Thursday, March 03, 2011
CLINTON: IRAN MEDDLING ACROSS MIDEAST
China Threatens to Expel Foreign Repoters
Pakistani Intelligence and CIA: Mutual Distrust, Suspicion
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
RADICAL ISLAM IN ACTION: KOSOVAR GUNMAN KILLS TWO US AIRMEN IN GERMANY; PAKISTAN SHOOTERS ASSASSINATE COUNTRY'S ONLY CHRISTIAN CABINET MINISTER
Obama Advises American Jewish Leaders: 'Search Your Souls' Over Israel's Commitment to Making Peace With Palestinians
Yemen President Blames Israel, US for Unrest
China Tightens Reporting Rules for Foreign Media
Rising Demand for Gold in China
Crude Continues Climb on Mideast News
Oil gains, ordinary people lose. Click here for the news.Tuesday, March 01, 2011
JORDAN HEATS UP
OIL RISES, STOCKS PLUNGE, GOLD SOARS
YEMEN'S MOST INFLUENTIAL CLERIC, GLOBAL TERRORIST WHO MENTORED OSAMA BIN LADEN, CALLS FOR ISLAMIC STATE
DIOR FIRES FAMOUS DESIGNER FOR SAYING HE LOVES HITLER
BAHRAIN POLICE STORM PEARL SQUARE
N. KOREA ISSUES NEW THREAT
Monday, February 28, 2011
UK: Khadafy Could Use Chemical Arms
SAUDI TANKS SEEN ENTERING BAHRAIN
KHADAFY COUNTERATTACKS
Islamonazi Iran Claims Olympic Logo Spells Zion
Libyan Regime's 3 Ds On Display
Saudi Arabia Dangerously Vulnerable or Vaccinated?
N. KOREA THREATENS CROSS-BORDER FIRE
CHINA ENERGY USE RISES
PROTESTERS BLOCK BAHRAIN PARLIAMENT
OIL RISES SIXTH STRAIGHT DAY
Sunday, February 27, 2011
CLASHES IN OMAN; TWO DEAD
Thursday, 3 March 2011
Regarding Iranian attempts to shape outcomes in Egypt and across the Middle East, America's Secretary of State appears to agree with China Confidential, as shown by remarks made yesterday. Click here for the story.
Related:
China is changing how foreign journalist can work in the country and reporters are being warned they risk expulsion if they try to cover pro-democracy rallies. Some tourist areas of the capital and Shanghai now have the same off-limits rules governing sensitive areas such as Tibet.
In a tense news conference Thursday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu accused some journalists of deliberately inciting trouble while covering pro-democracy protests.
She warned those journalists accused of flouting the rules could not be protected under Chinese media laws.
Jiang said, however, that journalists who respect the rules will have the protection of the law.
She said there is no law to protect those who journalists who create what she described as "disturbances".
Jiang spoke after Chinese police warned foreign journalists this week to obey new restrictions on covering rallies called by an on-line protest campaign, or risking having their work visas canceled.
Jasmine Revolution
Last Sunday, more than 16 journalists were physically harassed by plainclothes and uniformed police in Beijing, with one American journalist hospitalized after a severe beating.
The journalists went to an area in Beijing known as Wangfujing. An on-line campaign called for people to go to that area, and other locations around China, on Sunday afternoons, to show support for the revolutions sweeping the Middle East, and to seek justice and reform in China.
It appears, however, that few actual protesters showed up Sunday. In Wangfujing, journalists reported seeing scores of security officers.
Beijing and Shanghai have clamped down on security in response to calls for rallies. Some dissidents said they face new restrictions on their activities.
On Thursday, Jiang said repeatedly there had been no change in the reporting regulations that were made law after the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
These allowed reporters to interview people as long as they had their consent - and permitted foreign correspondents to travel without permission, except to sensitive areas, such as Tibet.
Media restrictions
But security officials have told some foreign journalists they must seek official permission to conduct interviews and to report in public in many areas.
Journalists were told they must have permits to report from Wangfujing, a shopping street popular with tourists next to Tiananmen Square.
Officials told some foreign journalists they can report freely anywhere else in China except in the protest areas - and to stay away from those.
Some journalists have applied to report from the protest sites this coming Sunday, but have been denied permission.
The United States, the European Union and media groups have condemned the media curbs.
-VOA
By Scott Stewart
On March 1, U.S. diplomatic sources reportedly told Dawn News that a proposed exchange with the Pakistani government of U.S. citizen Raymond Davis for Pakistani citizen Aafia Siddiqui was not going to happen. Davis is a contract security officer working for the CIA who was arrested by Pakistani police on Jan. 27 following an incident in which he shot two men who reportedly pointed a pistol at him in an apparent robbery attempt. Siddiqui was arrested by the Afghan National Police in Afghanistan in 2008 on suspicion of being linked to al Qaeda.
During Siddiqui’s interrogation at a police station, she reportedly grabbed a weapon from one of her interrogators and opened fire on the American team sent to debrief her. Siddiqui was wounded in the exchange of fire and taken to Bagram air base for treatment. After her recovery, she was transported to the United States and charged in U.S. District Court in New York with armed assault and the attempted murder of U.S. government employees. Siddique was convicted in February 2010 and sentenced in September 2010 to 86 years in prison.
Given the differences in circumstances between these two cases, it is not difficult to see why the U.S. government would not agree to such an exchange. Siddique had been arrested by the local authorities and was being questioned, while Davis was accosted on the street by armed men and thought he was being robbed. His case has served to exacerbate a growing rift between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI).
Pakistan has proved to be a very dangerous country for both ISI and CIA officers. Because of this environment, it is necessary for intelligence officers to have security — especially when they are conducting meetings with terrorist sources — and for security officers to protect American officials. Due to the heavy security demands in high-threat countries like Pakistan, the U.S. government has been forced to rely on contract security officers like Davis. It is important to recognize, however, that the Davis case is not really the cause of the current tensions between the Americans and Pakistanis. There are far deeper issues causing the rift.
Operating in Pakistan
Pakistan has been a very dangerous place for American diplomats and intelligence officers for many years now. Since September 2001 there have been 13 attacks against U.S. diplomatic missions and motorcades as well as hotels and restaurants frequented by Americans who were in Pakistan on official business. Militants responsible for the attack on the Islamabad Marriott in September 2008 referred to the hotel as a “nest of spies.” At least 10 Americans in Pakistan on official business have been killed as a result of these attacks, and many more have been wounded.
Militants in Pakistan have also specifically targeted the CIA. This was clearly illustrated by a December 2009 attack against the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in which the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), led by Hakeemullah Mehsud, used a Jordanian suicide operative to devastating effect. The CIA thought the operative had been turned and was working for Jordanian intelligence to collect intelligence on al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan. The attack killed four CIA officers and three CIA security contractors. Additionally, in March 2008, four FBI special agents were injured in a bomb attack as they ate at an Italian restaurant in Islamabad.
Pakistani intelligence and security agencies have been targeted with far more vigor than the Americans. This is due not only to the fact that they are seen as cooperating with the United States but also because there are more of them and their facilities are relatively soft targets compared to U.S. diplomatic facilities in Pakistan. Militants have conducted dozens of major attacks directed against Pakistani security and intelligence targets such as the headquarters of the Pakistani army in Rawalpindi, the ISI provincial headquarters in Lahore and the Federal Investigative Agency (FIA) and police academies in Lahore.
In addition to these high-profile attacks against facilities, scores of military officers, frontier corps officers, ISI officers, senior policemen and FIA agents have been assassinated. Other government figures have also been targeted for assassination. As this analysis was being written, the Pakistani minorities minister was assassinated near his Islamabad home.
Because of this dangerous security environment, it is not at all surprising that American government officials living and working in Pakistan are provided with enhanced security to keep them safe. And enhanced security measures require a lot of security officers, especially when you have a large number of American officials traveling away from secure facilities to attend meetings and other functions. This demand for security officers is even greater when enhanced security is required in several countries at the same time and for a prolonged period of time.
This is what is happening today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The demand for protective officers has far surpassed the personnel available to the organizations that provide security for American officials such as the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and the CIA’s Office of Security. In order to provide adequate security for American officials in high-threat posts, these agencies have had to rely on contractors provided by large companies like Blackwater/Xe, Dyncorp and Triple Canopy and on individual contract security officers hired on personal-services contracts. This reliance on security contractors has been building over the past several years and is now a fact of life at many U.S. embassies.
Using contract security officers allows these agencies not only to quickly ramp up their capabilities without actually increasing their authorized headcount but also to quickly cut personnel when they hit the next lull in the security-funding cycle. It is far easier to terminate contractors than it is to fire full-time government employees.
CIA Operations in Pakistan
There is another factor at play: demographics. Most CIA case officers (like most foreign-service officers) are Caucasian products of very good universities. They tend to look like Bob Baer and Valerie Plame. They stick out when they walk down the street in places like Peshawar or Lahore. They do not blend into the crowd, are easily identified by hostile surveillance and are therefore vulnerable to attack. Because of this, they need trained professional security officers to watch out for them and keep them safe.
This is doubly true if the case officer is meeting with a source who has terrorist connections. As seen in the Khost attack discussed above, and reinforced by scores of incidents over the years, such sources can be treacherous and meeting such people can be highly dangerous. As a result, it is pretty much standard procedure for any intelligence officer meeting a terrorism source to have heavy security for the meeting. Even FBI and British MI5 officers meeting terrorism sources domestically employ heavy security for such meetings because of the potential danger to the agents.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the primary intelligence collection requirement for every CIA station and base in the world has been to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership. This requirement has been emphasized even more for the CIA officers stationed in Pakistan, the country where bin Laden and company are believed to be hiding. This emphasis was redoubled with the change of U.S. administrations and President Barack Obama’s renewed focus on Pakistan and eliminating the al Qaeda leadership. The Obama administration’s approach of dramatically increasing strikes with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) required an increase in targeting intelligence, which comes mostly from human sources and not signals intelligence or imagery. Identifying and tracking an al Qaeda suspect amid the hostile population and unforgiving terrain of the Pakistani badlands also requires human sources to direct intelligence assets toward a target.
This increased human intelligence-gathering effort inside Pakistan has created friction between the CIA and the ISI. First, it is highly likely that much of the intelligence used to target militants with UAV strikes in the badlands comes from the ISI — especially intelligence pertaining to militant groups like the TTP that have attacked the ISI and the Pakistani government itself (though, as would be expected, the CIA is doing its best to develop independent sources as well). The ISI has a great deal to gain by strikes against groups it sees as posing a threat to Pakistan, and the fact that the U.S. government is conducting such strikes provides the ISI a degree of plausible deniability and political cover.
However, it is well known that the ISI has long had ties to militant groups. The ISI’s fostering of surrogate militants to serve its strategic interests in Kashmir and Afghanistan played a critical role in the rise of transnational jihadism (and this was even aided with U.S. funding in some cases). Indeed, as we’ve previously discussed, the ISI would like to retain control of its militant proxies in Afghanistan to ensure that Pakistan does not end up with a hostile regime in Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal from the country. This is quite a rational desire when one considers Pakistan’s geopolitical situation.
Because of this, the ISI has been playing a kind of a double game with the CIA. It has been forthcoming with intelligence pertaining to militants it views as threats to the Pakistani regime while refusing to share information pertaining to groups it hopes to use as levers in Afghanistan (or against India). Of course, the ability of the ISI to control these groups and not get burned by them again is very much a subject of debate, but at least some ISI leaders appear to believe they can keep at least some of their surrogate militants under control.
There are many in Washington who believe the ISI knows the location of high-value al Qaeda targets and senior members of organizations like the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, which are responsible for many of the attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. This belief that the ISI is holding back intelligence compels the CIA to run unilateral intelligence operations (meaning operations it does not tell the ISI about). Many of these unilateral operations likely involve the recruitment of Pakistani government officials, including members of the ISI. Naturally, the ISI is not happy with these intelligence operations, and the result is the mistrust and tension we see between the ISI and the CIA.
It is important to remember that in the intelligence world there is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service. While services will cooperate on issues of mutual interest, they will always serve their own national interests first, even when that places them at odds with an intelligence service they are coordinating with.
Such competing national interests are at the heart of the current tension between the CIA and the ISI. At present, the CIA is fixated on finding and destroying the last vestiges of al Qaeda and crippling militant groups in Pakistan that are attacking U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The Americans can always leave Afghanistan; if anarchy and chaos take hold there, it is not likely have a huge impact on the United States. However, the ISI knows that after the United States withdraws from Afghanistan it will be stuck with the problem of Afghanistan. It is on the ISI’s doorstep, and it does not have the luxury of being able to withdraw from the region and the conflict. The ISI believes that it will be left to deal with the mess created by the United States. It is in Pakistan’s national interest to try to control the shape of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal, and that means using militant proxies like Pakistan did after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.
This struggle between the CIA and ISI is a conundrum rooted in the conflict between the vital interests of two nations and it will not be solved easily. While the struggle has been brought to the public’s attention by the Davis case, this case is really just a minor symptom of a far deeper conflict.
Pakistani Intelligence and the CIA: Mutual Distrust and Suspicion is republished with permission of STRATFOR.
Islamist gunmen strike on two continents. Click here and here for the reports.
The attack in Europe echoes the Fort Hood massacre and underscores the vulnerability of airport approaches and lobbies and similar locations where travelers gather ahead of being subjected to stringent security checks.
PRESIDENT MEETS WITH HEADS OF MAJOR US JEWISH GROUPS;
REMARKS ALARM MANY LEADERS; BUT OTHERS DESCRIBE OBAMA
AS 'THOUGHTFUL' AND INFORMED, MAYBE NAIVE, NOT HOSTILE
By Ben Harris
JTA EXCLUSIVE
NEW YORK, NY (JTA) -- President Obama reportedly urged Jewish communal leaders to speak to their friends and colleagues in Israel and to “search your souls” over Israel's seriousness about making peace.
In an hourlong meeting Tuesday with about 50 representatives from the Jewish community’s chief foreign policy umbrella group, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Obama reiterated the U.S. commitment to Israel, according to statements from both the White House and the Conference of Presidents.
But several participants at the meeting told JTA that the President also implied that Israel bears primary responsibility for advancing the peace process. They interpreted the President’s comments either as hostile, naive or unsurprising.
Obama said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is eager to secure his legacy by establishing a Palestinian state and would accept a decent offer if one were on the table, according to participants.
“The Palestinians don't feel confident that the Netanyahu government is serious about territorial concessions,” the President reportedly said.
Withdrawal From Jerusalem's Arab Areas
Obama reportedly said that the Jewish sections of Jerusalem would remain in Israeli hands as part of any peace deal, but that the Arab sections would not.
Participants uniformly declined to speak on the record about the meeting in keeping with admonitions from Conference of Presidents leaders that specifics should not be discussed publicly. While there was general consistency in the reports about Obama's comments, interpretation of them varied widely.
“Many people felt that their worst fears about Obama were confirmed with respect to Israel,” one participant said. “They felt an enormous hostility towards Israel.”
Other participants disagreed, calling such views ridiculous. They said the meeting was a positive one, described the President as “thoughtful” and “forthcoming” in his remarks, and said no new ground was broken.
“The people who loved Obama probably still love him, the people who had big reservations about Obama probably have more reservations than they had before,” one longtime Jewish organizational official told JTA.
The atmosphere, most agreed, was cordial and gracious.
Hostile or Naive?
“I thought he reaffirmed his support of Israel, and I thought he did it quite well,” one participant said. “Nothing that he said would I interpret in any way as being anti-Israel or opposed to Israel.”
Others suggested that the President wasn't hostile so much as naive about Palestinian intentions and his belief about Israel's supposed lack of commitment to peacemaking. Still others suggested both interpretations were flawed.
“I think the President showed a deep understanding, in great depth, of the issues that have arisen in the Middle East, including the Palestinian-Israeli peace process as well as the broader regional issues,” a participant told JTA. “I would be very surprised for anybody in the room who listened to the detailed and thoughtful way in which he responded to questions to characterize them as naive or unknowledgeable.”
Another Arab nut. Click here for the story.
America's so-called ally, the President of Yemen, facing ouster at the hands of Islamists, claims the unrest sweeping the Arab world is run from a secret "operations room" in Tel Aviv with the support of the White House.
UPDATE (POSTED 2:23 PM US EST): SALEH CALLS WH TO APOLOGIZE
The United States sits atop awesome energy resources, including conventional oil (located on and off the shores of the U.S.) and heavy crude oil, natural gas, coal, and shale. For political reasons, however, developing these resources in the national interest is a non-issue. In fact, development of American natural resources is a non-issue. Creating real wealth, billions of dollars in tax revenue for the government--and millions of well paying, permanent jobs, when the ripple effects of oil and gas, mining and mineral projects are taken into account--is a taboo topic.
TWO DEAD IN PREDAWN RAID
CHINA CONFIDENTIAL ANALYSIS: Bahrain is cracking down--hard--with Saudi support. The clearing of Pearl Square by baton-weilding police follows the visit to neighboring Saudi Arabia by Bahrain's embattled king. The Saudis are determined to prevent an overthrow of Bahrain's monarchy by the country's Shiite majority. Even replacing Bahrain's present system with a constitutional monarchy is strongly opposed by Saudi rulers, who assert that virtually all Bahraini Shiites are loyal to Iran. The Saudis see Bahrain as truly strategic, in contrast with faraway Libya.
More madness from the nuclear-arming regime that Obama tried to engage. Read all about it here.
As China Confidential predicted, North Korea has threatened to retaliate against South Korea for bombarding the North with leaflets urging a Mideast-style uprising. Click here for the story.
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