After working as an interrogator for a U.S. military contractor in Iraq, Eric Fair took a job as an analyst for the National Security Agency. When he went to the NSA, Fair was reckoning with the torture of Iraqi prisoners, torture he had witnessed and in which he had participated.

Fair would go on to write a memoir detailing his experiences in Iraq; the book, Consequence, was published last month to strong notices, including not one but two positive reviews in the New York Times. But Fair actually wrote about his time as an interrogator more than a decade earlier in an internal NSA publication.

One of the publication’s editors asked him to contribute a piece about “how my experience as an interrogator influences my work at the NSA,” as he put it in Consequence. Fair submitted an article in which “I question the efficacy of certain intelligence-gathering techniques and wonder whether, for the sake of morality, it might be best to sacrifice some level of tactical knowledge.”

“I was asked rewrite this section. I cut it completely. Instead, I wrote about how my experience in the interrogation booths had familiarized me with the overall intelligence cycle.”

Fair’s article for the NSA publication is among the files provided by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. It appeared in SIDtoday, a newsletter for the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SID, and is being released by The Intercept. (Read Part 1 and Part 2.) (...)

Terror victims win Supreme Court judgment against Iran

(...) Bowen’s BBC report goes to pains to ignore perhaps the most significant material context of Masood Azhar’s ability to enter Britain in 1993, despite being connected to Osama bin Laden: state-sponsorship.

In 1993, Azhar was founding chief of the Pakistani militant group Harkat ul-Mujahedeen (HuM), previously called Harkat ul-Ansar (HuA). In both guises, Harkat was closely protected by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), due to its key role in the CIA-MI6 backed war to eject the Soviets from Afghanistan.

A core feature of this covert programme was the bastardisation of Islam: the financing of extremist preachers and the proliferation of thousands of madrasahs preaching violent jihadism.

So concerned were the West’s national security mandarins to ensure these burgeoning madrasahs taught the ‘right’ doctrines, they directly financed the printing of hundreds of thousands of textbooks supplied to Muslim school children, “filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings” in the words of the Washington Post.

These violent doctrines successfully subverted the conservative teachings of countless Islamic seminaries within the spectrum of Deobandi and Salafi schools of thought. Far from jihadist ideology being an automatic product of those traditions, the toxic climate of the Cold War provided an unprecedented material boost to a violent extremist fringe, who were now empowered to dominate Islamic discourses.

Masood Azhar’s great British Bosnian adventure

When Masood Azhar decided to pop up in Britain in 1993, it was at the behest of British security services. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Bowen’s BBC story.

It’s widely assumed, even by those who should know better, that Western patronage of Islamist mujahideen ended decisively with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In reality, US and British intelligence agencies continued to see potential utility for bin Laden’s Islamist brigades in the post-Cold War period to continue rolling back Russian and Chinese geopolitical influence.

That appears to have been one reason the US and British governments used Azhar’s HuM to recruit British Muslims into the unfolding war in Bosnia.

According to 26-year intelligence veteran, the late B. Raman, head of the counter-terrorism division of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), which he co-founded:

“The radicalisation of Britain’s Muslim youth of Pakistani origin began in the mid-1990s with the full knowledge and complicity of British and US intelligence agencies… In the mid-1990s, the Pakistan-based jihadi group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM - previously known as the Harkat-ul-Ansar, HuA) sent a contingent to help Bosnian Muslims in their fight against the Serbs. They were sent by the government of Benazir Bhutto at the request of the Bill Clinton administration.”

Raman had firsthand access to Indian intelligence on these matters, having retired in 1994 from his post as Additional Secretary in the Indian government’s Cabinet Secretariat, where he was in charge of counter-terrorism.

This contingent of about 200 British Muslims of mostly Pakistani origin, reported Raman, “was raised and trained by Lieutenant General (retired) Hamid Gul, former director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who himself used to visit Bosnia.”

They “received training in the camps of the HuA (Masood Azhar’s Harkat ul-Mujahideen), and joined the HuA in Bosnia with the blessings of London and Washington. Among them was Omar Sheikh, who went on to mastermind the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002… Thus began the radicalisation process of Muslim youth of Pakistani origin in western Europe.” (...)

(...) This is a frightening picture, but it is also decidedly optimistic. If the young men and women who leave the London suburbs and the banlieue of Paris to fight in Syria or Iraq have been indoctrinated, the problem can be solved by re-educating them. Like children who have been abducted by a freakish sect, they can be deprogrammed and reintegrated into the mainstream. In this comforting story, jihadism is a roadblock standing in the way of what Barack Obama has called “the arc of history”. Liberal values show the direction in which all of humankind wants to move. Once the roadblock has been removed, the normal course of progress can resume.

One difficulty with this reassuring story is that it passes over the role of Western policies in creating the conditions from which Isis emerged. Much of the ruling elite of Isis was recruited from the secular Ba’ath Party, in the vacuum the Americans created when they dismantled the state of Iraq shortly after invading the country. Equally, the Western policy of promoting regime change in Syria has had the effect of strengthening Isis (in part by relying on exaggerated or non-existent “moderate forces”). And toppling Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya has created a zone of anarchy from which jihadists can operate freely, and through which hundreds of thousands more desperate migrants may flow into Europe this summer.

But there is a still larger flaw in the ­ruling narrative, in which terrorism will wither away as the Middle East modernises. The belief that underpins Western policies, which holds that the overthrow of despots allows a popular embrace of liberal values, is groundless. Liberal democracy is not the modern norm and everything else a temporary aberration. The modern world has been as fertile in producing tyrannies as democracies, if not more so, and there is no reason why this should cease to be the case in future. (...)

(...) Despite the tiny number of victims (and each life of every one of them is precious), the American government shells out around $500 million on anti-terrorism programs per victim. But the USG only puts out $10,000 on cancer research per victim.

Just having more mental health counseling covered by health insurance would possibly cut down on that 41,000 a year who commit suicide. Militarizing our police, spying on everyone’s internet use, and so forth can’t possibly save a fraction of the number of deaths that better health insurance would.

For days now, American cable news has broadcast non-stop coverage of the horrific attack in Brussels. Viewers repeatedly heard from witnesses and from the wounded. Video was shown in a loop of the terror and panic when the bombs exploded. Networks dispatched their TV stars to Brussels, where they remain. NPR profiled the lives of several of the airport victims. CNN showed a moving interview of a wounded, bandage-wrapped Mormon American teenager speaking from his Belgium hospital bed.

All of that is how it should be: that’s news. And it’s important to understand on a visceral level the human cost from this type of violence. But that’s also the same reason it’s so unjustifiable, and so propagandistic, that this type of coverage is accorded only to western victims of violence, but almost never to the non-western victims of the west’s own violence.

A little more than a week ago, as Mohammed Ali Kalfood reported in The Intercept, “fighter jets from a Saudi-led (US and UK-supported) coalition bombed a market in Mastaba, in Yemen’s northern province of Hajjah. The latest count indicates that about 120 people were killed, including more than 20 children, and 80 were wounded in the strikes.” Kalfood interviewed 21-year-old Yemeni Khaled Hassan Mohammadi who said that “we saw airstrikes on a market last Ramadan, not far from here, but this attack was the deadliest.” Over the past several years, the U.S. has launched hideous civilian-slaughtering strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Iraq. Last July, The Intercept published a photo essay by Alex Potter of Yemeni victims of one of 2015’s deadliest Saudi-led, US/UK-armed strikes. (...)

Think like the enemy. Let’s suppose I am an Islamic State terrorist. I don’t do bombs or bullets. I leave the dirty work to the crazies in the basement. My job is what happens next. It is to turn carnage into consequences, body parts into politics. I am a consultant terrorist. I wear a suit, not explosives. A blood-stained concourse is a means to an end. The end is power.

This week I had another success. I converted a squalid psychopathological act into a warrior-evoking, population-terrifying, policy-changing event. I sent a continent into shock. Famous politicians dropped everything to shower me with cliches. Crowned heads deluged me with glorious odium.

I measure my success in column inches and television hours, in ballooning security budgets, butchered liberties, amended laws and – my ultimate goal – Muslims persecuted and recruited to our cause. I deal not in actions but in reactions. I am a manipulator of politics. I work through the idiocies of my supposed enemies.

Textbooks on terrorism define its effects in four stages: first the horror, then the publicity, then the political grandstanding, and finally the climactic shift in policy. The initial act is banal. The atrocities in Brussels happen almost daily on the streets of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus. Western missiles and Isis bombs kill more innocents in a week than die in Europe in a year. The difference is the media response. A dead Muslim is an unlucky mutt in the wrong place at the wrong time. A dead European is front-page news. (...)

• Second mass-casualty strike the US military has undertaken this month
• Two strikes have killed more than 200 people at ‘terrorist training camps’

The FBI’s worst nightmare is coming true

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/fbi-worst-nightmare-coming-true-131621066.html

(...) Other than the higher-than-normal death toll, this mass killing is an incredibly common event under the presidency of the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate, who has so far bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries. As Nick Turse has reported in The Intercept, Obama has aggressively expanded the stealth drone program and secret war in Africa.

This particular mass killing is unlikely to get much attention in the U.S. due to (1) the election-season obsession with horse-race analysis and pressing matters such as the size of Donald Trump’s hands; (2) widespread Democratic indifference to the killing of foreigners where there’s no partisan advantage to be had against the GOP from pretending to care, (3) the invisibility of places like Somalia and the implicit devaluing of lives there, and (4) the complete normalization of the model whereby the U.S. President kills whomever he wants, wherever he wants, without regard to any semblance of law, process, accountability or evidence.

The lack of attention notwithstanding, there are several important points highlighted by yesterday’s bombing and the reaction to it:

1) The U.S. is not at war in Somalia. Congress has never declared war on Somalia, nor has it authorized the use of military force there. Morality and ethics to the side for the moment: what legal authority does Obama even possess to bomb this country? I assume we can all agree that Presidents shouldn’t be permitted to just go around killing people they suspect are “bad”: they need some type of legal authority to do the killing.

Since 2001, the U.S. Government has legally justified its we-bomb-wherever-we-want approach by pointing to the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), enacted by Congress in the wake of 9/11 to authorize the targeting of Al Qaeda and “affiliated” forces. But al-Shabab did not exist in 2001 and had nothing to do with 9/11. Indeed, the group has not tried to attack the U.S. but instead, as The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage noted in 2011, “is focused on a parochial insurgency in Somalia.” As a result, reported Savage, even “the {Obama} administration does not consider the United States to be at war with every member of the Shabab.”

Instead, in the Obama administration’s view, specific senior members of al-Shabab can be treated as enemy combatants under the AUMF only if they adhere to al-Qaeda’s ideology, are “integrated” into its command structure, and could conduct operations outside of Somalia. That’s why the U.S. Government yesterday claimed that all the people they killed were about to launch attacks on U.S. soldiers: because, even under their own incredibly expansive view of the AUFM, it would be illegal to kill them merely on the ground that they were members of all al-Shabab, and they thus need a claim of “self-defense” to legally justify this.

But even under the “self-defense” theory that the U.S. Government invoked, they are allowed – under their own policies promulgated in 2013 – to use lethal force away from an active war zone (e.g. Afghanistan) “only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” Perhaps these Terrorists were about to imminently attack U.S. troops stationed in the region – immediately after the tassel on their graduation cap was turned at the “graduation ceremony,” they were going on the attack – but again, there is literally no evidence that any of that is true.

Given what’s at stake – namely, the conclusion that Obama’s killing of 150 people yesterday was illegal – shouldn’t we be demanding to see evidence that the assertions of his government are actually true? Were these really all al-Shabab fighters and terrorists who were killed? Were they really about to carry out some sort of imminent, dangerous attack on U.S. personnel? Why would anyone be content to blindly believe the self-serving assertions of the U.S. Government on these questions without seeing evidence for it? If you are willing to make excuses for why you don’t want to see any evidence, why would you possibly think you know what happened here – who was killed and under what circumstances – if all you have are conclusory, evidence-free assertions from those who carried out the killings?

(...)

3) Why does the U.S. have troops stationed in this part of Africa? Remember, even the Obama administration says it is not at war with al-Shabab.

Consider how circular this entire rationale is: the U.S., like all countries, obviously has a legitimate interest in protecting its troops from attack. But why does it have troops there at all in need of protection? The answer: the troops are there to operate drone bases and attack people they regard as a threat to them. But if they weren’t there in the first place, these groups could not pose a threat to them.

In sum: we need U.S. troops in Africa to launch drone strikes at groups that are trying to attack U.S. troops in Africa. It’s the ultimate self-perpetuating circle of imperialism: we need to deploy troops to other countries in order to attack those who are trying to kill U.S. troops who are deployed there.

4) If you’re an American who has lived under the War on Terror, it’s easy to forget how extreme this behavior is. Most countries on the planet don’t routinely run around dropping bombs and killing dozens of people in multiple other countries at once, let alone doing so in countries where they’re not at war.

But for Americans, this is now all perfectly normalized. We just view our President as vested with the intrinsic, divine right, grounded in American Exceptionalism, to deem whomever he wants “Bad Guys” and then – with no trial, no process, no accountability – order them killed. He’s the roving, Global Judge, Jury and Executioner. And we see nothing disturbing or dangerous or even odd about that. We’ve been inculcated to view the world the way a 6-year-old watches cartoons: Bad Guys should be killed, and that’s the end of the story.

So yesterday the President killed roughly 150 people in a country where the U.S. is not at war. The Pentagon issued a five-sentence boilerplate statement declaring them all “terrorists.” And that’s pretty much the end of that. Within literally hours, virtually everyone was ready to forget about the whole thing and move on, content in the knowledge – even without a shred of evidence or information about the people killed – that their government and president did the right thing. Now that is a pacified public and malleable media.

The Pentagon today released 198 photos related to its investigations into abuse of detainees by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The photos are mainly close-up shots of arms, feet, heads, hands, or joints, sometimes showing bruises or scabs. Faces are redacted with black bars. It’s not always clear where each of the photos was taken, but they come from internal military investigations and have dates ranging from 2003 to 2006. Sometimes the marks on the prisoners’ skin are labeled with tape measuring the size of the wound, or a coin or pen for comparison.

These photos appear to be the most innocuous of the more than 2,000 images that the government has fought for years to keep secret. Lawyers for the government have long maintained that the photos, if released, could cause grievous harm to national security because they could be used for propaganda by groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The legal case has stretched on for more than a decade, since 2004, when the American Civil Liberties Union first sued to obtain photos beyond the notorious images that had been leaked from the prison at Abu Ghraib.

It has been reported that some of the 2,000 images show soldiers posing with dead bodies, kicking and punching detainees or posing them stripped naked next to female guards. The 198 photos that were released today do not show any of this. (...)

It has been a week of bombings across the world, most of them carried out by Islamic State (Isis). Some were highly publicised because they took place in the centre of large cities and involved foreigners, such as the suicide bombing on 12 January close to the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul which killed 10 people, nine of them German tourists. Two days later gunmen and bombers claiming allegiance to Isis killed two people in Jakarta in an attack that topped the international news agenda because it appeared to show that Isis has a frightening global reach. Furthermore, it took place in a city of 10 million people which is a media hub, ensuring that there were plenty of television cameras to record events.

The reverse is true of a double bombing in Muqdadiyah, a town in the Iraqi province of Diyala, north-east of Baghdad, which took place the day before the Istanbul attack. Though the casualty figures of 46 killed and 55 wounded were far worse than in Turkey and Indonesia combined, the slaughter was scarcely noticed by the Iraqi or international media. Isis had first exploded a bomb outside a coffee shop, allegedly frequented by Shia militiamen belonging to the Hashd al-Shaabi movement, and followed this up soon after with a second explosion that killed people who had gathered to see what was happening or to help the injured.

The attack provoked, as Isis probably intended, retaliatory attacks on Sunni by Shia militia who killed 15 people, burned seven Sunni mosques and at least 36 shops. Diyala is a mixed Sunni-Shia province, famous for fruit growing when I first visited in the 1990s but notorious over the last 12 years for sectarian warfare. Even within Iraq there was little publicity for the killings last week, because people in Baghdad are used to this happening in Diyala, the Shia-dominated government and Shia militias were not keen to publicise it, and the risks of doing so were demonstrated when two journalists from Sharqiya television channel were killed.

The publicity generated by a “terrorist” attack may exaggerate or understate its political significance. In Indonesia, it was in the interests of Isis, the Indonesian government and the perpetrators of the attack to emphasise that it was similar in method and intent to the massacre in Paris on 13 November.

Isis wants to show it can operate anywhere in the world, and the Indonesian government that it can largely thwart such evil intentions. In fact, Isis does not seem to have had much to do with it, but the extreme Islamist faction that carried it out knows that it can instantly generate vast global interest and news coverage by labelling itself as the Isis branch in Indonesia. The Isis attack in Istanbul is important because it shows that the movement now considers itself to be at war with the Turkish state that between 2011 and early 2015 showed a tolerance for IS movements in and out of Turkey that were central to the growth of the movement. Ankara was sympathetic to all jihadi movements trying to bring down President Bashar al-Assad and saw Isis as a counter-balance to the growing strength of the Syrian Kurds.

Turkish policy towards Syria has been one miscalculation after another since the Syrian uprising began five years ago. Assad did not fall, and Isis became much stronger than the Turks expected. Worst of all, not only did Isis fighters fail to beat the Syrian Kurds in the four-and-a-half month siege for the city of Kobani on the Turkish border, but the Kurds allied themselves with the United States and have been advancing with the help of thousands of US airstrikes. The 25,000 Kurdish soldiers of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) are not on their own the most powerful military force in Syria, but backed by the largest air force in the world they are of crucial significance.

Turkey is deeply alarmed by the rise of a militarily strong Kurdish quasi-state running along its southern flank in de facto alliance with the US and Russia. It has discovered to its cost that Isis is not the answer to the Kurds, but it is not clear what is. Five years ago there were not wholly unrealistic dreams in Ankara of Turkey being a model for the new Middle East, and spreading its influence through Iraq and Syria. Instead, it is now in danger of being excluded from the region after allying itself to Saudi Arabia and Qatar and supporting or turning a blind eye to the activities of extreme jihadi groups such as Isis, the al-Qaeda affiliate, the al-Nusra Front and the ideologically similar Ahrar al-Sham. (...)