of self-identification of the Muslims and an important element of the mode of life of the people.

After the break-up of the USSR the situation in Kazakhstan from the religious point of view is exemplified not only by the revival of the religions traditions for Kazakhstan, namely Islam and Christianity, but by the appearance of other numerous religious trends.

The first years of independence were marked by the large scale construction of mosques and orthodox churches. Quran was published in Kazakh and Russian translations, the Bible (Injil) became available in Kazakh language. Special shops selling religious literature and calendars opened. Religious periodicals were published. Since 1997 the monthly “Islam Elemi” (“Islam World”) and the newspaper “Nur Shapagat” were published. According to official Kazakh data there are people of 130 nationalities who belong to 46 different confessions living in peace and harmony.

Committee on religions of the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Kazakhstan informed that on January, 1st, 1990 there existed 671 religious associations in Kazakhstan, representing 10-15 confessions. Consequently, by the beginning of 2011 the number of religious associations should expand to 4479.

Statistics show that 65% of the associations are Muslim (Sunni, Schiit, Sufi Ahmadijsky Zhamagat) and 35% belong to other confessions, including 378 communities of Evangelical Baptist Christians, 241 communities belonging to the Russian orthodox church, 90 communities belonging to the Catholic church, about a hundred communities of Lutherans, 104 communities of Seventh day Adventists, 131 communities of Jehovah Witnesses, 45 communities of Pentecostals, 3 branches of Russian orthodox church abroad, 7 Old Believers churches, 5 Buddhist communities, 24 Judaic communities, 12 Krishna communities, 1 community of the Armenian Gregorian church, 23 Baha’I communities.

These figures cover only the registered organizations. Among believers there are followers of almost all world religions: Islam, Christianity (Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism), Buddhism as well as Judaism, Hinduism, ancient polytheistic cults and modern new trends.

The religions traditional for Kazakhstan – Sunni Muslim and Russian orthodox Christianity – account for 60% of all religious communities registered in the republic and the majority of the religious people. According to the official figures 70% of the population are Muslims, 25% – Orthodox (some sources give the figure of 28%), 1% – Catholics, 05% – Protestants, other confessions – less than 1%. But there has never been a broad survey on the question of which particular confession people belong too.

These numbers – 70% of Muslims and 25% of Orthodox – are taken for granted. It gives identification of ethnic and confessional identity. Accordingly, all people belonging to “Muslim” nations are considered as ethnic Muslims and all Slavs – Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, probably with the exception of Poles – are identified as Orthodox. In reality most of religious communities are multinational. There exist Kazakhs-Orthodox and Slav-Muslims.

Religious fervor of the population of Kazakhstan is exaggerated. According to sociologists, some part of the people living in Kazakhstan is indifferent to religion, especially in the cities and in the northern part of the country. The powerful atheist policy of the USSR pursued in the twentieth century was decisive in the fact that today there are atheists and hesitant people.

According to the Kazakhstan experts religious people make up approximately 60% to 70% of the whole population. Russian Orthodox Christianity is one of the major religious trends in Kazakhstan. Russian Orthodox Church belongs to the structure of Moscow Patriarchy. By decision of the Sacred Synod taken in 1991, it has three dioceses in Kazakhstan: Astana-Almaty, Shimkent and Ural. Russian Orthodox Church prepares priests at the Almaty diocesan theological school.

In 1991 Vatican took the decision to establish a Catholic episcopate in Kazakhstan. The Catholic cathedral in Karaganda is already erected. The situation with religion has become quite complicated with attainment of independence. Besides traditional Islam and Orthodoxy there are several religious organizations of mystic trends working in Kazakhstan.

Most active are “Society for Krishna Consciousness”, “Seventh-day Adventist Church”, “Jehovah Witness”, “Church of the New Life”, “White Brotherhood”, Old Believers, Presbyterians, New Apostolic Church, Mennonites, Bahá’ís, “Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon”, “ Grace Church “, and a number of others. Some of them were registered as secular associations (Dianetics Center and others). Besides the trends known earlier, there appeared new religious associations unknown before. For example, two churches were identified as engaged in destructive activity – “Scientology” and “The New Life”.

Religious organizations functioning in the country actively work with all groups of the population. Missionaries of all possible trends come from the USA, Germany and South Korea as businessmen, teachers, health workers and other professionals.

Still their activities are aimed at propaganda of non-traditional confessions and trends, and spreading of proselyte
literature among the people of Kazakhstan. The Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan guaranties freedom of conscience and freedom of worship.

Representatives of all confessions freely practice their activities. Kazakhstan is a secular state and no religion has a dominant position in everyday life, ideology or politics. The conception of Kazakhstan as a secular multinational and multi-religious state implies equal rights for all nationalities and religious communities, granting them freedom of conscience.

The process of Islamic revival in Kazakhstan was followed by the process of revitalization of Islam. Growing number of Mosques, Madrasah, Muslim schools and Islamic institutions of higher education, Islamic publications, well educated ministers of religion come as evidence of reactivation of religious life.

Now there are 2.5 thousand Mosques in Kazakhstan (compared to 63 during the Soviet period). In 1999 the Central Mosque with a capacity to welcome more than three thousand people was opened in Almaty. The number of religious Muslims is permanently growing. Local Muslim organizations work with ethnic Muslims in order to “bring them back to faith”. More and more young and middle-aged people turn to religion. Arab countries invest considerable amounts of money in the Islamic education of the young. Most of religious schools and institutions were also built with the money invested from abroad.

Structural changes in the religious establishment took place. Before January 1990 Muslim communities of Kazakhstan were subordinate to the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Central and Kazakhstan located in Tashkent. In 1990 Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Kazakhstan (SDMK) was established.

More and more believers go on a Hajj to Mecca. Though for most of believers the pilgrimage to the common Islamic holy places is hard to undertake. The number of Pilgrims visiting local holy places is growing. Several visits are considered equal to Hajj. The interest in the Quran is growing. International competitions of Quran readings take place. As many believers did not study and can’t read Arabic, they phonetically transcribed the Quran in Kazakh and learned the texts aurally.

This helps the believers to learn the prayers necessary for the Namaz. Many people find the process of learning religious rules long and difficult that is why Islam rituals are mostly celebrated. The position of Islam in family matters also grows stronger. Celebrations of Islamic traditions become an integral part of everyday life of the Kazakhs. Most Kazakhs consider themselves Muslims and celebrate at least some part of the rites and rituals.

That concerns the Friday Namaz in the Mosque, religious holidays (Oraza, Qurban ait), the ritual of circumcision (Sunnat/Sundet), the obituary-obsequies rituals and marriage rituals. During religious holidays people perform charitable actions, especially Muslim businessmen. They give immolated cattle to the poor, as well as personalized donations to orphan homes and hospitals.

Growing importance of the religious holidays is stressed by the fact that children born on those days get names like Aisha, Islam, Ramasan, Medina, Oras. During the Muslim holidays of the Great Fast (Orasa) and Leyla Al-Qadr, the Night of Power (Kadyr Tuni) there is a lack of space in the Mosque for all who want to go there. However, only a small part of believers go to the Mosque regularly and celebrate some of the obligatory rites of Islam (ablutions and others).

Many Kazakhs started to fast during the month of Ramadan. These people are much respected; they are often invited for the evening meal (auyz ashar). To have them at the table is considered to be a blessing for the hosting person who does not fast.

New features of socio-political and cultural life in Kazakhstan have a big influence on Islam. There is a real Islamisation boom in the society of the country. The growth of the Kazakhs’ religiosity is incredibly quick. Besides the traditional Islam there are widely spreading Islamic trends that are not characteristic of the Kazakh practices. Especially in big cities, the number of followers of Islam with specific appearance (bearded, in short trousers), type of behavior and world-view, has grown.

Young people having no serious religious education fall under influence of extremist movements and join them. It is the youth that makes 80 percent of the members of such organizations, and 10 percent of them are under 18 years of age. Moderate Islam of Sunni trend, characterized by tolerance for those of different beliefs, was most broadly present in Kazakhstan. Currently, not only traditional Islam and Sufi traditions reappear. There are different Islamic centers and organizations, sects and trends, religious extremist groups that appear over the country.

Whereas traditional Islamic practice involves traditional forms of Muslim society, Mosques, and Madrasahs,” nontraditional ” Islam is characterized by organization of socio-political movements, parties and mass manifestations. Events in the neighboring and distant Muslim countries affect the situation of Islam in the country. Radical Islamists in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kirgizstan openly engage in the brainwashing of the population with the aim to construct an Islamic state. According to special services, the Islamic fundamentalism and extremism have found their way into Kazakhstan as well.

Although it has not widely spread yet, there was no overt attempt to politicize Islam, such tendency remains nonetheless. Unique to Central Asia, the “Party of Islamic revival of Tajikistan” officially exists in Tajikistan. In Kazakhstan, however, activity of political organizations on a religious basis is legally forbidden. Still there are cases of appeals to Islam of certain political forces of nationalist orientation despite official prohibition.

Activity of 15 radical religious organizations is officially forbidden on the territory of Kazakhstan. There are “Al Kaida”, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Kurdish National Congress, Islamic Movement of East Turkestan “Brothers-Moslems”, the “Taliban” movement, “Boz Gurd” (Grey Wolf), “Osbat al-Ansar”, Jamaat of Mujahideens of Central Asia (another name for the “Group of Islamic Jihad”), “Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami” (“Party of freedom of Islam”), occultist mystical religious trends “Allja Ajat” and “Ata Jol” (another name “Ak Jol”) which emerged in Kazakhstan.
Some of them treat religious doctrines in their own ways. So in Jamaat of Mujahideens came to life the notion of “Amoliet”. It meant making money by committing robbery, brigandage and murder of “infidels” (“non Muslim by birth”), justified by the needs of Jihad (war against the “infidels”).

Religious extremist groups conduct active propaganda among the population spreading extremist Islamic literature. Lately they started using legal methods, for example, arrange charitable events during the “Oraza-Ajt” festivities. Two “nonconventional” trends have already been formed: the Salafits (often representatives of forbidden in Kazakhstan Vahhabism who call themselves Salafits) and the Quranits. The supporters of this conservative Islamic trend are characterized by denial of the Sunny and recognition of the Quran as the exclusive authoritative source of divine revelation.

They use direct references to the Quran and aspire to restore primary “true” and “pure” Islam. They reject any innovations (Bid’ah) in Islam as created by people. They adhere to the principle of monotheism (Tawhid) and deny the Kazakh cult of the sacred and the ancestors considering it deviation from monotheism.

Among Salafits (more known as Wahhabites) one notices the presence of armed groups inclined to radical actions. In July 2011 there was an armed conflict in the west of the country, that led to human losses on both sides of the Islamists and the law enforcement authorities. The Salafit trend is mostly present in the western areas of Kazakhstan – Atyrau, Mangistau, Aktyubinsk. The religious extremism arrived there from the Caucasus and with active propaganda of missionaries from the Arab states who came to work on oil development projects.

Salafits were trained in Almaty Madrasah and in Arab-Kazakh University of Shymkent, both were later closed by the authorities. Salafits are also trained at the Saudi Arabian Culture Center that is still functioning. Moreover, having taken a visa for a hajj to Saudi Arabia, young Kazakhs remain there to study in the Universities that belong to the Salafit movement.

Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Kazakhstan suggested to forbid the Islamic radical trend “Salafia” as one of the more dangerous. However, it is hardly possible to stop the propagation of this movement by forbidding it. Complex measures are necessary and, most importantly, it is necessary to solve the social problems of the youth, to provide education, jobs, and salaries.

The Kazakhstan Quranits consider Salafits to be their adversaries, not allies. Several years ago, the Quranit movement “Izgi Amal” was very active, its supporters belonging to the political elite. The Quranits are very dynamic with their propaganda aimed at Kazakhstan, which is administered through International Quran Center situated in North Virginia and through

Internet sites in English and Arabic. They consider that Muslims can sell and take drugs, as there is nothing said against it in Quran. Quranits do not set the Jihad aims, they strive to transform Islam in a peaceful way.

Peaceful movements within “non-traditional” Islam can also help radical ideas to colonize minds or they can themselves turn into radicalism. It is impossible to determine the limits after which peaceful moderate religious tendencies of “non-traditional Islam” become transformed into radical ones. Events in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kirgizstan make the threat of radical Islam even more eminent.

“Nontraditional” Islamic movements with ideologies glorifying the idea of Jihad present the source of threat for national security and social stability, as well as the unity of society in Kazakhstan. Followers of “non-traditional” Islam are ready for armed actions, clashes and terrorism. They attempt to involve young people in armed political struggle using their energy and religious ignorance.

Expansion of religious feelings among the youth has several causes; mostly social –lack of chance to get education, work, and housing. In such situation the young turn to new “non-traditional” trends of Islam. More and more frequently religious mood is known for its outbursts in the prisons of Kazakhstan. It oftentimes happens that radical Islam spreads through penitentiaries. Security structures fight hard with the Salafits, imprisoning them. The Salafits in long term imprisonment sermonize and carry out propaganda among the prison community.

They criticize social injustice thus attracting new followers, who are deeply inspired by radical ideas and become extremists by the time they leave prison. The position of Islamic radicals becomes stronger in southern and western regions. According to special services, religious situation in the West of the country gives rise to concern. In Atyrau members of one of the unregistered in Kazakhstan religious trends carried acts of profanation on Muslim cemeteries. The monuments and photos on the marble gravestones, that were judged not belong to genuine Islam, were the pretext for vandalism.

The gravestones were broken, the photos of the deceased were scratched and painted over. In the northern part of Kazakhstan a new pseudo-religious movement “Ata Joly” (“Road of Ancestors”) with its branch “Ak Jol” was formed within the Islamic frame. “Ata Joly” demands special attention, because of its activity and healing methods it has gained many adepts. “Ata Joly” outlined an itinerary for a healing religious pilgrimage to holy places of Kazakhstan.

Followers of “Ata Joly” should undertake a pilgrimage (ziarat) to holy places (often questionable) to come in contact with souls of the ancestors (“aruah”) and obtain their personal blessing that will help to get rid of illnesses and bad habits, or to reach success in one’s carrier. Such tours happen rather often in the South and the West of Kazakhstan. However, the northern part of the country did not see such events earlier. “Ata Joly” makes a good business out of these pilgrimages and gets steady income.

Expenses of one person on such religious tour reach 65 thousand tenge. Dozens of thousands of people go on such “pilgrimages” by car that carries a little white Islamic flag symbolizing purity of faith. The “healing” methods of “Ata Joly” have nothing to do with alternative medicine. The followers become convinced that they are blessed with healing powers and holiness (“Aulie”).In order to make one “holy” (“Aulie”), they manipulate his consciousness, use his emotions, draw parallels between his present with the past of his ancestors.

The activity of “Ata Joly” causes destructive changes in the mentality of a person and greatly harms this person’s mental and physical health. There were cases of suicide. “Ata Joly” and “Elle Ayat” were forbidden in the Republic of Kazakhstan in January 2009 by court decision. But the life-threatening activities of these movements went far beyond Kazakhstan, into Russia and Belorussia. The Islamic factor is becoming more active in the East of Kazakhstan as well.

Followers of non-traditional religions forbid any medical interference in the natural development of the body. Even in case of life-threatening danger they refuse blood transfusions. Some women in Semey for the reason of religious fanaticism give birth to their children at home running serious risk for their lives as well as their children’s. They refuse to vaccinate children. Such cases are still rare but they are on the increase. In 2010 sixteen families gave formal note refusing vaccination of children for religious reasons.

Doctors and representatives of traditional religions carry out educational work among the population, explaining that Islam and Christianity have never been against medicine Many non-traditional religious movements spread their beliefs among socially vulnerable strata of society – among the poor, large families and single mothers. Special attention by representatives of religious movements is paid to women, because, for different reasons, it is mostly the women who bring up children.

The woman influences greatly the spiritual and moral development of the child. Religious fanaticism of the parents can violate children’s rights. Thus there was an illegal commercial kindergarten of radical trend closed in Almaty. Children learned Arabic and basics of religion. Kindergartners carried hijabs. There are cases when parents forbid girls to go to school, as they cannot put on hijab for the lessons. Authorities are alarmed by the quick propagation of radical ideas. Economic success of the country is no `panacea against the activity of radical religious movements. Globalization and integration of Kazakhstan into international processes enhance these threats.

The measures of fighting religious extremism should be of integrated type. National security services control proselyte activity of Islam missionaries, confiscate weapons and extremist publications. To prevent the increase in dispersion of dangerous material, religious extremist texts undergo religious expert evaluation. The statutes of religious associations, audio and video products and other publications are checked.

The state takes seriously this question because the multitude of extremist Islamic movements is regarded as a threat to stability and unity of the Kazakh society. But more strict state control can violate freedom of conscience. Sometimes the expansion of radical ideas is connected with unsatisfactory work of local Muslim clerics. Many experts are very critical about the activity of SDMK. Mosque imams are often poorly trained and unprofessional in their work. Not all of them have higher or secondary specialized religious education.

It is not always that mullahs can correctly explain the essence of traditional Islam to believers, and, moreover, they do not dare to participate in discussions on religious questions and Salafism with representatives of radical movements active in Kazakhstan. The problem of lack of theologians and cult servants with good religious education is not new. Upon gaining independence by Kazakhstan, this was the most crucial aspect when religious revival began. Representatives of Muslim clergy did not have special religious education or any deep knowledge of Islamic theology, neither did they study Arabic.

Positions of official Islam were weakened by almost a century of state atheism policy. Many mosques were closed during the soviet period. Representatives of traditional Islam found themselves in a difficult position compared to preachers of radical Islam, professionally well trained and profusely financed from abroad by such countries as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and Syria. Severe competition with Islam radicals, in attracting people to the mosques as well, was affected by the low level of the training of the mullahs.

The question of providing all Kazakhstan mosques with highly educated staff is quite critical. 50 imams per year graduate from the only Islamic University in Kazakhstan. SDMK lacks funds to train them. The severe lack of well educated religious people is one of the reasons why radical trends of Islam propagate. In their turn, when criticized, representatives of SDMK reply that their resources for propaganda of Hanafi Mazhab to which the Muslims of the country traditionally belong are quite limited.

The poor social conditions in which imams live also play their role. Some rural mosques do not have any imams at all. It is there that representatives of radical movements start their activity.The leaders of Muslim community are alarmed by the growing influence of various Islamist groups in Kazakhstan. The representatives of the clergy are troubled by the fact that young people are religiously uneducated and join other movements.

The line between moderate religiosity and radical fanatic ideas is very thin and young people cross it even without seeing it. Imams started to carry conversations with people about religion and to instruct the young about wearing beards and hijab. They popularize the values of “traditional religion” and explain the threat of radical movements for the national security.

Imams emphasize the importance of religious education of young people. They suggest that believers should study Islam in mosques, Madrasah, at the official Internet sites of the big Mosques. Education is an important part of the integrated measures against religious extremism. SDMK speaks for the broad educational activity within the population. Though the interest in religion is progressing, most Muslims in Kazakhstan, as well as the representatives of the clergy, do not systematically have knowledge of religion’s basics.

For instance, in nineteen nineties it was popular among the young people to carry amulets (“tumar”). They were made of cloth with a surah of the Quran written on paper. Amulets were blessed by mullahs in mosques. And they were thought to belong to Islamic tradition. Today religiously educated people do not carry amulets as they do not correspond to the Islamic canons.

One becomes acquainted with Islam in the family, by reading books, information sites, discussions on the Internet forums or with the help of a preacher in the mosque. But because of the lack of information they sometimes fall under the influence of missionaries of extremist movements directly in the street. Authorities and leaders of Muslim clergy are alarmed not just by the growing religious activity of Kazakhs, but by the fact that they join radical movements.

In the middle of the nineteenth century one could acquire Islamic education with local mullahs or in the Muslim educational institutions in Ufa and Kazan. For example according to “Kazakh” paper (1917), in ten years 154 Kazakhs graduated from Madrasah “Galya” in Ufa. In the Soviet period Kazakh youth acquired religious education in Uzbekistan.

It is currently possible to acquire elementary spiritual education and to study Arabic at the mosque courses. One can also acquire Secondary Muslim education in Madrasahs in Merke, Lugovoi, Taraz, Shymkent and Almaty and higher religious education at the Islamic University “Nur Mubarak”. Imams are also trained in foreign theology institutions of the Eastern countries. The best university students were sent on the account of foreign sponsors to study in high schools of Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Syria and Kuwait. However, they were often sent to Muslim universities where they studied the Quran and Islamic theology. It was one of the external types of Islamist training.

There is the Islamic Institute of advanced training at the Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Kazakhstan (SDMK). 800 imams got further training there. Muslim clergy pays great attention to the dissemination of information about Islam, especially among the young people. That was the aim of the first Islamic TV channel “Asyl Arna” launched under the guidance of SDMK. The programs give interpretation of Islam, religious movements, and clarify the issue of interethnic peace. The Council “Foundation for support of Islam culture and education” is one of the tools to provide population with knowledge about Islam. The foundation assists in publishing books about traditional Islam and the informative spiritual magazine “Islam in Kazakhstan “.

In order to provide the young generation with religious education a new school subject “Religious studies” was introduced. As well as the quality of the text books, the fact that the new subject was taught by the people, who themselves did not have profound knowledge in the field of religion, were criticized. Only two universities train teachers in “Religious studies” that is why the shortage of trained specialist is so severe.

All these measures should help to provide knowledge about religions in Kazakhstan and to form progressive social consciousness of the young people. A new concept of Kazakh moderate Islam is suggested as a possible solution in the struggle with the radical movements. It is currently in the stage of development.

There exists a variety of approaches to the understanding of Islam in Kazakhstan, as well as ethnic and Islamic understanding. There are different concepts of “the Kazakh Islam”: a popular Islam at the level of ceremonies and everyday life, a synthesis of Islam and elements of pre-Islam beliefs and cults, and a Sufi doctrine of Khoja Akhmet Yassawy.

There also exists a variant of mild religiosity of Kazakhs. Traditionally Kazakhs belong to the religious trend of Muslim-Sunni influenced by ideas of Sufism. There is an opinion, mostly among intellectuals, that the original religion of Kazakhs is Tengrianism (a sky cult), and efforts should be taken for its revival.

There exists a threat that under the influence of the followers of Islam, non-traditional for Kazakhstan, the society can be doomed to splitting into groups. Urban Muslim-Kazakhs often oppose conservative traditions, while rural Muslims remain mostly faithful to “traditional Islam”. How can we expect Islam to develop in our country in this case? In order to settle this question it is necessary to choose an integrated approach, taking national traditions into account.

The specificity of Islam in Kazakhstan is determined by its intertwining with national traditions, devotion of Kazakhs to customs and traditions. Islam of Hanafiyah trend prevailing in Kazakhstan was close to the spiritual specificity of Kazakhs. Kazakhs did not belong to orthodox Muslims. Many Kazakhs celebrate rites and ceremonies never thinking about their inherent meanings. In other words, religious traditions tightly interlaced with national customs. In this way appeared a synthesis of Islam with ancient Turkic beliefs.

Islam in Kazakhstan, together with the main canons of Islam, imbedded national traditions of ancestors. Currently one can witness the search of the Kazakh concept of Islam. In the time of Islamist radical activity, which presents a serious danger for the country, it is necessary to have a homegrown alternative to radical Islam. The agency for affairs of religions develops measures to oppose religious extremism in Kazakhstan. It has suggested the idea of a new concept of “moderate peaceful Islam”. It proposes a further upgrade of the status of the traditional Islam of Sunni trend of Hanafi Mazhab and reinforcement of the role played by the Muslim clergy in Kazakhstan.

To our mind, the concept implies further development of the spiritual part of Islam and not the ritual part. The task is to revive traditional Islam, by showing the culture of Islam and its Muslim values. At the same time the concept of “moderate peaceful Islam” means that it is inadmissible for radical forces to use Islam for political purposes in multi-confessional Kazakhstan. It permits to diminish Islamo-phobia in the society.

The chairman of the Agency for affairs of religions Lama Sharif put forward the initiative “One nation – one religion”. We consider that this concept contradicts the Law “About freedom of confession and religious associations” which states that “no religion or religious association takes any advantages in relation to others”. Kazakhstan is a multinational state where different ethnic groups freely practice various religions. These are the main values of the country and they are the basis of stability of the Kazakh society. Sharif’s thesis causes negative consequences for and threatens public stability and inter-confessional consent in the country.

The Republic of Kazakhstan is a secular state in which religion is separated from the state. The preference and state support for one religion harms others. This religion becomes opposed to all other dogmas which peacefully co-exist in the country. The concept of development of one particular religion breaks the principle of noninterference of the state in affairs of religious associations and impairs religious tolerance in the country.

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EU spying plan: European Capability for Situational Awareness

September 26th, 2013

By SMART.

In times of social and political unrest, governments of mature and nascent democracies are increasingly tempted to reduce freedom of speech and unrestricted access to information, both offline and online.

It is undoubted that Internet and more broadly Information and Communication Technologies (ICT´s) can be conducive to a more effective protection and exercise of human rights across borders, facilitating freedom of expression and serving as a catalyst for social change, cultural diversity, political expression and democratic prosperity.

However, the opportunities for pluralism and diversity brought about by these technological developments are not risk-free. At the same time that the Internet has opened up a platform for journalists, bloggers, human rights defenders, political activists and citizens to make their voices heard, it has also allowed the use of sophisticated censorship and surveillance methods by non-democratic regimes to silent political criticism.

It is in that scenario that ICTs are an essential contributing factor for the creation of positive dynamics among citizens, freedom and democracy, as well as an unprecedented enabler of dialogue: a key element in society that requires ensuring that all parties can communicate, access and exchange information without restrictions, gateways or filters, and with appropriate privacy and security protections.

DG CONNECT, in close cooperation with other services (DG Development and Cooperation; DG Enterprise) and the European External Action Service (EEAS), has put in place the No-Disconnect Strategy. The goal of this policy toolkit is to provide on-going support to counter-censorship initiatives to facilitate the role of activists, political dissidents, bloggers, journalists and citizens living and/or operating in high-risk environments, making operational its commitment to uphold human rights and fundamental freedoms online.

This way, the No-Disconnect Strategy embraces the wider EU strategy for Human Rights. The No-Disconnect Strategy is part of the integrated response of the European Union to the events that unfolded in the Middle East and North African region during the Arab Spring to support and advance human rights and democracy in the region, as envisaged in the Joint Communication of the Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy “A Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the Southern Mediterranean” (COM(2011) 200)

Currently, the geographical scope of the Strategy is not limited to the aforementioned region, but operates at global scale given the fact that the implementation of the NoDisconnect Strategy is achieved in cooperation with other Services and through EU global instruments such as the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rightsled by DG Development and Cooperation; and the EU Strategic Framework on Human Rights and Democracy, led by the European External Action Service.

1.2. Specific Context

Keeping track of worldwide developments in the area of cyber censorship and establishing the link between Internet restrictions and violations of human rights can be greatly enhanced by a global monitoring system to develop «cartography» of digital repression, capable of mapping events in the cyber-geography of Internet through intelligence gathering.

A truly European capability for situational awareness that provides near-real time monitoring and visualization tools to increase the understanding of the state of Internet censorship can help EU decision-makers to obtain high-quality information and fine-tune early-warning capabilities necessary to better perform their functions, particularly in those cases which may require EU integrated and multi-level intervention.

Information that is quick, actionable and contextualized can ensure that institutional actions are tailored to reality and that appropriate awareness is created on outstanding technological, political, social, legal, media, policy and human rights related cyber censorship issues.

Through targeted event monitoring, not only EU Institutions but also digital activists, bloggers, journalists, human rights defenders, the open source community, researchers as well as many other stakeholders involved in the area of digital freedoms and Internet openness, will gain full situational awareness of the threat landscape and type of environment in which they operate, in order to make sound decisions and put in place fast response schemes in the event of a wide array of restrictions : a sharp increase of human rights violations in a given region such as crackdowns on civil society ; the enforcement of Internet restrictive policies and regulations ; court cases and wrongful detentions/imprisonments ; cyber-attacks to servers hosting politically sensitive content ; or Internet connectivity shutdowns, among others.

One of the reasons behind this technological effort is that Internet and other ICT´s have become key instruments for tracking political events and media; for crisis management and mapping; for disaster response ; for monitoring; for the development of preventive capabilities and risk assessments ; or for the support of democratization processes.

These capabilities can also be applied to events affecting negatively the integrity of Internet infrastructure, like Domain name system (DNS) filtering, state sponsored attacks to cyber activists systems or filtering blanket laws, for instance, to address questions of overall Internet security, resilience and stability. Internet can potentially be used for purposes that are inconsistent with fundamental values as well as inconsistent with basic Internet resilience and stability principles, adversely affecting the performance of critical systems and diminishing Internet security and stability as a whole: it can be argued that blocking and filtering can impair the architectural principles of the Internet and cause harmful (collateral) effects to other systems.

The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) has also accomplished research in the field of country-wide Internet outages caused by censorship. Others have focused on studying the collateral damages of censorship by DNS injection.

Last but not least, monitoring Internet censorship and its environment, both at the level of network infrastructure / network traffic and “on the ground”, can reinforce EU´s evidence-based approach to policy making as well as support the implementation of a human rights based approach, whereby human rights considerations and indicators can be factored in the European Union´s Internet and ICT policy development activities, among others.

It is therefore a priority for the European Union to: a) ensure the availability of Internet and other ICT´s as well as their use without arbitrary interference; and b) gather the necessary data to construct a global view of the cyber geography of censorship and its dynamics through targeted monitoring.

1.3.Examples of organisations and existing projects in the area of Internet monitoring

The European Commission has funded several Framework Programme research projects in the area of Internet and event monitoring. In particular, the 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7) has provided support to projects like EVERGROW (www.evergrow.org) and LOBSTER (www.ist-lobster.org); ETOMIC (www.etomic.org) -subproject of EVERGROW-; DIMES (www.netdimes.org) ; MOME (www.ist-mome.org) ; MOMENT (“www.fp7-moment.eu/”); perfSONAR (http://www.perfsonar.net/ for network performance monitoring in federated environments, developing services acting as an intermediate layer between the performance measurement tools and the diagnostic or visualization applications; or TRAMMS -Traffic Measurements and Models in MultiService Networks- (http://projects.celtic-initiative.org/tramms/).

The European Parliament asks regularly the European Commission to implement pilot projects related to media freedom and pluralism. For instance, the European Commission was asked in 2013 to implement two pilot projects, on the Media Pluralism Monitoring Tool (09 02 07) and on a European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (33 02 10).

It is possible that pilot projects in this area could also be foreseen by the budget of the European Union in the following years.
The U.S. Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) addresses topics related to Internet infrastructure level measurements and analysis to understand traffic trends affecting those infrastructures. Ark (Archipelago Measurement Infrastructure) is CAIDA’s active measurement infrastructure to reduce the effort needed to develop and deploy sophisticated large-scale measurements on a security-hardened distributed platform (http://www.caida.org/home/).

Most of the above mentioned initiatives and projects focus on monitoring Internet mainly at the lower OSI model layers. Lately the importance of collecting Internet data and information on traffic at higher layers and « on the ground » to obtain statistical data on Internet usage and usage of Internet applications, has grown considerably and currently attracts the attention of Internet researchers, advocates, industry, as well as of policy makers.

The European Commission has already launched in this context a study on « Statistical methodologies on Internet as a source of data gathering » – SMART 2010/0030, with the aim to test the feasibility of new forms of internet-based data collection that could enrich the efforts to monitor the take-up of ICT by social actors as well as the main impacts of ICT based applications and services ; and a study on « European Internet traffic: monitoring tools and analysis » – SMART 2012/0046, for the mapping of existing Internet monitoring tools and methodologies and to determine the sort of federated monitoring models that can be applied in Europe given the large amount of projects already active in the field.

2 OBJECTIVES

The tender “European capability for situational awareness” (ECSA) is aimed at providing to the European commission the necessary information to evaluate the feasibility of creating a European federation for cyber-censorship and human rights monitoring and the systems infrastructure necessary to that end. As such, the tasks of the study will address the definition of the governance framework and systems infrastructure that should govern and support the operations of a possible federation.

In order to translate reality into a cartography of cyber-censorship, the federation would be anchored in a dynamic platform -controlled from a dashboard-, where a federated network of partners Internet and censorship monitoring capabilities will aggregate a variety of clearly defined sets of data (including open data and big data) related to the location and intensity of cyber-censorship and surveillance in non-democratic countries or countries where human rights are most at risk.

The data gathering will have two tracks, the first one addressing restrictions/disruptions on internet and ICT infrastructure, access, traffic and content, overlaid with a second track of contextual data of political, social, legal, regulatory, policy, media or human rights nature, related to the internet or not. The reliable and near-real time information mashed-up in the dashboard will be presented in a user friendly manner and in different layers: interactive visualizations through live maps; alarms; subject-matter snapshot reports and geographical snapshot reports.

This type of capability is expected to enhance the early-warning, decision-making and policy making skills of EU policy makers and strengthen the level of situational awareness of stakeholders such as digital activists or human rights defenders. When drafting the offer, it is recommended that TENDERERS take into account the following long-term objectives or expected contributions of the tender “European Capability for Situational Awareness” to EU specific objectives:

− Enhancement of evidence-based policy making based on reliable information

− Support to the implementation of Human Rights-based approaches

− Reinforcement of early-warning capabilities and emergency response

− Optimization of resources and tailored targeted grant support in areas where human rights are most at risk in terms of cyber censorship

− Reinforcement of capabilities to ensure global Internet connectivity

− Ensure Internet security, resilience and stability

− Provide methods for network measurement

− Increase of situational awareness of actors affected by the complexity of cyber censorship, in particular of policy-makers, digital activists and human rights defenders

− Provide capabilities for crisis mapping A brief analysis of the current Internet monitoring ecosystem (including news/media, human rights, filtering and surveillance, traffic, security, legal or regulatory monitoring among others) suggests a rather scattered and haphazard scenario with several players (research centres, NGO´s, private sector or specific constituencies) but with little or no federation vision.

The results of individual projects could be stepped-up for the protection of fundamental freedoms online by means of a simple federation effort. The joint work of the various existing initiatives can play a decisive role in observing the complexity of cyber-censorship from and interdisciplinary and holistic point of view.

For that reason this study is expected to provide a detailed analysis of the different key constitutive elements of a targeted cyber-Censorship monitoring tool, provide recommendations on implementation and budget and present a small scale prototype or proof-of-concept use case with real data.

The tenderer will have to specify in the proposal:

• TASK 1: A list of Internet censorship monitoring organizations capable to constitute a Federation and a proposal for the structure of such Federation

• TASK 2: A catalogue of data sources and categories

• TASK 3: A proposal of a data governance framework, establishing the protocols that will govern the management of the data collected

• TASK 4: A list of necessary infrastructure, features and functionalities

• TASK 5: A set of recommendations on the implementation of the aforementioned tasks.

More specifically, the tasks to be performed under the contract are as follows:

Task 1 Internet censorship monitoring FederationTo develop a capability for situational awareness it is necessary that the monitoring activity is carried out by the collaborative work of a federated network10 of organizations with the relevant expertise and active in the field of Internet censorship monitoring (please see examples in Section 1.3). This federated network of organizations will act as data sources of a centralized system for further aggregation and processing.

The study should produce a complete and diverse list of existing projects and organizations which could be federated for the monitoring, collection and analysis of data related to Task 2. The list must be accompanied by an analysis of the different data sources and types of data collected by each organization or project, the methods employed, the tools or technological developments already in place, the type of expertise and the target groups.

This section of the study must also present a proposal for the structure of the Federation. At least, it shall contain a roadmap with the steps to create such federation; explain how the federation innovates, builds upon and complements other initiatives; provide a planning on how structural relationships will be ensured; present a membership scalability plan and a sustainability plan; indicate the allocation of rights, responsibilities and resources among members of the Federation; define the incentives for members of the federation; identify a common methodology for data gathering and processing based on open standards, protocols and API´s, and propose 5 individual members to constitute an “Advisory Group” that will guide the activities of the future federation during the execution of the contract.

For the purpose of this task (and to support the achievement of Tasks 2-4), the contractor will have to run a consultation targeting Internet (censorship, surveillance and security) monitoring on how to best achieve the objectives of this tender immediately after the start of the contract and during the first 4 months after the start of the contract, followed by the organisation of a workshop to showcase the results and gather additional input from attendees.

The results of the consultation and the workshop will be presented within the content of the First Interim Study Report. This section of the study must also present a proposal for proportional allocation of roles, responsibilities and resources among members of the federation.

This part of the study should be able to reply to the following questions, taking into account the context outlined in Section 1:
• What monitoring organizations, facilities and networks do exist primarily in Europe
(28 Member States)?

• What are the main monitoring capabilities of those existing initiatives?

• What sort of federated monitoring models can be applied in Europe and what is the
best way to implement them?

Task 2 Data Sources catalogue

Taking into account the results of the consultation, the study should produce a comprehensive list of data sources and categories to be monitored for the enhancement of human rights and effective exercise of fundamental freedoms online. Those data sources and categories will be main sources of information for the central monitoring system, and therefore ensuring their richness as well as the variety of the aggregators is a key requirement. While defining the list, Contractors will have to take into account the following conditions:

– The event monitoring activity and the data gathering will happen at two levels:

a) The first level relates to the “state of the Internet infrastructure, connectivity and access”, in order to have a near-real-time understanding of network disruptions and traffic alterations in the form of blocking; filtering; connectivity blackouts or slowdowns; power outages; cyber-attacks and security events including attacks on activists´ networks via Distributed Denial of Service attacks, spyware or malware; countries passing laws or applying measures with a negative impact on Internet infrastructure and on its resilience, security and stability; cyber censorship and surveillance technological developments; stateled cyber-attacks, etc.

This track must provide early-warning capabilities, enhance incident response schemes and ensure network connectivity in the event of disruptions, besides providing a new source of information about Internet security and infrastructure incidents. It shall
gather reliable data concerning the “cyber-geography” of Internet infrastructure, traffic, access and connectivity taking into account that Internet can potentially be used for purposes that are inconsistent with fundamental rights as well as inconsistent with basic Internet resilience and stability principles, thus adversely affecting the integrity of the Internet as a whole.

b) The second level relates to “what is happening on the ground”, to have a near-realtime understanding of events and developments taking place in connection with censorship and surveillance but from the perspective of human rights organizations, domestic and international media networks or outlets, legal, policy, research organizations and democracy advocates.

Monitoring activities will address locations where there are grave concerns over intense citizen surveillance or illegitimate censorship of the Internet and other electronic communication technologies and will monitor, for instance: laws and policies affecting the use of ICT for the exercise and protection of human rights; media freedom and pluralims constrains; relevant political events affecting digital freedoms; arrest of activists and journalists in connection to ICT blocked sites; different types of restrictions to freedom of expression; court rulings; illegal detentions; unrest in time of elections; crack-downs on protesters and a wide array of other human rights violations.

This track must provide early-warning capabilities, support evidence and human rights based approaches to Internet policy-making; enhance crisis prevention and management activities, support democracy building and advocacy campaigns and ensure that ICTs are at the disposal of human rights. It shall gather reliable data across actors and organizations directly involved in digital freedoms and the defense of human rights on the ground, as well as from research and academic institutions, legal centers or organizations, private security companies and media actors of all sorts.

– As indicated above, data can be gathered from a wide variety of sources to be defined, such as public sources using Open Data, Big Data and Scientific Data; from private entities, civil society, Academia, actors on the ground, etc. Without the intention of limiting the categories of data to the ones referred below, there are a number of data sets that at least should be monitored:

1. Technical data: Internet infrastructure measurement; connection speed; Internet routing data; correlation of routing data with other intelligence; jitter; traffic latencies; packed loss; packet interception; wrong query resolving; network connectivity shutdowns and slowdowns; state of “health” of the DNS and BGP systems; impact of implementation of DNS-level filtering and blocking measures; surveillance technology producers and trade operations; IP traffic restrictions; proxy censorship; Internet backbone performance; Denial of Service attacks; politically-motivated attacks; malware activity; attacks to activists or media networks; domain de-registration; server takedowns; URLs intervened; targeted redirections; network outages; or power grid failures; domains seized.

2. Internet tools data: restrictions on websites that provide e-mail or other applications like social networks; web hosting; search engines; translation services; VoIP services; circumvention tools; security software; anonymizers; security and privacy training materials; P2P file-sharing, chat or IMS.

3. Political data: unlawful restrictions applied to websites expressing views contrary to the government and government opposition groups; human rights related content such as advocacy, abuses, women liberties; freedom of expression; minority rights; religious movements; foreign policy; political transformations and elections; ethnic groups; history; economics; international organizations; NGOs, activists and human rights defenders; political parties and opposition parties; quality of governmental organizations and judicial system; elections data. 4. Conflict/Security data: armed conflicts; border disputes; extremist and separatist movements; government militias; military operations; cyber capabilities; cyberwar; data loss; hosting disruptions; malware; spyware.

5. Legal and Policy data: legislative developments related to censorship and surveillance; laws to restrict of freedom of expression; court rulings; possibilities to appeal; Internet rights; possibilities to report blocked content like whistle-blowing services; judicial system monitoring; IPR enforcement; Law Enforcement Agencies; arrests; Internet policy, abusive application and/or criminal defamation laws and disproportionate civil sanctions, including laws related to the criticism of politicians, abusive invocation of public morality or national security (including protection of the nation or national values or incorrect application of hate speech laws)

6. Business data: Internet and ICT industry practices affecting human rights; Business and Human Rights initiatives and guidelines; private censorship; or dualuse export controls.

7. Social/Human Rights data: sexual content; minorities and women´s rights; gaming; gambling; dating sites; drugs and alcohol; public health; sensitive or controversial history, art and literature; environmental issues; hate speech; LGBTI; sex education and family planning; pornography; activism; freedom of association; hacking or topics perceived as sensitive or offensive.

8. Media data: media intelligence; social networks; local and foreign press; media outlets; news and video platforms; freedom of expression and media freedom and pluralism; blogging domains; platforms and services; web hosting sites; satellite blocking or jamming; multimedia sharing platforms or restrictions on allocation of spectrum, harassment, intimidation and fostering of self-censorship, impunity for crimes against media actors, media ownership and/or concentration endangering the possibility of independent media.

This part of the study should be able to reply to the following questions, taking into the context outlined in Section 1 and in Section 2 – Task 1:

• What data sources and categories are necessary (including the ones referred to in
the text above and beyond those if appropriate), whether they are all accessible and
to whom are they available?

• What are the data sources and categories which the Federation proposed in Task 1
can provide and what are the gaps as compared to this analysis?

• How will the gathering of such data be organized?

Task 3 Data Governance Framework (Data Protocol)

The contractor should present a coherent proposal for the Data Governance framework applicable to the data gathered. The framework must be based on objective data governance standards to ensure the quality of the data collection, processing, storage, organization, access, display and communication.

At least, the data governance framework must determine applicable criteria to issues of: data collection; data ownership; data quality and quantity; processing; storage; digitalization; presentation; data verification; data security; anonymity; different types of access to data (roles); duration of access; restricted uses; fair and ethical uses; “do not harm” principle; responsibility for damages; disclosure obligations; enforcement; transparency vs. security; data retention or data loss. The contractors can propose the inclusion of additional factors in the data governance framework to ensure an efficient and safe governance of data resources.

The study should contain an analysis of the possibility to set up, on top of the open database, an additional layer of information for restricted use of the EU institutions and containing restricted EU information and sensitive or confidential information coming from operations on the ground. The contractor should make recommendations as regards this issue in Task 5.

In addition, the contractors should present a proposal for implementation of the suggested Data Governance Framework, clearly indicating the relationship of such data governance activities with the role of members of the Federation and the necessary software and hardware infrastructure (for this purpose it is necessary to align the content of this study task with the technical and infrastructure specifications, features and functionalities requested in Task 4).

This part of the study should be able to reply to the following questions, taking into the context outlined in Section 1 and in Section 2 -Task 1 and Task 2:

• What are the main elements that should be taken into account by an optimal data governance model?

• Are there data governance standards that can be used for this particular case?

• Do all data sets and sources need the same level of protection?

• What kind of security measures need to be put in place?

• How will data governance model be implemented among members of the Federation and what is the necessary infrastructure to make it operative?

To continue reading this great report. Please go to: http://cryptome.org/2013/09/eu-spying-plan.pdf

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Israel exposes Iran’s strategic goal: nuclear weapons capability

September 26th, 2013

By Cryptome.

Iran’s strategic goal: nuclear weapons capability.

Iran’s interim goal: A deal with minor concessions that preserves Iran’s future ability to rush forward to produce nuclear weapons.

1. The current Iranian charm offensive aims at reaching a deal with the international community that will preserve Iran’s ability to rapidly build a nuclear weapon at a time of its choosing – the so-called breakout option.

2. Iran seeks an arrangement in which sanctions are eased or lifted in exchange for cosmetic concessions, while allowing Iran to retain sufﬁcient nuclear material and – no less importantly – nuclear infrastructure to complete its military nuclear program on short notice.

3. Iran is developing and installing new and advanced centrifuges for this purpose. These centrifuges enable Iran to enrich – within weeks – even low enriched uranium to weapons grade highly enriched uranium, the most critical component in making nuclear weapons. This speedy enrichment capability will make timely detection and effective response to an Iranian nuclear breakout increasingly difﬁcult, if not impossible.

4. Thus, by themselves Iranian cessation of high enrichment and agreement to hand over all of its existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium would be insufﬁcient. Iran could still speedily use its advanced centrifuges to transform its stocks of low enriched uranium to weapons grade highly enriched uranium in no time.

5. Iran’s negotiation strategy is entirely consistent with Rouhani’s policy of “smile and enrich.” Rouhani has boasted that when he was Iran’s nuclear negotiator, he engaged the West in futile negotiations to buy the time needed to complete the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, an indispensable part of Iran’s military nuclear program.

6. Since the Iranian elections, the regime has continued to move full steam ahead towards attaining a nuclear weapons capability. Iran continues to enrich uranium (in deﬁance of UN Security Council and IAEA resolutions), continues to upgrade both the quantity and quality of its centrifuges, continues to build the heavy water reactor in Arak nd continues to deny IAEA inspectors access to sites suspected of housing military nuclear activities.

7. Iran must be prevented from achieving a breakout capacity. The international community must make the following unequivocal demands of Iran.

Iran must:

a. stop all nuclear enrichment;

b. dismantle the illicit underground nuclear facility near Qom and the cascades of second generation centrifuges in Natanz;

c. remove all enriched material from its territory;

d. stop the construction of the heavy water reactor in Arak.

8. Only by ensuring that Iran complies with all four conditions will the international community succeed in stopping Iran’s nuclear program. Any half-measures would allow Iran to continue developing nuclear weapons capabilities behind a smokescreen of promises.

9. Until Iran meets all these obligations, the pressures on it must be increased, rather than decreased.

10. In order to achieve a genuine and enforceable arrangement that will deny Iran a nuclear breakout option, diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran must be increased and backed up by a credible military threat.

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Somalia’s Al-Shabaab: Down But Not Out

September 22nd, 2013

By George Washington University.

Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahedeen, meaning “Mujahedeen Youth Movement” in Arabic, is an alQa’ida aﬃliated terrorist organization that seeks to establish an Islamist state in Somalia. In its short history, al-Shabaab has evolved from a small militia group to a formidable insurgent force that once controlled signiﬁcant amounts of territory. Extending beyond Somalia, al-Shabaab has pursued a global jihadist agenda by launching terrorist a Tacks in countries such as Uganda and Kenya, and soliciting support from the Somali diaspora and external extremist groups.

Following the 2006-09 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, al-Shabaab rose to national prominence as a symbol of resistance against Ethiopian ‘occupiers.’ Filling the void in the wake of Ethiopia’s withdrawal and the collapse of the Islamic Courts

Union, the group rapidly expanded becoming Somalia’s dominant governing enty. By August 2010, al-Shabaab controlled the majority of south and central Somalia, and launched its ﬁrst international a Tack targeting Uganda’s capital Kampala with multiple suicide bombings.However, by late 2011, al-Shabaab’s fortunes had turned. A three pronged oﬀensive led by government allied African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), Kenyan, and Ethiopian forces, combined with a famine in south and central Somalia, forced al-Shabaab to withdraw from Mogadishu and reassess its strategy.

Over the next year, internal divisions, a loss of public support, and continued oﬀensives by government-allied forces throughout the country signiﬁcantly weakened the group. Although al-Shabaab remains a major threat to security in Somalia, today, the group’s resources, territory, and inﬂuence have diminished signiﬁcantly.

Origins

While al-Shabaab emerged as an organization in 2006, the group’s roots extend back to the 1980s and the nascent stages of the militant political Islamic movement in Somalia. In particular, the militant group al-Ihad al-Islam (AIAI) provided a platform for the growth of religious extremism and the training of future al-Shabaab leaders in Somalia.

By 2005, al-Shabaab had emerged as a loose organization of militia leaders running the military wing of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a conglomeration of religious courts competing for control of south and central Somalia. As of 2006, the UIC had rapidly become the dominant political body in south and central Somalia, taking full control of Mogadishu.

Facilitated in part by ﬁnancial backing from Persian Gulf and Somali businessmen, The UIC’s increasing strength along with the inclusion of extremist elements, was deemed a threat to Ethiopia and the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia, based in of Nairobi.8 In late 2006, with international support, Ethiopia invaded Somalia and ousted the UIC.

The collapse of the UIC led to the emergence of several groups engaged in a bloody insurgency against Ethiopian forces. Nonetheless, al-Shabaab dominated the struggle, and by the :me Ethiopia withdrew in January 2009, the group had evolved to become Somalia’s most eﬀective ﬁghting force.

2009 – A Poli>cal Vacuum in Somalia Several independent factors helped facilitate al-Shabaab’s ascendency in Somalia, the most prevalent of which is the failure of various political ideologies and governments to establish lasting law and order. Aper Siad Barre’s military dictatorship fell in 1991, Somalia lapsed into nearly two decades of clan aﬃliated warlordism and the absence of central government rule.10 During this period, 14 internationally backed eﬀorts, such as the 2000-04 Transitional National Government (TNG), tried and failed to rehabilitate the country – earning it the reputation of the world’s worst failed state.

Following years of ﬁghting, a new order began to emerge in Somalia around 2000.12 Inﬂuenced by political Islam and proselytizing Wahhabi Islamists from the Gulf, religion took on an increasing role in Somali society. Islamic charities and leaders rose to prominence helping facilitate an environment for the increased acceptance of Islamist organizations.

Al-Shabaab’s Relationship with Clans

Clans remain at the heart of Somali society and identity, and understanding clan politics is key to understanding local dynamics and the failures of central governance. Since its inception, al-Shabaab has been critical of clannism, attempting to present itself as above clan politics. During its rise to prominence, al-Shabaab espoused a narrative of “Somali Nationalism” to unify Somalis under al-Shabaab and mitigate clan conflict.

Nonetheless, al-Shabaab has engaged in clan-based military and economic alliances throughout south and central Somalia at times. In many instances, al-Shabaab intervened in conflicts between clans or backed minority clans against rival dominant clans. Additionally, many top al-Shabaab leaders are also prominent clan figures and al-Shabaab has drawn support from these connections to strengthen the organizations position in Somalia.

(Senior al-Shabaab commander Muktar Robow from the Rahanweyn clan is one such example). Conversely, clan rivalries have also caused turbulence within al-Shabaab. For example, during the 2011 famine that ravaged south and central Somalia, some analysts felt al-Shabaab’s blocking of relief agencies caused conﬂict amongst its leadership, as the clan members of certain leaders, such as Muktar Robow, suﬀered immensely, while those of other leaders, such as Amir Ahmed Godane’s Isaaq clan did not experience the same fate.

Governance Structures

In 2010, al-Shabaab controlled the majority of south and central Somalia, establishing centralized governance structures and instating a chain of command that controlled thousands of ﬁghters and managed territory from the national to the local level. At the national level, al-Shabaab is led by Amir Abdi Ahmed Godane (Abu Zubeyr), who heads the main Shura council – a committee of key al-Shabaab leaders that ranges from eight to roughly forty members.18 Under the Shura council are a series of national ministries or “Maktabatu,” which are responsible for the group’s national military, media, ﬁnancial, and religious/legal operations.

This administrative structure is replicated at the regional level, where al-Shabaab divides into regional governing bodies or “Wilaadaya.” In 2010, the size and strength of these regional administrations varied signiﬁcantly, with the largest footprint in major urban centers such as Baidoa and Kismayo. Today, al-Shabaab largely retains a similar operating structure, but has been forced to adjust to territorial losses.

Al-Shabaab Messaging

While not monolithic in its ideology or goals, al-Shabaab employs several key narratives to present itself as the true and righteous power in Somalia and a unify of Muslims around the world. Al-Shabaab’s messaging strategy has also proven to be dynamic and innovative, marked by the group’s early embrace of social media and communication in multiple languages in an aTempt to a Tract wider support from the global Somali diaspora.

At its core, al-Shabaab subscribes to an extremely conservative religious ideology, Salafi-Jihadism, which runs counter to Sufism, a mystical form of Islam that has been practiced in Somalia since the 15th century. While Sufism is embraced by many different elements of Somali society, it is considered heretical by al-Shabaab.23 Portraying itself in a global battle against non-Muslims, al-Shabaab calls for the reunification of the Ummah (global Muslim community) under the Caliphate, a global Islamic state.

In 2009, al-Shabaab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane stated, “We will fight and the wars will not end until Islamic sharia is implemented in all continents in the world.” At the national level, al-Shabaab utilizes religious and nationalist sentiments to depict itself as defenders of Islam and Somalia in the face of invading forces.

Tapping into the wave of nationalism spurred by the 2006 Ethiopian invasion, al-Shabaab expanded its ranks from hundreds to thousands, and pushed for the establishment of an Islamic Emirate of Somalia. The organization initially generated considerable local and international support with this narrative, as many Somalis living in diaspora countries returned to Somalia to fight alongside al-Shabaab against the Ethiopians or provided financial support to the group.

In the United States, several individuals have either provided financial support for al-Shabaab or left to fight alongside the group in Somalia.29 Since 2007, more than twenty young men have left Minnesota – the home of the largest Somali Diaspora community in America – to fight with al-Shabaab.

External Linkages

Al-Shabaab maintains a formal aﬃlia:on with al-Qa’ida. Nonetheless, al-Shabaab’s ini:al appeals for a merger went unheeded by al-Qa’ida’s leader Osama Bin Laden, who believed a public alliance would bring undue pressure on Somalia. However, following the death of Bin Laden, al-Qa’ida’s new leader Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Shabaab Amir Godane released a video announcing the formal merger of the two groups in February 2012. While the alliance remains in place, al-Shabaab did not adopt the al-Qa’ida name and the relationship has created signiﬁcant internal rumblings amongst al-Shabaab’s leadership.

In April 2012, senior al-Shabaab commander Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys publicly challenged the authority of al-Shabaab and al-Qa’ida, declaring that jihad can be waged in many diﬀerent ways and by many diﬀerent groups. Aweys elaborated, “We are in al-Shabaab but its operation is very wrong, we should correct it . . . al Shabaab [sic] and al Qaeda [sic] do not represent the Muslim world, they are only part of it.”

Al-Shabaab has also worked closely with the Yemen-based al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). AlShabaab leaders have collaborated with AQAP and the group has open acted as a conduit to al-Qa’ida for al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab members have received training in Yemen and brokered weapons transfers. In 2012, two weapons shipments reportedly sent by AQAP intended for al-Shabaab were captured oﬀ Somalia’s northern coast.

In addition to working with al-Qa’ida and its aﬃliates, al-Shabaab has demonstrated its ambitions by expanding a presence throughout the Horn of Africa. Al-Shabaab aﬃliated extremist groups have sprouted up throughout East Africa; namely the Kenyan Muslim Youth Group (MYC) in Kenya and Ansar Muslim Youth Center (AMYC) in Tanzania. Moreover, upper Kenyan forces invaded Somalia in October 2011, al-Shabaab launched an aggressive campaign targeting security forces and civilians in Kenya.38

Al-Shabaab: Strategy and Tactics

Following the collapse of the UIC and departure of Ethiopian forces in 2009, al-Shabaab initially launched a guerilla warfare campaign designed to overthrow the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and establish an Islamic state in Somalia. Through local alliances and the use of tactics such as armed ambushes and suicide bombings, al-Shabaab captured large amounts of territory in south and central Somalia.

By August 2010, al-Shabaab had gained signiﬁcant strength and shipped its strategy to employ conventional military assaults and direct engagements with TFG and AMISOM forces. This was particularly true in Mogadishu, where al-Shabaab launched a military oﬀensive during the month of Ramadan [August 2010] that divided the city in half. However, the Ramadan oﬀensive failed to wrest control of the city from the government, and al-Shabaab’s fortunes came down. Facing mounting pressure from AMISOM and TFG forces in Mogadishu, al-Shabaab conducted a “strategic withdrawal” from the Somali capital in August 2011.

Following its departure from Mogadishu, alShabaab faced even greater challenges as Kenya began an incursion into southern Somalia, while anti-al-Shabaab militias, such as Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama (ASWJ), and Ethiopian forces pushed southeast from the Ethiopian border. To address these challenges, alShabaab withdrew from most major cities in Somalia. Some members fled to safe havens like the Galgala Mountains in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, and possibly other countries such as Yemen.

In south and central Somalia, al-Shabaab shifted its strategy back to a campaign based on guerilla warfare tactics.44 On all fronts, including Mogadishu, al-Shabaab increasingly employed irregular attacks ambushing military convoys, assassinating government and military officials, and conducting bombings with IEDs, grenades, and landmines.

Despite the shift back to guerilla warfare, al-Shabaab has not been able to stop the advance of allied forces. On 29 September 2012, Kenyan forces took Kismayo, al-Shabaab’s home base from which it generated significant amounts of revenue through the taxation of local economic activities. In response to the loss, al-Shabaab more than doubled its rate of attacks over the next three months launching over twenty per month against pro-government targets. While alShabaab has not sustained this intensity in 2013, likely due to its continued loss of financial resources and public support, it nonetheless retains the ability to inflict significant violence.

To keep reading this report go to: http://www.gwumc.edu/hspi/policy/HSPI%20Issue%20Brief%2022%20Somalia%20Al%20Shabaab.pdf

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Has modern media lost its old ways?

September 22nd, 2013

Contributor Opinion.

It seems when we look into the past, that journalism was significantly better before than it is now. Even though, news stations in the 70’s generated less revenue as compared to stations now, they had many more bureaus worldwide, specially when the editorial side was in control of the news desk. They also conducted more investigations and were tougher with the government or so it seemed.

After having the privilege to individually chat with a few good old journalist, they all agree, that the decline of the Media is due to the business side taking control of the editorial. But the corruption has taken a bigger leap on mainstream television broadcast, than on print, or radio. Even though, a few critics disagree.

From The Daily Journalist perspective, few networks produce good and solid investigations outside of their basic reports, undermining other ‘swept aside’ but more important issues that should be reported and are not.

In fact, national news networks (not local) seem to have a mechanical and circular bondage between Media-Business-Government which has strengthened over the years with worrisome doubts that surround their “close partnerships and interest.” One could say without almost no opposition that the Media, unlike in the past, “sleeps” with its investors and government watchdogs giving them special treatment. Hiding even perhaps important news due to outside pressure and financial punishment if published!

Obviously, understanding the problem above, Social Media ‘not’ classic Media has become an alternative tool for the public to get better and even more extensive insight on stories reported, but not investigated leaving a worrisome amount of doubts! And more than ever before, everyday people use Social Media as a medium to expose alternative news that the Media is not reporting, (but should), due to a somehow decline of serious investigations which has created lots of conspiracy theories.

But in your view, what is the difference between journalism now as compared to the journalism in the past? Do you agree or disagree most media networks are in decadence? Is the Media in bed with the government and other institutions that support it? Is Social Media: Youtube….the alternative route for many to expose, what the media fails to report? What is the future of the media and should it look to the past to find itself?

Hossein Amiri.

“What is the difference of reporting now as compared to the journalism in the past?

The difference is the equipment journalists have today that they didn’t have in the past. And the other difference is easier access to information. Today Journalist can get a lot of useful information from the office they are working via internet or social networks, but in they past they were not able.

Do you agree or disagree most media networks are in decadence?

At least the case is true for newspapers. Today people prefer to get the news from cyber media and from satellite channels.

Is the Media in bed with the government and other institutions that support it?

Unfortunately, this is the biggest problem for media today. The biggest problem comes from financial resources that they need. While they were handled in the past with little money, today they require more financial resources.

Is Social Media: Youtube….the alternative route for many to expose, what the media fails to report?

Some how, but their reputation is not as much as official Media and there is also a new phenomenon named citizens journalist.

What is the future of the media and should it look to the past to find itself?

No Idea.”

Claude Nougat.

“Great question, and a hard one to answer beyond my own personal point of view. Over the years (since the 1960s) I’ve been a faithful reader of the International Herald Tribune (particularly since the late 1970s when I started to live in Italy) which, as everyone knows, is the New York Times’ sister publication in Europe.

It is in fact quite different from the NYT and has its own team that contributes remarkable articles about Europe – politics and mores – and I can vouch for the excellence of the articles regarding Italy since I live there and follow local news – which by the way are often compliant with what the parties want. Italian newspapers are unbelievably politicized and have always been.

And that is my main point: the idea that journalism was more independent 40 or 50 years ago is a lovely idea but it is probably delusional. The past always looks better. We all think of the Washington Post, the Watergate scandal and the unraveling of an American President, the first in History.

But look at that episode another way (and I remember very well that is how it all struck us): it was so UNUSUAL that two reporters from a major newspaper managed to discover so much dirt coming from so high up (I mean the White House). Yes, that’s my point: it struck us all as highly unusual and remarkable.

Because the run-of-the-mill press was not that way, not at all. Journalists tended to toe the line that was given to them by the powers-at-be. Nothing unusual in this. It’s human nature. To have the courage to step out and tell the truth is something few people have…

And I’m not so sure that Social Media on Internet is the answer. I see a lot of self-serving articles and posts – we’ve fallen into the age of the “sponsored articles” that mixes fresh news and reporting with publicity for a given product or a celebrity.

So was the past so much better? I doubt it. Is SM on Internet the answer? Maybe. You tell me!”

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Sokari Ekine.

“It is difficult to say and I am presuming this question refers to US MSM for which I have no measure.

Nonetheless, I think first we have to separate print media that is now online and new online media with no print history and TV. Old news media like the Guardian, Reuters and US giants, the NYT and Washington Post still continue to engage in investigated journalism whilst at the same time are both constrained by financial cost of a declining print readership and having to rethink their media strategies. Still its a chicken / egg situation, the more investigate journalism they engage in sure the higher their readership?

My understanding is that like most things, media today is driven by business needs but it is the TV networks where the real corruption and decadence takes place. Al Jazeera is one of the few media giants that successfully incorporates, TV and online media, social media etc as well as produces great news programmes – and I am not saying they are without bias, but far less partizan than the rest of the MSM channels and I am happy they are finally able to broadcast in the US beyond the north east. Personally this is the only news channel I can bear to watch, the rest are so shamelessly partizan, uninformed and sensational in their presentation.

Social media, Twitter and blogs, do provide additional news and insight from the commons plus they can call out MSM when they are wrong or misrepresenting. However they only have the capacity for very local investigative work though this is generally of a very high standard.

I would like to see more local online news and community TV/Radio because it is here that we as people can truly engage in democratic processes. It would be great to see networks of local citizen led media reporting on their respective communities in the US and Europe like those reporting on Global Voices [globalvoicesonline.org].

Catherine Haig.

“Media has changed distinctly in the years past. Before we had Brinkley’s, Cronkite, Jennings, so many others that were legitimate journalists. Today we have Huffington Post and Yahoo full of kids with degrees in art history, philosophy, SEO Marketing…even Arianna Huffington is NOT a journalist yet she is co-owner and visible in the world of media. People actually listen to the “DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART” to get their news even though it’s billed as a comedy show.

Bill Mahr’s REALTIME on HBO is considered a news source and he’s also a comic. Even free newspapers in NYC like METRO which is better written than AM NY which is written by illiterate former employees from the NY Post – I don’t really know for sure so this isn’t a fact, merely an opinion. Sometimes reading the Huffington Post hurts my head and eyes so much I have to look elsewhere. CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CBS NEWS, CURRENT which is now AL JAZEERA all make me sick.

Recently Middle East “expert” Christine Amonpour gave her “expert” opinion on a show while crying and carrying on about how the USA should bomb Syria because of the “genocide” that is going on between rebels and the government. She sounded like a raving maniac but she is an “expert” and no one disagreed at least allowing her to rant for a bit which went viral.

The internet is at fault for much of the crap news that is going on in our world today. Anyone with an internet connection and an opinion can log on and spout their crap for all to argue with. Gone are the real news tellers – now we have story tellers who spin their lies so that we can bang our heads against the wall screaming for the truth.

Even TV show 60 MINS has gone to the dogs. With the admission of our Federal Gov with regards to “spying that NSA is performing on Americans” I doubt that the Feds have these media types in their pocket. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is the other way around. The “CI’s (confidential informers) are in our government and the storytellers are media after stories, soundbites, video and capturing a Pulitzer.

Bloggers, of which I am one, commit themselves to following hot stories and writing about them – writing their own opinions about them. I am so guilty of this but it’s a blog so that’s the excuse. However people like THE DRUDGE REPORT, DAILY BEAST, PEREZ HILTON have made their Opinions extremely lucrative. Money talks and bs walks. Every time a so called JOURNALIST opens their mouth today I look at the DAILY JOURNALIST, ROUTERS and/or other fact/sourced base online newspapers for the real news.

Each of these “media” outlets and this includes THE YOUNG TURKS (whom I believe are a total joke as an informational source) twist the news to fit their agenda. The news of the past is also questionable to me because as a kid growing up how do I really know half of what they told us on TV back then was the truth? We don’t know and never will.

Media then and today is like a game of telephone; by the end of the game the story has a new headline and a completely different content depending on who is telling the story. It’s also like a game of “who saw the same accident?” 5 people can see an accident but the cop may well get 5 different stories on the same incident because all five of those people saw the accident at different angles.”

Eric Tham.

“The advent of blogs / social media adds a new dimension to journalism. In the context of Singapore, the government recently passed a law that requires ‘qualified’ websites to be registered with a bond $50k to ensure compliance.

This raised initial ire amongst the internet community and the many websites. In my view, social media has diluted the influence of traditional media. Bloggers can now express their views ‘much easier’.

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George Bailey.

“Some of my primary research is based on the Kennedy assassination. The media of that time is similar today–a marriage between cooperate interests and the government.

As former CIA William Colby told Congress, “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” The internet, social media, and some select talk radio shows, have been a great boon to getting real news out. However, we must be leery of proposed government safeguards.

The mainstream press went from being our watchdog to a lapdog. We must be vigilant not to follow that path and keep all avenues for real news reporting and research open.”

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Ann Dillard.

“In my observances and opinion, earlier on we had a clear and purer intent for journalism. Journalism was once what held government, businesses and people accountable. As stations and networks grew in popularity and competition, it became more about attracting viewers. And as the general population has been dumbed down, the reporting became more about what would attract them than the truth. As it is progressing today, the owners of these entities have become guided by their agenda and truth has been completely lost.

It became about how sensational it could be to attract viewers then as the government and those with agenda realized the power of the media, it has become a place to push the agenda of the backers and owners of the networks and if they are in league with the government agenda then that is what they push and anything contrary is lost or covered up.

We have no journalism today. It is all orchestrated for agenda. The owners of the MSM are in league with the Progressive agenda and that is what is pushed. They are protecting the Obama Regime from being exposed for what it is. It’s all about their bottom line and real journalism has been lost.

We do not have freedom of the press any longer. We have no journalism. We only have talking heads reading agenda and propaganda so that they can keep their jobs. It’s become all ‘talkshow’ … people like Oprah were a big part of this change. Masses turned to these shows instead of the news. With the realization of her popularity and influence others changed to be more like this. Oprah promoted her agenda and it worked. Media is like a circus show. Everything is hidden by the man in the tent behind the show…

Obama is a media creation. They cover up his past and anything that goes against the agenda. The power of the media has been seen clearly by the election of the fraud.

One must find alternate ways to see past the media cover ups and lies.

Are there any who are brave enough to reveal the truth with real journalism? I think if groups could align to do this that there would be a real audience now. Many are seeing what a fraud the news has become and are hungry for the truth instead of the agenda and propaganda.

Journalism died when the greed, duplicity, agenda took over.”

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Jowan Mahmod.

First of all, the definition of ‘better’ journalism is difficult to explore as the evolution of journalism can be identified as either better or worse depending on what parameters we employ to value journalism. Indeed the character of coverage has changed throughout the past 30-50 years not only with regard to new digital media but also by way of globalisation and more people increasingly crossing national borders.

Journalism may have been more investigative, but it has also been one-way, regulated and ruled by political and national agendas. The pragmatic question within this context is therefore how journalism has changed and what the impacts and implications of this are with regard to nations and societies, citizens, and globalisation.

In this contributing post, I would like to take the question to a meta-level and theorise around the consequences of new digital media vs. traditional media (television, radio, and print).

In his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson explains that imagining nations was possible due to print and broadcasting media. Tools of modernity gave to people, who had never met each other, a shared belief that they belonged together.

When images of a nation go through a gate-keeping process, in which authoritative actors uphold and approve the images that reflect the current political alignments, it gave people, in the same nation, the encouragement to freely participate in the project of that nation’s politics. Modern tools of communication had an important role in the development of national feeling. Anderson thus made print capitalism and broadcast media the central focus for the creation of the imagined community that conceals diversity.

But what happens when the images of a nation – culture, religion, race, gender – do not just cross national boundaries but are articulated in a transnational space by anyone, regardless of authority? This is what is happening in the new digital media as different technologies are changing the way we communicate and interact. Perhaps journalism was more investigative pre-Internet, but it is now synchronous and two-way, and anyone can make their voices heard, as long as it is being censored by authoritarian regimes.

This is a major contributing factor that has made for instance the Arab Spring possible, where people suddenly can share their own stories instead of having journalists describing the world to and for them. Needless to say, journalists still play an important role in terms of sharing stories and images from all around the world in a more analytical manner, but the way in which this happens has changed due to the easy accessible and competing powerful tools such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc. Hence, media networks are not necessary in a decline, instead information through the various different technologies without gate-keepers has become more diverse and ‘messier’.

The messiness of information here refers to the explosion of opinions, views, feelings, and contradictions that complicate bureaucracies and ideological state apparatuses. That said, the key question here does not only concern the changing character of journalism and news making, but also how uncontrolled information is being scrutinized by the audience; critical thinking and media literacy are as important to address within these debates regardless of if we are talking about traditional media and journalism or new media and Twitter.

In conclusion: While perceptions of who belongs where are based on an imagined community, nation-states are very real in terms of juridical and social citizenship, but concealed images and speeches have found new transnational spaces where anyone with access can interfere. In the wake of the Arab Spring this was clearly demonstrated when societies on the edge of revolutions relied on speech-acts in Tweets and Facebook posts (and compelling photos using mobile phones). Although the role of social media and online communities in these uprisings is not completely confirmed, this online communication entails acts through words and digital demonstrations and protests, that later echoed internationally with the aid of the wider international community online.

Hence, the changing nature of journalism and news reporting is not merely a question of competing interests and financial aspects, but also politics and national interests. Such kind of observation has not really made any resonance in the debates on journalism, new media, and for instance the Arab Spring. However, these are the directions that new technologies and globalization point to and it would be a serious mistake to ignore these phenomena as they are de facto changing social relations and rules on the ground, especially in the context of journalism, online communications, and nation states.”

David J. Merkel.

“We overestimate the degree to which journalists were neutral in the past. There were many cases in the 1800s and early 1900s where the press was biased, and favored the interests of capital, labor, slave-owning, abolish slavery, etc.

We think that things are abnormal today, but they aren’t. Perhaps what was abnormal was an era where conservatives did not have interests in media, and all of the media was liberal.

But let’s look at this from a different angle, and I will show you an area where things have gotten better: financial journalism.

Financial journalism has gotten much better over the last 20 years. The journalists are far more savvy about financial concepts. This applies to both liberals and conservatives. The criticism is more sharp on both sides, and more intelligent. This is a good thing, and educates us all far better.

Some of this stems from the farm team at theStreet.com, and all of the places that they go after they learn. Some of it comes from the intelligent bloggers who write regularly on investing, and the journalists who read them.

Regardless, the quality of the journalism in finance has gotten far better over the last twenty years, and for that, we should be grateful.”

Jaime Ortega. (Editor)

The main difference is that journalist in the past had access to more news bureaus all over the world, and reporting in general carried investigations, rather than just plain reporting. A: Anyone can report and add feelings to any story. B: Many foreign bureaus are now closed because they lack funding.

Local news is the least affected, but the corruption is way more visible in mainstream networks broadcasting national and foreign news. But here a few points below why the decadence has grown larger (it was never perfect).

Students that study journalism today, are hardly trained properly to investigate, and only focus on reporting. Investigation is the talisman of journalism and the forefront of real impact news. But many students never learn the basis of news gathering, data research, and pace tracking […] but only focus on editing tasks and collecting simple sources with no relevance subjective for investigation. Perhaps because its harder to get a good story!

If a student reports about a cafeteria or about a football match, is that equate to investigate government extortion, corporate corruption, intelligence […?] I believe in the 70’s despite other problems, investigation was prime to journalism, but is rarely anymore. Students focus on ‘chip and dale’ stories that have no impact outside of their campus and many are not prepared or qualified to conduct serious investigations. I believe that is a big chunk of the problem, at least in the U.S.. Other countries follow other protocols.

Another red dot blurring the media today as opposed to the past, is that it reports without conducting a thorough investigation on topics of real concern. Actually they conduct investigations on topics of less concern, which have no real relevance and hardly any impact. ( I am not talking about war coverage)

A television anchor is ‘not’ by definition a journalist, he is a reporter. And the media tends to mix that anchors, reporters, paparazzi’s follow the same category as journalist! Which tends to make the public sphere confused about who is who in the media world. Reporters only memorize, analyze and report stories, journalist on the other hand, report, research and should know how to investigate.

That brings us to the next point. The real media decline has not affected print media that much, but actually, broadcast and radio networks have significantly seen a worrisome downgrade in conducting serious reporting. Specially broadcast , which has caused a lot of harm to the ‘general media’, and I am personally concerned that it has given rise to conspiracies in social media outlets like Youtube as a gateway for public distrust. Now more than ever before, citizens have decided to become self-reporters, out of distrust from broadcast networks that seem to have forgotten how to investigate serious issues. I cannot blame the public sphere for thinking that way, WMD’s anyone? […] ‘cough cough.’

Many mainstream media outlets are in bed with their sponsors, and sponsors have deeply influenced stories which possibly affect close investors, that could and would ruin the reputation of the interest they represent if investigated. That becomes a problem for highly spirited investigative journalist because those who like to report on serious stories might have to run the agenda of the business side instead, arbitrarily violating the integrity of the editorial desk they represent . It happens a lot, and in order to keep your job, sometimes you got to go with the flow and leave good stories wash away.

Bias is another problem. Fox vs MSNBC vs RT vs CNTV vs Aljazeera vs NPR. It just shows that the public sphere is eager to back their own personal ideologies, rather than to investigate wherever is that the truth is pointing within a controversial story or topic. And these channels instead of untangling their personal bias and exposing a 360 view, they feed their loyal viewers what they want, which concludes into more selective bias! You don’t see that problem as much in print, at least in the U.S..

Story relevance? They’re thousands of stories every day that occur in the U.S., (an estimate Avg. of 11,000 stories) but only two make the national stories and one the international headlines. Have you ever wondered, how many stories under the radar don’t get filtered, that might actually be even more important than those selected by the media gatekeepers as headliners? You would be very surprised!

The media is evolved from advertisers in the 1800, to Muckrakers in the 1920’s, to the golden age in the 70’s of exposing government. All had negative issues also. Now, the media has become a conglomerate enterprise that feeds the interest of national and financial interest, infotainment, and single melodramatic murder reports as “real news.” The investigation side, was buried by the business side in the early 90’s.

Expect what we call at the TDJ a “data blackout.” That is the complete disbelief from the public sphere, of the “boy who cried wolf” the third time! If you go to Youtube you will find an amazing rise of media disbelievers. We estimate that more than half of youtube users, believe the Boston Bombings and 9/11 were an inside job; the government is run by a powerful elite of investors like the Trilateral Commission, SSR, Bilderberg Group; The U.S. Criminal Division works with CEO top banks who planned the 2008 financial crisis; Al-Qaeda is an imaginary enemy invented by the U.S.; Haarp is used to control people; Darpa is working to manipulate people […] and the list goes on and on. The media is going to pay someday for not conducting hard investigations, and just basing its reporting in opinions, specially on topics that need serious revision. That would help the skeptic public access more credible answers, as opposed to creating their own imaginary conspiracies.

There is a difference in reporting about a singular murder, and reporting about why the Intelligence Community is building thousands of top secret clearance buildings all over the country, which by the way comes out of tax payer dollars! I want to thank Dana Priest of the Washington Post for that investigation, that would have never seen the light in mainstream broadcast news. Impossible.

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Wall Street vs. Main Street: A Comparison of Views

September 20th, 2013

By American University.

1. Introduction

The phrase “Wall Street versus Main Street” became commonplace during the recent financial crisis as a shorthand means of describing opposing sides in a variety of contexts, from blame attribution to beneficiaries of government intervention to investor protection. In the aftermath of the crisis, this characterization has become synonymous with the divide between the “haves” and “have-nots”, manifested for example in the sentiment apparent in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

It regularly appears in speeches of policymakers and politicians eager to address perceptions related to the faltering economy. In short, “Wall Street versus Main Street” distinguishes the views of financial insiders from those of the general population. Yet beyond the conventional wisdom and rhetoric, is there really a Wall Street/Main Street divide? On one hand, skeptics might appeal to theories of information flow to argue that financial market transactions are the result of individual investor decisions or standard finance theories that management decisions of publicly-traded firms are a direct result of the desire to maximize shareholder value. On the other hand, proponents would point to the low proportion of active investors in the Main Street population, citing evidence of low financial literacy rates (Lusardi and Mitchell 2011), few Americans holding stocks outside of a retirement portfolio (Poterba and Samwick 1995), and growing income inequality (Heathcote, Perri, and Violante 2009).

This paper examines the relationship between popular and market beliefs in an attempt to measure the magnitude of the Wall Street/Main Street divide. We find surprising similarities between beliefs about future stock market returns elicited from surveys of a representative sample of the U.S. population and market beliefs as calculated through option prices using the Black-Scholes model.

The main questions of interest are:

(1) Do Wall Street expectations influence the views of the general US population (Main Street),

(2) Does Main Street uncertainty mirror Wall Street uncertainty?

The approach taken in this paper draws on literature from finance, behavioral economics, econometrics, and survey methodology, specifically the following areas:

(1) the formation of equity return expectations,

(2) the information content of option-implied probabilities,

(3) the information content of subjective expectations, and

(4) the tendency of survey respondents to report focal points (clustering around rounded numbers) when asked probabilistic questions.

Researchers using survey data find substantial heterogeneity across individuals with regards to their expectations about future equity returns, although for any given individual, reported expectations appear to be relatively stable but by no means constant over time (Brennan, Cao, Strong, and Xu 2005; Dominitz and Manski 2011; Hudomiet, Kézdi and Willis 2011; Hurd and Rohwedder 2012).

Some of the interpersonal heterogeneity is attributable to differences in optimism among population subgroups: for example, women, African Americans and those in the lower education categories have less optimistic expectations relative to the overall population.

This expectations heterogeneity has in turn been used to explain heterogeneous investment in equities (Kézdi and Willis 2003, 2011). A separate literature gleans expectations of market participants from option price information, following the results from an early paper by Breeden and Litzenberger (1978) deriving state-contingent securities from combinations of options, thereby demonstrating that corresponding prices of these securities are implied by option prices: specifically, the price density of the state-contingent security evaluated at a strike price is equal to the second derivative of the price of a European call option with respect to the strike price.

A variety of functions for the price of an option are admissible in this context; the most often used one is the option pricing model described by Black and Scholes (1973) and Merton (1973) and we follow that convention in this paper. A number of researchers consider the inclusion of survey expectations in models of economic behavior (see Manski (2004) for a survey of this literature) and demonstrate that including probabilistic expectations can improve inference about economic behavior relative to models using only data on economic choices (revealed preference models).

Yet others show that survey responses do not exactly align with true expectations – for example, due to large clusters of responses occurring at “focal points” of the response distribution (e.g., Dominitz and Manski 1997; Hurd, McFadden, and Gan 1998; Kleinjans and Van Soest 2010) – and argue that adjustments to survey data to account for such aspects are necessary to improve inference (Bassett and Lumsdaine 2000; Lillard and Willis 2001).

While much of the literature comparing expectations to economic behavior is in the context of analyzing consumer intentions (e.g.,buying a new car, see Juster 1966), a similar approach considers expectations about equity markets and investors’ behavior (Hurd and Rohwedder 2012). The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 describes the data construction and descriptive statistics of the main variables.

Section 3 describes the model.Section 4 examines the results of the regressions performed. Section 5 compares the predictive accuracy of Wall Street and Main Street beliefs. The final section concludes.

2. Data

The American Life Panel (ALP) provides a novel dataset with which to investigate the research questions. An internet panel with about 3000 active panel members, the ALP contains more than 200 survey modules (and associated survey weights designed to ensure a nationally representative population) administered by the RAND Corporation. A more detailed description of the ALP sampling frame, survey population, interview length, response rate and participation incentives is in Appendix A.

While some of the survey modules are stand-alone, others belong to periodically-repeated series (waves) on the same topic. This paper uses responses obtained from modules designed by Michael Hurd and Susann Rohwedder to investigate the effects of the financial crisis on American households, gathered from November 5, 2008 until March 10, 2011, corresponding to 25 waves of information.

Hurd and Rohwedder (2010) provide a detailed description of this series of modules; they are briefly summarized here. The first wave asks respondents about a wide range of topics such as labor force status, stock ownership, mortgage payments and expectations about the future. The second wave was conducted in February 2009 and subsequent waves have been conducted monthly from May 2009 onwards. Each module also contains demographic control variables such as age, race, gender, marital status, and education.

The final sample (after adjustments for, e.g., missing observations) consists of 47,488 surveys from 2,652 respondents (94.9% of the total number of surveys and 98.3% of the total number of 6 respondents) gathered over 364 survey days. The sample construction is also detailed in Appendix A1.

2.1 What Main Street thinks: survey expectations about future stock market performance As a proxy for the views of “Main Street”, the ALP elicits expectations about the stock market from survey participants via a series of questions, the first of which is the following (hereafter referred to as the “PositiveReturn” question):

“We are interested in how well you think the economy will do in the future. On a scale from 0 percent to 100 percent where “0” means that you think there is absolutely no chance, and “100” means that you think the event is absolutely sure to happen, what are the chances that by next year at this time mutual fund shares invested in blue chip stocks like those in the Dow Jones Industrial Average will be worth more than they are today?”

Respondents can give an answer ranging from zero to one hundred (the answer need not be an integer) to indicate the percentage chance of the event happening, as well as leaving the response blank. If a numerical response is not recorded to this question, the question is asked a second time, preceded by the additional instruction “You did not answer. Your answers are important to us. Please give us your best guess.”

To this second question, either (a) a response ranging from zero to one hundred, or (b) “don’t know” is recorded. The same structure of questions is repeated for a greater than 20% return and a greater than -20% return. For expositional ease, the questions referring to the probability of a positive return, a more than 20% return, and a more than -20% return will be referred to as PositiveReturn, >Plus20, and >Minus20, respectively. Using all three questions (when available) from above 47,488 surveys yields a total sample size for studying Main Street probabilities of 139,327 observations.

The phrasing of these questions may lead to differences in respondents’ interpretation (and hence the answers they give, see, e.g., Tversky and Kahnemann (1981)), since there is an implicit subjectivity associated with respondents’ understanding of “mutual funds shares” or “blue chip stocks like those in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)”. For the purposes of this paper, however, it is necessary to assume that the responses given represent respondents’ subjective probability that the nominal (not inflation-adjusted) level of the DJIA in one year will be [greater / more than 20% greater / more than -20% greater] than the current level of the DJIA.

For each respondent, the current level of the index is assumed to be the closing level on the most recent business date prior to the date of interview, so that the response is assumed to be based on information available at the time of interview

For more about this report: go to: http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/news/upload/Lumsdaine-paper.pdf

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Iran in Latin America

September 13th, 2013

By Woodrow Wilson International Center.

On December 2, 1823, President James Monroe, in his State of the Union Address, established the principles of what is now known as the Monroe Doctrine: that the United States would consider any nation’s attempt to extend “their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Nearly two hundred years later, President George W. Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, included the Islamic Republic of Iran in his now famous “axis of evil,” emphasizing it was “arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

It is therefore not surprising that the developing economic and political relations between the Iranian government and the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua—in addition to the more long-term relationship with Venezuela—have raised concerns in both the United States and the region about Iranian objectives in Latin America.

Iran’s involvement in Latin America is unquestionable, and is growing at a rapid pace; within four years of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being elected in 2005, Iran opened six new embassies in Latin America including Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay, in addition to the five embassies already in operation – Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela.

Indeed, in no uncertain terms, Ahmadinejad has declared, “When the Western countries were trying to isolate Iran, we went to the U.S. backyard.” Throughout the region, Iran is brokering potentially significant economic deals. Iran and Venezuela have entered into more than two hundred bilateral agreements on a variety of issues while Ecuador and Iran have entered into an energy cooperation deal that calls for cooperation in the building of an energy refinery and petrochemical unit in Ecuador, training of Ecuadorian oil sector workers by Iranian experts and assistance with maintenance of Ecuadorian facilities.

In Nicaragua, Ahmadinejad has pledged to rebuild a sea port on Monkey Bay at a cost of more than $350 million. In addition, Bolivia has been promised Iranian invest-ments of more than $1 billion over the next five years

In August 2009, Iran “offered Bolivia a loan of $280 million, in addition to spending $200 million on building two cement factories and three milk facilities.” These numbers and others frequently reported are agreements and do not represent actual investments or expenditures on the part of the Iranian government. Farideh Farhi, has noted that Ahmadinejad “can go around and sign all these things, but ultimately it’s the Iranian parliament that has to decide whether it’s going to” fund each specific initiative.

Between 2001 and 2007, Iran and Venezuela entered into 180 cooperative agreements, valued by Iran at $20 billion Nevertheless, the International Monetary Fund estimated their bilateral trade at just $16 million in fiscal year 2006. While Iran is clearly driving the relationship, Latin America is far more than a passive participant observer. Following Iran’s commitment to invest $1.1 billion in Bolivia’s gas facilities, Bolivian President Evo Morales declared that the country’s only embassy in the Middle East would move from Cairo to Tehran.

More significantly, Morales lifted longstanding visa restrictions, allowing anyone with an Iranian passport to enter Bolivia without a visa or other documentation.11 Morales’ plea on The Daily Show, “Please don’t consider me part of the axis of evil,” notwithstanding, he has cautioned, “We will never promote war but nor do we accept that in the name of peace the criteria of the strongest prevails.”

Hugo Chávez’s decision to allow the establishment of Iran’s Banco Internacional de Desarrollo (BID) in Caracas provided Iran with a “foothold into the Venezuelan banking system” , “a perfect ‘sanctionsbusting’ method,” allowing Iran to evade U.S. financial sanctions.

Allegations abound, however, that Iran’s economic interests in Latin America are secondary, or at worst a cover, for more sinister desires. In November 2008, Turkish customs officials seized a suspicious Iranian shipment bound for Venezuela. The shipment, manifested as “tractor parts,” actually contained barrels of nitrate and sulfite chemicals, commonly used for explosives, as well as dismantled laboratory equipment.

Turkish officials engaged their Office of Atomic Energy and military experts to examine the materials.15 Similarly, some doubt the legitimacy of the plants and factories constructed by Iran in Venezuela. Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney for New York County, has suggested, “we should be concerned that illegal activity might be taking place” because of their “remote” location and “secretive nature.”

Nevertheless,on both sides, there exists a disconnect between pledges of cooperation and realities on the ground. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton commented, for example, “The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua,” concluding, “and you can only imagine what that’s for.”

Not only did the Nicaraguan and Iranian governments deny such a project, but even a U.S. diplomat in Managua admitted, “There is no huge Iranian Embassy being built as far as we can tell.” A U.S. State Department spokesperson concluded, “It perhaps suggests the Iranians are talking about investments and influence that they don’t yet have.”

Given Iran’s nuclear capabilities, there is concern throughout the region and in the United States as to what role supportive countries like Venezuela might play in the advancement and proliferation of nuclear technologies. Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has expressed concern saying, “We are very worried and I can’t refrain from saying so, that nuclear war be brought to our neighborhood. This is very serious, very worrying,”19 and with seemingly good reason. In September 2009,

“Iran said it test-fired short-range missiles, just days after it confirmed it is building a second uranium-enrichment facility.”20 Rodolfo Sanz, Venezuela’s minister of basic industries and mining has indicated that Venezuela “could have important reserves of Uranium,” and while he rejects allegations that Venezuela is supplying Iran’s nuclear program, he did confirm that “Iran is helping us with geophysical aerial probes and geochemical analyses.”

In September 2009, Chávez announced an agreement with Russia for assistance in developing a nuclear energy program and plans for the establishment of a “nuclear village” with technological assistance from Iran. Asked if Washington is worried, Thomas Shannon, then the top State Department official for Latin America, responded, “What worries us is Iran’s history of activities in the region and especially its links to Hezbollah and the terrorist attacks that took place in Buenos Aires,”concluding, “Past is prologue.”

As far back as November 2007, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution “expressing concern about threats to the U.S. by deepening economic and security ties between Iran and like-minded regimes in the Western Hemisphere, including Venezuela.” The resolution had its base in “evidence that Iranian-backed Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization raises…..

To read more about this great repor please go to: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Iran_in_LA.pdf

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Dividing lines: Grazing and conﬂict along the Sudan –South Sudan border

September 9th, 2013

By Joshua Craze.

The border region between Sudan and South Sudan contains some of the two countries’ most fertile land. Much of the border lies between the ninth and tenth parallels, just below the dunes and stabilized sand sheets of the goz (Johnson, 2010b, pp. 16–17). While the goz sees rainfall of only 400–600 mm per year, the border regions, with their heavy clay soil and acacia bush, see rainfall of 600–800mm per year. Supplies of gum arabic, wood for charcoal, and a variety of precious stones and minerals are also found along the border.

Control of these assets is an issue in some of the contested borderland areas, but none of the contemporary disputes over the border can be reduced to a struggle over resources. The most valuable resource along the border is land, for agriculture and grazing. While there is oil in the borderlands, none of the contested areas contain oil, with the notable exceptions of Diffra in Abyei, and Hejlij on the Unity–South Kordofan border.

In the cases of Diffra and Hejlij, the sense of historical entitlement to these areas, on the part of the Ngok and Rueng Dinka, is just as important a motivating force for South Sudan in its territorial claims. This is not to say that resources are not crucial to an understanding of con-ﬂict in these areas. Most importantly, the border regions offer a dry-season space for pastoral and trans humant groups from both sides to ﬁnd grazing for their cattle.

In this sense, the borderlands have always been a meeting place between different Sudanese groups, and, like all meeting places, they are also centres of tension, where competing claims must be negotiated. Very schematically, one can say that the history of the borderlands over the last 90 years has been the tale of their transformation from zones of encounter to zones of division.

One of the important moments in this transformation was the 1920 implementation of the Closed District Ordinances (CDO), which were designed to prevent Northern traders travelling south, and to create, as far as possible, a cultural and political separation between Sudan and South Sudan. This policy 16 Small Arms Survey HSBA Working Paper 30 was formalized as the Southern Policy in 1930, and attempted to stem the spread of Islam.

It was terminated in 1946. However, even during the period of the Southern Policy’s implementation, its effects were not uniform and implementation not standardized. Renk county was excluded from the CDO, and close links developed between the resident Abialang Dinka and Northern Sudanese merchants and agriculturalists (see section VI). The Abialang Dinka also learned to speak excellent Arabic, and many of them converted to Islam. Kaka town, now in Upper Nile state, was moved between provinces during the British colonial period, in part to ensure continued trade links between the town and what is now South Kordofan.

In other areas, the separations brought about by the Southern Policy were more absolute. Sudan’s civil wars transformed the landscape along the border.20 During the second civil war, militias backed ﬁrst by the National Islamic Front (NIF) and later by the National Congress Party (NCP) displaced primarily Dinka populations and destroyed civilian settlements. In some rural areas, the SPLA held sway and organized ‘peace markets’ between Northern traders and the Southern Sudanese (SUPRAID, BYDA, and Concern Worldwide, 2004).

In other areas, SAF-backed militias organized relations between pastoralist peoples in the border zone, leading, in the present, to markedly different relationships between these areas and the GRSS. Despite the constant movements of the war, when the criterion for evaluating the border between the two countries was being decided in 2005, the SPLM insisted the border should be the provincial boundary of the southern provinces as it existed on 1 January 1956—the date of Sudan’s independence. This date provides a historical datum to which future disputes about the border can be referred.

Unfortunately, the provincial boundaries of 1956, to the extent they existed, were not well recorded by the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government. As Douglas H. Johnson, who advised the South Sudanese government on its border claims in 2006, notes, ‘much of the border was unsurveyed [at the time of independence]. Even the most detailed maps do not record signiﬁcant topographical features along the boundary lines’ (Johnson, 2010b, p. 15).

The difﬁculties of relying on an incomplete, and often inaccurate, set of documents to determine a historical border that has only a dubious relationship to present patterns of cohabitation will be explored in the next chapter. It should be noted here that the only exception to the legal centrality of the 1956 border is Abyei, where the CPA mandated the Abyei Boundaries Commission (ABC) to establish Abyei as ‘the area of the nine Ngok Dinka Chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905’ (Abyei Protocol, 2005, clause 1.1.2).

In the case of Abyei, the ABC had to rule on the extent of a people; for the 1956 border, the actual practices and locations of border communities are unimportant. Legally, what counts is a relatively inaccessible historical record. This is the central reason why communities like the Abialang Dinka of Renk county feel so angered by political negotiations over the border; they feel marginalized because, indeed, they are marginalized: where communities actually lived in 1956—never mind at present— is, legally, besides the point.

This is signiﬁcant because, as numerous historians have shown, in many places the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government had a relatively light footprint, and the administrative boundaries of a given territory may not even have been particularly reﬂective of how communities were spatially organized in 1956.

Since 1956, much has changed in the border region. Even if an agreement can be reached between Sudan and South Sudan about the location of the border, it will inevitably cause a great deal of disruption, forcing people to reorganize themselves in the present to ﬁt along a line from the past. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to resolving the crisis along the Sudan–South Sudan border is that it involves tackling not one but many problems. Most fundamentally, there is a territorial dispute between two states, and a series of
local tensions between the different groups who live along the border.

These two different threads interact in all sorts of surprising ways: sometimes nationalism is taken up in order to advance local interests; sometimes, as in the case of Abyei, local interests are a mask for national politics. In theory, the disruption caused to local communities by the imposition of a national border should be minimal. The CPA, a raft of subsequent security arrangements, and the 27 September Addis Ababa agreements all safeguard the free movement of transhumant and pastoralist groups. In practice, however, since the signing of the CPA in 2005, Northern pastoralist groups have found it increasingly difﬁcult to enter South Sudan, especially since the country’s formal secession in July 2011.

In part, the difﬁculties of Northern pastoralist can be traced back to the second civil war. Many pastoralists—such as the Missiriya of South Kordofan—were involved in militias whose raids displaced Southern border communities, and these actions damaged traditional conﬂict-resolution mechanisms.22 Some Southern suspicions about Northern pastoralists are fuelled by uncertainty about whether a given group is composed of pastoralists or of NCP-backed militia members.

This suspicion explains the ban on Thuraya satellite phones in many grazing agreements: South Sudanese communities fear their positions will be reported to SAF. This distrust is not helped by the fact that the extant NCPbacked militias in South Sudan use the same routes into the country as Northern pastoralists, leading to fears that the two parties are collaborating. Another problem for Northern pastoralists also dates from the second civil war. During this period, when groups like the Missiriya passed into Southern states, they had to negotiate with the SPLA, and not just with local groups.

This situation has continued post-CPA, and it has made grazing agreements increasingly a matter for state-level political and military deliberation. This has meant that grazing routes are subject to new and unfamiliar evaluations—security concerns and military positioning—and it has also reduced the need for host and migrant communities to work together, weakening traditional conﬂict resolution mechanisms.

These mechanisms were already strained by the second civil war. The GoS organized militias to attack Southern Sudanese border communities, and these militias were often composed of members of the very border communities that rely on grazing in Southern Sudan. Compensation for relatives of those killed by militias has often not been paid, breaking down inter-community links.

The legacy of the war is also visible in the number of small arms found along the border. While South Sudan has now made moves towards community disarmament in several border states, in a situation of general uncertainty, many communities do not want to give up the weapons that saw them through the last war.

In Sudan, the GoS continues to arm militias and Popular Defence Forces (PDF), and pastoralists do not feel safe in South Sudan without weapons. Even if, as is agreed in the 27 September Addis Ababa agreements, a Safe Demilitarized Border Zone (SDBZ) is established, and both SAF and SPLA withdraw from the border regions, it will still be difﬁcult to ensure that pastoralist groups enter without weapons, a difﬁculty that current negotiations occlude.

Craze Dividing lines If grazing negotiations are in the hands of state actors, border communities have also increasingly been acting like states. Since 2005, communities have made absolute, quasi-nationalist claims over the border region more frequently.

Grazing rights have been guaranteed by a national political framework that does not deliver, driving pastoralist and transhumant communities to frame their demands in terms of the absolute claims of the nation-state. In Appendix Two of the ABC report, several types of rights claims are distinguished. Dominant rights are those rights that pertain to areas of land over which a group has non-negotiable rights.

Secondary rights are often seasonal grazing rights, and are a limited set of rights over an area: the limits often
refer to time (in dry but not rainy season), extent (along this grazing route, but not another), or use (for grazing, but not for settling). Often, secondary rights areas can overlap—two groups can share an area where both groups have secondary rights claims—and one can also have secondary rights where another group has dominant rights, such as the Missiriya’s grazing rights in Abyei, or Seleim grazing rights on the west bank of the Nile in Upper Nile state.

The CPA does not ofﬁcially recognize ﬂexible secondary rights claims—it simply says that ‘traditional rights’ to movement will be respected, rather than spelling out processes by which secondary rights disputes will be articulated and resolved. Since 2005, such rights claims have not been respected, and pastoral and transhumant groups on both sides of the border have increasingly framed their claims as dominant rights, or, in extremis, as claims of absolute and exclusive rights to an area.

In a negotiating framework that only thinks in terms of state-based political actors, framing one’s demands like a state is an attempt to gain visibility: the Missiriya lay absolute claim to an area south of the River Kiir24, where historically they had secondary rights, and the Rueng Dinka lay claim to an area that roughly correlates to their seasonal grazing territory in South Kordofan—the maximal area of their secondary, not dominant, rights.

These claims have largely undermined the shared understanding of secondary rights claims that existed among communities along the border. Missiriya claims to exclusive possession of Abyei, for instance, threaten the possibility of cohabitation with the Ngok Dinka, who feel angry that the Missiriya are claiming territory they feel is theirs.

The nationalization of the Sudan–South Sudan border has also changed relationships between border communities in other ways. In border negotiations, the idea that pastoralists are simply foreigners within a nation-state is increasingly invoked. For instance, the Malual Dinka of Northern Bahr el Ghazal compare the Rizeigat to Kenyans and Ugandans.

This is a fundamental transformation of the way the relationship between host community and pastoralists is conceptualized. While Kenyans and Ugandans work in South Sudan, they are not afforded the privileges that Northern pastoralists received before the second civil war: they are treated as foreigners within a state framework, rather than as a people with whom the Malual Dinka had a long relationship based on reciprocity and shared ties. Further, the relationship between Kenyans and South Sudan is ﬁxed: the formal frameworks of expectation and action for a migrant worker do not shift relative to family ties, ecological conditions, and political circumstances.

This is very different from grazing agreements between pastoralist groups and host communities, before they were redeﬁned in terms of a nation-state framework. The imposition of a national boundary has also instituted a more general asymmetry. Over the last 60 years, Northern pastoralists came south to graze their herds and buy cattle and, while Southern groups would not generally go north for grazing (especially after having been displaced from their northernmost grazing sites during the second civil war), they would travel north for wage labour, and relied on the trade brought south by Northern merchants.

Shortly before South Sudan formally declared independence, Sudan closed its border, and fewer traders got through, causing higher prices and a lack of basic commodities all along the frontier. Moreover, as people returned from Sudan to South Sudan to vote in the July 2011 referendum, and the situation for the South Sudanese in Sudan became increasingly precarious, border communities began travelling north much less.

This asymmetry feeds into a belief among Southerners that there is no reason to allow Northern pastoralists into South Sudan as they bring nothing productive with them. Furthermore, as there is no longer any reason to travel north, there is less reason to worry about maintaining relations with Northern groups. Finally, following years of ill treatment in Sudan, many returnees are angry at Sudanese traders and pastoralists for things that happened to them in Khartoum; the pastoralists are taken as tokens of Sudan more generally, and become targets for South Sudanese retribution.

In general, since South Sudan gained independence, community antipathy along the border has increased as GoS-backed militias, intensiﬁed nationalism, and trade blockades create new lines of division. While the 27 September Addis Ababa agreements would be a step forward if implemented, even a full agreement on the contested areas would leave a great deal of work to be done to repair inter-community relations and to discover how pastoralist and transhumant groups can retain their livelihoods in the face of a new national border.

Border negotiations

There are two analytically separate issues involved in negotiations over the border between Sudan and South Sudan: where the border is, and what type of border it is. There is then a third question at stake: what type of temporary border should Sudan and South Sudan have while deciding the above, and whereshould this temporary border be located.

The ﬁrst two questions are related. While, for instance, the Missiriya advance claims to territory beyond the River Kiir (Craze, 2011, pp. 18–21), they are primarily concerned with securing safe grazing routes in Abyei and South Sudan. However, their experience since the CPA has taught them to mistrust South Sudanese promises that their safety and freedom of passage will be secured in an Abyei belonging to South Sudan (Pantuliano et al., 2009, pp. 18–19). Because they do not have faith in the promise of a soft border they can easily cross, they insist on an absolute location for the border, so as to safeguard their rights, with Abyei remaining within the boundaries of Sudan.

One of the reasons negotiations over the border have run aground is that border communities have little faith that the type of border dictated by the CPA will be actualized, leading to groups making expansive claims for land, and refusing to believe that their secondary rights will continue after the imposition of a national border. Both the NCP and the SPLM have important constituencies among border communities, and both sides have been intransigent because they fear alienating these groups, who, for the reasons indicated above, fear any concessions on where the border is located.

At the same time, as Johnson has argued (2010b, p. 108), the interests of local groups have been instrumentalized by the NCP and the SPLM to mask national interests, and destabilize the talks in Addis Ababa. Because the type of border guaranteed by the CPA is so vague, local groups have been distrustful of arguments that appear to place areas where they have secondary rights outside the ofﬁcial borders of their respective countries.

The CPA gave no space to the very real changes to secondary rights claims that will occur with the imposition of an international frontier. Indeed, there has been little frank discussion of the border as a political issue at all. The border was not, in the structure of the CPA, considered to be a political issue, but one determined by a bureaucratic mechanism—the Technical Border Committee (TBC). Consequently, that mechanism was politicized, as political issues ran aground in a bureaucratic structure.

The CPA

During the negotiations leading up to the signing of the CPA, the GRSS insisted that the line determining the North–South boundary would be the provincial boundaries of Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile as they stood on 1 January 1956. This understanding of the border dates from the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement, which deﬁned (articles 3 and 4) the Southern Region in the same way.

In 2005, delimiting the boundary was thought to be essential, not simply to conﬁrm the extent of the two territories, but also to establish the area in which a population census and voter registration for the referendum on Southern secession could occur. The CPA tasked the TBC, which was to be established by the presidency, with carrying out the delimitation and demarcation of the border between January and July 2005.The CPA does not give details on the modalities of the TBC’s work, and does not give deadlines for speciﬁc tasks.

Impasse at the TBC

The TBC was set up later than planned, amid disagreements about its composition. It was ﬁnally established in September 2005, after the deadline for it to complete its work had already passed. The presidential decree that established

the TBC stated:

1. The Technical Committee has the task of demarcating the border line between South
and North Sudan as of 1/1/1956.
2. Without contradicting the generality of the text in item (1) above, the Committee has the following functions and powers:
a. Consult all maps, drawings and documents.
b. Visit all the border areas between North and South Sudan and overlapping tribal areas.
c. Consult tribal leaders and civil administrators in the overlapping areas, listen to their statements and review any documents provided by them.
d. Solicit internal and foreign expertise if necessary.

From the outset, the TBC was hampered by a lack of funding and a series of lengthy procedural disputes. The South Sudanese members of the committee said the delays occurred because the NCP members could not take decisions without conferring with those above them in the GoS political hierarchy. An ofﬁcial close to the process said one NCP minister, Idris Abdul Gadir, could be
called ‘the nineteenth member of the committee.’

To keep reading about this great report please go to: http://www.smallarmssurveysudan.org/fileadmin/docs/working-papers/HSBA-WP30-North-South-Border.pdf

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Al-Qaeda and the FSA likely responsible for chemical attack in Ghouta

September 7th, 2013

Iraqi army and intelligence services captured a five member al-Qaeda cell last week that specialised in manufacturing “extremely dangerous” chemical weapons intended for use in Iraq and abroad, the Iraqi Defence Ministry said.

The Daily Journalist Comment:

Our theory about the latest Chemical Attack in Syria holds Al-Qaeda and the FSA responsible. We believe that SAA defectors of high rank gave inside knowledge to Al-Qaeda about all the stock piles of chemicals weapons deserted by Assad’s forces due to territorial expansion from the Rebels.

Al-Qaeda helps the training of Rebels and provides weapons to the FSA. Not all rebels inside the FSA take orders from Al-Qaeda, but do get supplied with weapons to combat Assad’s forces. Not all FSA operatives are radical Islamist, some really just fight Assad for nationalist causes, unlike Al-Qaeda.

We understand by Intelligence reports that 30% of casualties are caused by mistakes conducted by the own rebels, who’ve never been properly trained to use sophisticated weapons and are not educated enough to learn without military mentor ship.

We believe this to be an accident, originally targeted to the SAA, by the rebels. However, what we ‘cannot prove’ is whether this was really an attack caused by the FSA , or was an Al-Qaeda move to hit Ghouta, a farming section outside of Damascus that posses Alawite/Shia communities.

The Daily Journalist has 90% confidence this was perpetrated by FSA forces, that work alongside Al-Qaeda operatives. They both have different nationalistic goals and but similar beliefs, and they hate Shia’s,, Christians, and Alawites who are working alongside Assad.

There is currently no credible report that denies Rebels or Al-Qaeda ever used these chemical weapons, that caused 1,300 deaths in Ghouta.

By Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh, August 31, 2013

Ghouta, Syria – As the machinery for a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria gathers pace following last week’s chemical weapons attack, the U.S. and its allies may be targeting the wrong culprit.

Interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, where the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said at least 355 people had died last week from what it believed to be a neurotoxic agent, appear to indicate as much.

The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad’s guilt was “a judgment … already clear to the world.”

However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.

This was reported by Turkey Intelligence.

“Turkish security forces found a 2kg cylinder with sarin gas after searching the homes of Syrian militants from the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra Front who were previously detained, Turkish media reports. The gas was reportedly going to be used in a bomb.

The sarin gas was found in the homes of suspected Syrian Islamists detained in the southern provinces of Adana and Mersia following a search by Turkish police on Wednesday, reports say. The gas was allegedly going to be used to carry out an attack in the southern Turkish city of Adana.

On Monday, Turkish special anti-terror forces arrested 12 suspected members of the Al-Nusra Front, the Al-Qaeda affiliated group which has been dubbed “the most aggressive and successful arm” of the Syrian rebels. The group was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in December.

Police also reportedly found a cache of weapons, documents and digital data which will be reviewed by police.

Following the searches, five of those detained were released following medical examinations at the Forensic Medicine Institution Adana. Seven suspects remain in custody. Turkish authorities are yet to comment on the arrests.

Russia reacted strongly to the incident, calling for a thorough investigation into the detention of Syrian militants
in possession of sarin gas.

“We are extremely concerned with media reports. Russia believes that the use of any chemical weapons is absolutely
inadmissible,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday.”

By Intel Center.

ASSESSMENT

While it is impossible to ascertain the exact nature of al-Ablaj’s comments regardingsarin and the poisoning of water supplies, it is clear that al-Ablaj said an attack againstAmericans would occur following his latest interview with al-Majallah, which was published on 25 May. Due to Abu Mohammad al-Ablaj’s previous messages to alMajallah providing advance notice of the Riyadh attack, one 35 days and another about 48 hours prior, his latest threat delivered through an established channel should be taken with serious concern.

INTRODUCTION

This report is designed to pull together and help make sense of the various comments made by al-Qaeda member Abu Mohammed al-Ablaj in his emails to the Arabiclanguage news magazine al-Majallah. While al-Ablaj’s comments regarding water and sarin have gotten disproportionate attention in the media and other circles, it is our assessment that the most significant comments are those pertaining to a planned series of operations in Gulf states, as well as a threat of an impending attack against US interests, possibly within CONUS.

The comments regarding water and sarin are significant, however, it is impossible to fully understand the context of the remarks without first reviewing the full correspondence between him and al-Majallah. The introduction of sarin and water into the interview may have been the result of an al-Majallah question or by al-Ablaj himself. We simply do not know. It is also important to point out that sarin and the threat to poison water do not appear to be necessarily linked.

Al-Qaeda has demonstrated an interest in water and conducted research on the subject. In2002, at least one plot was foiled in Rome, Italy dealing with water. A cell believed to be connected to al-Qaeda was apparently working to contaminate the water supply of the US Embassy there with cyanide.

As far back as February 1995 a letter by Ramzi Yousef concerning a strategy to obtainthe release of Abdul Hakim Murad in the Philippines was found to contain a reference to water. In the letter Yousef writes, “We also have the ability to make and use chemicals and poisonous gas for use against vital institutions and residential populations and drinking water sources and others.”

Once again, it is impossible to know the nature of al-Ablaj’s comments pertaining to water without seeing the original correspondence. It is our assessment that when viewing al-Ablaj’s comments in light of other recent threats by al-Zawahiri and Thabit bin Qays,the attacks in Riyadh and Casablanca, as well as other developments, that the threat of an attack against Western interests, especially American, is high. An attack using sarin or targeting the water supply are only two of many options al-Qaeda may select.

To continue reading this report: http://www.intelcenter.com/ATA-PUB-v1-0.pdf

By Belfercenter.

Several terrorist groups have actively sought weapons of mass destruction (WMD) of one kind or another. In particular, the Japanese cult group Aum Shinrikyo, al Qaeda and its associates—notably the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Jemaah Islamiya and Lashkar al Tayyib—figure most prominently among the groups that have manifested some degree of intent, experimentation, and programmatic efforts to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. To date, however, al Qaeda is the only group known to be pursuing a long-term, persistent and systematic approach to developing weapons to be used in mass casualty attacks.

Osama bin Ladin’s assertion in 1998 that it was his Islamic duty to acquire weapons of mass destruction ensured that the fulfillment of this intent would become a top priority for his lieutenants in the ensuing years. In an effort to explain his thinking to his followers, and to help guide their efforts, the al Qaeda leader has offered a number of statements that provide a need and rationale for using weapons of mass destruction as a means of achieving the group’s concrete and ambitious goals.

Most recently, he promised in a 2007 video release to “escalate the killing and fighting against you (Americans)”–on grounds of destroying an international conspiracy to control the world–adding, “The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of globalization in order to protect democracy.”

These statements should not be interpreted as empty rhetoric and idle threats: Osama bin Ladin has signaled a specific purpose for using WMD in al Qaeda’s quest to destroy the global status quo, and to create conditions more conducive to the overthrow of apostate regimes throughout the Islamic world.

His argument is essentially that even weapons of mass destruction—which are outlawed under Islam—are a justifiable means of countering US hegemony. Osama bin Ladin’s morality-based argument on the nature of the struggle between militant Islamists and the US-led coalition of secular forces focuses the group’s planning on the acquisition of strategic weapons that can be used in mass casualty attacks, rather than on the production of tactical, more readily available weapons such as “dirty bombs,” chemical agents, crude toxins and poisons.

In this light, it is not surprising that the group’s top WMD priority has been to acquire nuclear and strategic biological weapons. Considering the potential that such weapons hold in fulfilling al Qaeda’s aspirations, their WMD procurement efforts have been managed at the most senior levels, under rules of strict compartmentalization from lower levels of the organization, and with central control over possible targets and timing of prospective attacks. In this sense, their approach has been “Muhammed Atta-like”—similar to the modus operandi Khaled Sheikh Mohammed employed in making preparations for the 9/11 attacks—as opposed to resembling the signature characterizing most terrorist attacks to which the world has become accustomed.

Al Qaeda’s patient, decade-long effort to steal or construct an improvised nuclear device (IND) Al Qaeda Weapons of Mas Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality? flows from their perception of the benefits of producing the image of a mushroom cloud rising over a US city, just as the 9/11 attacks have altered the course of history. This lofty aim helps explains why al Qaeda has consistently sought a bomb capable of producing a nuclear yield, as opposed to settling for the more expedient and realistic course of devising a “dirty bomb,” or a radiological dispersal device.

Another 9/11-scale operational plot managed by the al Qaeda core leadership was the development of anthrax for use in a mass casualty attack in the United States. The sophisticated anthrax project was run personally by al Qaeda deputy chief Ayman Zawahiri, in parallel to the group’s efforts to acquire a nuclear capability; anthrax was probably meant to serve as another means to achieve the same effect as using a nuclear bomb, given doubts that a nuclear option could be successfully procured. Notably, al Qaeda’s efforts to acquire a nuclear and biological weapons capability were concentrated in the years preceding September 11, 2001.

Based on the timing and nature of their WMD-related activity in the 1990’s, al Qaeda probably anticipated using these means of mass destruction against targets in the US homeland in the intensified campaign they knew would follow the 9/11 attack. There is no indication that the fundamental objectives that lie behind their WMD intent have changed over time.

On the other hand, the pursuit of crude toxins and poisons appears to have been of little interest to the al Qaeda leadership, even though the production of such weapons is easier and thus might seem more attractive for potential use in attacks. Although experimentation and training in crude chemical agents and pathogens was standard fare in al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan before 9/11, their use in attacks appears to have been left to the initiative of individual cells and planners outside the direct supervision of the al Qaeda core leadership.

Prominent examples of small-scale chemical- and biological- related activity include Midhat al-Mursi’s (aka Abu Khabab) basic training for operatives in the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan before 9/11; the Abu Musab al Zarqawi network’s plotting to use ricin and cyanide in multiple attacks planned in Europe in late 2002-early 2003; and a Bahraini terrorist cell’s plot to use a crude cyanide gas device called the “mobtaker” (an Arabic word roughly meaning “invention”) in an attack on the New York City subway in the same time frame.

In each of these cases, the evidence suggests that the al Qaeda senior leadership was not directly involved or apparently even aware of attack preparations until late stages of planning. Moreover, there is no evidence that the al Qaeda leadership regarded the use of crude toxins and poisons as being suitable for conducting what would amount to pin prick attacks on the United States; on the contrary, Zawahiri canceled the planned attack on the New York City subway for “something better,” suggesting that a relatively easy attack utilizing tactical weapons would not achieve the goals the al Qaeda leadership had set for themselves.

1999-2001

Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan conduct chemical, biological, and radiological basic training courses for hundreds of extremists. The organization’s Durante & Tarnak Farms training courses were led by Abu Khabab al-Masri (aka Midhat Mursi al Sayid Umar), a chemist and alleged top bomb maker for al Qaeda, who was part of Osama bin Ladin’s inner circle and Abu Musab al-Suri (aka Setmariam), a Spanish citizen born in Syria .

1999-2001

Abdel Aziz al Masri (aka Ali Sayyid al-Bakri), confirmed to be the father of al Qaeda’s nuclear program, conducts nuclear-related explosive experiments in the desert. He is an explosives expert and chemical engineer by training, and reportedly self-taught on things nuclear.

Before August 2001

UTN CEO Bashiruddin Mahmood offers to construct chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs for al Qaeda and Libya, in two separate, discreet approaches.

Note: The US subsequently passed this information to Libyan intelligence Chief Musa Kusa in London. Musa Kusa later confirmed to US intelligence that Libya would have no dealings with the UTN “WMD for hire” consortium.28

November 7, 2001

Osama bin Ladin states in an interview with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, “I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent.”50 In the same interview, Ayman Zawahiri states that, “If you have $30 million, go to the black market in the central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist, and a lot of dozens of smart briefcase bombs are available. They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow to Tashkent to other central Asian states, and they negotiated and we purchased some suitcase bombs.”

Note: On November 14, 2001 President Bush met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Crawford, Texas, and is passed the Presidential Daily Brief containing an assessment of the proliferation threat posed by the Pakistan UTN group.52 Bush asked Putin if he is certain at all Russian nuclear weapons and materials are secure. Putin responded using words to the effect: I can only vouch for the security of nuclear materials in Russia after I assumed power.

January 2002

Capture of al Qaeda senior operative Ibn al-Shaykh al Libi. During interrogation by Egyptians, al Libi claims al Qaeda operatives received chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear training in Baghdad. He claims several small containers of nuclear material were smuggled into New York City by Russian organized crime.

June 2002

Extremists under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (aka Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh) conduct crude chemical and biological training and experiments in a remote camp in northeastern Iraq (Khurmal).71 Zarqawi’s commanders include Abu Ashraf, Abu Attiya and Abu Taisir, all of whom had served as lieutenants in the Herat Camp that Zarqawi ran in Afghanistan. Zarqawi is well known to al Qaeda, but is considered to be an independent operator who had not sworn loyalty (“bayat”) to Osama bin Laden.

Note: Zarqawi, a Jordanian, was engaged in a blood feud with the Jordanian government and was also preoccupied with mountingattacks in Jordan, in addition to his activities in Iraq.74He was convicted in absentia for planning the assassination of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman, Jordan.

August 2002

CNN exposes Afghanistan training camp experiments conducted on animals in late 1990’s, led by Abu Khabab al-Masri. These gruesome experiments include testing the lethality of crude toxins and poisons, including cyanide creams, ricin, mustard, sarin, and botulinum. Abu Khabab later laments that his students did not take their training to heart by using chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons in terrorist attacks.

Note: Abu Khabab was killed by a U.S. predator strike in Pakistan on July 28, 2008.

For more on this report: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/al-qaeda-wmd-threat.pdf

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Security Analysis of Accountable Anonymous Group Communication in Dissent

September 4th, 2013

By Yale University.

1 Introduction.

Anonymous participation is often considered a basic right in free societies (Yale Law Journal 1961). The limited form of anonymity the Internet provides is a widely cherished feature (Teich, Frankel, Kling, and Lee 1999; Wallace 1999), enabling people and groups with controversial or unpopular views to communicate and organize without fear of personal reprisal (Stein 2003).

Yet anonymity makes it difﬁcult to trace or exclude misbehaving participants (Davenport 2002). Online protocols providinstronger anonymity, such as mix-networks (Chaum 1981; Adida 2006), onion routing (Goldschlag, Reed, and Syverson 1999; Dingledine, Mathewson, and Syverson 2004), and Dining Cryptographers Networks or DC-nets (Chaum 1988; Waidner and Pﬁtzmann 1989; Sirer et al.2004; Golle and Juels 2004), further weaken accountability, yielding forums in which no content may be considered trustworthy and no reliable defense is available against anonymous misbehavior.

DISSENT (Dining-cryptographers Shufﬂed-Send Network) is a communication protocol that provides strong integrity, accountability and anonymity. Members of small, private online groups,whose membership is closed and known to its members, are able to send anonymous messages to each other, to the whole group, or to a non-member, in that the receiver knows that some member sent the message, but no one knows which member.

DISSENT holds members accountable, not by compromising their anonymity but rather by ensuring that communication resources are allocated among all communicating members, and that any disruption results in the identiﬁcation of some malicious member during a “blame” process. Members are thus unable to corrupt or block other members’ messages, overrun the group with spam, stuff ballots, or create unlimited anonymous Sybil identities (Douceur 2002) or sock puppets (Stone and Richtel 2007) with which to bias or subvert the group’s deliberations.

DISSENT builds on the shufﬂe of Brickell and Shmatikov (2006a), combining that with DC-net techniques for efﬁcient bulk communication. It uses only readily available cryptographic primitives and handles arbitrarily large messages and unbalanced loads efﬁciently. Each member sends exactly one message per round, making it usable for voting or assigning pseudonyms with a 1-to-1 correspondence to real group members. DISSENT has limitations, of course. It is not intended for large-scale, “open-access” anonymous messaging or ﬁle sharing (Goldschlag, Reed, and Syverson 1999; Clarke, Sandberg, Wiley, and Hong 2000).

DISSENT’s accountability property assumes closed groups, and may be ineffective if a malicious member can leave and rejoin the group under a new (public) identity. Finally, DISSENT’s serialized GMP-SHUFFLE protocol imposes a per-round startup delay that makes DISSENT impractical for latency-sensitive applications. Further discussion on related anonymous communication systems is included in Section 6.

DISSENT was ﬁrst introduced by Corrigan-Gibbs and Ford (2010). In addition to sketching the protocol and security arguments, they describe practical usage considerations and give the results of several performance experiments based on a prototype implementation. We focus here on a detailed exposition of DISSENT and a rigorous analysis of its security properties.

Indeed, during our analysis of the original protocol, we identiﬁed several attacks. For example, anonymity could be broken by replaying protocol inputs in subsequent rounds, by providing at certain points incorrect ciphertexts to some members and correct ones to the rest, or by copying ciphertexts at other points. Accountability for disruption could be avoided by copying the protocol inputs from honest members, and honest members could potentially be falsely accused of disruption by rearranging valid signed messages to create phony logs. Protocol termination could be prevented for some members by causing failures for them while allowing the rest to terminate successfully and thus not participate in a blame process.

See the appendix more details of these attacks. In order to ﬁx these ﬂaws, we made several non-trivial modiﬁcations to the original protocol. To prevent replay attacks we added key generation steps. To prevent equivocation attacks we added rebroadcast steps, and have members intentionally cause intermediate protocol failures when equivocation is observed. We add the use of non-malleable commitments to prevent submission duplication, and we add phase numbers to prevent log forgery. Finally, to prevent non-termination of the protocol, we make all steps non-optional, in particular including an opportunity for blame at the end of every execution to ensure accountability.

We are able to give proofs of security for this improved protocol. In particular, we provide rigorous proofs of integrity, accountability, and anonymity. Obtaining a fully secure protocol with proofs required a surprising amount of additional work given the relative simplicity and maturity of the underlying ideas. However, as observed by Wikstrom (2004), the complexity of anonymous ¨ communication protocols has frequently resulted in incomplete proofs and subtle errors (see further discussion in Section 6).

The main contributions of this paper, therefore, are (1) we provide a full description of an improved DISSENT protocol, (2) we present precise deﬁnitions of its security properties, and (3) we give rigorous proofs that the protocol satisﬁes those deﬁnitions. Section 2 outlines DISSENT’s framework and security model. Section 3 describes the GMPSHUFFLE protocol, and Section 4 details the GMP-BULK transfer protocol. Section 5 provides formal security properties and their proofs. Section 6 summarizes related work, and Section 7 concludes.

Protocol Overview DISSENT is designed to be used in a group setting. Each member i of the group is associated with a long term public signing key pair (ui; vi). DISSENT provides a shufﬂed send communication primitive that gives sender anonymity among that group. During each protocol run, every group member i secretly creates a m essage mi and submits it to the protocol. The protocol effectively collects all secret messages, shufﬂes their order according to some random permutation that no one knows, and broadcasts the resulting sequence of messages. Each input message mi can have a different length Li.

We present a messaging interface, called the General Messaging Protocol, that DISSENT implements. DISSENT in fact deﬁnes two protocols implementing this interface: the GMP-SHUFFLE protocol provides anonymous communication for ﬁxed-length messages, and the GMP-BULK protocol builds on this to provide efﬁcient anonymous communication of arbitrary-length messages.

2.1 The General Messaging Protocol

A Group Messaging Protocol GMP is a 3-tuple of algorithms SETUP(vi), ANONYMIZE (mi; K; nR; ; f) and VERIFY-PROOF(pj; `i). SETUP takes a member’s public signing key vi as input and outputs one or more session nonces nR, a set K of all members’ signing keys, an ordering of members , and optionally a message length L. All group members run the SETUP algorithm before each protocol run to agree on common parameters. Such agreement might be achieved via Paxos (Lamport 1998) or BFT (Castro and Liskov 1999). We emphasize that SETUP does not generate members’ signing keys; rather, it uses long term signing keys submitted by each member.

ANONYMIZE takes a message mi, a set K of members’ signing keys, one or more round noncesnR, an ordering of members , and optionally a ﬂag f as input, and outputs either (SUCCESS; M0i),where M0i is a set of messages, or (FAILURE; BLAMEi ; `i), where BLAMEi is a set of observed misbehaviors, and `i is a log of a protocol run. After agreeing on common parameters, the group runs the ANONYMIZE algorithm. The goal of the algorithm is to anonymously broadcast the set of messages submitted by group members. If a protocol run succeeds for a member, then she outputs the anonymized messages. Otherwise, the protocol run fails and the group member produces a set of blame proof(s) for the member misbehavior(s) responsible for the protocol run failure.

VERIFY-PROOF takes a proof pj of member j’s misbehavior and a log `i as input, and outputs either TRUE indicating that pj is indeed a proof of j’s misbehavior given the observed protocol history represented by log `i , or FALSE otherwise. If a run of

ANONYMIZE fails for member i, then i blames at least one dishonest member j by producing a proof pj of j’s misbehavior and a log `i. VERIFY-PROOF is used to verify that proof pj does in fact indicate misbehavior by j given `i.

2.2 The GMP-Shufﬂe Protocol

The GMP-SHUFFLE protocol enables the anonymous exchange of equally sized messages. However, it incurs extra communication if only one member wishes to send, and its decrypt-and-shufﬂe phase is inherently serial. GMP-SHUFFLE builds on a data mining protocol by Brickell and Shmatikov (Brickell and Shmatikov 2006b) to broadcast the input set of ﬁxed-length messages, one from each group member, in an unknown permutation, providing cryptographically strong anonymity. Like many anonymous messaging protocols, the original data mining protocol was vulnerable to untraceable denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by malicious group members. We remove this vulnerability by adding go/no-go and blame phases, which can trace and hold accountable any group member maliciously disrupting the protocol.

In the GMP-SHUFFLE protocol, all members 1; : : : ; N choose their secret messages m1; : : : ; mN of equal length L. Each member has a long lived signing key pair (ui; vi) and knows the ordering of the group and a session nonce nR. For a single run of the protocol, each member generates two key pairs, called inner and outer, and shares the public keys with the group. Each member i iteratively encrypts its message mi using all inner and then all outer public keys. The resulting ciphertext messages are sent to a group leader who strips one layer of encryption from each ciphertext using his outer public key, permutes the messages, and forwards the permuted set to the next member who repeats the process.

Removing all layers of outer encryption yields a set of inner ciphertext messages which member N broadcasts to the entire group. All members inspect the set to verify that their inner ciphertext is present. If all members’ messages are included and every step of the protocol completes successfully, each member releases its inner private key allowing the set of permuted secret messages to be recovered. If any inner ciphertext is missing or corrupted, however, the inner keys are destroyed and the entire group enters a blame phase to ﬁnd the culprit member(s). Section 3 details the GMP-SHUFFLE protocol and Section 5 demonstrates its security.

2.3 The GMP-Bulk Protocol

The GMP-BULK protocol uses ideas from DC-nets (Chaum 1988; Waidner and Pﬁtzmann 1989; Sirer et al. 2004; Golle and Juels 2004) to anonymously transmit variable-length messages. In place of the DoS-prone slot reservation systems in prior DC-nets schemes, however, DISSENT leverages its GMP-SHUFFLE protocol to prearrange the DC-nets transmission schedule, guaranteeing each member exactly one message slot per round.

GMP-BULK uses the GMP-SHUFFLE protocol to broadcast an unknown permutation of the message descriptors submitted by each member. Each descriptor di contains the length Li of member i’s message mi, a cryptographic hash of mi, a vector S~ i of seeds sij, where each seed is encrypted with j’s session public key and assigns each member j a pseudorandom bulk ciphertext to transmit,
and a vector H~ i of hashes Hij validating each bulk ciphertext. The shufﬂed order of the message descriptors indicates the order in which the anonymous senders should transmit their secret messages.

Then, all group members broadcast bit streams based on pseudorandom seeds included in the message descriptors, so that XORing all members’ bit streams together yields a permuted set of all members’ variable-length messages. During a member’s own transmission slot, he transmits his own message XOR’d with the messages he has instructed all other members to generate.

During another group member’s transmission slot, members broadcast a pseudorandom bit string generated from an encrypted seed in the slot’s message descriptor. Cryptographic hashes in the message descriptors enable members to verify the correctness of each others’ bulk transmissions,ensuring message integrity and DoS protection throughout. If any group member sends an invalid bit string, then in a blame phase the owner of that transmission slot uses GMP-SHUFFLE to anonymously broadcast an accusation exposing the faulty group member. The GMP-BULK protocol is detailed in Section 4 and Section 5 proves its security.

2.4 Security Model

We assume the adversary is polynomial-time limited. We allow him to control a colluding subset of group members. We deﬁne the rest of the members as honest, in that they run the prescribed algorithms, and their internal states are hidden from the adversary. We assume that communication channels exist between all members, and that they can be observed by the adversary. The security properties we wish the protocol to satisfy are integrity, accountability, and anonymity, as we describe below. Formal deﬁnitions of these properties and their proofs are given in Section 5.

To continue reading this long report please go to: http://cryptome.org/2013/09/tor-network-dissent.pdf

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Raymond Stock answers critical questions about Syria’s conflict

September 2nd, 2013

Interview by Jaime Ortega.

Raymond Stock

Raymond Stock is Middle East Specialist: Scholar, Writer and Arabic-English Translator

1) Is the arab youth in the Middle East facing a critical dilemma with westernization and its values? Do they really want to live under an Islamic mindset and be open to westernization without any conflict? Is Arab activism of Muslim secularism growing against classical Islamic laws?

RS: Arab youth appear to be completely in flux. In recent years, there has been a growing trend of both secular and Islamic influences, along with a rising Islamist trend overall. But the extreme overreach of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis in Egypt alienated millions of previously sympathetic citizens of all ages, and especially the youth, who are exposed to more information (of varying quality) via social media and the Internet, and typically have a keener sense of outrage at injustice and hypocrisy. A similar phenomenon is playing itself out in Libya and Tunisia, and apparently even in Gaza and elsewhere, though not yet on the same scale as in Egypt.

As for secularism vs. “classical Islamic laws,” in my view, the two are incompatible, particularly when a literalist interpretation of the Islamic texts prevails. Yet even traditional, mainstream Islam does not recognize the equality of all citizens according to gender or religion, and even condones institutions like slavery, which still persists in a number of ways in parts of the Muslim world. Only if Islam as a whole experiences the equivalent of the Enlightenment, as fortunately occurred in the West, will be there be any hope of a healthy degree of secularism becoming the norm, and the vicious ideology of Islamism (in which there are no genuine moderates) becoming a rarity instead of the constant and growing monster (despite its major setback in Egypt), that it now is in both the Muslim world and beyond.

2) Is an Islamic State a better path to increase financial growth, politics and rights to the land for Arab countries in The Middle East, than for say a state ruled by dictatorial regimes?

RS: Your question assumes that only those two negative paradigms are possible in the Middle East. They are certainly the dominant ones on the whole, as Israel remains the only stable democratic state in the Middle East. The Arab Spring, which primarily empowered the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists throughout the region, has not brought genuine democracy, because that requires a separation between mosque and state. Nor can Islamism deliver economic prosperity–it is not focused on life in this world and material prosperity, but on imposing shari`a and recreating a supposedly perfect Islamic order that never really existed fourteen hundred years ago. It is also at war with the rest of the world, and hence can never provide a safe environment for investment.

The overwhelming rejection of Mohamed Morsi’s Islamist dictatorship, which came to power in a close and disputed election, probably wouldn’t have happened if he had placed the same priority on economic development that he did on exerting the MB’s control and and inserting those loyal to his ideology in every branch of the state and society. Perhaps if he had followed the initially softer, slower, craftier approach of Recep Tayyip Edorgan in Turkey, whose decade of increasing economic boom has masked the creeping encroachment of his very radical beliefs and his ever-more heavy handed approach to dissent, Morsi might have lasted a lot longer in power. However, even Erdogan’s real goals and character have finally been exposed to the point where a serious mass revolt broke out in Istanbul’s Taqsim Square and around the country in April. I very much hope that Turkey–where the formerly Ataturkist military has now been purged through a series of bogus conspiracy trials, forestalling an intervention such as that which happened in Egypt (driven by the largest demonstrations in history, demanding Morsi’s removal)–is able to change away from Islamism, preferably through elections, in the not-too-distant future.

3) The United Nations seems to be faced with a big dilemma and so is the U.S.. Bashar Assad, seems to be clamming radical Islam is a cancer for Syria, (but could be using that as an excuse to remain his personal wealth in power). But should the U.N. help Assad combat radicalism or help the FSA fight the SAA? Aren’t both problematic?

RS: If the U.S. and the West had decisively intervened to aid the Syrian opposition much earlier in the uprising–when the secular liberal elements were more dominant in the rebel forces–either directly or indirectly (through arms and training, etc.), then it perhaps could have more likely led to the creation of a new, democratic, non-Islamist state in the Arab world. That would have been a stunning achievement, in fact. Instead, the Obama administration has been covertly aiding primarily the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated forces via arms bought by Qatar and Saudi Arabia shipped into Syria, facilitated by the C.I.A., and possibly through arms gathered from Qaddafi’s vast arsenals in Libya by Islamist militia and shipped through Turkey as well, again with the involvement of the C.I.A.

The agency may also have been training anti-Asad Islamists with al-Qa`ida affiliations in Libya for insertion into the conflict in Syria. In my view, such actions are disastrous, and unfortunately of a piece with Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Arab Spring. Tragically, he appears to be following the advice of pro-Islamist advisers that the MB has penetrated and otherwise influenced in our security and diplomatic establishments, as well as Erdogan, who is said to be his closest friend among the world’s leaders. In reality, without a serious effort to find, assist and help enlarge the surviving secularist elements among the rebels, it really would be better not to intervene in Syria’s conflict now, because there is no happy outcome otherwise. Even on the issue of chemical weapons, whoever really has used them in Syria, it is certainly a worry that if Asad falls, the Islamists could take possession of his vast stockpiles of WMD (both chemical and biological), and they would be much less hesitant to use them overall than the current vile regime. Then again, Asad is a vital ally of Iran, which is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Syria, too, is among the largest. It is worth trying to change this dynamic, but it would require a complete re-orientation of Obama’s pro-Islamist approach, which sadly does not seem likely.

4) If the United States entered the war in Syria, as observed by the Department of Defense, would that benefit in any way, shape or form, U.S. interest on the region? In other words, is the main reason why the U.S. intervenes in foreign wars to only spread democratization plus capitalism to invest and fructify financially overseas or is it really to help those in need?

RS: Until the election of Barack Obama as president, the U.S. has historically intervened militarily in the Middle East to protect international stability and the free flow of commerce. That was true of America’s first military action in the region, against the Barbary Pirates in the early 19th century, and more recently in various actions to ensure the free flow of oil, given its importance to the economy of the United States, her allies and the rest of the world equally. After September 11, 2001, the U.S. also sought to spread democracy in the Arab world, beginning with the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Obama, however, at first set out to end American military involvement in the region, beginning with Iraq, where he unfortunately undid much of the progress made by his predecessor by supporting the Iranian-backed Maliki over the secularist Allawi in forming the government after the 2010 elections, though Allawi had won by one seat.

The result has been the return of violent sectarianism, a revival of al-Qa’ida in the country, and Iran’s indirect control of much of the nation’s leadership. His intervention in Libya, as it has in Syria, also came relatively late, and in addition was largely indirect (“leading from behind”), and consisted of a deliberate outreach to Islamists, some even openly allied with al-Qa`ida. Elsewhere in the Arab Spring, the Obama administration, the mainstream media and much of academe also supported the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies in Egypt and the throughout the region due to the delusional idea that they are actually moderate and thus a bulwark against al-Qa`ida, when in fact they share the same ideology. (The greatest difference between them is in strategy, with AQ and most of the Salafis demanding immediate change through jihad, and the MB preferring a more gradualist approach that can also include violence when expedient).

Thus Obama has turned traditional American Middle East doctrine on its head, from his early, clumsy attempts to put daylight between America and her closest local ally, Israel, to his support in a variety of ways for her worst enemies in the world, the Islamists–all in the mistaken belief that it would make both himself and the U.S. more popular in the Muslim world. The net result is that he is actually much more unpopular in the area than the oft-derided Bush. Though he has somewhat backtracked on these policies in Egypt particularly in fear of losing both the peace treaty with Israel and U.S. privileged access to the Suez Canal, along with vital anti-terrorist cooperation with that country, on the whole it has not changed. And that can only mean catastrophe for us all.

5) Russia and Iran are allies with the Syrian regime and consequently support it with military hardware. Is their interest exclusively directed to strategic oil-route-exports or is Iran just scared of having their own revolution and therefore has to support Assad?

RS: Syria’s primary state allies are Iran, Russia, China and North Korea (which supplied Syria with its nuclear program, attacked by Israel in 2007, and has been selling al-Asad missiles for delivery of chemical weapons and providing other assistance to his WMD programs too). Russia wants to maintain its warm-water port at Tarsus and maintain its own toehold in the region, which, as the former Soviet Union, it nearly dominated; China is anxious to establish its own presence in the Middle East and relies on Iran for much of its oil. Iran, which hopes to the regional hegemon, relies on Syria for its own outlet to the Mediterranean, to connect with the Shi`a community in Lebanon and to pass weapons and other materiel to her ally Hizbollah, and as its portal to the Arab world overall. If al-Asad falls it will indeed seriously weaken the Iranian theocracy–ironic, given the generally secularist nature of his regime.

6) With all the revolutions happening in the Middle East, how is that going to resolve with Israel’s future? Are the revolutions going to pay off badly for Israel in the long run?

RS: Predictions are a sucker’s game, especially in the Middle East. With that caveat in mind, let’s look at the what has happened since the beginning of 2011. Contrary to the prevailing (and predictable) anti-Israel propaganda both in the Middle East and beyond, most Israelis, like most people everywhere, cheered on the Arab Spring. They too wanted to believe that the popular uprisings really were about democracy and the economy, not about hatred of the “Zionist enemy.” The Israelis, of course, knew that the long-time Arab leaders had, to varying degrees, used their country as the chief diversion from dealing with problems inside their own. Yet unfortunately, though few would admit it, an issue that has bound many of the disparate opposition groups, both secular and Islamist, together all over the Arab world is a hatred of Israel along with rising anti-Semitism, which have remained among the greatest motivators of revolutionary sentiment to this day. Few of them were like more genuine liberals, like Egyptian satirist Ali Salem, who–though ironically of the older, Nasserist generation–broke the taboo against contact with Israelis by actually driving his own car to visit the Jewish State on his own in the early 1990s, in an effort to reach out to meet those who long for peace there as well.

He was following the earlier courageous plea of his friend and role model, the late Egyptian Nobel laureate in literature Naguib Mahfouz, who suffered boycott of his works across the Arab world and even death threats due to his calling for peace negotiations with Israel beginning in 1973. In the case of Egypt, particularly, the more pragmatic military leadership has wanted to maintain the peace treaty with the Jewish State because they remember the many humiliating defeats and economic destruction that accompanied the previous wars, from 1948 to the present. Thus you see the irony of Morsi’s own minister of defense and chief of the military General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, whom he appointed due to what seemed his sterling Islamist credentials, ultimately ousted by that same man, evidently because he also belongs to the military’s own internal culture of intense Egyptian nationalism–which Morsi’s pro-jihadi policies and destruction of the economy offended gravely. Even more ironically, Tamarod, the secularist group whose unbelievably successful petition led to the world’s largest political demonstrations in history, directed at Morsi, has since circulated another (fortunately much less successful) petition demanding an end to the treaty with Israel.

So in this sense, the Arab Spring really has been a threat to Israel, because it has lifted the lid off the raging hatred of their nation nurtured by the poisonously misinformed political activists (whose views are much more intense than much of the public’s) that had been repressed by the same leaders, including even Mubarak, had stoked for generations to stave off the very same revolutions that have ultimately toppled them. One can only hope that eventually this unreasoning hatred for a state demonized as the worst human rights violators on the planet (when but a casual glance at how the Arab states and terrorists have disregarded any consideration for those rights on a far broader and more lethal scale, by a factor of hundreds of thousands if not millions to one, utterly refutes this idea) will somehow diminish soon. This tragically enduring complex as well as the deeply ingrained religious and cultural issues mentioned earlier, however, mean that the region may not know either freedom within a fair and rational system, or lasting peace and prosperity, for the foreseeable future.

7) If Assad’s regime succumbs, which seems likely to happen due to territorial advantage from the Rebels. Is he going to be the last dictator left in the Middle East? And what will happen to Syria?

RS: Actually, in recent months, with the huge infusion of Shi’a forces ranging from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hizbollah, and numerous Iraqi factions (the latter documented brilliantly by Phillip Smyth) rushing to its aid, and the continued strong backing of Russia especially, the al-Asad regime has regained the territorial advantage. Now, unless the possibly imminent American military action really changes the situation on the ground, it does not seem likely that al-Asad will fall. The options for Syria’s future if he does fall could be an Islamist state or perhaps a failed state, with no side in their various configurations able to conquer all the others.

In any case, as noted above, if the U.S.–which alone has the capability to overwhelmingly influence the outcome in a short time–does not now really focus on identifying a non-Islamist, pro-Western (and peace-oriented) opposition and, if they are large enough, make sure that they win, then the long-term fate not only of Syria, but of the whole Middle East, could well be grim. Whatever happens, al-Asad is certainly not the last dictator in the region. Apart from Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, the next one might be al-Sisi himself. Despite his pledge for a swift, new transition to democracy–a problematic promise even with the best of intentions–word has recently emerged that members of the armed forces will no longer swear an oath of allegiance either to the president or (more disturbingly) the nation’s Constitution or laws, but solely to the military leadership instead: a very troubling sign.

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The Pentagon releases studies that suggest Christians and Roman Catholics as religious extremist

September 2nd, 2013

The Daily Journalist commentary.

These are a few study groups by the name of The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Alliance Defending Freedom organizations that provide information to the Pentagon, and U.S. Homeland Security for awareness about extremist groups operating inside the U.S.

The document states that Christians in general should be treated as “fundamentalist” therefore equating their outlook as a terrorism network or sect of people that could potentially target U.S. national objectives.

We suggest that Sesame Street, would be next in the list, and soon enough Elmo is going to be interrogated by the FBI, and explain the “Elmo” song is not meant to brainwash children to plot a massive revolution, that will ‘take out’ the president with a crayola.

Quite absurd. I wonder who sponsors or funds these groups? Will find out.

By Mark Potok. (by The Southern Poverty Law Center)

The radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years. The growth was fueled by superheated fears generated by economic dislocation, a proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories, the changing racial makeup of America, and the prospect of four more years under a black president who many on the far right view as an enemy to their country. The number of hate groups counted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last year reached a total of 1,018, up slightly from the year before but continuing a trend of significant growth that is now more than a decade old. The truly stunning growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement — conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy.

The Patriot movement first emerged in 1994, a response to what was seen as violent government repression of dissident groups at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and near Waco, Texas, in 1993, along with anger at gun control and the Democratic Clinton Administration in general. It peaked in 1996, a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, with 858 groups, then began to fade. By the turn of the millennium, the Patriot movement was reduced to fewer than 150 relatively inactive groups. But the movement came roaring back beginning in late 2008, just as the economy went south with the subprime collapse and, more importantly, as Barack Obama appeared on the political scene as the Democratic nominee and, ultimately, the president-elect. Even as most of the nation cheered the election of the first black president that November, an angry backlash developed that included several plots to murder Obama. Many Americans, infused with populist fury over bank and auto bailouts and a feeling that they had lost their country, joined Patriot groups. The swelling of the Patriot movement since that time has been astounding. From 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274.

That works out to a staggering 755% growth in the three years ending last Dec. 31. Last year’s total was more than 400 groups higher than the prior all-time high, in 1996. Meanwhile, the SPLC counted 1,018 hate groups operating in the United States last year, up from 1,002 in 2010. That was the latest in a string of annual increases going all the way back to 2000, when there were 602 hate groups.

The long-running rise seemed for most of that time to be a product of hate groups’ very successful exploitation of the issue of non-white immigration. Obama’s election and the crashing economy have played a key role in the last three years. At the same time, a third strand of the radical right — what the SPLC designates as “nativist extremist” groups, meaning organizations that go beyond normal political activism to harass individuals they suspect of being undocumented immigrants — shrank radically. After five years of sustained growth, these vigilante groups plummeted last year to 184 from 319 in 2010, a one-year drop of 42%. The decrease appears to be a product of bad press, internecine quarrels, and the co-optation of the immigration issue by state legislatures around the country passing draconian nativist laws like Alabama’s H.B. 56.

Patriot and Militia Groups 1995-2011

In some ways, it was surprising that the same deflating effect did not hit the Patriot and hate groups, as 2011 also saw many politicians and other public figures attacking Muslims, LGBT people and other minorities, effectively taking on some of the issues dear to the radical right. But there was enough of a far-right wind to fill the sails of politicians, hate and Patriot groups, and Tea Parties alike, very likely the result, in large part, of a view of Obama as a dire threat to the country. (An IBOPE Zogby survey last year found that 30% of all voters did not believe that Obama was born in the U.S. even after the release of his long-form birth certificate.) It’s hard to know how all this will play out, given the unsettled nature of the presidential campaign and, in particular, the GOP primaries.

The animus toward Obama and the government may be as much rooted in economic as racial anger. In May 2011, a scholarly study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that white Americans believe that progress in race relations since the 1950s has come at their expense, with bias against whites more of a social problem in the last decade than bias against blacks. (This comes against the backdrop of the Census Bureau’s prediction that non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority, falling to under 50% of the population, by 2050.) But a Pew Research Center study this January suggested that income inequality may be even more important.

The survey found that some two-thirds of Americans believe that there are “strong conflicts” between rich and poor, about a 50% increase since a 2009 survey. That sensibility also was apparent in both the Tea Parties and the Occupy Wall Street movement. And so it is with many extremist groups. August Kreis, a longtime neo-Nazi who in January stepped down as leader of an Aryan Nations faction after being convicted of fraud related to his veteran’s benefits, told the Intelligence Report that it was all about income inequality. “The worse the economy gets, the more the groups are going to grow,” he said. “White people are arming themselves — and black people, too. I believe eventually it’s going to come down to civil war. It’s going to be an economic war, the rich versus the poor. We’re being divided along economic lines.”

At the most macro level, the growth of right-wing radicalization — a phenomenon that is plainly evident in Europe as well as the United States — is related directly to political and, especially, economic globalization. As the nation-state has diminished in importance since the end of the Cold War, Western economies have opened up, not only to capital from abroad but also to labor. In concrete terms, that has meant major immigration flows, many of which have drastically altered the demographics of formerly fairly homogenous populations. In Europe and the U.S. both, white-dominated countries have become less so. At the same time, globalization has caused major economic dislocations in the West as certain industries and kinds of production move to less developed countries.

The sorry U.S. economy also may offer the best single explanation for the huge expansion in the so-called “sovereign citizens” movement, a subset of the larger Patriot movement. Although the size of the sovereign movement is hard to gauge — sovereigns tend to operate as individuals rather than in organized groups — law enforcement officials around the country have reported encounters. The SPLC, for its part, has estimated that some 300,000 Americans are involved. Sovereign citizens, whose ideology first developed in white supremacist groups, generally do not believe they are obliged to pay federal taxes, follow most laws, or comply with requirements for driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations. They also typically believe that filing certain documents can relieve them of debt or bankruptcy proceedings, or even bring them millions of dollars from secret government accounts. The claims are bogus, of course, but they have attracted thousands into the movement at a time of real financial hardship.

Hate Groups 2000-2011

Sovereigns’ focus on their supposed right to drive “upon the land” without any regulation has brought them into regular conflict with law enforcement officials. That was seen most dramatically on May 20, 2010, when a father-son team of sovereigns murdered two West Memphis, Ark., officers during a traffic stop, but officials have had other encounters. Just this January, a sovereign accused of trying to shoot a police officer during a traffic stop in Hurst, Texas, went on trial. “There is a contingent of malcontents out there who are exceedingly hostile,” Rich Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations, told the Christian Science Monitor for an article last year on the rising number of shooting deaths of police officers. “It’s a really complex phenomenon in that it’s a whole combination of factors where on one end you’ve got people like sovereign citizens, who are actually deliberately targeting police, as opposed to your garden-variety bad guy who’s carrying a gun and will not hesitate to use it.”

The FBI agrees. Last September, it issued a bulletin to law enforcement officials entitled “Sovereign Citizens: A Growing Domestic Threat to Law Enforcement” that describes the movement as “domestic terrorist.” The bulletin notes that sovereigns have killed six law enforcement officers since 2000 and that Terry Nichols, convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing, was a sovereign. The largest group of organized sovereigns, the Alabama-based Republic for the united States of America (RuSA), last year took a new step toward organizing a kind of government-in-waiting by adding a “Congress” with voting representatives in 49 states.

The group says it is in the process of “reinhabiting” the government. Although it can sound threatening, RuSA has not engaged in any known violence. But that’s not true of all other Patriot groups, two of which are alleged to have engendered major terrorist plots aimed at police and others last year. In March 2011, Alaska Peacemakers Militia leader Schaeffer Cox and four followers were arrested on weapons and conspiracy charges related to an alleged plan to kill Alaska state troopers and a judge. A state court later ruled that hundreds of hours of secret recordings made by informants would not be admissible, leading to the freeing of one of Cox’s followers. But Cox and the other three still faced federal weapons charges and, this January, a superseding federal indictment again charged them with conspiracy to murder. In a related development, a woman who was the militia’s secretary was arrested trying to enter Canada when officials found a pistol and information about pipe bombs and the ricin toxin in her truck.

Then, last November, federal officials arrested four members of a Georgia militia. The four elderly men were accused of plotting to assassinate public officials, bomb federal buildings, and carry out mass murders in four U.S. cities by dispersing deadly ricin dust from the windows of speeding cars. Like Cox and his comrades, the Georgia men are to be tried this year. One of the factors apparently driving the expansion of the radical right has been the spread of conspiracy theories and demonizing falsehoods. Tall tales about secret government concentration camps, for instance, have spread beyond Patriot groups into nativist organizations and others.

Equally preposterous stories of plots to impose Islamic Shariah law and to “recruit” schoolchildren into homosexuality have been plugged around the country, often by well-known public figures. It seems clear that this kind of propaganda boosts membership in conspiracy-minded groups. But what may end up affecting the American radical right more than any other single factor in the coming year is President Obama and the presidential election campaign. If the primaries generate more attacks on the nation’s first black president based on complete falsehoods — that he is a secret Muslim, a Kenyan, a radical leftist bent on destroying America — it’s likely that the poison will spread. And if he wins reelection next fall, the reaction of the extreme right, already angry and on the defensive as the white population diminishes, could be truly frightening.

ANTI-GAY GROUPS

The LGBT community made significant advances in 2011, with the repeal of the “Don’t Act, Don’t Tell” policy on gay men and lesbians in the military, the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage by Americans and the legalization of such bonds in New York state. But it was precisely these advances that seemed to set off a furious rage on the religious right, with renewed efforts to ban or repeal marriage equality and what seemed to be an intensification of anti-gay propaganda in certain quarters. American Family Association official Bryan Fischer, for instance, said that “gays are Nazis,” claimed that HIV does not cause AIDS but gay men do, and, for good measure, criticized black welfare recipients who “rut like animals.” In another development, most of the religious right groups that started out opposing abortion but moved on to attacking LGBT people have recently begun to adopt anti-Muslim propaganda en masse. The gay-bashing Traditional Values Coalition, for instance, last year redesigned its website to emphasize a new section entitled “Islam vs. the Constitution,” published a report on Shariah law, and joined anti-Shariah conferences. Overall, the number of anti-gay hate groups in the United States rose markedly, going from 17 in 2010 to 27 last year.

ANTI-MUSLIM GROUPS

The number of anti-Muslim groups tripled in 2011, jumping from 10 groups in 2010 to 30 last year. That rapid growth in Islamophobia, marked by the vilification of Muslims by opportunistic politicians and anti-Muslim activists, began in August 2010, when controversy over a planned Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan reached a fever pitch. Things got worse later in the year, when Oklahoma residents voted to amend the state constitution to forbid the use of Islamic Shariah law in state courts — a completely unnecessary change, given that the U.S. Constitution rules that out. The overheated atmosphere generated by these events also helped spur a 50% jump in the FBI’s count of anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2010. Then, in March 2011, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) held hearings on the radicalization of U.S. Muslims that seemed meant to demonize them. At the same time, there was a swelling of truly vicious propaganda like this remarkable Jan. 14, 2011, comment from columnist Debbie Schlussel: “They are animals, yes, but a lower form than the dog, as they won’t learn to change their behavior for a carrot or a reward.”

BLACK SEPARATIST GROUPS

The most remarkable development among radical black groups and individuals last year was the continuing spread of so-called “sovereign citizen” ideology, a set of ideas that originated in white supremacist groups of the 1970s and 1980s but has nevertheless taken off among African Americans. Sovereigns’ conspiratorial beliefs generally include the claim that Americans are not subject to most tax and criminal laws, including statutes requiring driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations. In the case of the black adherents, who make up only a sliver of the larger sovereign citizens movement, these ideas have been melded with selective interpretations of early black nationalists like Noble Drew Ali. Black sovereigns, like white ones, have engaged in a series of criminal acts, drawing up bogus financial instruments, harassing enemies with unjustified court filings, and even illegally seizing houses they do not own. Another noteworthy development among radical black groups was the Nation of Islam’s furious defense of Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, a sometimes Nation benefactor who was killed in an uprising later in the year. Nation leader Louis Farrakhan said that U.S. involvement in Libya would hasten the apocalypse. Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party, went further, calling President Obama a “nigger police chief” leading the attack on a “black man … on the run, named Qaddafi.”

CHRISTIAN IDENTITY GROUPS

Christian Identity, a radical theology that describes Jews as biologically descended from Satan and people of color as soulless “mud people,” has been declining in recent years, largely because its arcane, Bible-based doctrines seem to hold little interest for young racists. But last year that trend reversed itself, as a new Identity group, Crusaders for Yahweh, appeared with 30 chapters. The group is based in Chillicothe, Ohio, and led by Paul Mullet, a former member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations (whose members generally practice Christian Identity) who left that group in 2010. That year, Mullet briefly formed an organization he called the American National Socialist Party, but he has now moved on to Crusaders for Yahweh, which appears to be tied institutionally to Aryan Nations. Also last year, Identity lost one of its best-known proponents with the death at 64 of Peter John “Pete” Peters, pastor of the LaPorte (Colo.) Church of Christ. Peters, who ran an Internet and radio ministry called Scriptures for America, had inspired extremists for some four decades.

KU KLUX KLAN GROUPS

Overall, the number of Klan chapters last year fell to 152 from 221 in 2010, and the various Klan groupings were relatively quiet. But the year brought major changes in the Klan formations, with some large groups disappearing while others popped up or added large numbers of new chapters. Most notably, the second largest Klan group in America — the Marion, Ohio-based Brotherhood of Klans, with 38 chapters in almost as many states — folded when its leader, Jeremy Parker, joined the leading Aryan Nations faction. At the same time, however, the Rebel Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Martinsville, Va., and inactive for several years, came back to life under leader Stan Martin with 19 chapters. The United Knights of Tennessee Ku Klux Klan, meanwhile, shot up from a single chapter in Morristown, Tenn., to 19. Two others, the True Invisible Empire Knights based in Pulaski, Tenn., and the Traditional American Knights of Potosi, Mo., merged to form the Potosi-based True Invisible Empire Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

NATIVIST EXTREMIST’ GROUPS

The contemporary movement of “nativist extremist” groups — organizations that go beyond lobbying and other political activities meant to restrict immigration, and instead harass and confront individuals they suspect are undocumented immigrants —began in 2005, with the appearance of the first Minuteman groups. (The SPLC does not list nativist extremist groups as hate groups; only a handful of the most extreme anti-immigrant groups are listed that way.) For its first five years, the movement expanded rapidly, reaching a high point of 319 groups in 2010. Last year, that number plummeted by more than 40%, falling to just 184, for reasons that are both internal and external. Internally, the movement was disrupted by internecine quarrels and the negative publicity that was generated by a Minuteman leader’s murder of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter in Arizona, a case that resulted in the leader’s being sentenced to death last year. But what may have been even more important is the way that the movement was co-opted as state legislatures began passing draconian legislation meant to punish undocumented immigrants, effectively stealing the issue away from the nativist groups.

NEO-CONFEDERATE GROUPS

The neo-Confederate movement, whose heart is the Alabama-based League of the South (LOS), grew both smaller and more radical last year as its political efforts to organize a second Southern secession seemed to fall on bare ground. Founded in 1994 by former university professor Michael Hill, the LOS, which opposes racial intermarriage and seeks a society marked by “general European cultural hegemony,” had 42 chapters in 2010, but saw that number fall to 32 last year. The drop-off came as Hill’s rhetoric grew more belligerent than ever before. Last July, at his Abbeville, S.C., annual conference, Hill told LOS members that “we are already at war” and, earlier, he urged them to buy AK-47s, hollow-point bullets and tools to derail trains. Some 60 people at the conference learned how to draw down on an enemy, and Hill asked in a speech, “What would it take to get you to fight?” Meanwhile, the group’s relatively strong Alabama chapter, based in Wetumpka, almost finished work on a 4,000-square-foot building that it intends to use for international conferences.

RACIST SKINHEAD GROUPS

Last March, David Lynch, leader of the Sacramento, Calif.-based American Front and one of the best-known racist skinheads on the international scene, was shot to death in his Citrus Heights home; his girlfriend was shot in the leg. Within days, police were questioning Charles Gilbert Demar III, a Lynch associate also known as “Charlie Boots” who was the lead singer of the Stormtroop 16 band, as a “person of interest.” Demar was arrested when officials found crystal methamphetamine and a meth manufacturing setup in his apartment, but as of press time he had not been charged in connection with Lynch’s death. Another significant event on the skinhead scene took place last June, when the decade-old Vinlanders Social Club, one of the most violent racist skinhead groups, held its first white power concert. More than 50 people came to the event in Columbus, Ohio, including Richie Meyer, president of the Confederate Hammerskins, and Forrest Fogarty, a musician and one of Meyer’s more prominent followers. Their presence and friendly association with Vinlanders at the event reflected the success of a truce between the two groups that was reached in 2007, ending what had been described as a “blood feud” between them.

WHITE NATIONALIST GROUPS

Three large groups form the core of the white nationalist movement in the United States: the Council of Conservative Citizens, an outgrowth of the old White Citizens Councils, that fights against school integration and racial intermarriage; American Renaissance, a journal that justifies white nationalism by attacking the intelligence and mental health of black people; and the American Third Position (A3P), a racist party with electoral ambitions in many states and the nation at large. Of these, it has been A3P, which only started up in 2009, that has been growing the most rapidly. It also has attracted most of the best-known white nationalists in America to its cause. Last year, Virginia Abernethy, an emeritus professor of psychiatry and anthropology at Vanderbilt Medical School, joined the A3P board of directors, as did Tomas Sunic, an American-educated Croatian who has spoken at neo-Nazi events. Others who became A3P officials earlier include Kevin MacDonald, a deeply anti-Semitic professor at California State University, Long Beach; James Edwards, host of a racist radio show based in Memphis; Don Wassall, publisher of the anti-immigrant Nationalist Times; and Jamie Kelso, once an aide to former Klan boss David Duke. A3P is headed up by Los Angeles lawyer William Daniel Johnson, a man who once sought to deport every American with any “ascertainable trace of Negro blood.”

Extremism and Extremist Organizations 2013.

By ADF Media.

The number of hate groups, extremists and anti‐govt organizations in the U.S. has continued to grow over the past three years, according to reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They increased to 1,018 in 2011, up from 1, 002 in 2010 and 602 in 2000. The striking rise is fueled by the super heated fears generated by economic dislocation, a proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories,the changing racial make‐up of America and the prospect of 4 more years under a black president who many on the far right view as an enemy to their country country. The rise in hate crimes and extremismoutside themilitarymay be an indication of internal issues all services will have to face

To read the power point presentation please go to: http://www.adfmedia.org/files/ExtremismPresentation.pdf

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Is attacking Syria a smart move?

September 1st, 2013

Contributor Opinion.

Syria’s latest chemical use of weapons against its own population has divided the U.S. and Russia into a larger dilemma. From a neutral perspective it seems like the F.S.A. (the rebels) are defeating Assad’s army the S.A.A., And its unlikely, that Assad is going to win the civil war just looking by at Damascus, and Aleppo.

The chemical weapons used to kill 1.300, innocent people seem to have sparked a violation of human rights, U.N. and international laws. A team of investigators representing the U.N., is now coming back from analyzing the causes of the explosion.

Secretary of State John Kerry made a forceful case for U.S. military action against Syria on Monday, after a weekend in which the administration signaled that it was preparing for exactly that, as a response to Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians.

So its more than likely that Obama is going to take action backed by France, and England which are contemplating the possibility of engagement against the S.A.A., sometime this week.

But Putin and Iran have been clear in stating that support could bring a lot more problems for the Middle East (they could be right). Interestingly, Erdogan’s Turkey does not seem happy with China, Iran and Russia, and he is trying to come up with a new U.N. structure that won’t allow their congruent participation.

But the question is simple. Is the premature invasion and support to attack Assad’s Army, a good idea or a bad idea? By U.S. helping the F.S.A., is it going to lead to other concerns as seen in countries under the Arab Spring, which are still decentralized like Libya and Jordan to give a few examples? Is it better in this case to back up Russia and Iran that support the Assad’s regime, or is it better to support the UN the U.S. allies that want to help the rebels? Is Russia capable and not afraid of declaring war to the U.S. to protect their strategic interest in Syria?

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Romy Kerwin.

“The west has been very patient with the Assad government. However, he has gone where no-one can tolerate. He has killed 1300 innocent people, including young children by weapons of mass extinction.

He must go and be judged as a war criminal.Forget alliances. The nerve gas is absolutely the end of Syria. On a humanitarian viewpoint, it is morally repellent and must be stopped at all costs.

What I fear is that once this threshold of abomination is crossed, it could become a precedent for other countries in other wars.There must be zero tolerance for something so repugnant and cowardly.”

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Mr. Jaime Lopez.

“The idea that the US enter into any conflict is premature, mature, or on time can never be determined from opinions. Timing is strictly an opinion of individuals whom may have some or deep knowledge of the internal issues, be closer to the situation, have strong academic understanding of what caused the situation, are politically motivated, or have financial interests.

A better question is why does the US have to be directly involved at all? Because it is the middle east? Is that truly a good answer? We as a leader must always make the hard decisions, but the decision to violently strike at a country that has stepped over the line when dealing with its own citizens is not a decision.

One question that this issue raises is why are the French interested in participating? One thing we have learned over the past 20 years is that the French do not get involved to address human rights issues. There can be a simple answer, but that is not the correct answer. The French military is underfunded, and so their participation for whatever reason that maybe, will mean that the US taxpayer will be shouldered with funding the French.

The question goes back to why would the US get involved? This conflict is one that is being continued by the support of ‘outside’ parties. The rebels would have collapsed a long time ago had it not been for the supporters. Is there a good reason why the international community has decided that Syria must have a regime change? There is no outcry over the ongoing violence in Mexico even as it spills over into the USA, and that country’s inability to address that issue. So we have one country that exerts control over its citizens and another that has no control. No control appears to be the winning answer.

Use of chemical weapons is not to be tolerated, but why would the use of 1,000 lbs high explosive bombs be any more tolerated? Or even the use of a machine gun?

No doubt there are bad people in the world. And there is less doubt that these bad people should be removed in whatever way is necessary. But is wagging war on a country the proper way to make these changes?

Whether Russia, China, or anyone else wants to join into the mess is not relevant in making the decision to enter into any conflict such as this. It is whether it is the right thing to do. Premature, or just in time, that is for history books, and academics to debate as there is no way to calculate the correct time enter into a conflict that there will be no clear winners.”

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Themistocles Konstantinou.

“My opinion is that the attack on Assad’s forces will bring more problems than the one which they will solve. I think that it must be a cooperation between Russia and US to convince Assad for quick negotiations under the aegis of the UN. History has taught us how faulted invasions of any kind can lead or result into.

The situation there, It is like a delayed triggered bomb. The Shiites is the minority in the area but it is the minority who has the power to attract allies like Hezbollah, Iran and other who are against any western engagement in the area. If the so called “Arab spring” is a story like Libya or Egypt the situation after Assad will be more messy than now. I am not supporting Assad’s regime of course, but I saw the consequences after invasions around the MENA region. I saw Iraq, Libya, Egypt etc etc.

I am afraid about any engagement in Syria. The better is to convince Assad by pressing him to follow UN envoys on negotiations without many terms and delays. The presence of Peacekeeping forces from nations other than Arab or Muslim countries will help the situation to be eased and perhaps the presence of police forces like EULEX like in Kosovo will force the situation to be calmed in the cities.

In any case the UN’s real presence will not solve the complicated situation there. The key nations are Russia and the US to help propose a real solution. All the other solutions will lead into another Libya and Iraq disaster, where the situation after years worsened way before the Arab Spring started!”

Catherine Haig.

“First the United States’ relationship with Putin and Russia since the beginning of Putin’s regime has been nothing but terrible. The Snowden matter has not helped our relationship with Russia either and now Russia is proclaiming that if any foreigner that comes to their shores is gay they will be put into prison with the possibility of long detainment which is absurd.

This aside I was at first in favor of having a conflict with Syria because any kind of chemical warfare has to be squashed but what is the cost? This could very well lead to WW3 which is THE WAR TO END THE WORLD and I’m not being religious about this in the least. Arab Spring aside America does not need any more conflicts with these extreme Muslims who will rape, maim or kill anyone in their way. America can not support Assad’s regime because he is committing crimes against humanity. Assad is committing crimes against the Geneva Convention not to mention the human rights problem these deaths are causing around the world.

I am not a Muslim lover and in fact I could give a squat what Turkey thinks of doing or whatever these Muslim countries want to do to each other. I wouldn’t care if they blew each other up however if that chemical warfare went viral; it is very possible we could all die from it. While I do not think Putin is that stupid to declare war on the United States I also don’t see the gain of the USA entering into a fight that is not our own.

Why do we always have to police the world? Can’t they take care of things themselves? I’m sick to death of seeing soldiers go off to war for years. What is going on in the world is scary and scarier still is this talk of chemical weapons and I’m sorry, anything to do with a viral chemical going off in any part of the world is an evil all its own but 1300 Muslims; his own people he killed. It’s terrible but I don’t see why we have to get involved.

Lastly, Obama’s hands have been tied with regards to domestic matters as the GOP and Tea Party Baggers have kidnapped the house and have not budged an inch on anything to do with Obama’s 2nd term in the White House. Instead of helping to create jobs for people who need them they are busy policing millionaire Rap artists (Bey/Jay Z) from visiting Cuba) which is so absurd that they should get involved in something as frivolous as that when so many Americans are in desperate need to find work.

Obama promised us and by “us” I mean all of US AMERICANS a refreshing CHANGE but all I see in the last 5 years of his being POTUS is war, a continuation of the Bush policies, spying on Americans so our government can protect us and more of the same. IE: NO CHANGE unless you count the cents in my pocket. I understand that Obama’s hands are tied domestically but on foreign policy is he to be remembered as the “war president”? I really don’t think we should get involved in this Syria ordeal BUT if we do we have to take Assad out immediately, all his government has to be killed within the week they assault Syria.

No more pussyfooting around guys – IN and OUT – no hostages – we burn them to the ground and if Russia or Iran has something to say – bomb them too – but make sure they don’t survive. BTW, this is not my best idea but it is practical but in truth the most practical way is NOT TO GO INTO SYRIA AT ALL. I love the character SPOCK on Star Trek because at this point he’d say: It’s totally illogical.”

Claude Nougat.

“My reaction is: Why the rush? There is no doubt that chemical attacks are a crime against humanity, an abomination that should be contained and punished.

But why the rush to launch military strikes against Syria?

It took US President Bush Senior five months after the invasion of Kuwait to start the war on Iraq.

I’m not suggesting we should wait five months but we should at least put our case together in a strong, legal way. With the United Nations and the international community at large.

So far, the countries supporting war besides the US are only two: France and Britain. Turkey is wavering. Germany and Italy lean towards seeking a mandate from the United Nations Security Council first – which is no doubt going to be difficult given Russia’s position of unfailing support to Syria. Not to mention China’s. Still, it should be tried.

I just can’t understand why our politicians act like warmongers. It is fine to be morally indignant about chemical warfare, who isn’t?

But to launch yet another series of air strikes à la Lybia-style when we know that the rebels on the ground are mostly violent Muslim extremists, is that wise?

Or is it a way for Mr. Cameron and Mr. Hollande to draw people’s attention away from the economic problems both countries are facing?

Guns as a solution to bread and butter issues are a classic…”

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George Bailey.

“Here we go again. War without end. We are told that Assad of Syria used chemical weapons but like the death of Osama bin Laden, there is no evidence presented to prove this.

Not presently, anyway. At least when the Kennedy administration discovered the missiles in Cuba, pictures of the missile sites were presented for proof. To have known liars tell the world, “You can trust us,” is absurd. It’s ironic and bewildering to see a Noble Peace Prize winner so lusting for war.

But the governments of the major powers have always been a duplicitous bunch. Already Britain has backed out. Hopefully, a better solution will be found for this issue than simply bombing people.”

David Merkel

David J. Merkel.

“I was remiss when I said that the question on whether rebellion is ever justified was a dumb question. It is a dumb question, because the testimony of history predominantly shows that after rebellions, things are usually worse. But most people don’t study history, so they think that things will be better after a rebellion.

Thus the Arab Spring. How much has it done for those that rebelled? Are things better in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria? Any fair rendering knows that things are worse. Toss in US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan – things are worse in both nations from the interventions.

War rarely solves problems. War should only be entered into for just reasons that affect your own nation. There is no calling for nations to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations. It is a shame if people die, but often the interference will lead to the deaths of far more.

The US Government needs to drop the idea that it is the global cop. It also has to drop the idea that it uses its military to preserve tranquility in global commerce. Neither are just reasons to incite conflict.

The US needs to focus on its own problems, and bring its troops home. We don’t need to dominate the world. Let nations work out their own problems – they might do far less if they knew there was no possibility that the US would aid them”

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Joy Tiz.

“Today’s editorial in the WSJ is typical of the genre regarding Syria. Now that Obama has stupidly painted himself into a corner, we simply MUST take out Assad.

And replace him with what?

The pro interventionists never address that small point. We would be handing the country over to al Qaeda forces that have taken over the opposition movement.

This administration appears to be incapable of learning from its mistakes. We tried this in Egypt. How’s that working out?

The majority of Americans don’t want to be dragged into another war.

The Commander in Chief’s first priority should be: what is the US national interest at stake?

Do we have a national interest in Syria’s civil war? No.

We do, however, have an interest in the fate of the chemical weapons. Those could fall into al Qaeda hands and be used against our ally, Israel, or against us.

Any military intervention should be directed at locating and taking out Saddam’s old stash of WMDs if such a thing is even possible. If anyone can do it, it’s our military.

That’s our compelling national interest in Syria. Killing Assad just creates yet another power vacuum for radical Islamists to rush in and fill.”

Joel S.W. Davidi.

“As someone who lives in Israel, I am categorically against any military action on the part of the US and.or Europe. My reasons are manifold:

1. Western involvement in Arab inter-fighting has never resolved any conflicts, on the contrary, it has only served to exacerbate it. Does anyone even remember Iraq under Saddam Hussein? Hussein was a brutal dictator to be sure, but he kept his diverse population in check. Daily bombings in Baghdad was unheard of. Thank you America for ensuring another century of river of blood in Babylon…

Iraq is only one of many examples of utter failure.

2. Why does the world take for granted America’s self-granted role if being the world’s policeman? When Civil War was raging in America in the 1860s, there were quite a few atrocities committed on both sides, yet the world stayed out (except for England which initially sought to get involved in the war on the side of the South).

The situation in Syria is heinous, no doubt but it will be incalculably worse if the west decides to get involved. We risk a major conflagration in the region which will adversely affect only nations of the Middle East (including mine). Europe is under no threat and had no business getting involved in the affairs of the MIddle East.

3. The timing of the chemical attack is extremely suspicious and raises serious questions as to who really was behind it. Let us bear in mind that Assad, tyrant that he is, is a western-educated secularist Alawite (neo-Christian).

The so-called rebels are a rag-tag group that include the most insane and cruel Islamist fanatics (Al-Qaeda). Assad had the good sense of keeping the relative peace on its shared borders with Israel for decades. The so-called rebels speak openly about their plans to destroy Israel after they are done with Assad. No thank you. I’d rather take Assad any day. ”

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Pierre-Antoine Klethi.

“This question groups a variety of separate, yet interdependent questions that diplomats, military leaders and decision-makers must answer before maybe intervening in Syria:

Do we have to intervene because Syria violated Human Rights?

Can we intervene under international law and in the current diplomatic context?

Do we have the power to intervene effectively? Are we well-prepared enough?

Do we want to intervene or are we tired of war in remote regions?

If we intervene, how do we do it?

We have a designated “enemy” (the Assad regime), but do we have friends/allies in Syria?

What are the consequences of the intervention? And does our intervention make things better or worse, both in the short and in the long run? I will try to provide an answer to them at the best of my knowledge.

Do we have to intervene because Syria violated Human Rights?

Yes, I believe we have to. Western leaders, in particular US President Barack Obama, have declared that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line”. So, an intervention is clearly a matter of credibility. Moreover, the international system was built to ensure that crimes – such as the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime against its own population – would be prevented and, if prevention did not work, punished. So, if international law is to continue playing any role, it must be forcefully applied to impose sanctions on the users of chemical weapons.

Can we intervene under international law and in the current diplomatic context?

A military intervention requires a mandate from the UN Security Council. Now, it is clear that a country such as Russia has no intention of giving the green light to such operation. Therefore, save an unexpected turn of events, a potential intervention would be outside the international legal framework.

Now, there is a precedent: the NATO intervention in Kosovo, in 1999, which also took place without a mandate of the UN and did not please Russia. I believe that Russia will not react militarily to a “Western” intervention in Syria; it will use other measures of retaliation, but I do not think that Russia has the power to fight a Western coalition. Moreover, a Russian declaration of war would represent a dramatic escalation that no party wants. As for Iran, it is too weak as well. In my eyes, the most likely damage that Russia and Iran can create would be to channel more arms to support the Assad’s army.

Do we have the power to intervene effectively? Are we well-prepared enough?

I believe it mainly depends on the type of intervention (see question 5). The idea of intervening has truly emerged only in the recent days, so the level of preparation depends upon whether the military command (in particular, the American one) had already secretly prepared plans for an intervention or not.

Do we want to intervene or are we tired of war in remote regions?

Considering the public opinion about the war in Iraq, and even about the war in Afghanistan in some European countries, it is legitimate that leaders fear the reaction of their citizens if they get involved in yet another conflict. Moreover, the antecedents of intervention are mixed: Libya does not anymore make the headlines in Western media, but this does not mean that problems there disappeared and that the country is stabilised. So, politicians like Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are quite reluctant to intervene. But, on the other hand, our values, as well as former announcements (in particular, Barack Obama declaring that the use of chemical weapons would change the situation), require us to intervene.

If we intervene, how do we do it?

This is one of the biggest issues. There are several options: ranked from the least to the most increasingly interventionist, we have selective bombing using missiles shot from the sea, selective bombing using aerial intervention, the creation of a no fly-zone, and an intervention on the ground. I think the latter can clearly be excluded, because it would represent too much involvement, while the Western powers want a strong, but limited intervention. Moreover, the experience of Iraq also excludes such developed action. The no-fly zone is something that would help a lot the rebels, but it is unsure that the USA and their allies will go so far, knowing that it would be more difficult in Syria than it has been in Libya. I talked with a friend who is more specialised than me in security and defence matters, and he believes that the first option (missiles shot from the sea) is the most likely, but an effective intervention may require using the second option as well. Of course, the type of intervention will also depend from the goals of such intervention.

We have a designated “enemy” (the Assad regime), but do we have friends/allies in Syria?

This is another big question: who exactly are we siding with? The problem is that the rebels are quite divided and the main (or, even, only) element uniting them is the wish to get rid of the Assad regime. Moreover, there are reports that extremists / radical Islamists begin dominating the rebellion. But establishing an Islamic State is surely not the goal of the Western allies. Therefore, we need to define more clearly who we want to support in the fight; otherwise, toppling the Assad regime will be like overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq: a change in the relative power of the different parties to a civil war that we do not end.

What are the consequences of the intervention? And does our intervention make things better or worse, both in the short and in the long run?

This question must really be answered by military strategists and decision-makers before starting the intervention. Are we intervening to re-balance the conflict? Are we trying to topple the Assad regime directly or indirectly? Can we avoid a bloody civil war? How will we protect the minorities and the losers of the war after its end? How will we bring peace back to Syria? What are the consequences of an intervention for the rest of the region?

In my humble position of blogger, I cannot answer these questions. But I hope that those in charge of answering them will do so. I will simply indicate that claiming that an intervention would threaten the stability of the region is ridiculous, since the region is already unstable, refugees are already massively arriving in neighbor countries, and Syria is already in a situation of civil war.”

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Raphael Cohen-Almagor.

“More than 100,000 people were killed in Syria since the civil war has begun. President Obama’s foreign policy wishes to bring the American troops home, to reduce military intervention in the world, and to secure US borders. This policy is contra Bush who had no qualms sending American troops to wage war in Iraq and a futile war in Afghanistan. Obama is reluctant to interfere in conflict zones. Thus he has observed the lingering killing in Syria and opted for a limited American involvement — supplying the Syrian opposition with weapons. Obama is also unsure who would replace Assad. Hence it was possible for the Syrian civil war to take its toll for so many months.

However, the use of chemical weapons is beyond the scope of tolerance. Now it is time for President Obama to assert leadership as the President of the only superpower, as the leader of the free world.

It would have been sensible to exert pressure via the United Nations. The forerunner of the United Nations, the League of Nations, was established in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles “to promote international cooperation and to achieve peace and security.” At the conclusion of WWII, in 1945, representatives of 50 countries met in San Francisco at the United Nations Conference on International Organization to draw up the United Nations Charter. The Charter was signed on 26 June 1945 and the United Nations officially came into existence on October 24, 1945, when the Charter had been ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and by a majority of other signatories.

However, the UN is ineffective due to the Russian and Chinese support of the Syrian dictatorship. Surprise surprise, money and economic interests are way more important than human life.

The model to follow is Operation Desert Storm. To recall, the U.S. assembled a coalition of forces to join it in opposing Iraq’s aggression, consisting of forces from 34 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, France, Morocco, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Portugal, Qatar, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Spain, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

President Obama should assemble a similar force to oust the Assad brutal regime. The force should include Arab countries. The operation would begin by striking the Syrian army heavily from the sea and from the air. The Syrian opposition coalition is said to supply the Americans with a bank targets. Then follow with a comprehensive ground attack, ensuring that Syria won’t fall in the hands of radical Islamists. The USA should work together with the moderate elements to install a new government in Damascus. Replacing one evil with another won’t be prudent. The USA should work together with the Arab countries and with the Syrian opposition, ascertaining that Syria does not fall in the hands of Jihadi terrorists.

Toppling the Assad dictatorship without assuring the identity of the successor is a recipe for further bloodshed and instability. The USA should take effective means to see that Syria will be governed by people who prefer compromise to violence, who respect human life and who wish Syria to become a respected member of the League of Nations instead of a notorious country on the list of terrorist states.”

Jaime Ortega Simo. (Editor opinion)

“Obama shot himself in the foot by staging a political “action man” power ranger show. He was determined to strike Assad’s regime a few days back without clear evidence, and he now finds himself cruising a one-way battle holding hands with French support, but without British backup.

The UN investigation hasn’t been confirmed yet, but Obama is ready to make a move without actual proof? Well wasn’t Obama, the same candidate who declared he wanted to end the Bush foreign wars? Who laughed at Bush and the “fabricated hoax of Weapons of Mass Destruction”? Seems quite hypocritical to watch as he is even more indecisive than Bush, in what he is trying to accomplish, with Syria’s mission. So much for “Hope!”

The congress is not willing to go to war without a stabilized reason, as the U.S. shares no strategic concern in Syria other than having a larger Geo-political control in the Middle East.

Russia and Iran have picked up on Obama’s weakness and indecision, and have consequently lost respect for the U.S. Commander- In-Chief, which shows why Russia and China played a chase game with Edward Snowden, knowing that Obama’s administration is not tough enough outside of nice rhetorical speeches and broken promises. And they also watch news, they know Obama breaks basic promises.

But if he does attack Syria, the SAA will retaliate! And that retaliation logically will lead to a larger war. The FSA will become a U.S. temporary ally, but only for a short period of time. Then not long after Assad is out, the Sunni’s will start their own infidel campaign against the U.S. that will lead to chaotic occupation, with IED road bombs organized by AlQaeda militants that will support an Islamic state. Killings of Coptic’s, Shiias, and Alawites…

Obama needs to get out his head, that the U.S. is the ‘head quarters’ of all the power rangers around the world. Also lets not forget this wars, will cost a lot of taxpayer money and after slowly recovering from a financial crisis is the spark of another battleground the best solution? And who will be next? Iran, ,Sudan or Pakistan….?”

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Border agency report reveals internal struggles with corruption

August 31st, 2013

By Andrew Becker: Border and National Security Reporter.

Turf battles, internal dysfunction and other troubles have left U.S. Customs and Border Protection grasping to get a handle on corruption and other misconduct within its ranks, according to an internal study that has been kept secret for more than a year.

The agency, the nation’s largest federal law enforcement force with nearly 60,000 employees, has struggled to streamline its own disciplinary system, to stamp out an internal “code of silence” that protects corrupt co-workers from exposure or even to fully understand how bad the corruption problem is.

These woes and more are highlighted in a study conducted by the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute, which acts as a think tank for the Department of Homeland Security. The 80-page unclassified report, reviewed by the Center for Investigative Reporting, highlights nagging problems, some of which date back to 2002.

As the department has bolstered border security by adding thousands of new agents, expanding its Southwest border fence and deploying sophisticated surveillance technology, Mexican crime syndicates increasingly have turned to bribing agency employees and have attempted to infiltrate U.S. law enforcement ranks with their own operatives to avoid those obstacles.

Customs and Border Protection has identified at least 15 attempts of infiltration, according to the study, which did not give specific examples. That number could be much higher now as the agency, as mandated by a 2010 law, has ramped up efforts to administer polygraph exams to all new applicants.

As part of lie detector tests, prospective hires have admitted to drug trafficking, human smuggling and other illegal activity, according to examples the agency previously provided to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

One applicant told examiners that he smuggled 230 people across the border and shuttled drug dealers around border towns so they could conduct their business. Another admitted to various crimes, including transporting $700,000 in drug money and 50 kilograms of cocaine across the Southwest border.

Since Oct. 1, 2004, 147 agency officers and agents have been charged with or convicted of corruption-related offenses, ranging from taking bribes to allow drugs into the country to stealing government money. About a dozen of those cases came to light in 2012.

“This is a small minority of the workforce, but it represents a threat to our national security,” the authors wrote in the study.

The most recent incident involves a Border Patrol agent in Yuma, Ariz., who was arrested Dec. 2 when federal agents caught the two-year veteran as he loaded nearly 150 pounds of marijuana into his patrol vehicle while on duty.

The border agency has made strides to address the “persistent problem” of corruption, the report contends. In particular, the agency has used data to research and analyze potential threats and security weaknesses.

One example, dubbed Operation Side Door, examines leads and other data from applicants who have admitted to involvement with smuggling to detect possible links to current agency employees. Another, called Operation Southern Exposure, evaluates seizure data to spot potential employee misconduct.

Despite those innovations, the agency still lacks a comprehensive and coordinated approach to ferret out corruption, the study found.

The Government Accountability Office recently released its own report after a yearlong review of the border agency’s efforts to fight corruption, which came to a similar conclusion that the agency hasn’t implemented a comprehensive strategy, in addition to other concerns. But that report stopped short of looking at systemic issues that extend beyond Customs and Border Protection, which the internal study examined.

A prolonged turf battle with the department’s inspector general, which has been criticized for its own inefficiencies, has contributed to the border agency’s blind spots, the internal study found. The department’s inspector general has withheld information, neglected investigations and accumulated a backlog of investigations that at one point reached more than 1,000 corruption cases.

Charles K. Edwards, who is leading the Homeland Security inspector general’s office, testified in August during a House government reform hearing that turf battles among the agencies have subsided and his investigators could handle the nearly 1,600 cases of alleged employee misconduct open at the time.

The neglected cases and other inefficiencies have allowed employees suspected of corruption to remain in sensitive security positions or had their careers stunted before they were found not guilty, the study found.

Corruption-related cases generally have increased in recent years. Whether that is attributable to a hiring surge that in a decade has roughly doubled the size of the U.S. Border Patrol is inconclusive, the study says. According to the report, that’s because the inspector general has not shared enough information with the agency.

Susan Ginsburg, a former U.S. Treasury official and 9/11 Commission staffer, said it’s critical that agencies combine information and data so the Homeland Security Department and Congress have a clear picture of corruption at the border.

“It’s a pain in the neck for the department, but there are always going to be a few rotten apples in law enforcement,” Ginsburg said. “What hurts is when you’re not doing everything you can to prevent it and to weed them out.”

The inspector general’s office – which polices waste, fraud and abuse among border agents, customs officers and the rest of the Homeland Security Department – is under investigation following allegationsthat agents at a Texas branch office were instructed to fabricate reports.

In what may be the first of several court cases, Wayne E. Ball, a former agent with the inspector general in McAllen, Texas, pleaded guilty Jan. 17 to a charge of conspiring to falsify records in a federal investigation, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Brownsville, Texas.

The watchdog agency’s top investigator, three of his deputies and several agents have been put on administrative leave or reassigned pending the outcome of a Justice Department-led grand jury investigation into the allegations.

The inspector general since late spring also has unloaded hundreds of corruption and employee misconduct cases to the internal affairs offices for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to help whittle down its mounting backlog of investigations.

Part of the problem, the study concludes, is that while the inspector general’s office has the right of first refusal, it doesn’t have the agents to handle the thousands of complaints of wrongdoing. The inspector general has one agent for every 1,056 department employees. Customs and Border Protection, meanwhile, has one internal affairs agent for every 281 agency employees.

The study was commissioned in 2011 by then-Commissioner Alan Bersin and aimed to evaluate the agency’s countercorruption programs. Neither the agency nor the Homeland Security Department has made the report public since it was completed about a year ago. The Center for Investigative Reporting was allowed to view the report on the condition that the provenance remain confidential.

In August, David Aguilar, deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told lawmakers during a hearing on border corruption that the agency has acted on some of the study’s findings, without revealing details of the report, and made other overtures to address corruption. But it remains unclear to what extent the recommendations have been adopted.

Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael J. Friel said in a written statement that the overwhelming majority of employees work tirelessly to keep the country safe. He added that the agency has instituted extensive measures to prevent misconduct, including a rigorous vetting process of applicants and periodic background investigations of current employees.

The agency “stresses honor and integrity in every aspect of our mission,” he said. “We do not tolerate corruption within our ranks, and we fully cooperate with any criminal or administrative investigations of alleged misconduct by any of our personnel, on or off duty.”

According to the internal study, at least two things are working to root out corruption at Customs and Border Protection: polygraph tests for applicants and FBI-led task forces.

The lie detector tests have eliminated about 75 percent of applicants from consideration, including those who don’t show up for the exam.

The study also highlights the FBI-led Border Corruption Task Forces, of which there are 13 along the Southwest border, as a model for law enforcement cooperation. In the past, the inspector general has tried to block Customs and Border Protection internal affairs agents from participating on the task forces, arguing that only the inspector general has that authority.

Customs and Border Protection in recent years hired more than 200 internal affairs agents to root out corruption. But those agents frequently have been sidelined from pursuing the most serious offenses to handle disciplinary cases.

Such cases, including misuse of government property or drug abuse, on average take months to resolve because of the agency’s overtaxed disciplinary system.

While some issues are structural, others are cultural, such as the “code of silence” problem. While not unique to the agency, the “’code’ presents an insidious challenge to workforce integrity, and requires explicit, targeted and sustained attention,” the report states.

Officials over the years have tried to grapple with some of these issues, warning against the structure in place today. In 2008, then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff denied a request from W. Ralph Basham, the Customs and Border Protection commissioner from 2006 until 2009, that his internal affairs agents have the authority to investigate criminal matters involving employees.

Chertoff reasoned that corruption was tied to smuggling and trafficking, which are crimes probed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the department’s investigative arm.

Basham’s predecessor, Robert C. Bonner, in 2003 advised that without a fully functional internal affairs office, it would be impossible to rope in corruption.

“The fact that 134 (now 147) current or former (Customs and Border Protection) employees have been arrested or indicted on corruption-related charges since October 1, 2004 validates Commissioner Bonner’s concerns,” the report states.

http://cironline.org/reports/border-agency-report-reveals-internal-struggles-corruption-4126

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U.S. Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons

August 31st, 2013

Posted by The Daily Journalist.

The United States Government assesses with high confidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013. We further assess that the regime used a nerve agent in the attack. These all-source assessments are based on human, signals, and geospatial intelligence as well as a significant body of open source reporting.Our classified assessments have been shared with the U.S. Congress and key international partners.

To protect sources and methods, we cannot publicly release all available intelligence – but what follows is an unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s analysis of what took place.

Syrian Government Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21

A large body of independent sources indicates that a chemical weapons attack took place in the Damascus suburbs on August 21. In addition to U.S. intelligence information, there are accounts from international and Syrian medical personnel; videos; witness accounts; thousands of social media reports from at least 12 different locations in the Damascus area; journalist accounts; and
reports from highly credible nongovernmental organizations.

A preliminary U.S. government assessment determined that 1,429 people were killed in the chemical weapons attack, including at least 426 children, though this assessment will certainly evolve as we obtain more information. We assess with high confidence that the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attack against opposition elements in the Damascus suburbs on August 21.

We assess that the scenario in which the opposition executed the attack on August 21 is highly unlikely. The body of evidence and information used to make this assessment includes intelligence pertaining to the regime’s preparations for this attack and its means of delivery, multiple streams of intelligence about the attack itself and its effect, our post-attack observations, and the differences between the capabilities of the regime and the opposition. Our high confidence assessment is the strongest position that the U.S. Intelligence Community can take short of confirmation. We will continue to seek additional information to close gaps in our understanding of what took place.

Background:

The Syrian regime maintains a stockpile of numerous chemical agents, including mustard, sarin, and VX and has thousands of munitions that can be used to deliver chemical warfare agents. Syrian President Bashar al-Asad is the ultimate decision maker for the chemical weapons program and members of the program are carefully vetted to ensure security and loyalty. The Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) – which is subordinate to the Syrian Ministry of Defense – manages Syria’s chemical weapons program.

We assess with high confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year, including in the Damascus suburbs.This assessment is based on multiple streams of information including reporting of Syrian officials planning and executing chemical weapons attacks and laboratory analysis of physiological samples obtained from a number of individuals, which revealed exposure to sarin.

We assess that the opposition has not used chemical weapons. The Syrian regime has the types of munitions that we assess were used to carry out the attack on August 21, and has the ability to strike simultaneously in multiple locations. We have seen no
indication that the opposition has carried out a large-scale, coordinated rocket and artillery attack like the one that occurred on August 21.

We assess that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons over the last year primarily to gain the upper hand or break a stalemate in areas where it has struggled to seize and hold strategically valuable territory. In this regard, we continue to judge that the Syrian regime views chemical weapons as one of many tools in its arsenal, including air power and ballistic missiles, which
they indiscriminately use against the opposition.

The Syrian regime has initiated an effort to rid the Damascus suburbs of opposition forces using the area as a base to stage attacks against regime targets in the capital. The regime has failed to clear dozens of Damascus neighborhoods of opposition elements, including neighborhoods targeted on August 21, despite employing nearly all of its conventional weapons systems. We assess that the regime’s frustration with its inability to secure large portions of Damascus may have contributed to its decision to use chemical weapons on August 21.

Preparation:

We have intelligence that leads us to assess that Syrian chemical weapons personnel – including personnel assessed to be associated with the SSRC – were preparing chemical munitions prior to the attack. In the three days prior to the attack, we collected streams of human, signals and geospatial intelligence that reveal regime activities that we assess were associated with preparations for a chemical weapons attack.

Syrian chemical weapons personnel were operating in the Damascus suburb of ‘Adra from Sunday, August 18 until early in the morning on Wednesday, August 21 near an area that the regime uses to mix chemical weapons, including sarin. On August 21, a Syrian regime elementprepared for a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus area, including through the utilization of gas masks. Our intelligence sources in the Damascus area did not detect any indications in the days prior to the attack that opposition affiliates were planning to use chemical weapons.

The Attack:

Multiple streams of intelligence indicate that the regime executed a rocket and artillery attack against the Damascus suburbs in the early hours of August 21. Satellite detections corroborate that attacks from a regime-controlled area struck neighborhoods where the chemical attacks reportedly occurred – including Kafr Batna, Jawbar, ‘Ayn Tarma, Darayya, and Mu’addamiyah.

This includes the detection of rocket launches from regime controlled territory early in the morning, approximately 90 minutes before the first report of a chemical attack appeared in social media. The lack of flight activity or missile launches also leads us to conclude that the regime used rockets in the attack.

Local social media reports of a chemical attack in the Damascus suburbs began at 2:30 a.m. local time on August 21. Within the next four hours there were thousands of social media reports on this attack from at least 12 different locations in the Damascus area. Multiple accounts described chemical-filled rockets impacting opposition-controlled areas.

Three hospitals in the Damascus area received approximately 3,600 patients displaying symptoms consistent with nerve agent exposure in less than three hours on the morning of August 21, according to a highly credible international humanitarian organization. The reported symptoms, and the epidemiological pattern of events – characterized by the massive influx of
patients in a short period of time, the origin of the patients, and the contamination of medical and first aid workers – were consistent with mass exposure to a nerve agent. We also received reports from international and Syrian medical personnel on the ground.

We have identified one hundred videos attributed to the attack, many of which show large numbers of bodies exhibiting physical signs consistent with, but not unique to, nerve agent exposure. The reported symptoms of victims included unconsciousness, foaming from the nose and mouth, constricted pupils, rapid heartbeat, and difficulty breathing. Several of the videos show what appear to be numerous fatalities with no visible injuries, which is consistent with death from chemical weapons, and inconsistent with death from small-arms, high-explosive munitions or blister agents.

At least 12 locations are portrayed in the publicly available videos, and a sampling of those videos confirmed that some were shot at the general times and locations described in the footage. We assess the Syrian opposition does not have the capability to fabricate all of the videos, physical symptoms verified by medical personnel and NGOs, and other information associated with this chemical attack.

We have a body of information, including past Syrian practice, that leads us to conclude that regime officials were witting of and directed the attack on August 21. We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on August 21 and was concerned with the U.N. inspectors obtaining evidence. On the afternoon of August 21, we have intelligence that Syrianchemical weapons personnel were directed to cease operations. At the same time, the regime intensified the artillery barrage targeting many of the neighborhoods where chemical attacks occurred.

In the 24 hour period after the attack, we detected indications of artillery and rocket fire at a rate approximately four times higher than the ten preceding days. We continued to see indications of sustained shelling in the neighborhoods up until the morning of August 26.

To conclude, there is a substantial body of information that implicates the Syrian government’s responsibility in the chemical weapons attack that took place on August 21.As indicated, there is additional intelligence that remains classified because of sources and methods concerns that is being provided to Congress and international partners.

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