In what is sure to be one of the most glaringly obvious headlines written about the General Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair, the Washington Post writes: “Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director.”
Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Right after the [...]]]>
In what is sure to be one of the most glaringly obvious headlines written about the General Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair, the Washington Post writes: “Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director.”
Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Right after the election, Petraeus submitted his resignation to President Obama after being under investigation by the FBI for months; he had already reportedly broken off his relationship with Broadwell, his biographer.
ABC reports that the FBI did not in fact inform the White House because their findings were “the result of a criminal investigation that never reached the threshold of an intelligence probe” — but even as the FBI was mulling over what to do next, one of the agents on the case was contacting Florida socialite Jill Kelley to inform her of their findings so far.
The investigation showed just how broad the Bureau’s powers are with respect to communications monitoring. Rather than observing what The Daily Beast calls “the spirit of minimization to lead the FBI to keep any personal revelations within the bureau and not say anything to anybody” in other cases involving personal threats, it seems that the since-dismissed agent violated this policy and not only told Kelley, but Members of Congress as well, before the Tampa office handling the email-reading contacted the Director of the FBI to warn of possible national security implications.
As a result of the FBI’s case with Kelley, the US/NATO commander in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen, is also now “involved” in the scandal due to his lengthy email correspondence with Kelley that has raised concerns over potential breaches of national security.
Though the details of the affair have captured headlines and a large number of officials and foreign policy commentators are bemoaning the damage done to Petraeus’s military-policy reputation, some discussion is occurring over the ex-DCIA’s record as top general in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Langley’s chief drone advocate.
Issandr El Amrani at the Arabist offers a succinct observation of how Petraeus’s star rose in the Beltway hierarchy as the US sought a way out of Iraq: “[h]e delivered results of sorts for the US, which gave Washington political cover for an exit.” While this certainly represented a success for a despairing Bush White House, it was not a step towards carrying out an extended occupation, or even reinvigorating the potpourri of war aims increasingly advanced after 2003 to re-spin the war’s WMD casus belli. Iraq’s ongoing political troubles offer few hints as to how counterinsurgency, or COIN, may have staved off total collapse. At least, from the military’s perspective, the “Surge” staved off a complete collapse and ensured the US could withdraw in the near future, not unlike Nixon’s 1973 “peace with honor” adage in Vietnam. With Iran maintaining its influence in Baghdad (handed to them by the US invasion), disparate militias eyeing each other warily in Kurdistan, and Iraq’s anti-Iranian & anti-American terror cells looking to Syria to revitalize their regional struggle, America’s 21st century “peace with honor” may sound just as hollow for some Iraqi officials today as it sounded for South Vietnamese negotiators back then.
COIN itself never came to reoccupy the spot formerly reserved for “nation-building” in the years Robert McNamara’s whiz kids rode high. As Andrew Sullivan and Michael Hastings note, the general himself did not exactly follow his own press in practice when he transfered over to Afghanistan, emphasizing air strikes and special operations missions over his much-lauded counterinsurgency practices of going door-to-door to win the population over. As Spencer Ackerman, who has issued an apology for not being more aware of how the general’s Army office was influencing his past reporting, Petraeus has done much to expand the CIA’s own drone program, calling for a significant expansion of the program just weeks before his resignation.
COIN and its mythologizing aside, there are few reasons to expect that the general’s counterterrorism policies will suddenly fall out of favor with the White House, not least because Deputy NSA John O. Brennan has been one of the driving forces for institutionalizing drone warfare since his appointment in 2009. The influential former DCIA Michael Hayden, now coming off of his stint as an advisor to former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is urging the agency to move away from its targeted killing trajectory and back towards threat assessment and anticipation. He remarked that looking to the future of the Agency, “[t]he biggest challenge may be the sheer volume of problems that require intelligence input.”
There is little chance though that Petraeus’s downfall will see the downgrading of the Agency’s robot presence. With both the US and Pakistan unwilling to launch ground major operations into the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions due to the casualties their armed forces would incur, the drone wars are regarded as the most effective military option available. Neither Washington nor Islamabad — or on the other side of the Indian Ocean, Sana’a and Mogadishu — have either the capacity or will for anything more. Or for anything less, in fact, since that would mean ceding the field to the targets, who despite their losses, can draw strength from these strikes. The CTC man told the Washington Post last year while the Agency may be “killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now,” he himself does not think he’s implementing a truly sustainable policy for this Administration, or for those that will follow.
But as the Post reported this past month, Deputy NSA Brennan seems to think otherwise, along with those reportedly elevated in the CIA under Petraeus’s directorship.
While the relationship between reporter and officer — whether sexualized or not — is likely to remain a topic of debate and “soul-searching” for commentators in the coming months, and COIN may fade away from Army manuals trying to plan out the next “time-limited, scope-limited military action, in concert with our international partners,” the new face of counterterrorism that is the General Atomics MQ series is likely to be the general/DCIA’s most lasting legacy. And this will be the one that holds the fewest headlines of all in the weeks to come, given it’s broad acceptance across both major parties and the “punditocracy.”
]]>First posted at Gary’s Choices
At the link is the text of an affidavit accusing Iran of organizing a hit on the Saudi Ambassador in Washington. I find this very hard to believe. In fact, this plot, if true, departs from all known Iranian policies and procedures.
To [...]]]>
First posted at Gary’s Choices
At the link is the text of an affidavit accusing Iran of organizing a hit on the Saudi Ambassador in Washington. I find this very hard to believe. In fact, this plot, if true, departs from all known Iranian policies and procedures.
To be sure, Iran has plenty of reasons to be angry at both the United States and Saudi Arabia. They attribute the recent wave of assassinations of physics professors and students, as well as the intrusion of the Stuxnet worm, to the US and Israel. And the king of Saudi Arabia is reliably reported to have called for the US to bomb Iran.
Iran has reportedly been involved in past assassinations in Europe and bombings in Argentina and elsewhere. But the assassinations were of Iranian counter-revolutionaries in the 1980s, and the bombings were always carried out by trusted proxies — normally a branch of Hezbollah. Iran’s fingerprints were always concealed beneath one or more layers of disguise.
Iran has never conducted — or apparently even attempted — an assassination or a bombing inside the US. And it is difficult to believe that they would rely on a non-Islamic criminal gang to carry out this most sensitive of all possible missions. In this instance, they allegedly relied on at least one amateur and a Mexican criminal drug gang that is known to be riddled with both Mexican and US intelligence agents.
Whatever else may be Iran’s failings, they are not noted for utter disregard of the most basic intelligence tradecraft, e.g. discussing an ultra-covert operation on an open international line between Iran and the US. Yet that is what happened here.
Perhaps this operation is just as it appears. But at a minimum both the public and the Congress should demand more detailed evidence before taking any rash or irreversible action.
If Iran is really as stupid and as incompetent as this case implies, then perhaps they are their own worst enemy and not the clever and determined adversary that they are made out to be.
]]>Earlier today the FBI issued a press release stating that two Iranian men have been criminally charged in a New York court for allegedly plotting to assassinate [...]]]>
Earlier today the FBI issued a press release stating that two Iranian men have been criminally charged in a New York court for allegedly plotting to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. Here are some examples of how the U.S. mainstream media initially headlined the story:
ABC News: Iran ‘Directed’ Washington, D.C., Terror Plot, U.S. Says
New York Times: U.S. Accuses Iranians of Plotting to Kill Saudi Envoy
Washington Post: Iran behind alleged terrorist plot, U.S. says
So from the looks of things, Iran has been planning a terrorist plot on U.S. soil, right? Wrong, at least for now that is. There are many holes in this story that need to be filled before the government of Iran can be credibly accused of committing what could be interpreted as an act of war. For a summary of related events so far, read Jim Lobe’s report, and following are some preliminary questions that need answering:
1) Who has the authority to operate on behalf of the Iranian government?
If a relative of a member of the U.S. military or CIA plans a murder on foreign soil and claims he was ordered to even though the U.S. denies it, would we consider that a terrorist plot by the U.S.?
The accused named in the FBI press release are Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old Iranian-American from Texas with dual citizenship, and Gholam Shakuri, an alleged Iran-based member of Iran’s secretive Quds Force. What does the U.S. have that proves they were acting on behalf of the Iranian government, which, by the way, quickly denied the charges?
2) Who approached who first?
If Arbabsiar approached the agent first, how did he find them? If the FBI put Arbabsiar under surveillance for suspicious activities and then lured him into direct communication (which could have been the initial point of contact), was the FBI involved in other persuasive activities as well? Considering the loony aspects of this story which even Hillary Clinton has alluded to, is it wrong to question the sanity of Arbabsiar? Is it unfathomable that the FBI could have found a crazy and/or impressionable person who was acting on his own accord but was in some way related to elements of the Iranian government?
Update: A report in the Washington Post by Greg Miller and Julie Tate sheds some light on who Arbabsiar really is. According to House intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.):
It is my belief he was recruited for this particular operation
3) What are the exact details of Arbabsiar’s confession and under what conditions was it made?
4) While in FBI custody, Arbabsiar made calls to his “cousin” in Iran who is allegedly a “big general” in the Iranian army and a “senior member of the Qods Force”. How did the FBI verify his cousin’s identity?
Did the cousin verify his identity on the phone? If yes, why would he do that if they knew one another? Would the alleged cousin really have been that imprudent while speaking to someone that he was planning an assassination plot with?
5) Why is the “cousin” unnamed?
6) Why would a government that is constantly accused of conniving to build nuclear weapons so that it can allegedly wreak destruction upon its adversaries attempt to assassinate someone as insignificant as the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in such a poorly conducted plot and with the use of such low-level assailants?
While nothing is impossible, Iran has shown its capabilities in Lebanon and Iraq and this plot is not its style. You would think that after surviving for 32 years with the most powerful countries in the world against it, the leaders of the Islamic Republic would have learned a few things about carrying out high-risk operations with diligence and maximum impact — clearly not the case here.
7) What could Iran gain from this plot?
Certainly tensions have increased between Iran and Saudi Arabia over the past year, but Iran has been battling the Saudis in other ways, by exerting influence over Iraq’s government, for example. As Jim Lobe points out, if this plot is really Iran’s doing, it will only lead to more strangling sanctions and bring the threat of war closer. Unless you are among the misguided group of people who think that Iran’s current government is suicidal, taking part in an event like this is simply not in Iran’s interest.
8) What can Iran lose from this plot?
As Lobe and Josh Rogin have pointed out, Iran hawks are having a field day with this story. Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) immediately called for the U.S. to collapse Iran’s central bank and unsigned opinion pieces are urging further action (what comes after sanctions?) against the Iranian “threat.” This story was also broken on the same day that further OFAC sanctions were announced, with more on the way.
I am not doubting that suspicious and worrisome events took place with regard to Arbabsiar or that Iran has animosity towards Saudi Arabia and the U.S. and vice versa (recall Saudi Arabia urging the U.S. to bomb Iran), but do we really have enough evidence to claim that the government of Iran directly attempted to carry out an assassination plot on U.S. soil? That’s a serious, game-changing charge. Even if you don’t want to accept Iran’s official denial, you need to produce more facts before you can make that case. It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will do its job and provide us with them.
]]>Reports that FBI counterterrorism training programs relied heavily on Islamophobic material has sent shockwaves through the FBI and the Department of Justice. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman has closely followed the influence of FBI trainer William Gawthrop’s presentation, “The Sources and Patterns of Terrorism in [...]]]>
Reports that FBI counterterrorism training programs relied heavily on Islamophobic material has sent shockwaves through the FBI and the Department of Justice. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman has closely followed the influence of FBI trainer William Gawthrop’s presentation, “The Sources and Patterns of Terrorism in Islamic Law,” and notes that the slides have been cited in Justice Department training material which portray an existential battle between Islam and the West.
Ackerman notes that in 2007, Gawthrop taught a class on “intelligence and homeland security” and the National Defense Intelligence College. A ThinkProgress investigation into Gawthrop’s background reveals he was part of a U.S. Army War College think tank, the Proteus Management Group (PMG), at which Islamophobic training material and papers were regularly produced and shared.
Pat Cohn, a contractor for the Army who works at the War College and is listed as a contact for the group, told ThinkProgress that, to the best of his knowledge, Proteus had been shut down when it lost its funding. He could not say when the funding had been cut. Portions of the project’s website have been erased but a combination of a cached version of the website and documents still hosted on U.S. military web-servers reveal a DOD operation which served as a breeding ground for the Islamophobic narratives present in Gawthrop’s presentations.
Proteus’ mission was to “consider differing values and perceptions,” and “frame complex issues holistically.” A banner on the now-erased Proteus website reflects the group’s “outside the box” mission.
Proteus, which was sponsored by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence and the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership, hosted Gawthrop as a “PMG Fellow.” A March 2007 Proteus newsletter directs readers to one of Gawthrop’s articles in which he suggests the ideas of Islam should be “countered” through “critical vulnerabilities.” He writes:
- Critical vulnerabilities of the Koran, for example, are that it was uttered by a mortal; portions were ghostwritten by others; portions were lost or redacted, and it was revised and re-issued by another mortal. Similar vulnerabilities may be found in Mohammad’s character as a political and military leader, the character of other Clerics in the Modern Era, as well as the topics addressed in the Haddiths.
But Gawthrop’s portrayal of Islam as inherently violent — indeed he glosses over the history of Christian wars of aggression by declaring “the Crusades were a delayed response to Jihad” — and at odds with Western civilization was hardly outside the norm in the “future” research conducted at Proteus.
Documents hosted on DOD webservers and associated with the Proteus program lay bare a culture of hostility toward Islam and closely resemble the messages in Gawthrop’s training materials.
A “Proteus Monograph Series” on “Truth, Perception, And Consequences,” authored by Christine A. R. MacNulty, reads:
- [The Enlightenment] was the time of a major paradigm shift for the West, away from the authoritarian epistemology of medieval religious doctrine and towards an empirical epistemology based on the scientific method. The Islamic world has not been through a similar shift, which could explain its current predicament. [...]
While the [Islamic] radicals permit no creativity in general, they exhibit great creativity in terms of tactics and the development of IEDs, bombs, and other weaponry. They are innovative in their uses of technology such as cellphones. But behind them are still the concepts of revenge, honor, and “face” mixed with resentment and envy of the West.
In a presentation delivered by Cynthia E. Ayers at a Proteus workshop in August 2006, she warns that the Bush administration’s offer of incentives for Iran to cease nuclear enrichment could “be interpreted by Iranian leaders as an offer to pay ‘tribute’ in submission to Islam.” The presentation concludes with this slide.
While public attention has focused on Gawthrop’s presence at the FBI, documents from Proteus would suggest that the Islamophobic narratives in his presentations were common, if not actively encouraged, by the Department of Defense at the Army War College.
]]>Spencer Ackerman’s reports on Islamophobic training sessions at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have sent the Bureau into damage control mode. On Thursday, the FBI held a conference call with Muslim civil rights groups to apologize for the offensive training materials, which Ackerman has [...]]]>
Spencer Ackerman’s reports on Islamophobic training sessions at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have sent the Bureau into damage control mode. On Thursday, the FBI held a conference call with Muslim civil rights groups to apologize for the offensive training materials, which Ackerman has published over the past week.
The FBI has promised a “comprehensive review of all training and reference materials,” but Ackerman, in an article published today, reveals that the work of well-known Islamophobes permeates the FBI’s training culture and the internal reference resources available to FBI agents.
Ackerman reports that the mandatory online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), included the following description of Sunni Muslims:
- Sunni Muslims have been prolific in spawning numerous and varied fundamentalist extremist terrorist organizations. Sunni core doctrine and end state have remained the same and they continue to strive for Sunni Islamic domination of the world to prove a key Quranic assertion that no system of government or religion on earth can match the Quran’s purity and effectiveness for paving the road to God.
An examination of the FBI’s library in Quantico, which is not open to the public, revealed that the Bureau stocks a wide range of resources on Islam but includes a number of books by well known anti-Islam authors Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer.
Pipes and Spencer are featured prominently in the Center for American Progress’ new report, “Fear, Inc.,” which outlines the small but influential group of individuals and institutions who help promote anti-Muslim hatred in the U.S.
Spencer, who claims that “Islam is not a religion of peace” and has suggested that President Obama may be a Muslim, gained notoriety after it was revealed that Norwegian terrorist Anders Brevik’s manifesto included 162 references to Spencer and his blog Jihad Watch.
Pipes famously observed that “all immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” He also plays a key role in the Islamophobia echo chamber by repeating the falsehood that Obama is a former Muslim who “practiced Islam.”
The combination of Islamophobic presentation and the FBI’s apparent endorsement of noted anti-Muslim “experts” like Spencer and Pipes raises serious questions about the FBI’s counterterrorism training and the Bureau’s understanding of Muslim Americans.
Earlier this month, the Seattle Times reported on a disastrous presentation by an FBI agent at a community outreach workshop. The failed presentation offers insights into how federal law enforcement officers’ training has seriously hampered their ability to engage with Muslim communities.
]]>It states
…our mutual distaste for the behavior of the regime in Tehran [...]]]>It states
- …our mutual distaste for the behavior of the regime in Tehran should not influence our analysis of the Mojahedin.
and that
- Shunned by most Iranians and fundamentally undemocratic, the Mojahedin-e Khalq are not a viable alternative to the current government of Iran.
But that was years ago and any day now the MEK could be delisted from the U.S foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. Virtually unchecked, its well-funded lobbying blitz in Europe resulted in its delisting from the U.K. and E.U. terror lists. This has enabled it to create a larger support base there than it has in North America. It particularly enjoys a significant audience among past and present British parliamentarians such as Lord Corbett of Castle Vale (Robin Corbett). Corbett is the chairman of the “British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom,” the main British MEK lobby group. In addition to the U.S. heavy-weights with high national security officials that the MEK has paid to appear at its European rallies are Iranians and non-Iranians like the people pictured here and here.
After its successful test run in Europe, the MEK set its sights on the world’s most wanted ally and now its crazed leader Maryam Rajavi (her husband’s whereabouts are unknown) is knocking on Washington’s door saying all the right things about the “Mullahs in Iran” while using key buzz words like “democratic”.
Over the years the FBI, Human Rights Watch, the Rand Corporation and several U.S. mainstream news outlets have produced in-depth investigations detailing the group’s past and present, some revealing the absurdly high “speaking fees” it provides to prominent figures who have appeared at its events. But even with a steady flow of damning information available, it is still spreading non-factual claims through its lobbying representatives. One way it does this is by issuing regular press releases through PR Newswire (a well-known online marketing tool) which are then reproduced as articles on news websites (see here and here for one example). Its lobbyists regularly talk to the press which is forced to quote them and MEK representatives have also been given full editorial slots in major U.S. newspapers.
The MEK’s ongoing delisting campaign is guided by the belief that the American public and the U.S. government are ignorant enough to believe its statements no matter how many times they’re proven false. The breathless claims of seeming support made by former U.S. officials are marketed by the MEK as a testament to its legitimacy, especially when these people conflate the human rights issue at the MEK’s base in Camp Ashraf near the Iran-Iraq border with its FTO delisting campaign as if they go hand in hand. But they don’t. Writing about Mitt Romney adviser Michael Reiss’s advocacy for the MEK the American Conservative’s Daniel Larison states (emphasis is mine):
- Like many other pro-MEK advocates, Reiss has confused the issues of the treatment of the population of Camp Ashraf with the question of whether the MEK should remain on the FTO list. The people at Ashraf should be relocated outside Iraq, and they should not be sent to Iran against their will, but this has nothing to do with the MEK’s designation by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. It ought to be possible to address what is properly a political refugee problem left over from the Iraq war without legitimizing a terrorist group.
Dokhi Fassihian and Trita Parsi have also written about how the “international community” rather than just the U.S. can help the people of Camp Ashraf.
Some of my colleagues have called the the MEK delisting campaign an “Iranian debate” but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The majority of Iranians don’t support the MEK in Iran or outside of it. Most Iranians aren’t debating the MEK’s merits, they’re either loudly speaking out against it, or consider it an annoying distraction from the widely recognized opposition in Iran, the Green Movement. That’s because the MEK killed Iranians through organized terror bombings and assassinations during and after the revolution and because it fought against its own people during the Iran-Iraq war. The war took hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives. It is ingrained in Iranian memory as nearly a decade of suffering imposed on them by the U.S.-backed regime of Saddam Hussein who even used chemical weapons on young Iranian soldiers. Which nation’s people would forgive such an act of treason?
More recently, the MEK’s attempts to paint itself as Iran’s “main opposition” and its declarations on behalf of the “Iranian people” have infuriated representatives and supporters of the Green Movement which, unlike the MEK, brought millions out into the streets of Tehran in 2009.
Those who think Iranians would support the MEK simply because of its number one goal of bringing down the Islamic Republic are seriously mistaken. Every anti-IRI Iranian I have interviewed has said something to the tune of: “They are bad, but the MEK is worse.” Those who think the MEK should be supported simply because it detests the Iranian government as much as they do (see Patrick Kennedy) are also misguided. The chances of the MEK being installed in Tehran are very low; the Iranian population wouldn’t allow it.
The only Iranians who support the MEK are family members of those who were persecuted by the regime and those whose understandable hatred of the current government has driven them to blind desperation. At best, its support base among Iranians is under 30,000 and perhaps significantly less, and Iran is a country of over 70 million. If the MEK has such a large support base as it claims, why was its recent rally outside the Washington Department of State attended by “hundreds” rather than thousands or hundreds of thousands? Why did organizers feel the need to bus and fly people to the rally for free from other cities? As with many of its other events, some attendees admitted to not being familiar with the group or its objectives. Others admitted to being paid to attend.
Some may wonder why I am writing all this if the MEK is so obviously illegitimate. That’s because their delisting campaign has been well-organized and somewhat effective. They have, after all, successfully convinced the U.S. government to reconsider their FTO designation. Their campaign is also currently in full swing and should be addressed as such.
But delisting the MEK is unlikely to result in the group being accepted by Iranians, or the fall of the Iranian government. It may not even impact the status of the 3,000+ people who are trapped in Camp Ashraf, all under real threat by the Iraqi government and many held against their will. But delisting it will result in the leadership being able to raise money easier in the U.S. which they can then use to sway Mideast policy by lobbying congress. It will also harm the most legitimate democratic opposition in Iran: the Green Movement.
A decision to delist will strike yet another blow to the possibility of peaceful U.S.-Iran relations since it will be interpreted by the Iranians as an act of U.S. aggression, adding more fuel to the ongoing Cold War between the two countries. It will also reinforce a well-known stereotype about the U.S. as a country led by people who are indeed gullible enough to believe anything — even the claims of a well-funded terror group that has killed U.S. nationals.
The leadership cannot escape its bloody past. Among Rajavi’s militaristic quotes are: “Take the Kurds under your tanks and save your bullets for the Islamic Guard.” It also cannot erase the abundant information that journalists and other neutral non-state actors have made available about them. The MEK can only counter negative press with fabrications (as it is doing with its cyber army of defamers and lobbyists) and hope that the Obama administration is weak and naive enough to submit to the pressure it has been working furiously to impose upon it.
But as argued by Elizabeth Rubin of the New York Times who visited Camp Ashraf in 2003 and experienced the group’s inner-workings first-hand:
- Mrs. Clinton should ignore their P.R. campaign. Mujahedeen Khalq is not only irrelevant to the cause of Iran’s democratic activists, but a totalitarian cult that will come back to haunt us.
We can only hope that Mrs. Clinton is listening.
]]>