Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Names you know… Dhovar Tsarnev and Tamerlen Tsarnaev… Two young Chechen born brothers, raised in the United States, radicalized through the internet, and responsible for the deadly Boston Bombing attack.

That is the story media has told you but what about the story they have all but ignored? About another Chechen with a lesser known name. Who is Ibragim Todashev and why was he killed by the FBI during an interrogation over the Tsarnev brothers?

Today, you will hear from the widow of that man, and the questions she is still waiting to have answered.

The first step toward truth is to be informed.

As I said, it is a name most americans don’t know at all Ibragim Todashev. A 34 year-old Chechen, living in Orlando, Florida and friend of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlen Tsarnev.

Here is the story.

On May 22nd of this year, FBI agents and Massachusetts state police officers showed up in Orlando florida to interview Todashev.

Before moving to Orlando, Todashev lived in Massachusetts. He was a mixed martial arts fighter and through that sport, became friends with boston bombing suspect Tamerlen Tsarnev.
That was why, only weeks after the bombings, the FBI went to meet with Todashev. but it was during that interrogation when something went terribly wrong

According to a statement released by the FBI,

“The agent, two Massachusetts State Police troopers, and other law enforcement personnel were interviewing an individual in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation when a violent confrontation was initiated by the individual. During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries.”

So what violent confrontation took place? Media reports were all over the place on what happened. The New York Times claimed that Todashev pulled a knife on the agent. Other media claimed it was a samurai sword and then metal pole, some said a broom stick. That is, until
the Washington Post was told by an unnamed law enforcement source that Todashev had neither a knife or gun, that he was completely unarmed but did lunge at the agent.

Who saw this happen?

Another important question. Because according to the FBI, who is doing an internal investigation, immediately prior to the killing, after hours of interrogation, all of the other interrogators withdrew and left the room, leaving the FBI agent who fired the shots alone with Todashev.

That agent, claims that Todashev was about to sign a confession to his involvement along with Tamerlen Tsarnev in an unsolved triple murder in Massachusetts and it was just before he was going to sign that confession that he attacked.

The ex-wife of Todashev spoke to me via Skype.

Ben: “What do you make of the claim that all the agents left him and only the agent who killed Ibragim remained in the room with him?”

Reni: “We still don’t know what exactly happened, how many were in there when he was shot. It is still not clear, they are not telling us anything. So far we know it was three of them when they started the interrogation of them but who was in there when he was shot, we still don’t know.”

Aside from the very strange details surrounding an FBI agent left alone with a suspect, who then must defend himself and kill that suspect, are these details.

The agent who shot and killed Todashev, reportedly shot him 7 times including in the head and chest. I say reportedly, because on July 8th, the autopsy report on Ibragim Toashev was finalized and ready for release. According to the Orlando medical examiners office forensic records coordinator,

“The FBI has informed this office that the case is still under investigation and not to release this document.”

All of which is not only unusual, but the entire investigation so far has been surrounded by secrecy. Another issue that the FBI has not even addressed is that while the claim was that Todashev attempted to attack the agent, friends and his ex-wife claim that Todashev was recovering from knee surgery.

Ben: “You say that Ibragim was recovering from knee surgery, so what was the injury and how bad was that knee?”

Reni: “He had done his surgery in the middle of march. For a month and a half he was still on crutches. He was still limping, he was still in pain and with a light touch to his knee, he would feel the pain. He was still in pain on the knee, he was still walking and limping on the knee.”

Ben: “Is it true that he was on crutches at the time that he was killed?”

Reni: “Not necessarily. He was on them sometimes and when he would feel the pain he would go and get the crutches.”

Ben: “Obviously it is speculation on your part but why do you believe that Ibragim was killed?”

Reni: “He got 7 shots and one of them was the back of the head. Clearly this was an execution.”

Ben: “How do you know that one was to the back of the head?”

Reni: “Because I saw the body.”

Ben: “How do you know that it was an entry wound and not an exit wound for the bullet?”

Reni: “I can’t tell, I’m not a professional but from what I see and the medical examiner in Orlando says that he had 7 shots, 1 in the back of the head.”

Ben: “The medical examiner told you?”

Reni: “Yes, they have told me from day one when I came to sign for the body and to take it.”

Ben: “And he told you that he was shot in the back of the head? Incredible.”

Reni: “He said that he had 7 shots, 1 in the head, 3 in the heart, 1 in the liver and I believe that 1 was somewhere in the shoulder or in the arm.”

What you need to know, is that while the ACLU has requested an independent investigation in Florida and Massachusetts, both those requests have been rejected by law enforcement, saying that it would be inappropriate.

Meanwhile, CAIR in Florida is reporting that a friend of Todashev, was arrested in September and was denied a lawyer for 6 days. That even though he repeatedly requested to speak with an attorney, the FBI agents allegedly responded, “That is not happening.”

CAIR-Florida Civil Rights Director Thania Diaz Clevenger said in a statement.

“It fits the pattern of abuse and troubling behavior by FBI agents beginning in the days prior to the killing of the unarmed Ibragim Todashev. One can only wonder if Mr. Todashev was denied his rights to legal council during the questioning that ultimately resulted in his death.”

In addition, other Chechen friends of Todashev say they are being pressured by the FBI to spy on friends and neighbors. The story here that media just won’t cover is the incredible secrecy surrounding this young man’s death, the fact that he was killed so brutally during an interrogation and to so many people its not even that big of a deal because he might be connected to a terrorist.

Ben Swann Nov 14, 2013

Find this story at 14 November 2013

© Ben Swann 2014

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Waltham, September 11, 2011: Three men, throats slit, cash and drugs left on the bodies. Two years later, two dead suspects: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and a friend who the FBI says was about to confess. One haunting question: Could solving this case have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings?

waltham-triple-homocide

It’s nearly midnight in a nondescript condo complex a few blocks from Universal Studios in Orlando, and Tatiana Gruzdeva has been crying all day. Though neither of us knows it yet, as she sits on the corner of her bed and sobs in tiny convulsions, the fact that she’s talking to me will lead to her being arrested by federal agents, placed in solitary confinement, and deported back to Russia.

Next to us on the bed are nine teddy bears. Eight of them came with her from Tiraspol, Moldova. The ninth was a gift from her boyfriend, Ibragim Todashev. Today would have been Ibragim’s 28th birthday, but he is not here to see it, because in the early hours of May 22, 2013, a Boston FBI agent shot and killed him in this very apartment, under circumstances so strange that a Florida state prosecutor has opened an independent investigation. According to the FBI, just before Ibragim was shot—seven times, in two bursts, including once in the top of the head—he was about to write a confession implicating himself and alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a brutal triple homicide that took place in Waltham, Massachusetts, in September 2011.

I’m sitting awkwardly at one end of the twin bed. She’s crying quietly, cross-legged at the other end, wearing shorts and a white shirt with sequins. Most of her outfits have sequins or rhinestones. She’s 19. I’m 26. We both have long blond hair. We’ve both been close to men who were in trouble with the law, and lost them violently. We’ve been talking for about an hour, mostly about men, and parties, and moving forward after a tragedy. Ibragim was a good man, she says. He could never have committed a murder.

“I’m here alone,” she cries. “I hope it never can be worse than this.”

I try to comfort her, but it’s complicated. We both want to know why Ibragim Todashev was killed. She wants to clear his name. For me, and for the families of the Waltham murder victims, Ibragim’s shooting may have snuffed out the last chance at finding out what really happened that night. In the back of my mind is this question: Did her dead boyfriend kill my friend Erik?

September 11, 2011 was a Sunday, and at twilight Erik Weissman was looking for somewhere to spend the night. That afternoon he’d visited his younger sister Aria at a diner down the street from their parents’ home, but he didn’t have a place of his own—he’d been couch-surfing since the cops busted him on drug charges back in January. He kept his belongings at his friend Brendan Mess’s apartment on a dead-end street in Waltham, and that’s where he usually stayed. Erik and Brendan were established pot dealers who occasionally worked together and shared an interest in sports, personal fitness, and designer weed. But Erik had cleared out of the apartment while Brendan was going through a dramatic breakup with his live-in girlfriend, Hiba Eltilib. He had recently been staying with a friend in Newton. “That chick is crazy,” Erik had repeatedly told the friend.

That night his friend in Newton was busy, so around 7:30 p.m. Erik drove his Mercedes SUV back to Brendan’s place in Waltham. It was a warm night, cloudless. Brendan and Hiba had finally broken up, and Hiba had split for Florida, so the coast was clear. Brendan had invited another friend, Rafi Teken, to come over, too. Like Erik, Rafi had been avoiding Brendan’s place while Hiba was there. Rafi and Hiba were known to get into arguments of their own.

At 7:30, Erik sent a text to his friend in Newton. Shortly thereafter, all three men stopped answering their phones.

The bodies were found the next day. Erik was 31. Brendan was 25. Rafi was 37.

It was Hiba who found them, of all people. On September 12, she returned unexpectedly from Florida—most of Brendan’s friends were under the impression that she wasn’t coming back—and after she couldn’t reach Brendan on her cell phone, she showed up at the apartment and asked the landlord to open the door. The bodies were inside. One news report says that Hiba left the house and screamed, “They’re all dead!” Another says she went outside, crying, with blood on her feet, and calmly asked for a cigarette.

Their throats had been slashed with such force that their heads were nearly decapitated. A veteran Waltham investigator called it “the worst bloodbath I have ever seen,” and compared the victims’ wounds to “an Al-Qaeda training video.” About a pound and a half of high-grade marijuana covered two of the corpses. Rafi Teken’s face was left untouched. Erik Weissman had a bloody lip. But Brendan Mess, an experienced mixed martial artist who trained in jujitsu, had real fighting wounds. His arms were covered in scratch marks. He had puncture marks on his temple and the top of his head, another mark by his ear, and he was bruised around the lips. It didn’t scan like a robbery: There were eight and a half pounds of pot left in bags and glass jars, and $5,000 dollars left on the bodies—enough for a cheap funeral, for one of them.

Hours later, Middlesex County District Attorney Gerry Leone stood amid a scrum of reporters on the dead-end street outside Brendan’s home at 12 Harding Avenue. State police had found a “very graphic crime scene” in the second-floor apartment, he said. “It does not appear to be a random act.” He told reporters that there was no evidence of a break-in—that it was likely the assailants and dead men knew one another. Assailants, plural? a reporter asked. Leone replied that there were “at least two people who are not in the apartment now, who were there earlier.”

“This is a fluid, ongoing investigation,” he said. “We will have information as we develop the facts.”

But they didn’t.

ibragim-todashev-autopsy
FROM TOP LEFT, PICTURES RELEASED BY IBRAGIM TODASHEV’S FATHER SHOW HIS WOUNDS—BULLET HOLES IN HIS TORSO AND THE TOP OF HIS HEAD—AS WELL AS THE BLOODY SCENE AT HIS ORLANDO APARTMENT.

From the beginning, investigators failed to follow up on seemingly obvious leads. They didn’t visit the gym where Brendan trained, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of Brendan’s best friends, was never questioned—even though several of Brendan’s friends say they gave his name to the police. Ten days after the murders, a state police detective essentially told one victim’s mother that investigators were waiting for the case to solve itself.

It would take 18 months and two homemade bombs before FBI investigators exhumed the case—and once they did, they were able to move with uncanny speed. It took them mere hours to link Tamerlan to the Waltham triple homicide. The day after Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with Watertown police, plainclothes FBI agents detained his friend, Ibragim Todashev, at gunpoint. Although the FBI seems to have initially been looking for evidence of a wider terrorist cell in connection with the marathon bombings, within weeks its agents were questioning Ibragim about the Waltham murders. According to the FBI, agents were able to bring Ibragim to the brink of a written confession by pressuring him with circumstantial evidence.

If you believe the FBI’s account, then you must also believe this: If Waltham police had figured out who hacked three men to death on September 11, 2011, there’s a good chance we would not be talking about the Boston Marathon bombings. Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Ibragim Todashev might be alive and in jail. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might be just another mop-headed, no-name stoner at UMass Dartmouth. There would be no One Fund. Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, and Martin Richard would still be alive. Sean Collier would have graduated from the MIT police department to the Somerville Police Department by now. And for the friends and family of the three men who died in Waltham, perhaps their grief would not still be paired with such haunting questions.

I met Erik Weissman in the summer of 2006, after my freshman year of college. I was 19. He was 26. He’d come to sell us some high-end weed. I was with my friends from high school in a Newton attic, and it felt less like a drug deal than a Tupperware party. Erik had spotless sneakers, wire-rimmed nerd glasses, and a contagious smile. He produced a series of glass jars from a black duffel bag, each filled with a different strain of headies: Blue Dream, Grand Daddy, Alaskan Thunder Fuck. My friends were easily impressed; I teased him for talking game. My father, Norman Zalkind, is a criminal defense lawyer, and I grew up discussing his cases and clients at the kitchen table.

A few days later, Erik picked me up and we drove around in his blue Audi, taking turns playing Lil Wayne and Buju Banton on our iPods and smoking Erik’s Sour Diesel. We did that a few times that summer: driving aimlessly, talking, smoking. He was one of the few friends who encouraged my cheesy freshman-year poetry. He thought of himself as an entrepreneur and a connoisseur of pot; he would fly to Amsterdam regularly to buy seeds of a particular variety that interested him. He talked about selling pot as if it were a community service, and told me repeatedly that he didn’t operate in violent circles. I told him about my father and his clients. I told him his line of work always ends badly. He laughed.

Over time I stopped smoking pot, and we grew apart. The last I heard from him was sometime in January or February of 2011. He wanted my father’s number. He’d been busted when his landlord went into his apartment, saw his stash, and called the cops. Boston police had seized more than $20,000 in cash and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of marijuana from his Roslindale home. He had always told me that he sold only pot, but in the raid police also seized cocaine, Vicodin, and OxyContin.

I gave him the number for my dad’s law firm. He sounded scared.

Soon after my dad took me out for oysters to thank me for the referral. He told me there was a problem with Erik’s warrant, and he didn’t think the case would go to trial.

I never spoke to Erik again.

There was a lot about him I learned only after his death. The drugs and money he lost when he was arrested left him $50,000 in debt to his Sour Diesel connection in California, his friends told me. He’d invested in a California bong company called Hitman Glass, but his money woes kept him from moving out West. In the months before they died, Erik and Brendan were working together to expand their pot business, trying to buy in larger quantities and purchasing equipment to grow marijuana on their own, according to another dealer who sometimes worked with them.

Waltham is often described as a small, quiet, suburban town, but in 2011 it was teeming with much bigger drug operations. A few months before the murders, federal investigators indicted a steroid-popping Syrian national named Safwan Madarati, the Waltham-based head of a violent international drug ring. Madarati, the indictment revealed, hired thugs to assault and intimidate his enemies, and maintained “personal connections with members of the Watertown police department.” A former Watertown officer was among those charged in the case. In an unrelated case only a few months later, police arrested a former Watertown council member after they found $2 million worth of hydroponic pot in his Waltham warehouse. They were all convicted.

Police quickly seized on Erik and Brendan’s pot dealing, and theorized that the murders must have been connected to a drug dispute or robbery. “Whose toes were they stepping on in Waltham?” one friend remembers being asked. Investigators grilled the victims’ friends about Erik and Brendan’s drug sources, and asked with whom they had financial disputes. “They were telling us that it could’ve been a drug deal that had gone wrong,” recalled Bellie Hacker, Erik’s mother. “But then it didn’t make sense because there was money left behind, and the marijuana.”

For Bellie, the aftermath of the murder was excruciating. In addition to the cops’ theory about a drug deal gone wrong, there were other dark rumors circulating, some of them concerning Brendan’s ex-girlfriend, Hiba. “One of the theories was that Hiba hired someone to kill Brendan and just Erik and Rafi were there and they got killed, too,” Bellie said. According to news reports, police questioned Hiba on several occasions. Before dropping out of sight, she gave anonymous interviews to the New York Times and the Boston Globe disavowing any involvement in the crime. Bellie didn’t know what to believe. “Nothing really made sense,” she said.

It didn’t help that police seemed to save their toughest questions for the victims’ families and friends. A few days after the murders, Erik’s sister, Aria, learned that her brother had kept a storage unit, and called the company to ask if she could get access to Erik’s belongings. They didn’t call back, and instead she got a hostile phone call from a detective, State Trooper Erik Gagnon, assigned to the Middlesex County DA’s office. What did she think she was going to find in that box? Gagnon asked. Drugs? Money? She remembers that Gagnon called her “deceitful” and threatened to prosecute her for interfering with the investigation. “How many murders have you solved?” he barked. (When I asked Gagnon about the conversation, he wouldn’t comment on it directly, but said, “If someone said I was being accusatory, maybe ask them why.”)

Friends of Erik’s who spoke to the police after his murder had similar experiences. One friend, who did not have a police record, told me he was questioned by detectives just hours after carrying Erik’s casket at his funeral. “They were treating us less like friends and more like drug dealers,” he said.

Then there were leads that the detectives seemed to ignore. They never visited the Wai Kru gym in Allston, where Brendan practiced mixed martial arts several times a week, according to gym owner John Allan. They never spoke to his training partner and best friend, Golden Gloves champion Tamerlan Tsarnaev, even though several friends gave the police his name in a list of Brendan’s closest contacts. Meanwhile, detectives called Aria into the police station and accused her of knowing who killed her brother. She broke down in tears as her mother defended her.

Ten days after the bodies were found, detectives told Bellie that they were not actively pursuing leads in her son’s murder. Instead, she remembers state police detectives explaining, they were waiting for a suspect to shake loose. “They were basically waiting for someone to come forward and say who did it,” Bellie recalled. “They said, ‘Someday down the line, someone is going to need a plea bargain.’”

It was September 22, 2011. The case would go cold for 582 days.

There was a time, just after the bombs went off on Boylston Street, when it looked like the families might finally get some answers about who killed Rafi, Brendan, and Erik. On April 19, media outlets made the connection between Tamerlan and Brendan. Friends recalled that Tamerlan had acted differently after Brendan’s death, and hadn’t attended his memorial service. John Allan, the owner of Wai Kru gym, recalled approaching Tamerlan to offer his condolences, only to have Tamerlan laugh him off.

Bellie was hopeful that the renewed attention would stir something up. “It got international news, everyone found out about it, the whole world knew about it, and someone will get the fire under their tush, and we’ll start really getting some answers,” she remembers thinking.

A few days after the Watertown manhunt, Aria says, she spoke to Gagnon for the first time since 2011. He asked for her brother’s cell-phone number and the name of the gym Brendan Mess went to. The Middlesex County DA’s office had Boston cops send over the files from Erik Weissman’s previous arrests.For the first time, Brendan Mess’s younger brother Dylan and his friends were questioned about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The FBI agents wanted to know if either Brendan or Tamerlan was involved in organized crime. If Tamerlan had guns. Who else he sparred with. If Tamerlan prayed, if he preached. The agents asked if the auto shops where Tamerlan and his father sometimes worked were part of an organized-crime ring.

A few weeks later, in mid-May, FBI agents called on Dylan again. He and a friend met them at Dwelltime, a café near Inman Square. The agents, who were in plainclothes, took them into the back of a van and showed them a series of photo lineups. Dylan and his friend looked at each other, and told the agents that the man in the last photo looked vaguely familiar.

The man in the photo, they would later learn, was Ibragim Todashev.

No one who knew Ibragim Todashev seemed to have a complete picture of who he was. Even his own father, with whom he spoke regularly, did not know he had a wife in America, let alone a girlfriend. Ibragim was a womanizer. He was kind to children. He had a sweet tooth, and a temper. He was a trained MMA fighter who liked to hang out with a close-knit group of Chechnyan friends; he didn’t socialize outside of that circle. He was an erratic driver—he’ d been in several car accidents. He and his friends liked to drive luxury cars, but they’d buy old, broken-down ones and fix them up. He liked to listen to a Russian singer called Mr. Credo, who sings in a fake North Caucasus accent about buying drugs from the Taliban.

Ibragim was the eldest of 12 children—his father, Abdulbaki Todashev, had two wives. The family was on the move constantly in the chaos of war-torn Chechnya. After the wars, Ibragim attended college in Russia for three years before leaving in 2008. He arrived in Boston with a student visa (though he would never attend school here), and shortly thereafter received asylum.

Ibragim was welcomed into Boston’s insular Chechnyan community. Tamerlan was one of his first friends. They worked out together, and went clubbing. But it seems he never socialized with Tamerlan’s many American friends. He most likely knew Tamerlan’s friend Brendan, though, because the three of them once lived within a few blocks of one another around Inman Square, and they all trained at the Wai Kru gym.

According to owner John Allan, Tamerlan introduced Ibragim to the gym shortly after Ibragim first arrived in Boston in 2008. Allan remembers them praying together before training. “[Ibragim’s] English was horrific, and it was really hard to communicate with him,” Allan recalled. “In the beginning I assumed the fights and problems were related to language. But later I learned he was just very hotheaded.” For some reason, Allan said, the word “motherfucker” would incite in Ibragim an inconsolable rage. “He would lose it. He would just lose it. He would be ready to fight 17 people and not care if he would win or lose. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be directed to him.”

In 2010 Ibragim was working for a medical-transport company when he got into a verbal argument with another driver in traffic on Tremont Street. By the time police arrived, he was out of the car, being held back by several bystanders as he screamed, “You say something about my mother! I will kill you!”

Ibragim met his wife, Reni Manukyan, when she came to visit his roommate in May 2010. He was 24; she was 20. They exchanged phone numbers, and when she went home to suburban Atlanta, they began a courtship via text message. The relationship moved fast. By July, Reni, an Armenian Christian, had converted to Islam and married Ibragim; a few months later Ibragim moved in with her in Georgia. But he had trouble finding work, and came back to Boston in the summer of 2011 to work at another medical-transport company. Reni came to visit that July to watch him fight a match (he lost). She remembered that his friend Tamerlan called frequently during that visit. Reni told reporters that Ibragim left Boston in August; she told me she had a bank statement that proves he was in Atlanta the day after the murders, but she said her lawyers advised her not to show it to me.

By early 2012, Ibragim had moved to Orlando alone. A year later, when the bombs went off in Boston, he was living with a girlfriend in a condo complex located between Universal Studios and a swamp. A month later, the FBI shot him dead.

Anonymous FBI sources gave numerous accounts of Ibragim’s death to the press, managing to be both vague and contradictory. The agency claimed that, just before being shot, Ibragim had been sitting at a table, about to write a statement that would implicate both himself and Tamerlan in the Waltham murders. In some reports, he lunged at an FBI agent with a knife, while others said he used a pole or a broomstick. It was an agonizing development: The FBI claimed he had been killed at precisely the moment he was about to give the answers so many of us had been waiting for.

Whatever occurred in Ibragim’s apartment the night he was shot dead, his death put the FBI on the defensive. The agency quashed the coroner’s report, leading media outlets and the American Civil Liberties Union to call for an independent investigation. On its editorial page, the Globe declared that “the agency’s credibility is on the line” due to its lack of accountability in Ibragim’s death. Ibragim’s father accused the agency of “premeditated murder” and released photos of his son’s bullet-ridden corpse, showing that he’d been shot in the top of the head—even though the FBI contended that one of its agents had fired in self-defense. Instead of providing answers, the FBI’s investigation of Ibragim had turned into a sudden dead end.

Bellie was infuriated. “Oh, I was so angry,” she said. “That was just horrible, because here we had an opportunity, they were starting to make connections and tie people and find out more information… and the man that could’ve given us answers is no longer available to us.”

She added, “Where is there for us to go?”

But there was at least one person who might know more about Ibragim. At the time of his death, he had been living with a woman named Tatiana Gruzdeva. I found her on Facebook: a slight 19-year-old with bleached blond hair and huge green eyes. She posted a lot of selfies. I sent her a friend request. On the night of September 18, she accepted it.

We corresponded for a few minutes, and then she sent me her number. When I dialed, she picked up right away. Her voice sounded small, but she talked rapid-fire, her Russian accent thick but understandable. I told her I was a reporter, and that I wanted to hear her story.

Two days later, I flew to Orlando to meet her.

By the front door of 6022 Peregrine Avenue, a wire statue of a cow held a pink sign with the word “Welcome.” The apartment was all one room, with a lofted bed surrounded by a waist-high wall. Tatiana invited me in, and I looked around, taking in the sliver of a linoleum kitchen, distinguished from the carpeted living room by a small island. Tatiana slept in an upstairs loft, in a bed covered in stuffed animals, watched over by a poster of Muhammad Ali. The back wall was all windows, looking out on a black pond a few yards off, where a bale of turtles broke the surface to take in the evening air. Tatiana pointed out the place in the living room where the carpet had been cut out, because it had been stained with Ibragim’s blood.

She had met Ibragim through a mutual friend, Khusen Taramov. Then she moved in. “First it was just friends,” she said, “and after, we starting having relationship and we were sleeping together like boyfriend and girlfriend.” She cooked him meals. Together they adopted a cat, Masia. “It was like a small family, me and him and the cat, he was like a little baby for us.”

Tatiana knew that Ibragim had been married to Reni. She believed they were divorced.

After the Boston bombings, Tatiana recalled, Ibragim seemed upset. “He didn’t tell me it was his friend, he just was so sad. I said, ‘What happen with you?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ Long time he don’t want to tell me. And after, he tell me, ‘My friend is dead.’”

The day after Tamerlan was identified as a marathon bombing suspect, Tatiana was washing the dishes when Ibragim stepped outside. Then she heard shouts outside the house: Get down! Get down! She saw Ibragim on the ground, surrounded by six or seven men. She didn’t know who they were, because they weren’t wearing uniforms. She says they told her they were FBI agents.

They handcuffed Ibragim and made him sit in the middle of the room, and began questioning him about the Boston bombings, asking him what he knew and where he was on the day of the attack. Tatiana spoke up: “He was with me, he was in the house, we didn’t do anything wrong,” she told the agents.

“They just kept asking again and again, the same questions,” she said. They asked if he knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He replied that the two of them had been friends. Tatiana said this was the first time she had heard the name.

Eventually the FBI left with Ibragim, confiscating his phones and computers. About six hours later, Tatiana said, Ibragim came home, reassuring her that everything was okay. The next day, she said, agents returned their electronics.

As best as I can tell, the FBI arrived on Ibragim’s doorstep looking for a terrorist. The marathon bombings had been the largest act of terrorism on American soil since 9/11, and if there were any chance that the Tsarnaevs had ties to a terrorist organization, federal agents had to find it. Wrapping up a drug murder was not their top priority.

For the next month, Ibragim and Tatiana were under intense surveillance. Agents intercepted Ibragim’s wife, Reni, in an airport and questioned her for five hours; she was later interviewed several more times. They even tracked down his old Boston roommate.

Meanwhile, Tatiana said, agents contacted the couple regularly on the phone, visited their home, and on several occasions called them into the local field office for more questioning. They asked Ibragim about a call from Tamerlan a month before the bombings, just after Ibragim had undergone knee surgery. “He asked how he feels after surgery and Ibragim tells him, ‘I’m better, what about you? How is your family?’ So they would talk just a little bit and that’s it,” Tatiana said. At some point, Ibragim deleted the call from his phone’s memory. “FBI asked him, ‘Why did you delete this phone call?’” Tatiana said. “And he said, ‘I was scared.’”

When Ibragim and Tatiana left the house, he would point out cars to her. “When we go to the workplace or we go hang out with him, he show me in the street, ‘Look, look, they’re following us,’” Tatiana recalled.

On May 4, according to an arrest report, Ibragim got into a fistfight over a parking space, beating a man unconscious. He fled the scene in his white Mercedes, pursued by Orange County Sheriff’s deputies. When they caught him, Officer Anthony Riccaboni got out of the car and drew his gun. Ibragim put his hands up, and Riccaboni got a good look at him.

“I could see the features of the suspect’s ears. I immediately recognized the marks on his ears as a cage fighter/jujitsu fighter,” Riccaboni later wrote in his report. “I told this suspect if he tried to fight with us I would shoot him.”

He made the suspect lie on the ground, but when he got up, he told Riccaboni something unexpected.

“Once on his feet, the suspect commented that the vehicles behind us are FBI agents that have been following him,” Riccaboni wrote. “I noticed 3 (three) vehicles with dark tint. These vehicles began to leave the area. I noticed one vehicle was driven by a male, had a computer stand and appeared to be talking on a radio.”

If Ibragim was right, FBI agents had just watched him beat a man bloody without intervening.

Then they turned the pressure up higher.

About two and a half weeks after Ibragim was first interrogated, the FBI called him back to their office yet again. While he was being interviewed, Tatiana said, two agents took her into an office, where they questioned her for three hours. At first they continued to ask her about the Boston bombings. The agents wanted to know if Ibragim was planning another attack.

“They asked me, ‘Can you tell us when he will do something?’” Tatiana recalled. “I said, ‘No! I can’t!’ Because he wasn’t doing anything, and I didn’t know anything.”

Then they brought up a new topic: a triple murder.

“They said, ‘We think he did something else, before.’ They said he killed three people in Boston 2011 with a knife. I said, ‘It’s not true! I can’t believe it.’ You know, I was living with him seven months, and we have a cat.”

Throughout the course of my reporting, Tatiana is the only one of Ibragim’s associates who recalled being questioned about the Waltham murders before Ibragim’s death.

When agents didn’t get the answers they wanted, Tatiana said, they told her they would call immigration officials to detain her. Her visa had expired weeks before. “I said, ‘Come on guys, you cannot do this! Because all this two and a half weeks, you know my visa was expired and you didn’t do anything. And [now] because you need me and I say I don’t want to help you, you just call to immigration?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And they called immigration and immigration came and they took me and they put me in the jail.”

For a week, she said, she was kept in an immigration detention facility. She was allowed to talk to Ibragim every day on the phone. She said he told her that when he had come to find her in the lobby the day she was detained, FBI agents mocked him, saying, “Where’s your girlfriend?”

He told her he was so angry, he felt like hitting them for lying to him and stealing her away.

Later that week, the facility had a visiting day, she said. Ibragim came to see her.

“He kissed me, he hugged me like never, it was so sweet, like always. And he tell me, ‘I will marry you when you get out of here, or in the jail, whatever. If we can marry in the jail, we will marry in the jail.’”

On May 21, the last night of his life, Ibragim was hanging out with friends when the FBI called him again. It was an agent Ibragim’s friends were by now familiar with, but knew only by his first name: Chris. The agent told Ibragim that men from Boston were here to ask him a few questions. Ibragim got nervous. He was afraid of a setup, he told his friend Khusen Taramov.

“And I said, ‘All right, if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. But if you don’t do it, they’re not gonna leave you alone. They’re gonna get more suspicious.’ And so he decided to go, and he wanted me to go with him,” Khusen told reporters later. Despite his temper and proclivity toward violence, Ibragim had stayed relatively calm under weeks of questioning and scrutiny. But now, heading to meet the “men from Boston,” his demeanor changed. Ibragim gave Khusen his family’s phone number back in Chechnya, and told him about the $4,000 he had in his apartment, inside his jacket pocket. In case he got locked up, Khusen thought. Then Ibragim said something strange: “Worst-case scenario,” he told Khusen cryptically, “forgive me.”

When Khusen and Ibragim got to the apartment, Chris was with three other officers—an FBI agent from Boston, and two Massachusetts state troopers. Orlando police were on the scene as well.

The officers took Ibragim into the apartment and Chris said he needed to interview Khusen outside.

It was 7:30 p.m. At the same time, at two different locations in Georgia, agents were interviewing Reni yet again, and questioning Reni’s mother, Elena Teyer, for the first time.

Agent Chris asked Khusen a few questions, “Like what do you think about bombings, or do you know these guys, blah blah blah, or what is my views on certain stuff. You know what I mean, lotta stuff, different questions,” Khusen said. Chris didn’t mention a triple murder.

Khusen waited outside the house for four hours. Then at 11:30 p.m., he was told to leave, and that the agents would drop off Ibragim back at the plaza where the friends often hung out.

What happened next inside the condo is known only to the officers who were there.

Pictures later released by Ibragim’s family, of his inert body, show that he was shot four times in the chest, twice in the arm, and once in the top of the head.

Neighbors remember hearing shots a little after midnight. One of them looked out the window to see the parking lot filled with police cruisers. Then he heard an ambulance coming.

At Glades County Detention Center, in Moore Haven, corrections officers were suddenly hustling Tatiana from an immigration jail to a cell in solitary confinement.

She didn’t know why they had moved her. When she asked, they said, “We’ll tell you tomorrow in the morning.”

The next morning immigration officers came to her cell. They told her Ibragim was dead.

“They said, ‘He’s gone.’

“I said, ‘Come on, what do you mean? That’s not true.’

“They said, ‘He died yesterday.’

“I said, ‘No! I just talked with him.’

“They said, ‘We have a paper, and it says that he’s dead, and you can make a phone call.’”

She called Khusen. He told her it was true: Ibragim was dead. “And I’m screaming. I have panic attack. I realize, I realize, he is really dead. And it’s true, you know, it’s true. And I will not see him anymore. It’s not like a movie, it’s not like we broke up or something, I will not see him anymore, for all my life. And everything is flush in my heart, my heart was broken, because me and Ibragim, we had a plan, we had a plan to be together, we had a plan to have a family…. And now he’s not here and we’re not going to be together anymore.”

She told me she was given a sedative, and was kept in solitary confinement for four more days before being returned to an immigration jail. Her detainment stretched for months longer. Finally, on August 9, she was released. Ibragim’s friend Ashurmamad Miraliev came to pick her up, along with Ibragim’s father, who had flown to Florida from Chechnya.

They drove her back to the apartment she had shared with Ibragim, where he had been killed. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, the house is clean, and we cleaned everything.’”

But the cat, Masia, was gone. With Ibragim dead, and Tatiana in jail, there was no one to feed it, and it had run away into the swamp.

When FBI agents came to tell Reni Manukyan that her husband was dead, they claimed they had hard evidence of his guilt in the Waltham murders. “We have DNA that proves he was involved in that triple murder,” she remembered them saying. “The only thing I was telling them is, ‘This is not true, this cannot be true.’”

With the exception of Ibragim’s alleged confession, no agency has ever offered an official explanation of how it connected either him or Tamerlan to the Waltham murders. Reni’s account is the only one that even suggests the FBI has physical evidence linking her husband to the crime. Last July, the New York Times quoted an anonymous official suggesting that DNA evidence may have linked Tamerlan to the crime scene. But as for Ibragim, the official said, they made their case based merely on “a lot of circumstantial pieces.”

If, in fact, the FBI had only circumstantial evidence against Ibragim at the time they shot him, it might explain what happened next. Investigators who had previously asked Ibragim’s friends only about the bombings suddenly returned to ask them about the murders. Even though their suspects were both dead, the case remained open. After Ibragim’s death, the FBI continued its take-no-prisoners approach: Several of Ibragim’s friends found themselves detained, interrogated, and ultimately deported.

The first to go was Tatiana. On October 1, after I’d published an account of my interview with her, she called me collect from Glades County Detention Center. She’d been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and placed back in solitary confinement—and, she says, immigration agents told her repeatedly that she was about to be deported for talking to Boston magazine. By October 11, she was on a plane back to Russia. An official from ICE confirmed that Tatiana had been in the country legally on what’s called a “deferred action” extension of her expired visa. The official could not tell me why she had been deported.

Others felt the scrutiny of the FBI as well. Several of Ibragim’s Orlando friends worked in a pizza shop; the owner told me that after the FBI came to question him, he fired them. Reni’s mother, Elena—a noncommissioned officer with the U.S. Army—says she was told that she would be flagged as a security risk, preventing a promotion. Khusen left the United States in mid-June, to attend Ibragim’s funeral in Chechnya, but when he attempted to return to the U.S. in December, according to several sources, he was blocked from boarding a plane, despite having a green card.

In one case, I was able to catch a glimpse of how the agency was maneuvering behind the scenes—and how, after Ibragim’s death, its focus seemed to shift from looking for a terror cell to investigating the Waltham murders. When it came to Ibragim’s friend Ashurmamad Miraliev, the agency worked clandestinely with local, state, and federal agencies to manufacture a charge against him, interrogate him without a lawyer present, and ultimately get him out of the country.

After Ibragim’s death, Ashurmamad had come to live with Tatiana, supporting them both with pizza-delivery work. On September 18, while Ashurmamad was driving Tatiana to an appointment with her immigration officer, he was pulled over on an expired driver’s license. But this was no ordinary traffic stop. Between five and seven unmarked law-enforcement vehicles were present; Ashurmamad says FBI agents and local police took him out of his car and escorted him to the Orlando police headquarters. Tatiana never saw him again.

Contacted later, Orlando Police Sergeant Jim Young looked up the arrest record and said it looked like a routine traffic stop—with no mention of FBI involvement. But Ashurmamad says he was questioned by the FBI for hours—he’s not sure exactly how long—and was denied requests to speak to his attorney. (The FBI has declined to comment on this case, but a Tampa Field Bureau public-affairs official told me it is their policy to question individuals “with their consent, or in the presence of their attorney.”)

Agents had previously interviewed Ashurmamad and two of his roommates two days before Ibragim died. They questioned him about his own religious beliefs, the Boston Marathon bombings, and about Ibragim. Now, four months later, the interrogation was different. This time, agents were mostly interested in Ibragim and his involvement in the triple murder in Waltham. They wanted to know if there was someone else who might have been involved in the killings, and who else might have information.

But after hours of questioning, when Ashurmamad asked to leave, the agents told him he was going to jail—on a state charge they claimed to have nothing to do with. That turned out to be an outstanding warrant for a witness-tampering charge. It was the first Ashurmamad had heard of it—but the next thing he knew, he was behind bars.

The trumped-up charge stemmed from an incident the previous summer, when his friend Ibragim had gotten into a fight at a hookah bar with a manager named Youness Dammou. The next day, Youness walked into the pizza shop next door, where Ashurmamad worked. A screaming match ensued; Ashurmamad was angry that Youness had called police after the fight. At the time, police weren’t able to identify Ibragim as the assailant, and Youness never mentioned his confrontation with Ashurmamad, so the case was closed. Then almost a year later, on May 17—five days before Ibragim was shot—the case was suddenly reopened. I wanted to know why.

I found Youness working in an Orlando strip mall. He told me it hadn’t been his idea to reopen the case. Instead, he had been approached by an FBI agent in May, who took him to meet with an Osceola County Sheriff’s Department detective in an unmarked cruiser in a Burger King parking lot. The agent sat in the front seat, Youness sat in the passenger seat, and the detective sat in the back. They showed him a picture of Ibragim. They told him about another fight Ibragim had been in recently—the incident in which agents apparently watched him beat up a man over a parking space without intervening. When he heard about the other assault, Youness was eager to press charges.

The law-enforcement officers did not mention that Ibragim was involved in a larger investigation. A few days later, however, Youness saw Ibragim’s face on the news and learned his aggressor was a murder suspect—and dead.

That was the last he heard about it until the end of August, when the detective came back with another request: The last time they’d met, Youness had recounted the incident with the man who’d screamed at him in the pizza shop, Ashurmamad Miraliev. (Youness hadn’t actually known the man’s name; in the case file the detective wrote that an “Agent Sykes” provided the identification.) The detective said Ashurmamad could be charged with a crime. Would Youness like to pursue charges against him? At first Youness said he wasn’t so sure, but then he agreed.

So the FBI had been matchmaking: They had helped the sheriff’s department go fishing on a long-closed case to find a victim and a charge with which they could pressure or detain first Ibragim, and later Ashurmamad. The witness-tampering charge the FBI brought against Ashurmamad was so flimsy that it was dropped in just a month.

And yet it didn’t matter. Although he had never been to Boston and never met the Tsarnaevs, Ashurmamad was nonetheless flagged—according to a note on the booking sheet—“ON TERRORIST WATCH LIST/PLACED PROTECTIVE CUSTODY AND HIGH RISK. HOUSE ALONE.” Ashurmamad was taken from the Orlando Police Department to the Osceola County jail, where he was kept alone in an 8-by-10 room. To meet with his lawyers, he had to have his hands and wrists shackled and be chained to the ground. Ashurmamad told me there were no windows, the light was always on, and he was always cold. He was there for a month until the tampering case was dropped. But he wasn’t released. His student visa had expired, and he’d missed a court date while he was in jail. So he was moved directly to an immigration detention facility, and on November 4, he was ordered to be deported back to Tajikistan.

Nine months after Ibragim’s death, the FBI still hasn’t put the Waltham case to rest—or offered any further insight into the death of the man who might have closed it. Back in January, FBI director James Comey claimed the agency had completed its report on Ibragim’s shooting and was “eager” to share it—but almost two months later, the report somehow still hadn’t been released. The Florida prosecutor’s office was also investigating the shooting—but at the end of 2013, shortly after speaking with the Department of Justice, it announced the report would be delayed.

When I spoke to Ibragim’s father in February, he said he was waiting to hear the FBI’s findings before deciding whether to file a wrongful-death lawsuit. But that account is unlikely to shed significant new light on Ibragim’s death: The FBI has a long, unbroken history of clearing its agents of wrongdoing in shooting incidents, the New York Times found in a review of 150 such cases over the past two decades. And according to WBUR’s David Boeri—quoting unnamed “law-enforcement sources familiar with accounts of what happened” that night—the FBI has little to add to the story it peddled to reporters on background shortly after the killing. Boeri’s sources told him that during the interrogation, Ibragim admitted to being present at the crime scene but “blamed Tsarnaev for the murders.” He also quoted law-enforcement sources saying that Ibragim had knocked over a table and come at the FBI agent with a pipe.

According to a statement by the Middlesex County DA’s office, the triple-homicide case is “open and active” and state police, Waltham police, and the FBI are conducting a “thorough, far-reaching” investigation. “This investigation has not concluded and is by no means closed,” it said.

They have not updated the statement in nine months.

In late September, Aria Weissman and Dylan Mess invited me to accompany them to the annual Garden of Peace ceremony, which is held beside a dry, stone-lined riverbed near the State House to honor Massachusetts homicide victims. As she does every year, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley presided over the event. “We have more people who are here to listen and to find some peace tonight,” she said to the crowd that evening.

Afterward, Aria, Dylan, and I approached Coakley and asked her why there hadn’t been any progress in the Waltham case. “We haven’t been getting any answers,” Aria told Coakley.

Coakley was calm and respectful. “I know how frustrating and how difficult it is for you,” she told us. The triple murder, Coakley explained, was not her investigation—it was the Middlesex County DA’s concern. She said that she could and would follow up to make sure state police were working with Waltham police on the murder case. “The Waltham PD and the state police should be working together,” she told us.

But two weeks later, Detective Patrick Hart of the Waltham police, who has been investigating the murders since before the Boston Marathon bombings, told me his department had not been contacted by Coakley’s office. “No one here knows,” he said at the time. “I think I would have been told.”

Two days after I reported on Coakley’s exchange with Aria and Dylan, a victims’ advocate from the Middlesex County DA’s office reached out to Aria. The advocate said officials from the DA’s office were looking to sit down with the victims’ families and provide more information soon. But they never did.

After Ibragim was killed, Bellie Hacker’s friends congratulated her. The case had been solved—she must be so relieved!

“I’d say, ‘Don’t pay any attention, nothing is solved,’” she said.

She’s still waiting to be shown evidence—to know, finally, what truly happened to Erik. “I was told that once they knew something, someone would knock on my door in the middle of the night,” she said. “I was told that I would be contacted even in the middle of the night.”

State officials once told Bellie that they were waiting for a lead to shake loose, maybe from another case.

They were right. But by then it was too late.

By Susan Zalkind | Boston Magazine | March 2014

Find this story at 7 March 2014

Copyright © 2014 Metrocorp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Questions are mounting over whether U.S. security officials failed to heed warnings that could have foiled the bombing of the Boston Marathon. After news emerged that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was on the intelligence radar in the United States. As a result, there have been growing calls for federal agencies to re-examine their priorities, particularly to focus on sting operations that critics say constitute entrapment. We speak with Trevor Aaronson, author of “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism,” published in January. He is co-director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and a contributing writer at Mother Jones. His most recent article is called, “How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong ‘Terrorist.'” In the piece, he writes while the FBI “decided to stop tracking Tsarnaev — whose six-month trip to Russia at that time is now of prime interest to investigators — the FBI conducted a sting operation against an unrelated young Muslim man who had a fantastical plan for attacking the U.S. Capitol with a remote-controlled airplane.”
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today with mounting questions over whether U.S. security officials failed to heed warnings that could have foiled the bombing of the Boston Marathon. This comes as authorities say the surviving suspect behind the bombing, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has confessed to planning further attacks in New York City. Speaking Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the suspects intended to detonate the rest of their explosives in Times Square.

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Last night we were informed by the FBI that the surviving attacker revealed that New York City was next on their list of targets. He told the FBI, apparently, that he and his brother had intended to drive to New York and designate additional in Times Square. They had built these additional explosives, and we know they had the capacity to carry out the attacks.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: According to New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the two brothers abandoned the plan only when they realized that the car they had hijacked did not have enough gasoline for the trip. In addition to carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings that left three dead and over 170 wounded, the brothers are also accused of shooting dead an MIT campus police officer last Thursday before being apprehended.

Meanwhile, at a news conference on Thursday in the Russian republic of Dagestan, the mother of the suspects, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, denied her sons had anything to do with the bombings and blamed the United States for robbing her of her children.

ZUBEIDAT TSARNAEVA: I’m like sure that my kids were not involved in anything. Yes, I, like, would prefer not to live in America now. Why did I even go there? Why? I thought America is going to, like, protect us, our kids; it’s going to be safe for, like, any reason. But it happened opposite, like it’s just—America took my kids away from me. Only America.

AMY GOODMAN: After news emerged that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was on the intelligence radar in the U.S., there have been mounting calls for federal agencies to re-examine their priorities, particularly a focus on sting operations that critics say constitute entrapment. In an editorial on Wednesday, The Washington Post wrote, quote, “The FBI has devoted considerable resources to sting operations against people it judges to be terror suspects, sometimes on what look like dubious grounds. … [I]t’s not clear that a sometimes far-fetched plot would have gone forward without the encouragement and help of FBI informants,” they wrote.

For more, we go to Tampa, Florida, to talk to Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. He is co-director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and a contributing writer at Mother Jones. His most recent piece is called “How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong ‘Terrorist.'” In the piece, he writes, while the FBI, quote, “decided to stop tracking Tsarnaev—whose six-month trip to Russia at that time is now of prime interest to investigators—the FBI conducted a sting operation against an unrelated young Muslim man who had a fantastical plan for attacking the US Capitol with a remote-controlled airplane.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Trevor. Why don’t you lay out your point in this article? Who was this other person? And what happened to the tracking of the Boston bombing suspect?

TREVOR AARONSON: Well, what we know is that in January 2011 the FBI in Boston investigated two men that they suspected could be involved in terrorist organizations or somehow sympathetic to terrorist organizations. The first was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and we all know the story. They investigated him, looked at his web traffic and decided that he wasn’t a threat. And that’s where their trail essentially ended. In the same month, in January 2011, an FBI informant who was a heroin addict and was being paid thousands of dollars by the FBI came to the bureau and said, “I know a man named Rezwan Ferdaus. Rezwan Ferdaus said he wanted to commit an act of terrorism.” And it was a ridiculous idea. He wanted to fly a remote-controlled airplane into the U.S. Capitol building and have it laden with grenades and and then explode it over the—or detonate it over the gold dome.

But if it wasn’t bad enough that his idea was patently ridiculous, Rezwan had no capacity to even move forward in it. He didn’t have any money. He didn’t have any access to explosives. He didn’t really have any capacity at all to commit even the most minor crime. And yet, the FBI, instead of choosing to pursue Tamerlan Tsarnaev, chose to start a nine-month sting investigation, sting operation on Rezwan Ferdaus. They gave him $4,000, which he used to purchase a remote-controlled airplane. They then paid for a trip for him to scout out locations in Washington, D.C., where he could launch the airplane. And then, in the final stage, they gave him all the explosives he needed. They gave him C-4. They gave him grenades. And they delivered it to him. And at that point, the FBI arrested him and charged him with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. He did plead guilty to that, and he’s serving 17 years in prison. But what’s interesting about it is that the evidence in his case clearly showed that without the FBI’s assistance, without the FBI providing all of the means and opportunity, he never would have been able to commit his crime. And yet, at the same time, the FBI chose not to pursue the person who ultimately detonated bombs at the Boston Marathon.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Trevor, we’ve seen this over and over again, and you’ve looked at it, the tendency of the FBI to use undercover informants who actually become instigators or co-conspirators in a plot to snag folks who otherwise would not be able to commit these crimes.

TREVOR AARONSON: That’s right. You know, since 9/11, there have been more than 175 defendants who have been caught in terrorism sting operations. And this is due to a very aggressive policy that has its roots in the current FBI mission of preventing the next attack at whatever cost. And so, what the FBI is looking for are men who they believe, you know, will become the terrorists of tomorrow. They want to catch today that terrorist of tomorrow. And so they look for people who are espousing radical beliefs, who say they want to commit some sort of act of violence, and then they set up, through undercover agents and informants posing as al-Qaeda operatives, these elaborate sting operations in which they provide everything that the target of the sting operation would need. You know, it can be the transportation. That can be the guns and the weapons. In some cases, that can be even the idea for the terrorist attack. And then they put it all together, let the person move forward in the plot, and when they push the button that would detonate the bomb, they then arrest them and announce to the public another terror plot foiled.

But if you look closely at these cases, it’s very clear that the men caught in these cases never could have committed their crimes were it not for the FBI providing the means and the opportunity. You know, these are men who are far more aspirational than operational, in the FBI’s parlance, and yet the FBI then arrests them and charges them, with the full extent of the law, as if they were terrorists. And, you know, the question I raised in my book, which came out in January before the Boston bombing, is: What are we missing as a result of pursuing these men, who are really of questionable importance, who are really of questionable danger? And I think what the Boston bombing shows is that as we’re—as the FBI has been pursuing these men in sting operations whose danger is very questionable, perhaps we’re missing the real dangerous guys, such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar.

AMY GOODMAN: The FBI has come under criticism after reports emerged, of course, that the agency interviewed the Boston suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in January 2011 and decided not to pursue his case. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney defended the FBI’s claim it did everything it could with the information it had at the time.

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: You know, all of these—all of these issues are obviously under investigation. What we do know is that the FBI took action in response to that notification, investigated the elder brother, and investigated thoroughly, and came to the conclusion that there was no derogatory information, no indication of terrorist activity or associations, either foreign or domestic, at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: That was White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Your response, Trevor Aaronson?

TREVOR AARONSON: I think what this suggests is that the FBI is pursuing people for the wrong reasons. You know, for example, the FBI is limited in the law in how it can pursue people. It has 72 hours to do what’s called a threat assessment, to figure out if there is information that will allow them to establish a predicate to move forward in an investigation. And what’s ultimately happening is that the FBI is finding people like Tsarnaev, who may not have direct—you know, that they can’t find direct information on that they’re involved in crimes, and yet instead they’re finding these loudmouths who say they want to commit an act of terrorism, and then they move forward in these elaborate sting operations.

And I think what we really need to examine here is how the FBI targets and how the FBI puts on suspicion lists people they suspect might be involved in terrorism. I mean, saying you want to commit some sort of act of terrorism, being a loudmouth, is really enough to launch these elaborate sting operations. And yet, the people who are committing the real offenses, the real acts of terrorism, the, you know, Tamerlan Tsarnaevs or Faisal Shahzads, who—the Faisal Shahzad who delivered a bomb to Times Square that fortunately didn’t go off—the really dangerous guys aren’t being trapped in these sting operations, in part because, in a way, they’re not dumb enough to go into the local mosque or into the community and talk to an informant about how they want to commit an act of terrorism. The really dangerous guys aren’t being detected by the FBI. And so, I think we really need to examine how we consider the targets, how we target the targets, and ultimately, who we should be investigating for possible terrorist operations.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what have you been able to tell from the information that’s come out so far about this age-old problem of lack of coordination between the FBI and the CIA—the Russian intelligence actually contacted both agencies separately at different times about their concerns about Tamerlan—and whether there’s been any progress in terms of these agencies being able to coordinate their activities?

TREVOR AARONSON: Well, what is interesting in the Boston case, for example, is, you know, the Russian government contacted both the FBI and the CIA and expressed a concern about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. That wasn’t enough for them to really pursue an investigation against him any more than they did. And yet, you know, the nine-month sting operation they conducted on Rezwan Ferdaus was brought to them through an FBI informant who had a heroin addiction and was working for money for the FBI. I mean, I certainly think a threat—a possible threat coming from the Russian government is much more credible than an informant, but yet the FBI chose to follow the informant’s tip over the Russian government’s.

But what this also gets at, as you mention, is that there has been—has long been competition between the intelligence agencies in the United States. The CIA doesn’t get along well with the FBI; the FBI doesn’t get along well with the CIA. The FBI also doesn’t get along well with the NYPD’s intelligence division. There’s a real competition here. And that was illuminated very clearly in the 9/11 report, where lack of communication really exacerbated the problems of intelligence at that time. And while we’ve seen improvements, what clearly this shows is that those improvements haven’t been good enough.

AMY GOODMAN: We hear you fine.

TREVOR AARONSON: Those improvements haven’t been good enough.

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Trevor. We hear you fine.

TREVOR AARONSON: OK. Those improvements haven’t been good enough. I mean, the problem has been that the—that here’s a case where both the CIA and the FBI were looking at the same defendant, both from information from the Russian government, and they weren’t communicating at all. And I think, you know, this really needs to be addressed, which is, you know, shouldn’t we have been pursuing someone much more thoroughly who was—came to our attention through the Russian government, as opposed to coming to our attention through an FBI informant who, you know, has a financial incentive in finding terrorists and, you know, knows he can get a payday if he can bring someone to the FBI who says he wants to commit some sort of act of terrorism?

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the question of informants, that you’ve been discussing, and how they’ve been used by intelligence agencies in counterterrorism work, especially after 9/11. We have been reporting on this for years. I’m going back to 2010 to Imam Salahuddin Muhammad of Newburgh, New Jersey, about—of Newburgh, New York, about FBI informants within the Muslim community.

IMAM SALAHUDDIN MUHAMMAD: I believe that what we are seeing today with the FBI surveillance and the FBI allowing for agent provocateurs to enter into Muslim communities is the same thing that happened in the ’60s with a lot of the black nationalist organizations. That’s what I see happening today in the Islamic community. The FBI, they are sending these agent provocateurs into the community, and they are cultivating and nurturing and actually creating situations that would never have occurred if they didn’t have their man in there to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Imam Salahuddin Muhammad of Newburgh, New York. Trevor Aaronson, your final comment?

TREVOR AARONSON: You know, it’s important to realize that since 9/11 we’ve had an explosion of informants. You know, in the COINTEL days of the ’60s, there were 1,500 informants. Today there are 15,000. And most of them are targeting Muslim communities, and many of them are acting as agent provocateurs. Their mission is to go into Muslim communities, find people who are espousing violence or say they want to commit some sort of act of terrorism, even if they have no means, even if they have no capability of committing that crime, and then putting everything together—you know, getting the idea, then saying to them, “Well, I can provide the bombs, I can provide the weapons,” and then the FBI, in an elaborate sting, provides the transportation, provides the weapons and everything that they need to move forward in a terrorism sting operation. And then, when they arrest them, they announce to the public: “Another terrorism plot foiled. Here’s the FBI. Here’s us keeping you safe. Here’s us doing our jobs.” But I think the real question we need to ask is, you know: Through these sting operations, have we exaggerated the threat of Islamic terrorism in the United States, while at the same time missing the real threats, missing the Tamerlan Tsarnaevs, missing the Faisal Shahzads, missing the Nidal Hasans? Because the FBI has a clear record of being able to set up in sting operations people who want to commit violence but don’t have the means, while at the same time it misses the really dangerous threats, like what we saw in Boston.

AMY GOODMAN: Trevor Aaronson, I want to thank you for being with us, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, also co-director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and contributing writer at Mother Jones. We’ll link to your piece, “How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong ‘Terrorist.'” Trevor Aaronson’s work has won more than two dozen national and regional awards, including the Molly Prize and the Data Journalism Award.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’re going to rural Georgia, where young black and white women have decided that they’re not going to go to segregated proms any longer, and they’re having their own prom tomorrow night. We’ll speak with them. Stay with us.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Find this story at 26 April 2013

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

The U.S. government segregates terrorism cases into two categories — domestic and international. This database contains cases classified as international terrorism, though many of the people charged never left the United States or communicated with anyone outside the country.

Since the 9/11 attacks, most of the 796 terrorism defendants prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice have been charged with material support for terrorism, criminal conspiracy, immigration violations, or making false statements — vague, nonviolent offenses that give prosecutors wide latitude for scoring quick convictions or plea bargains. 523 defendants have pleaded guilty to charges, while the courts found 175 guilty at trial. Just 2 have been acquitted and 3 have seen their charges dropped or dismissed, giving the Justice Department a near-perfect record of conviction in terrorism cases.

Today, 345 people charged with terrorism-related offenses are in custody in the United States, including 58 defendants who are awaiting trial and remain innocent until proven guilty.

Very few terrorism defendants had the means or opportunity to commit an act of violence. The majority had no direct connection to terrorist organizations. Many were caught up in FBI stings, in which an informant or undercover agent posed as a member of a terrorist organization. The U.S. government nevertheless defines such cases as international terrorism.

415 terrorism defendants have been released from custody, often with no provision for supervision or ongoing surveillance, suggesting that the government does not regard them as imminent threats to the homeland.

A large proportion of the defendants who did have direct connections to terrorist groups were recruited as informants or cooperating witnesses and served little or no time in prison. At present, there have been 32 such cooperators. By contrast, many of the 296 defendants caught up in FBI stings have received decades in prison because they had no information or testimony to trade. They simply didn’t know any terrorists.

DATA LAST UPDATED ON APRIL 20, 2017
Find this story at 20 April 2017

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Trial and TerrorTrial and Terror
Part 1
The U.S. government has prosecuted almost 800 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never committed an act of violence.

OVER THE LAST 15 years, the U.S. government has quietly released more than 400 people convicted on international terrorism-related charges, according to a data analysis of federal terrorism prosecutions by The Intercept. Some were deported to other countries following their prison terms, but a large number of convicted terrorists are living in the United States. They could be your neighbors.

The release of people convicted on terrorism-related charges with little if any monitoring by law enforcement might suggest U.S. government officials believe they can be fully rehabilitated following minor prison terms. A more likely explanation is that many of these so-called terrorists weren’t particularly dangerous in the first place.

Among them is one of the Herald Square bombers, who plotted to attack the New York subway in 2004. Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay, egged on by informant Osama Eldawoody, conspired to plant bombs at the Herald Square station. They drew rough plans on napkins, surveilled the station, and discussed how they might acquire explosives. It was all talk. The two alleged bombers took different paths after their arrests. Siraj fought the charges and went to trial, where he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He won’t be released until 2030. Elshafay pleaded guilty and received a comparably modest sentence of five years in prison and three years of supervised release. He’s been a free man since January 28, 2009.

Or consider the case of Wassim I. Mazloum, who was part of an alleged terror cell in Toledo, Ohio, with Mohammad Zaki Amawi and Marwan Othman El-Hindi. The group’s leader was Darren Griffin, a former U.S. Army Special Forces member who became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI following a drug arrest. As part of a sting, Griffin trained the three men to use firearms, watched jihadi videos online with them, and conspired with Amawi in a half-baked plot to smuggle laptops from Jordan to Iraq. Mazloum, who was convicted at trial for his role, was released in April 2014.

Others convicted on terrorism-related charges were more blustery than dangerous. Two of the men who operated the website RevolutionMuslim.com — Jesse Curtis Morton and Joseph Cohen — were released. Morton and Cohen (who went by Younus Abdullah Muhammad and Yousef Mohamid Al-Khattab, respectively) were converts to Islam and encouraged violence against various people, including Jewish-American community leaders and the creators of “South Park.” Cohen was released in August 2016. Morton became an FBI informant and was released in February 2015. He was a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, which described him as a “reformed” extremist, until December 2016, when local police in Virginia arrested him for bringing crack cocaine to meet a prostitute. Because the drug and prostitution arrest violated his parole terms, Morton went back to prison — but he’s scheduled to be released again on April 23.

Some of the more than 400 people convicted on terrorism-related charges and freed since 9/11 appear from government evidence to have been involved in genuine plots or to have been connected to dangerous actors. For example, Hassan Abu-Jihaad was a Navy signalman who was convicted at trial of providing material support to Al Qaeda by disclosing the location of the USS Benfold in an online forum. Using coded language, he also provided an FBI informant with information about the movements of U.S. Navy ships. He was released in January 2016.

Still others are quietly reintegrating into society through halfway houses, or “residential re-entry management centers,” in the language of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, for instance, was once in the national spotlight as the co-conspirator of Colleen LaRose, better known by her online moniker, “JihadJane.” LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez were part of a small group that went to Ireland and plotted to murder Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist best known for his drawing of the Prophet Mohammed’s head on the body of a dog. In Ireland, Paulin-Ramirez married Ali Charaf Damache, who was arrested in Spain in December 2015 on a U.S. warrant alleging he was a terrorist recruiter. While Damache was fighting extradition from Spain, Paulin-Ramirez was finishing her prison term in a halfway house in Philadelphia, where she was released on March 21.

IN THE WAR on terror, U.S. District Courts have represented the primary stage of what can fairly be described as national security theater. With a near-perfect record of conviction, the Justice Department since the 9/11 attacks has hauled into court nearly 800 people on terrorism-related charges. While Justice Department and FBI news releases and press conferences heralded the arrests of such defendants, the U.S. government has said precious little about the hundreds of people convicted on terrorism-related charges who have been released back into the United States or deported to their home countries. During the remainder of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, for example, 67 people convicted on terrorism-related charges are scheduled to be released, according to The Intercept’s data analysis.

Those being released today, and the ones who will be released tomorrow, were yesterday examples the U.S. government held up as thwarted enemies caught by newly aggressive counterterrorism agents. One-fourth of those so far released were targets of FBI sting operations, in which an informant or undercover agent, posing as a terrorist operative, provided the means and opportunity for otherwise incapable individuals to move forward in terrorist plots. In congressional testimony, FBI Director James Comey and his predecessor, Robert Mueller, have specifically mentioned foiled plots from sting operations as examples of jobs well done, all part of a larger, ongoing pitch to justify to Congress and the public the more than $3 billion the FBI spends every year on counterterrorism efforts.

The FBI declined to answer specific questions about the release of people convicted on terrorism-related charges and did not provide any information about programs or policies to monitor those who have been released. “The FBI’s mission is to stay ahead of threats to the U.S. and its interests in order to protect the American people and uphold the U.S. Constitution,” FBI spokesperson Carol Cratty said, offering instead a blanket statement. “It is our duty to follow up on information we receive by using all lawful investigative techniques and methods to ensure public safety.”

The so-called Liberty City Seven case is indicative of how the U.S. government plays up the dangers of terrorism defendants when they are arrested but then never acknowledges that such purportedly dangerous individuals are routinely returned to their homes in the United States, in some cases just a few years after their arrests. As in other stings, the defendants in the Liberty City Seven case had no connection to terrorists. An undercover FBI informant, pretending to be an Al Qaeda agent, was the only alleged connection to terrorism. The case, one of the earliest of the FBI’s informant stings, was sloppier than most as well, because much of the bureau’s evidence seemed to support the men’s steadfast assertion that they were street hustlers trying to scam a big-talking Middle Easterner out of his money, not terrorists on the make. In fact, despite the government’s efforts to obfuscate this inconvenient fact, the seven men weren’t even Muslim; they considered themselves members of the Moorish Science Temple, blending together elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their belief system.

“The Liberty City case was a bellwether for the FBI and the Justice Department,” said James J. Wedick, a former FBI supervisory agent who was hired by the defense team to review the evidence. “If they could get convictions based on a thin case like this, they had a green light to be even more aggressive with terrorism stings.”

MIAMI – JUNE 23: Media stands outside the warehouse that the FBI raided last evening June 23, 2006 in the Liberty CIty neighborhood of Miami, Florida. The U.S. Justice Department was expected to provide details of an alleged plot to attack the Chicago Sears Tower, in which at least seven people who were staying in the warehouse were arrested in Miami. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Members of the media stand outside the warehouse raided by the FBI in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, Florida, June 23, 2006. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
IN 2004, THE brothers Burson and Rothschild Augustin lived in a Miami apartment above Narseal Batiste. Batiste, a former Chicago street preacher, operated a small drywall and construction business and considered himself a student of Western religions, studying the Old Testament, New Testament, and Quran. Inspired by the Guardian Angels he had seen patrolling in Chicago, Batiste also fashioned himself something of a community activist and guardian.
The Augustin brothers joined up with Batiste and, along with a half-dozen others, worked in his drywall business and together rented a warehouse in the Miami neighborhood known as Liberty City, where they offered martial arts training and religious studies to neighborhood kids. They called themselves the “Seas of David” and would sometimes wear military-style uniforms as they marched through the streets. The group was largely Batiste’s personality cult. He described himself as the “divine leader” and suggested once that “man has the authority to, on a certain level, be God.”

A Yemeni man named Abbas al-Saidi ran a convenience store in Miami that Batiste and his guys frequented. Al-Saidi, who had worked as an informant for the New York Police Department, got in touch with the FBI and reported a suspicious group of men from Liberty City, who he claimed had sent him to Yemen to make connections with Al Qaeda. FBI agents turned al-Saidi into a paid informant, and on instructions from the bureau, he introduced Batiste to a second informant, Elie Assaad, who was posing as a representative of Osama bin Laden. Assaad was a seasoned hand for the FBI, having conducted another terrorism sting in South Florida that lured a young man named Imran Mandhai into a bomb plot. (Mandhai was released from prison in March 2015 and deported to Pakistan.)

For Batiste, who is now incarcerated in a low-security facility in Texas, what happened next was nothing more than a street hustle; according to the U.S. government, the interaction between Batiste and Assaad was far more sinister.

“Al-Saidi made it perfectly clear that he was dealing with the police, and if we played the game the way he would lay it out, we’d be able to get a certain amount [of money] and then just basically break off and just go about our business and do all the things that we wanted to do,” Batiste said in a phone interview from prison.

FBI video footage of a meeting between Narseal Batiste and Elie Assaad, an informant posing as a representative of Osama bin Laden.

Batiste and Assaad met in a hotel room to discuss their future together. A hidden FBI video camera recorded their meeting. Following al-Saidi’s advice to dress the part of a Muslim extremist, Batiste wore what appeared to be a turban and carried a walking staff. He looked more like a Halloween partygoer than an Al Qaeda operative. “I’ve never met someone like you,” Batiste confessed to Assaad. “Someone on a mission.” They both sat at a table, where Assaad was eating a room service meal.

“I am a man that is determined. Whether I get any help from you or not, I’m going to do what needs to be done,” Batiste continued in the video, being as vague as possible. “And I’m well on my way of accomplishing that. I’m not far right now.”

“You’re not far? So I’m not wasting my time,” Assaad said, holding a french fry. He then added: “They didn’t bring me from over there just to hear words. I will see some action, or no?”

“Yeah, you’re not wasting your time,” Batiste said. “Absolutely, absolutely.”

MIAMI – JUNE 23: The inside of a warehouse that the FBI raided is viewed through a hole in the door June 23, 2006 in the Liberty CIty neighborhood of Miami, Florida.The US Justice Department was expected to provide details of an alleged plot to attack the Chicago Sears Tower, in which at least seven people who were staying in the warehouse were arrested in Miami. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Inside the Liberty City warehouse rented by the FBI for Narseal Batiste and his friends, viewed through a hole in the door, June 23, 2006, Miami, Florida. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
BUT THE LIBERTY City Seven plot consisted mainly of words. Assaad kept promising to transfer $25,000 to Batiste, who in turn said what he needed to say to string along Assaad. They talked about a harebrained plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago. Batiste even boasted he could raise an army in Chicago. As time went by and no money arrived from Assaad, however, Batiste and his group became frustrated. So the FBI, through Assaad, rented them a newer, larger warehouse, complete with a refrigerator stocked with food and a new van they could use — all to keep them on the hook and to keep them plotting.
“At that time, we were just thinking, OK, we got the warehouse, and then inside the warehouse, they had food and everything,” Rothschild Augustin remembered. “Like frozen food, fish and stuff. So we were thinking, wow, the money is coming. Then they had a van in there. So we were thinking that all that was ours, so we just kept going along with it.”

The FBI had wired the new warehouse with cameras. Once they were in the warehouse, Assaad asked Batiste and his guys to swear a “bay’at,” or oath of allegiance, to Al Qaeda.

“It was kind of like we got blindsided. We just show up and, ‘Hey, you are going to take this oath.’ What? What oath? Whatever, we just went through it, uncomfortable,” Rothschild Augustin said.

Batiste was still trying to do whatever was necessary to sucker Assaad out of his money. Here was a guy giving them a warehouse, a van, and a promise to provide $25,000. So what if they had to pledge an oath like Boy Scouts? Each of the men stood before Assaad, gave his name, and then pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda. The hustle was finally working, everyone thought.

“The so-called bay’at, oath thing, that was placed upon us — all that was basically acting, just making up stuff,” Batiste recalled.

After the oath, Assaad asked Batiste to do one more thing: take pictures of the FBI office and federal courthouse in Miami. So Batiste and two of the guys gamely drove around Miami taking photographs from their van, with a camera provided by the FBI.

FBI video footage of Elie Assaad administering an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda.

AT THIS POINT, Batiste’s spiritual adviser, a Chicago preacher named Sultan Khan Bey of the Moorish Science Temple, arrived in Miami and the case transformed into theater of the bizarre. An FBI surveillance vehicle recorded Batiste and his guys picking up Khan Bey and his wife, both dressed in colorful flowing African-inspired garb, from the airport in Fort Lauderdale.

When Batiste explained to Khan Bey what had been happening — the generous Arab guy who gave them a warehouse with a refrigerator full of food in exchange for the oath and taking a few pictures — Khan Bey told the group what should have been obvious all along: They were fools being played by the feds. Khan Bey then held a trial of sorts for Batiste, banished him, and took possession of the warehouse and control of the small group. Another of Batiste’s spiritual advisers, Master G.J.G. Atheea, who unbeknownst to the others had agreed to wear a wire for the FBI, confronted Khan Bey at the warehouse and advocated for Batiste’s return as leader of the group. An argument erupted, and Khan Bey grabbed a gun and shot at Atheea, narrowly missing him.

The gun was legal and registered to Lyglenson Lemorin, a Haitian-born member of the group who had carried it for security detail work in the past. Lemorin had mistakenly left the gun at the warehouse, where Khan Bey found it.

Miami police arrested Khan Bey for the shooting, and federal prosecutors took over the case. Khan Bey cooperated by talking to agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It wasn’t his first run-in with the law. Khan Bey had been convicted of rape in 1977 and attempted murder in 1973. He pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm and received a sentence of 14 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, with the stipulation that his sentence be served at a facility near his home in Chicago.

During the madness in Miami, the group was falling apart. Lemorin, frustrated by Batiste and his ill-conceived scam, moved to Atlanta. Some of the other guys began to distance themselves from Batiste after the oath, believing he’d pushed the hustle too far. Patrick Abraham ignored all the folly around him by focusing on jobs with the drywall company.

IMG_20160515_192731-1492629195 Patrick Abraham now lives in Haiti, where he teaches English at a school in Port-au-Prince. Photo: Trevor Aaronson
ON JUNE 22, 2006, Abraham was driving to a worksite when he saw a Chevrolet Suburban accelerate past his van and then quickly stop in front of him. “I see people come out of everywhere and pull out guns, aiming at my window,” Abraham remembered. After the FBI agents rushed the car, one asked Abraham a question that perplexed him: “Do you have a bomb in the car?”
“What?” Abraham asked, confused.

“Do you have a bomb in the car?” the agent repeated.

Abraham shook his head, exasperated. “Go ahead with the bullshit, man,” Abraham said, giving the agents permission to search his vehicle.

The others were arrested in similarly dramatic ways. Seven agents, for example, arrested Rothschild Augustin while he was shopping for clothes.

After their arrests, the FBI brought each of the Liberty City Seven individually into interrogation rooms at the bureau’s Miami office. Stanley Phanor, one of the guys who had remained loyal to Batiste throughout, didn’t understand why he had been arrested when he wound up in an interrogation room. A slender, soft-spoken man of Haitian descent, Phanor had gone by the nickname Sonny since he was a child. In the indictment, prosecutors listed him as “Brother Sunni,” perhaps as a way of making him seem more menacing and Islamic.

None of the men accepted a plea deal, and they all stood trial together. The case was bullshit, they agreed. The first trial resulted in a hung jury for six of the seven defendants. Because he’d abandoned the group during the sting, Lemorin was acquitted — but was immediately detained by immigration officials for deportation.

“On the one hand, they just seemed like a hapless group of guys and their defense all along was that they were just going along with it because they were going to rip off [the FBI informant],” said Jeffrey Agron, who was the jury foreman. “There were a fair number of people on the jury who believed that it was a scam. … On the other hand, when asked to pledge an allegiance to Al Qaeda, they did it. When asked to take pictures for the plot, they did take the pictures.”

Family members of some of the seven men charged with plotting to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago and other buildings, center left in white t-shirts, look on during a news conference where activists spoke, Thursday, June 29, 2006 at the Liberty City neighborhood warehouse in Miami where the FBI arrested most of the men. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee) Family members of the Liberty City Seven look on during a news conference on June 29, 2006, at the warehouse in Miami where the FBI arrested most of the men. Photo: Wilfredo Lee/AP
IT TOOK THREE trials to convict five of the seven men. While Lemorin was acquitted in the first trial, Naudimar Herrera, a bit player in the group, was acquitted following the third trial. But five others — Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Phanor, Burson Augustin, and Rothschild Augustin — were convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization, among other charges, and sent to prison. Following their convictions, Jeffrey Sloman, who was then the acting U.S. attorney in Miami, said the prosecution “helped make our community safer by rooting out nascent terrorists before they could carry out their threats.” The convicted men received sentences ranging from six to 13 years. If the Justice Department thought the men were dangerous, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons seemed to disagree. The Liberty City Seven members were incarcerated in medium and minimum security facilities once in BOP custody. The FBI paid Assaad $85,000 and al-Saidi $21,000 for their work on the sting.
Burson Augustin was the first of the convicted Liberty City Seven defendants to be released, on September 21, 2012, after serving six years in prison. Instead of returning to Miami, he chose to move to Fort Myers, where he had an aunt and where no one else knew him. “I thought my best bet is to go to a place I don’t know,” Augustin said. “To get a fresh start.”

A well-built man who wears thick dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail, Augustin tried to make an honest living in Fort Myers, but he found it impossible to land a job with a terrorism conviction on his record. So Augustin went back to his old trade, hustling, and was soon busted for dealing cocaine. Because he was on supervised release at the time of the drug deal, his case went to federal court and he was sentenced to another four years in prison.

Lemorin, a Haitian national who had fathered two children in Miami, fell victim to a unique kind of double jeopardy. After being acquitted in the first trial, the evidence from that trial was used against him in immigration court. It proved enough to justify his deportation order.

His deportation was delayed because of the 2010 earthquake, which devastated Haiti. But one year after the earthquake, with the island still recovering from the destruction, Lemorin was on one of the first deportee planes to Port-au-Prince. In some ways, despite being acquitted, his punishment was in line with that of the other defendants: Between the time he was in a holding cell awaiting trial and his time in an immigration detention center, Lemorin spent nearly six years behind bars.

When he arrived in Haiti, he found himself detained yet again. Not knowing who among the deportees was a violent criminal and who wasn’t, Haitian officials threw everyone into detention cells. Those whose families had money could offer bribes to get loved ones released. The ones without family or means were at the mercy of Haitian officials in a filthy prison where cholera was spreading and some detainees had already died.

“There’s feces everywhere,” Lemorin remembered. “Feces on the wall, feces on everything, feces on the place where you take a shower.”

When Lemorin finally got out of detention, his relatives in Leogane gave him a small plot of land on which to live. His mother in Miami collected old cellphones and other electronics and shipped them to Lemorin, who sold them to buy the concrete and rebar to build his new home. He only has walls around the bedroom, but the foundation is laid. In time, he hopes to build up the walls around a small living room and kitchen.

In the United States, he was not only forced to leave behind his mother, but also his son and daughter. In April 2011, Lemorin learned that his 15-year-old son, Lukenson Lemorin, had been killed in a car accident in Miami. U.S. authorities denied Lemorin’s visa application to attend the funeral, he said, and he was forced to observe the service through a grainy Skype connection.

“I got robbed of my son’s life because I beat the case,” Lemorin said, tears welling in his eyes. “Twelve jurors found me not guilty. … And when I’m supposed to be home with my son, I’m in Haiti, deported, sent back for the same trial I beat.”

Two years after arriving in Haiti, Lemorin learned that his old friend Patrick Abraham had also been deported. Patrick had only distant relatives to help him in Haiti. But he had Lemorin, who offered to share his one-room home. On a recent evening, Abraham brought home a watermelon from Port-au-Prince. They sliced up and ate the watermelon together as they watched the kids from the village playing soccer with a deflated ball. Impoverished and isolated from the rest of the world, the pair seemed the world’s least probable terrorists.

For his part, Lemorin isn’t bitter about his circumstances. He doesn’t blame the United States. “I love America,” he said. “America is a great country. But what happened to us, it’s not America that did it. It’s not America — it’s a few people in America that others put their trust in.”

IMG_20160512_153116-1492629193 Burson Augustin is now back in South Florida, where he is trying to rebuild his life after serving a decade in prison. Photo: Trevor Aaronson
ABOUT 700 MILES away, in Miami, the rest of the Liberty City Seven are mostly together. Burson and Rothschild Augustin live in a small studio apartment in Broward County, north of Miami. Burson landed a job as a valet on Miami Beach; these days, having learned from his experience in Fort Myers, when he fills out job applications, he just leaves the question about felony convictions blank. It’s best not to try to explain. Rothschild has bounced from job to job; he’s done stints sewing body armor in a factory in an industrial part of town and working in a juice bar in a trendy section of Miami.
Stanley Phanor was released on June 28, 2016, after a short stay at a halfway house. He’s living with his mother in Little Haiti, where Burson and Rothschild Augustin sometimes visit. If the FBI is at all concerned with members of an alleged terror cell associating again in the city of their crime, the three are unaware of it. The Bureau of Prisons does not treat the release of people convicted on terrorism-related charges any differently than that of other criminals, and the FBI does not have a program to track and monitor released terrorists, at least not that it has acknowledged publicly. Phanor and the Augustin brothers haven’t been prohibited from seeing each other, and none of them have seen anything to suggest they are under physical surveillance. As far as they can tell, no one is paying any attention to them at all.

They’ll have a new addition soon. The Liberty City Seven’s alleged ringleader, Narseal Batiste, will be released to a halfway house this summer, a little more than a decade after he purportedly tried to wage a ground war against the U.S. government.

Trevor Aaronson
April 20 2017, 7:12 p.m.

Find this story at 20 April 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

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Trial and TerrorTrial and Terror
Part 2
The U.S. government has prosecuted almost 800 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never committed an act of violence.

˅ EXPAND ALL PARTS
SINCE THE 9/11 attacks, at least 30 people convicted of international terrorism-related offenses have become informants and/or cooperating witnesses in exchange for leniency in sentencing, according to an analysis by The Intercept of federal terrorism prosecutions.

Using the threat of criminal prosecution to encourage someone to cooperate is a well-worn tactic that long predates the war on terror. But this tactic has been used to great effect by federal prosecutors in the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks. There’s a cruel irony in this system. The misguided men, and sometimes women, who are caught up in counterterrorism stings — where an undercover agent or informant encourages or facilitates plans for an attack — are often sentenced to decades in prison because they have no information to trade. Members of the so-called Liberty City Seven, a group of Miami men who discussed a bomb plot with an undercover informant posing as an Al Qaeda operative, spent six to 13 years behind bars; they couldn’t become cooperating witnesses, because they didn’t know any real terrorists. But the more dangerous a defendant, or the more extensive his contacts with terrorists, the more likely he can leverage his connections for leniency.

One early informant was Mohammed Junaid Babar, an Al Qaeda operative who provided material support to efforts against U.S. forces in Pakistan. In exchange for more than six years of cooperation, Babar received a sentence of time served and 10 years of supervised release. As part of his supervised release, Babar was required to continue to cooperate with the government. His whereabouts have never been disclosed publicly, and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has no public record of Babar having entered custody at any point during his cooperation.

The case of Najibullah Zazi offers another example. Zazi trained with Al Qaeda in Pakistan and then mixed beauty-supply chemicals for backpack bombs in a motel outside Denver. He was arrested in September 2009, before he could drive to New York and place those bombs on the subway. Zazi, whose sentence has been pending since he pleaded guilty in February 2010, is currently working for the government as a cooperating witness.

Some of the government’s cooperating witnesses have been plucked from far-flung battlefields. Bryant Neal Vinas, who went by the name Bashir al-Ameriki, was captured in Pakistan. After admitting that he fired rockets on a U.S. military base in September 2008, Vinas turned informant. He provided information about a plot to blow up a Long Island Rail Road commuter train in New York’s Penn Station as well as information about Belgian and French men who attended the same training camp he did. Vinas pleaded guilty in January 2009 to an indictment charging him with, among other offenses, conspiracy to kill Americans and material support for terrorists. His sentence has been pending since then, and there is no record of him ever being turned over to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, suggesting he is in a witness security program.

One of the most colorful and revealing cases of a terrorism defendant-turned-cooperator is that of Earnest James Ujaama, perhaps the most prolific cooperating witness in the war on terror. A would-be entrepreneur with an explosive temper and a penchant for running minor scams, Ujaama became a close associate of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, whom a senior Justice Department official once called “an unrepentant all-purpose terrorist.” But while Abu Hamza is now serving a life prison sentence, Ujaama is free, living in idyllic Berkeley, California, collecting approximately $2,000 per month from the federal government, at least until recently, and looking to tell his story to a receptive audience.

I first heard from Ujaama on November 12, 2015, when he sent me an email. “I’m looking to tell the story of a case that I think you will be most interested in,” he wrote. Later that day, in another email, Ujaama disclosed the primary condition of his cooperation. He wanted me to write a book with him about his life. “I’ve listened to you speak,” he wrote. “I’ve watched your presentation. I like your work.”

In a series of phone and email conversations, Ujaama described how he also wanted compensation for his story. “I don’t pay for access to people,” I told Ujaama.

This sort of back-and-forth continued for months. Sometimes I initiated contact, because I was intrigued by Ujaama’s story. Sometimes he reached out to me, for reasons that were not always clear. Our exchanges always were short-lived. Ujaama is a chameleon-like man who has been many things: entrepreneur, author, college student, religious scholar, newsletter publisher, aspiring movie producer, website designer, even a mule carrying cash into Afghanistan. Now, it seemed, he was attempting to fashion a new career as a terrorism expert, but at his core, the slender 51-year-old with close-cropped hair and braces on his teeth is a hustler — someone who, in the words of one federal judge, always plays “fast and loose.”

During his 13-year cooperation as a witness for the government, Ujaama has testified in two terrorism trials — including that of Abu Hamza, who was also known as Mustafa Kamel Mustafa — and would have testified in a third had the defendant not pleaded guilty. In a court filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney John P. Cronan called Ujaama’s cooperation with the government “extraordinary.”

Finally, in October 2016, Ujaama wrote me once again. He was irritated by a 60 Minutes story about Mary Quin, a New Zealander who was kidnapped in Yemen by an Al Qaeda-affiliated group and portrayed by CBS News as the U.S. Department of Justice’s star witness in Abu Hamza’s trial. This was outrageous to Ujaama, because in his view, he was the star witness against the religious cleric with connections to Al Qaeda. “You should come see me. I’m in the Bay Area until November,” Ujaama wrote. We agreed to meet the following month.

LONDON, United Kingdom: (FILES) Imam Abu Hamza al-Masri addresses followers during Friday prayer in near Finsbury Park mosque in north London, in this 26 March 2004 file photo. Hamza al-Masri was found guilty Tuesday 07 February 2006 of incitement of racial hatred and soliciting murder charges after a criminal trial in London. Hamza, 47, was convicted of six out of nine soliciting-to-murder charges and two out of four charges of “using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred”.AFP PHOTO/ODD ANDERSEN/FILES (Photo credit should read ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images) Imam Abu Hamza al-Masri addresses followers during Friday prayer near Finsbury Park Mosque in north London on March 26, 2004. Photo: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
BORN IN DENVER as James Earnest Thompson, Ujaama moved to Seattle as a boy. “I grew up under the Black Panthers,” he said in court testimony. By most accounts he was whip-smart, driven, and eager to make a mark on the world.

But Ujaama also had a fiery disposition. Once, when his girlfriend called police and reported that he had a gun, Ujaama got into a scuffle with a cop and broke the officer’s watch. Enacting revenge on his girlfriend for the incident, Ujaama poured a five-pound bag of sugar into her car’s gasoline tank.

In the mid-1980s, Ujaama moved to Pelican, Alaska, to take a job at a seafood company, where he said he struggled with a racist culture there. “I just got tired of being called nigger,” he recalled. One day, frustrated by the racism, Ujaama grabbed a .375 Winchester rifle and shot out the window of the housing unit where he was staying. He went to jail for the incident.

By the early 1990s, he’d returned to Seattle and joined the personal computer industry. Ujaama was a partner in Olympic Computers, which sold IBM clones at wholesale. But the company didn’t last; Ujaama began a scam, telling customers to send him checks so that he would get the money rather than his partner. In all, Ujaama raked in about $10,000 from the ploy.

Then Ujaama switched to writing books, positioning himself as a motivational speaker and community activist. One book, “The Young People’s Guide to Starting a Business Without Selling Drugs,” encouraged young black men to become entrepreneurs. “When a person lacks knowledge and vision,” Ujaama wrote in the foreword, “that person becomes a soldier in the wrong war, an enemy to others and to themselves.”

Ujaama followed these efforts with a work of fiction, “Coming Up,” a semi-autobiographical story about two friends — one becomes a drug dealer, the other a successful businessman. Ujaama moved to Los Angeles in the hopes of turning “Coming Up” into a movie. Although he claimed to have received a commitment for half of the money to produce the film adaptation, the promised funds were contingent on Ujaama raising the second half from other sources, which he couldn’t do. It was a flop, like most of Ujaama’s business ventures.

Despite characterizing himself as an entrepreneur, Ujaama has never run a successful business, at least not according to any measure the IRS would endorse. He has never paid taxes, and in some years did not file tax returns at all. “The understanding I had was that I did not owe taxes,” he said.

At a low point after failing to turn his book into a movie, Ujaama returned to Seattle and converted to Islam in late 1996. Ujaama devoted himself to Islam and moved to England to study under Abdullah El-Faisal, a Jamaican-born cleric who was imam of the Brixton Mosque in South London. Ujaama became something of an apostle for El-Faisal, traveling back and forth from London to Seattle, where he’d sell tapes of El-Faisal’s sermons. Yet rather than providing a portion of the sales to El-Faisal, Ujaama pocketed the proceeds.

While in London, Ujaama married a Muslim woman from Somalia, and they had a child. El-Faisal had taught Ujaama that jihad training was a Muslim’s obligation, so in late 1998, Ujaama traveled to Afghanistan for training. “I was looking to learn physical jihad training, which would include hand-to-hand combat, how to use weaponry, and live as a Muslim,” Ujaama explained later in court testimony. He made his way to a training camp run by a conservative Muslim missionary group. The camp used an aging Soviet-built military barracks, a soccer field, a large artillery gun, and some broken-down tanks. Ujaama received weapons training and learned how to recite the Quran. But he wasn’t much of a militant. One night, while in the bathroom, Ujaama accidentally fired his rifle. He soon fell ill and left the camp after just two weeks.

Ujaama returned to London and continued his studies under El-Faisal. At the time, El-Faisal was badmouthing Abu Hamza, the religious leader in London who would later be prosecuted in New York. Some of El-Faisal’s students asked Ujaama to meet with Abu Hamza and help mediate the dispute.

Abu Hamza commanded a mysterious aura because, well, he looked like a James Bond villain. He had one eye and was missing both of his hands, forcing him to use a prosthetic hook. Born in Egypt, Abu Hamza studied civil engineering before coming to the United Kingdom in 1979. Various stories have circulated about how Abu Hamza sustained his injuries, including one that alleged his hands were chopped off after he was caught stealing in Saudi Arabia. In truth, according to Abu Hamza, he lost his hands and an eye during an explosives accident while assisting the Pakistani military in a road-building project.

Ujaama recalled being “very impressed with Sheikh Abu Hamza” from that initial meeting. After listening to Abu Hamza’s taped lectures, Ujaama turned his back on El-Faisal. “I decided that he wasn’t a good person to follow,” Ujaama said. His spurned mentor began telling people that Ujaama had stolen money.

But it didn’t matter. Ujaama had his new teacher, Abu Hamza, who had a growing international following through the website of his organization, Supporters of Sharia. When Ujaama decided to return to the United States in 1999, Abu Hamza gave him about a dozen tapes of his lectures. The tapes bore Supporters of Sharia’s logo — a shackled man behind bars reaching out of the cell with a Quran in hand. The lectures were “very angry, but serious,” according to Ujaama, who distributed copies in Seattle’s Muslim community. As he did with El-Faisal’s tapes, Ujaama pocketed the profits.

It was during this return trip to Seattle that Ujaama heard about a ranch in southern Oregon. The entrepreneur in Ujaama saw an opportunity: He could build a training camp for Muslims and advertise it to Abu Hamza’s followers. Ujaama sent a fax to Abu Hamza describing his idea, but he also exaggerated the progress he’d made in turning the ranch into a training camp. He claimed he had secured weapons and recruits and had already started to build structures. He asked Abu Hamza to send two men from London to assist him.

Oussama Kassir, center, Lebanese-born Swedish citizen wanted in the United States on suspicion of plotting to set up a terrorist camp there, is escorted by heavily armed policemen to the courtroom in Prague on Wednesday, April 25, 2007. The Czech court ruled today that Oussama Kassir can be extradited to the USA however he immediately appealed the decision of the Municipal Court in Prague. Kassir is charged in the USA with conspiracy aimed at providing material support to terrorists for which he faces up to a life sentence if found guilty. Kassir was arrested by the Czech police upon an international arrest warrant at Prague’s Ruzyne airport during a stop-over of his plane flying from Stockholm to Beirut in December 2005. (AP Photo/CTK) ** SLOVAKIA OUT ** Oussama Kassir, center, a Lebanese national and Swedish citizen wanted in the United States on suspicion of plotting to set up a terrorist camp, is escorted by armed police officers to the courtroom in Prague on April 25, 2007. Photo: CTK/AP
THE MEN ABU HAMZA sent were Oussama Kassir, a Lebanese national and Swedish citizen who claimed to have been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, and Haroon Aswat, a slender British man. The brawny Kassir was to be a physical trainer at the camp, while the studious Aswat would act as a religious and Arabic tutor there. They flew to New York on November 26, 1999, and then took a Greyhound bus across the country to Seattle.

After they arrived, Ujaama drove the two men for eight hours to southern Oregon, where Ujaama showed them the ranch. Instead of having the makings of a training camp, it was desolate. There were no stockpiles of weapons. There were no recruits. The only structures were dilapidated trailers.

Ujaama, true to his roots, had been running a hustle. He just needed Abu Hamza’s stamp of approval and support, and he figured if he could get a couple of Abu Hamza’s guys on site, he could line up investments to get the weapons he claimed he already had and start the construction he said was already underway.

But Kassir, realizing that Ujaama had lied about the camp, became angry. “He got in my face and began to point his finger at me,” Ujaama later testified.

His training camp scheme dashed following the argument with Kassir, Ujaama fled back to Seattle, leaving behind the two men Abu Hamza had sent. Ujaama never returned to the ranch.

Instead, Ujaama moved back to London in the spring of 2000 and returned to his studies under Abu Hamza. If the religious cleric was irritated by Ujaama’s overselling of the training camp, or his dispute with Kassir, he didn’t seem to show it. He took in Ujaama as a close aide, and Ujaama began to work on the Supporters of Sharia website, expanding the English-language portion in order to reach non-Arabic speakers.

Eventually Abu Hamza had a mission for Ujaama. He asked him to travel to Afghanistan to deliver money and escort a member of the London mosque, a Ugandan-born British man named Feroz Abbasi. Abu Hamza gave Ujaama a letter addressed to the foreign minister of the Taliban government to guarantee safe passage into Afghanistan.

Ujaama and Abbasi purchased plane tickets and traveled to Pakistan. After checking into a hotel in Quetta, Ujaama snuck away without telling Abbasi and headed to the Taliban embassy. “I decided that because he would interfere with what I was doing,” Ujaama said. At the embassy, Ujaama handed the Taliban representative the letter from Abu Hamza.

The Taliban escorted Ujaama in an SUV across the border and to the Kandahar compound of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan who ran a training camp in Afghanistan. Following Abu Hamza’s instruction, he gave al-Libi an envelope containing 500 British pounds. Ujaama then traveled to Khost to find a girls’ school to deliver another envelope of money, but wasn’t able to locate it. Instead, he encountered a man who wanted to send Ujaama to the front lines in the Taliban’s war against the Northern Alliance. Ujaama called Abu Hamza in London to intercede. “I’m not here for that purpose,” he said.

The call prevented Ujaama’s military conscription, but Abu Hamza asked him about Abbasi. “I left him behind,” Ujaama said. Angry, Abu Hamza demanded that Ujaama go back to Pakistan and bring Abbasi to Afghanistan. Ujaama told Abu Hamza that he would collect Abbasi, even though he had no intention of doing so.

Back at the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, Ujaama continued to assist Abu Hamza and work on the Supporters of Sharia website. In early September 2001, Ujaama agreed to travel once more to Afghanistan to deliver money.

On September 11, 2001, on his way to Afghanistan, Ujaama was awoken to the Pakistani military police knocking on his hotel door. “They asked me if I needed protection,” Ujaama recalled. He learned that hijacked airplanes had been turned into weapons in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

Abu Hamza wanted Ujaama to continue into Afghanistan and deliver the money, but Ujaama refused. The U.S. military had begun bombing the country. Instead, Ujaama made his way to the United States, with 1,000 pounds of Abu Hamza’s cash in hand.

Ujaama was arrested in July 2002 at his grandmother’s former home in Denver, Colorado. “The government is conducting a witch hunt,” Ujaama said in a public statement at the time. The federal government first held Ujaama on a material witness warrant, then indicted him on material support charges related to the supposed training camp in Oregon.

Though he seemed destined for a lengthy prison sentence, Ujaama’s life was about to take a new turn.

AFTER HIS ARREST, Ujaama followed a path similar to those of other post-9/11 terrorism defendants. As part of a plea deal, Ujaama admitted that he conspired to aid the Taliban. In exchange for a sentence of two years in prison, Ujaama agreed to be a witness in the U.S. government’s prosecutions of Abu Hamza and the two other men who collaborated with Ujaama on the purported training camp in Oregon — Oussama Kassir and Haroon Aswat. In 2004, prosecutors in Manhattan charged Abu Hamza, Kassir, and Aswat with terrorism-related charges.

When they were indicted, Abu Hamza was in the United Kingdom, Kassir in the Czech Republic, and Aswat in Zambia. All three fought extradition to the United States, creating a prolonged legal battle that meant Ujaama would wait years to fulfill his obligation to testify in their cases.

By December 2006, Ujaama grew impatient and frustrated by what he viewed as the government forcing him to testify against Abu Hamza. He fled to Belize, where he hoped he could be reunited with his wife and child, but he was arrested by local authorities. Since he violated his plea deal in Washington, federal prosecutors indicted Ujaama again in Manhattan, this time with additional charges. As part of a second cooperating agreement, Ujaama pleaded guilty to three terrorism-related counts, including a conspiracy to build the training camp in Oregon. He served an additional four years in prison.

Ujaama testified against Kassir in 2009, helping the government to win a conviction and ensuring that the man he’d argued with on the ranch received a sentence of life in prison.

Five years after Kassir’s trial, federal prosecutors finally put Abu Hamza on trial in Manhattan. Ujaama testified for four days in the spring of 2014, describing in detail how he helped his former mentor with the Supporters of Sharia website and newsletter, how he asked him to send two men to the ranch in Oregon, and how he delivered money to Afghanistan.

Abu Hamza was convicted on May 19, 2014, and sentenced to life in prison. He is reportedly in solitary confinement and without his prosthetic limbs.

Haroon Aswat pleaded guilty in March 2015 following the successful convictions of Kassir and Abu Hamza. He received a sentence of 30 years in prison.

On October 23, 2015, Ujaama was sentenced, for the final time, in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. “I wish I would have never gotten involved with Abu Hamza,” Ujaama said at his sentencing. “And I think he’s a bad man.”

Judge Katherine B. Forrest said she did not believe Ujaama posed a terrorist threat. If he posed any threat to society, she said, it was “petty fraud or something like that.” She sentenced Ujaama to time served, and in recognition of Ujaama’s years of cooperation with the government, she declined to give him any term of supervised release.

For the first time since 2002, Ujaama was free.

ujaama_edit-1492629291 Earnest James Ujaama poses for a photograph at the University of Washington, where he became a graduate student while serving as a government witness in terrorism prosecutions. Photo: Wikipedia
UJAAMA NOW DIVIDES his time between Berkeley and Seattle. He’s collected at least $100,000 in payments from the government for his cooperation and has amassed student loan debt, which, as of late 2015, had reached $86,000. He expects to finish his doctoral studies at the University of Washington.
Following my year of on-and-off exchanges with Ujaama, we met for the first time in Berkeley in December 2016. I agreed to one condition: We’d keep the first day off the record, and then once we’d gotten acquainted, our conversations thereafter would be on the record.

But after speaking with me over coffee and lunch in Berkeley, Ujaama still wasn’t willing to participate in an interview for an article he couldn’t control. After several hours, I told him it was now his choice. I walked toward the Berkeley BART station. Ujaama followed. We chatted for another hour, standing in the train station lobby. I finally told him that if he wanted to be interviewed, he could come see me in San Francisco the next day.

That evening, I emailed Ujaama to give him one last chance to talk, and to let him know I’d be writing about him, regardless of his cooperation.

“Have a safe return home, bro,” was his only reply.

The next week, I sent Ujaama a list of questions for this story. “I’m in the middle of a research project for my doctoral studies and am very busy,” he wrote. He didn’t respond to any of the questions.

Ujaama doesn’t want to be seen as just another snitch in the ongoing war on terror. He clings to a personal brand of exceptionalism that paints him as both a victim of overzealous prosecution and a star actor on the larger stage of U.S. terrorism prosecutions. And while he insists he wants to spark reform, his case best illustrates the injustice of a system that gives light sentences to those who trade terrorist contacts and cooperation for leniency, while sending those with no such connections to prison for decades.

In the meantime, during my discussions with Ujaama, his Wikipedia entry was being updated almost daily with granular detail about his life.

The entry at one point refers directly to the editor responsible for the frequent updates: “This author is in possession of all court transcripts, sentencing memorandums, and primary documents related to United States vs. Earnest James Ujaama,” the entry read, noting that many of the documents are filed under seal. “Most of what is found on the Internet is piece-meal journalism, speculation or theory, and is outdated,” the entry continued.

I sent Ujaama one final question. “Are you the one writing your Wikipedia entry?” I asked. Ujaama never responded.

Trevor Aaronson
April 20 2017, 7:14 p.m.

Find this story at 20 April 2017
Copyright The Intercept

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Trial and Terror
Part 4
The U.S. government has prosecuted almost 800 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never committed an act of violence.

WHILE THE TRUMP administration has struggled to provide evidence to support the need for a travel ban targeting Muslims, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been working since at least 2015 to limit Muslim immigration.

In November 2015, in a letter co-signed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, then-Alabama Sen. Sessions accused the Obama administration of refusing to provide immigration information about defendants who had been charged in U.S. District Court with international terrorism-related offenses.

“It is quite telling that this administration — which seems to have unlimited resources to circumvent our immigration laws and further its executive amnesties — cannot find the time or resources to provide timely answers to these simple questions,” Sessions and Cruz wrote.

So the two senators took matters into their own hands. Using a list of 580 terrorism-related defendants provided by the Justice Department, Sessions assigned the staff of the Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, which he chaired at the time, to research the country of origin and immigration status of each defendant. The committee staff found that of the 580 terrorism defendants they researched, 375 were born outside the United States. To Sessions and Cruz, this validated their view that terrorism was a largely foreign threat.

In another letter to the Obama administration in June 2016, Sessions and Cruz wrote that the information “makes clear that the United States lacks the ability to properly screen individuals prior to their arrival to the United States. It further makes clear that our nation has a serious assimilation problem.”

The Sessions data, which included country of origin and immigration data for some, but not all, of the defendants, was among the sources used by The Intercept to build a database of international terrorism prosecutions since the 9/11 attacks. (The Intercept intends to keep the database up to date and expand the fields regularly; at present, staff members are researching, among other data, the country of origin for approximately 350 international terrorism-related defendants not found by the subcommittee staff.)

A review of the Sessions data, however, suggests that neither country of origin nor immigration status is a clear indicator of heightened national security concern.

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN NUMBER OF PEOPLE
United States 73
Pakistan 61
Lebanon 27
Somalia 21
Colombia 20
Yemen 20
Iraq 19
Egypt 17
Jordan 16
Afghanistan 10
Palestine 9
Saudi Arabia 9
India 8
Gaza 7
Syria 7
Morocco 6
West Bank 6
Indonesia 5
Kuwait 5
Canada 4
El Salvador 4
Iran 4
Turkey 4
United Kingdom 4
Albania 3
Bangladesh 3
Guyana 3
Mali 3
Sri Lanka 3
Sudan 3
Tunisia 3
Algeria 2
Bosnia 2
Eritrea 2
Ethiopia 2
France 2
Haiti 2
Kazakhstan 2
Kosovo 2
Libya 2
Nigeria 2
Senegal 2
Singapore 2
South Africa 2
Tanzania 2
Venezuela 2
Angola 1
Australia 1
Brazil 1
Cambodia 1
Chile 1
Denmark 1
Djibouti 1
Dominican Republic 1
Germany 1
Greece 1
Guatemala 1
Israel 1
Ivory Coast 1
Kuwait – Citizen of Jordan 1
Lebanon – Canada 1
Malaysia 1
Mexico 1
Nicaragua 1
Pakistan – Canada 1
Panama 1
Paraguay 1
Peru 1
Philippines 1
Qatar 1
Russia 1
South Korea 1
Trinidad & Tobago 1
United Kingdom – India 1
Uzbekistan 1
Vietnam 1
Yugoslavia 1
In June 2016, the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest chaired by Jeff Sessions released data on 580 terrorism defendants, including country of origin for 448, as part of his campaign to limit Muslim immigration. The data shows that national birthplace is a poor predictor of terrorist threat.

While at first blush the Sessions data may seem to suggest disproportionate numbers of terrorism defendants from countries affected by the travel ban, or by immigrants who came to the United States as refugees, the data is incomplete — country of origin is not known for 132 defendants, or 23 percent — and inherently biased by prosecutorial targeting. Following the 9/11 attacks, with the FBI increasing its number of informants in Muslim communities due to a presidential mandate, Muslims became the primary focus of terrorism investigations and, by extension, prosecutions for charges related to international terrorism. Many of these prosecutions were not for serious offenses such as material support or weapons of mass destruction, but instead for nonviolent crimes such as immigration violations or lying to FBI agents.

In addition, the U.S. government segregates terrorism prosecutions into two types — domestic and international. The Sessions data includes only prosecutions related to international terrorism and leaves out all prosecutions of domestic terrorists, who are in most cases born in the United States.

Of the 580 defendants in the list, Sessions’s committee staff found the country of birth for 448 based on open-source research. Of those, U.S.-born American citizens represented the single largest group, with 73 defendants. The second largest group, consisting of 61 defendants, was from Pakistan, which is not affected by the travel ban.

The numbers fall precipitously from there. The third-largest group, consisting of 21 defendants, was from Somalia, which is included in the travel ban. The other countries included in Trump’s travel ban were Iran (four), Libya (two), Sudan (three), Syria (seven), and Yemen (20). Iraq, which was in the first version of the travel ban but not the second, had 19 terrorism defendants in Sessions’s data.

For comparison, 20 of the terrorism defendants in the Sessions data were born in Colombia, the same number of defendants who were born in Yemen. If the travel ban were indeed about restricting travel from terror-prone nations, as the Trump administration has claimed, the Sessions data would in theory provide a compelling case for adding Colombia, a Catholic-majority nation, to the ban list.

The Trump administration’s travel ban, which was established by executive order and affected seven Muslim-majority nations in its first iteration and six in its second, also temporarily blocks refugees from entering the country. Of the 448 defendants for whom Sessions’s committee staffers could find information, 24 entered the United States as refugees. According to the Sessions data, not a single refugee from Syria has been charged with terrorism-related offenses in the United States. Trump’s first travel ban blocked Syrian refugees indefinitely. The current travel ban places a temporary halt on the entry of all refugees.

Neither version of Trump’s travel ban is in effect, following multiple successful court challenges arguing that the executive orders discriminate against Muslims. The Trump administration has filed notice to appeal at least one ruling that halted the second version of the travel ban.

Trevor Aaronson
April 20 2017, 7:15 p.m.

Find this story at 20 April 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Exclusive: Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal details of how police posed as protesters amid unrest following the death of Eric Garner
People protest after a grand jury decided not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the Eric Garner case.

Undercover officers in the New York police department infiltrated small groups of Black Lives Matter activists and gained access to their text messages, according to newly released NYPD documents obtained by the Guardian.

The records, produced in response to a freedom of information lawsuit led by New York law firm Stecklow & Thompson, provide the most detailed picture yet of the sweeping scope of NYPD surveillance during mass protests over the death of Eric Garner in 2014 and 2015. Lawyers said the new documents raised questions about NYPD compliance with city rules.

The documents, mostly emails between undercover officers and other NYPD officials, follow other disclosures that the NYPD regularly filmed Black Lives Matter activists and sent undercover personnel to protests. The NYPD has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment or interview.

Emails show that undercover officers were able to pose as protesters even within small groups, giving them extensive access to details about protesters’ whereabouts and plans. In one email, an official notes that an undercover officer is embedded within a group of seven protesters on their way to Grand Central Station. This intimate access appears to have helped police pass as trusted organizers and extract information about demonstrations. In other emails, officers share the locations of individual protesters at particular times. The NYPD emails also include pictures of organizers’ group text exchanges with information about protests, suggesting that undercover officials were either trusted enough to be allowed to take photos of activists’ phones or were themselves members of a private planning group text.

protesters text message
Police obtained access to protesters’ text messages, the documents show. Photograph: NYPD/Screenshot/Scribd
“That text loop was definitely just for organizers, I don’t know how that got out,” said Elsa Waithe, a Black Lives Matter organizer. “Someone had to have told someone how to get on it, probably trusting someone they had seen a few times in good faith. We clearly compromised ourselves.”

Keegan Stephan, a regular attendee of the Grand Central protests in 2014 and 2015, said information about protesters’ whereabouts was limited to a small group of core organizers at that time. “I feel like the undercover was somebody who was or is very much a part of the group, and has access to information we only give to people we trust,” said Stephan, who has been assisting attorneys with a lawsuit to obtain the documents on behalf of plaintiff James Logue, a protester. “If you’re walking to Grand Central with a handful of people for an action, that’s much more than just showing up to a public demonstration – that sounds like a level of friendship.”

Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD detective sergeant and professor at John Jay College, agreed that it would not be easy for an undercover officer to join a small group of protesters and hear their plans. “It would be pretty amazing that they would be able to get into the core group in such a short window of time,” said Giacalone. “This could have been going on a while before for these people to get so close to the inner circle.”

The NYPD documents also included a handful of pictures and one short video taken at Grand Central Station demonstrations. Most are pictures of crowds milling about or taking part in demonstrations. In one picture of a small group of activists, the NYPD identifies an individual in a brown jacket as the “main protester”. These images of protesters are reminiscent of those taken by undercover transit police, who were also deployed to Black Lives Matter protests in Grand Central Station in 2015.

nypd documents
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An individual is identified as the ‘main protester’. Photograph: NYPD/Screenshot/Scribd
Giacalone said this type of leadership identification was standard police practice at protests. “If you take out the biggest mouth, everybody just withers away, so you concentrate on the ones you believe are your organizers,” he said. “Once you identify that person, you can run computer checks on them to see if they have a warrant out or any summons failures, then you can drag them in before they go out to speak or rile up the crowd, as long as you have reasonable cause to do so.”

Attorneys say the documents raise legal questions about whether the NYPD was acting in compliance with the department’s intelligence-gathering rules, known as the Handschu Guidelines. The guidelines, which are based on an ongoing decades-old class-action lawsuit, hold that the NYPD can begin formally investigating first amendment activity “when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that an unlawful act has been, is being, or will be committed” and if the police surveillance plan has been authorized by a committee known as the Handschu Authority. (That committee was exclusively staffed by NYPD officials at the time.) However, according to the guidelines, before launching a formal investigation, the NYPD can also conduct investigative work such as “checking of leads” and “preliminary inquiries” with even lower standards of suspicion.

Michael Price, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said it was difficult to know whether NYPD’s undercover surveillance operations crossed the line, as the documents did not make clear what, if any, stage of investigation the police were in at the time of the operations. But he said the department’s retention of pictures and video raised questions, since police are not allowed to retain information about public events unless it relates to unlawful activity.

“So my question would be: what was the unlawful activity that police had reason to suspect here?” said Price. “It doesn’t appear that there was any criminal behavior they were talking about in the emails. Most references are to protesters being peaceful, so I would be very concerned if they were hinging their whole investigation on civil disobedience, such as unpermitted protests or blocking of pedestrians.”

Throughout the emails, the NYPD’s undercover sources provide little indication of any unlawful activity, frequently characterizing demonstrators as peaceful and orderly with only one mention of a single arrest.

“The documents uniformly show no crime occurring, but NYPD had undercovers inside the protests for months on end as if they were al-Qaida,” said David Thompson, an attorney of Stecklow & Thompson, who helped sue for the records.

Giacalone argued that police could have easily come up with a legal justification to initiate surveillance, especially if such operations occurred after the shooting of two NYPD officers in December of 2014 (all dates in the NYPD’s email communications were redacted). But he noted that such investigative activities would be harder to justify if officers were not directly observing signs of unlawful activity.

“If they’re not talking about any crimes being committed, they’re going to have a difficult time defending this. It may end up in another one of these lawsuits,” said Giacalone. “Some may say this is good police work, fine, but good police work or not, we have rules against this kind of thing in New York.”

Attorneys have already filed a petition charging that the NYPD may have failed to produce all of its surveillance records. But for some protesters, the damage has already been done.

“In the first couple of months, we had a lot of people in and out of the group, some because they didn’t fit our style but others because of the whispers that they were undercovers,” recalled Waithe. “Whether it was real or perceived, that was the most debilitating part for me, the whispers … It’s really hard to organize when you can’t trust each other.”

George Joseph in New York
Tuesday 4 April 2017 11.00 BST Last modified on Tuesday 4 April 2017 22.00 BST
Find this story at 4 April 2017

© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

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THE DEPARTMENT OF Homeland Security announced an unprecedented new restriction on travelers from 10 airports in eight Muslim-majority countries on Tuesday.

The DHS restriction states “that all personal electronic devices larger than a cell phone or smart phone be placed in checked baggage at 10 airports where flights are departing for the United States.”

It’s a Muslim laptop ban.

The 10 airports are in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

American-based airlines do not fly directly to the United States from these airports, so these restrictions will not apply to them. The impact of this move will instead fall on nine airlines, including Gulf-based carriers that U.S. airlines have been asking President Trump to punish since the day after his election.

The U.S. carriers have long complained that Gulf carriers such as Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways are unfairly subsidized by their national governments.

Executives at Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and American Airlines met with Trump in early February. The day before the meeting, a group representing these American airlines, called the Partnership for Open & Fair Skies, distributed a slick video using Trump’s own words to argue against the subsidies.

With this new travel impediment, Trump may be throwing these executives a bone. The new restrictions appear to be targeting airports that serve as flight “hubs” for these airlines — such as Dubai International, which is the hub of Emirates. Airlines use these hub airports to transfer passengers between flights, delivering significant savings.

California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, quickly rose to the defense of Trump’s DHS on Tuesday, calling the restrictions both “necessary and proportional to the threat”:

Ranking House Intel Dem Schiff backs new electronics ban on US-bound flights from 8 Muslim-maj countries – critics say measure is arbitrary pic.twitter.com/3zPwehf2ZW

— Jessica Schulberg (@jessicaschulb) March 21, 2017

In 2015, Schiff was one of 262 Members of the House who signed a letter protesting subsidies for the Gulf airlines. The letter is featured on the website of the Partnership for Open & Fair Skies.

Whatever the motivation, the security justifications are unclear at best. The Guardian interviewed a number of top technologists about the new policy on Tuesday, and they were puzzled. “If you assume the attacker is interested in turning a laptop into a bomb, it would work just as well in the cargo hold,” Nicholas Weaver, who is a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, told the paper.

“From a technological perspective, nothing has changed between the last dozen years and today. That is, there are no new technological breakthroughs that make this threat any more serious today,” Bruce Schneier, a top technologist at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told the Guardian. “And there is certainly nothing technological that would limit this newfound threat to a handful of Middle Eastern airlines.”

The United Kingdom enacted similar restrictions hours after the United States, but with two puzzling differences. The U.K. ban includes 14 airlines, including six based in the U.K. And it does not include airports in Qatar or the UAE — which are the epicenter of the subsidies dispute. Canada is reportedly weighing its own restrictions.

For its part, Emirates responded by inviting customers to sample its in-flight entertainment in lieu of tablets and laptops — by repurposing an old advertisement featuring Jennifer Anniston:

Let us entertain you. pic.twitter.com/FKqayqUdQ7

— Emirates airline (@emirates) March 21, 2017

Zaid Jilani
March 21 2017, 7:51 p.m.
Find this story at 21 March 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

A new Homeland Security rule will ban electronics on flights from airports in Muslim-majority countries. Is this protectionism or prudence? Well, it’s complicated.

Travelers from eight different Muslim-majority nations will no longer be allowed to carry laptops, tablets, or certain other electronic devices with them in the cabin on flights inbound to the U.S., according to new rules that take effect on Tuesday. The U.K. was quick to announce that it would follow suit with a Muslim laptop ban of its own.

Officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration say that the new rules reflect a potential threat of terrorists smuggling explosive devices on board planes using portable electronic devices—iPads, Kindles, and the like. The DHS guidance cites a 2016 attempted airliner downing in Somalia as one recent incident that could be linked to a laptop bomb. The U.S. rules affect last-point-of-departure airports from 10 airports—some of them the busiest hubs in the Middle East—from Saudi Arabia to Istanbul to the UAE.

Behind the order, though, lies a long history of conflict between America’s big three carriers—Delta, United, and American—and their peers in the Gulf. Critics spied an ulterior motive behind the Trump administration’s new rule: a protectionist measure for U.S. carriers promised by President Donald Trump.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman floated this notion in the Washington Post, suggesting that the financial security of United, American, and Delta might be behind the new counterterrorism measures. The U.S. airlines have grumbled for years that their counterparts from the Gulf—specifically Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways—benefit unfairly from government subsidies. Those carriers have recently expanded their service to U.S. cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. (as any Washington Wizards fan can tell you, since Etihad is a major advertiser in the Verizon Center).

Back in February, the chief executives of United, American, and Delta sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson complaining about the “massive subsidization of three state-owned Gulf carriers … and the significant harm this subsidized competition is causing to U.S. airlines and U.S. jobs.” In a meeting with the executives shortly thereafter, Trump promised “phenomenal” tax relief, broad deregulation, and other forms of support to the industry.

It’s not yet clear whether this laptop travel ban applies exclusively to all inbound flights from Muslim-majority airports or just those from Gulf carriers. If the latter, that would be a boon to U.S. operators. International business-class travelers—and there are a lot of them circulating between the U.S. and the Middle East—are bound to prefer flights that allow them to work on the plane. During a 14-hour nonstop haul from Dubai to Dulles, passengers are likely to appreciate all the electronic conveniences and entertainment they can carry.

But a one-sided ban would also be a plain violation of trade rules. Global airline carriers have been duking it out over national subsidies for years. In September, the World Trade Organization ruled that the European Union had been illegally propping up Airbus to the tune of $22 billion, a decision that the Washington Post described as “the most expensive dispute in international history.”

A U.K. electronics ban in the Gulf would bite the hand that feeds British Airways.
The Financial Times reports that the rule applies only to non-U.S. carriers: Saudi Arabian Airlines, Royal Jordanian Airlines, Emirates, Etihad Airways, Qatar Airways, Kuwait Airways, Turkish Airlines, EgyptAir, and Royal Air Maroc. Several of these state-owned airlines have indeed enjoyed massive subsidies from their governments. But there’s nothing in the guidance released by Homeland Security that specifies those carriers or otherwise exempts U.S. domestic airlines from the electronics ban. DHS is specific only about the 10 affected airports.

According to CNN, domestic carriers are not affected by the ruling because they do not operate any direct flights to the U.S. from those airports. A travel engine search corroborates and complicates that explanation. Delta runs flights from Cairo to Washington, D.C., that are operated by Air France, for example. British Airways operates American Airlines flights from Istanbul to New York. Both Delta and United operate inbound flights by other carriers—Lufthansa, KLM, and so on—from the restricted airports.

Homeland Security has not responded to a request for clarification. Across the pond, an electronics ban is even more more complicated, since Qatar Airways has increased its ownership stake in the parent company for British Airways to 20 percent after Brexit. A U.K. electronics ban in the Gulf would bite the hand that feeds British Airways.

These bans may be motivated by urgent and legitimate national security concerns. Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and a Democrat, says that the electronics ban is justified. There is a debate to be had even if the threat is real, though. The tradeoff between travel security and convenience is an enormous drag on productivity (not to mention a cost for airports and airlines). The new rules may sidestep that debate. If an electronics ban applies solely to Gulf carriers, exempting domestic airlines, then it’s pretty plainly a protectionist measure, of the kind that Trump has explicitly promised to deliver for U.S. airlines.

The risk, of course, is that Gulf states could respond in kind—meaning that no one gets to binge on Netflix on international flights. Trade battles have a way of escalating quickly. After the European Union restricted hormone-treated beef from America in 1999, the Clinton administration retaliated with a 100 percent tariff on Roquefort from France. The Bush administration escalated the conflict—totally arbitrarily!—with a 300 percent duty on Roquefort in 2003. The ensuing cheese war lasted nearly through the Obama administration.

Depriving Americans of imported fromage is one thing; taking screens away from their toddlers could represent a whole other degree of inconvenience. Whether or not the Trump administration is pushing protectionist trade policies under the guise of national security, it seems likely that international flights are going to feel a whole hell of a lot longer.

KRISTON CAPPS @kristoncapps Mar 21, 2017 10 Comments

Find this story at 21 March 2017

Copyright 2017 The Atlantic Monthly Group.

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The question of whether political operative Roger Stone helped Russian hackers break into the email of Democratic politicians, to some people, invites another: Who says the hackers were Russian?

The FBI does, and so do several U.S. intelligence agencies, as they’ve declared repeatedly over the past five months. But among private-sector computer security companies, not everybody thinks the case is proven.

“I have no problem blaming Russia for what they do, which is a lot,” said Jeffrey Carr of the international cybersecurity company Taia Global Inc. “I just don’t want to blame them for things we don’t know that they did. It may turn out that they’re guilty, but we are very short on evidence here.”

As Carr notes, the FBI never examined the servers that were hacked at the Democratic National Committee. Instead, the DNC used the private computer security company CrowdStrike to detect and repair the penetrations.

“All the forensic work on those servers was done by CrowdStrike, and everyone else is relying on information they provided,” said Carr. “And CrowdStrike was the one to declare this the work of the Russians.”

The CrowdStrike argument relies heavily on the fact that remnants of a piece of malware known as AGENT-X were found in the DNC computers. AGENT-X collects and transmits hacked files to rogue computers.

“AGENT-X has been around for ages and ages, and its use has always been attributed to the Russian government, a theory that’s known in the industry as ‘exclusive use,’” Carr said. “The problem with exclusive use is that it’s completely false. Unlike a bomb or an artillery shell, malware doesn’t detonate on impact and destroy itself.

“You can recover it, reverse-engineer it, and reuse it. The U.S. government learned a lesson about that when it created the Stuxnet computer worm to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Stuxnet survived and now other people have it.”

Carr said he is aware of at least two working copies of AGENT-X outside Russian hands. One is in the possession of a group of Ukrainian hackers he has spoken with, and the other is with an American cybersecurity company. “And if an American security company has it, you can be certain other people do, too,” he said.

There’s growing doubt in the computer security industry about CrowdStrike’s theories about AGENT-X and Russian hackers, Carr said, including some critical responses to a CrowdStrike report on Russian use of the malware to disable Ukrainian artillery.

“This is a close-knit community and criticizing a member to the outside world is kind of like talking out of turn,” Carr said. “I’ve been repeatedly criticized for speaking out in public about whether the hacking was really done by the Russians. But this has to be made public, has to be addressed, and has to be acknowledged by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.”

MARCH 24, 2017 7:00 AM
BY GLENN GARVIN

Find this story at 24 March 2017
Copyright http://www.miamiherald.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Russia, we are told, breached the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), swiped emails and other documents, and released them to the public, to alter the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

How substantial is the evidence backing these assertions?

Hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate unusual network activity, the security firm Crowdstrike discovered two separate intrusions on DNC servers. Crowdstrike named the two intruders Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, in an allusion to what it felt were Russian sources. According to Crowdstrike, “Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none,” and “both groups were constantly going back into the environment” to change code and methods and switch command and control channels.

On what basis did Crowdstrike attribute these breaches to Russian intelligence services? The security firm claims that the techniques used were similar to those deployed in past security hacking operations that have been attributed to the same actors, while the profile of previous victims “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government. Furthermore, it appeared that the intruders were unaware of each other’s presence in the DNC system. “While you would virtually never see Western intelligence agencies going after the same target without de-confliction for fear of compromising each other’s operations,” Crowdstrike reports, “in Russia this is not an uncommon scenario.” [1]

Those may be indicators of Russian government culpability. But then again, perhaps not. Regarding the point about separate intruders, each operating independently of the other, that would seem to more likely indicate that the sources have nothing in common.

Each of the two intrusions acted as an advanced persistent threat (APT), which is an attack that resides undetected on a network for a long time. The goal of an APT is to exfiltrate data from the infected system rather than inflict damage. Several names have been given to these two actors, and most commonly Fancy Bear is known as APT28, and Cozy Bear as APT29.

The fact that many of the techniques used in the hack resembled, in varying degrees, past attacks attributed to Russia may not necessarily carry as much significance as we are led to believe. Once malware is deployed, it tends to be picked up by cybercriminals and offered for sale or trade on Deep Web black markets, where anyone can purchase it. Exploit kits are especially popular sellers. Quite often, the code is modified for specific uses. Security specialist Josh Pitts demonstrated how easy that process can be, downloading and modifying nine samples of the OnionDuke malware, which is thought to have first originated with the Russian government. Pitts reports that this exercise demonstrates “how easy it is to repurpose nation-state code/malware.” [2]

In another example, when SentinalOne Research discovered the Gyges malware in 2014, it reported that it “exhibits similarities to Russian espionage malware,” and is “designed to target government organizations. It comes as no surprise to us that this type of intelligence agency-grade malware would eventually fall into cybercriminals’ hands.” The security firm explains that Gyges is an “example of how advanced techniques and code developed by governments for espionage are effectively being repurposed, modularized and coupled with other malware to commit cybercrime.” [3]

Attribution is hard, cybersecurity specialists often point out. “Once an APT is released into the wild, its spread isn’t controlled by the attacker,” writes Mark McArdle. “They can’t prevent someone from analyzing it and repurposing it for their own needs.” Adapting malware “is a well-known reality,” he continues. “Finding irrefutable evidence that links an attacker to an attack is virtually unattainable, so everything boils down to assumptions and judgment.” [4]

Security Alliance regards security firm FireEye’s analysis that tied APT28 to the Russian government as based “largely on circumstantial evidence.” FireEye’s report “explicitly disregards targets that do not seem to indicate sponsorship by a nation-state,” having excluded various targets because they are “not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests.” [5] FireEye reported that the APT28 “victim set is narrow,” which helped lead it to the conclusion that it is a Russian operation. Cybersecurity consultant Jeffrey Carr reacts with scorn: “The victim set is narrow because the report’s authors make it narrow! In fact, it wasn’t narrowly targeted at all if you take into account the targets mentioned by other cybersecurity companies, not to mention those that FireEye deliberately excluded for being ‘not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests’.” [6]

FireEye’s report from 2014, on which much of the DNC Russian attribution is based, found that 89 percent of the APT28 software samples it analyzed were compiled during regular working hours in St. Petersburg and Moscow. [7]

But compile times, like language settings, can be easily altered to mislead investigators. Mark McArdle wonders, “If we think about the very high level of design, engineering, and testing that would be required for such a sophisticated attack, is it reasonable to assume that the attacker would leave these kinds of breadcrumbs? It’s possible. But it’s also possible that these things can be used to misdirect attention to a different party. Potentially another adversary. Is this evidence the result of sloppiness or a careful misdirection?” [8]

“If the guys are really good,” says Chris Finan, CEO of Manifold Technology, “they’re not leaving much evidence or they’re leaving evidence to throw you off the scent entirely.” [9] How plausible is it that Russian intelligence services would fail even to attempt such a fundamental step?

James Scott of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology points out that the very vulnerability of the DNC servers constitutes a muddied basis on which determine attribution. “Attribution is less exact in the case of the DNC breach because the mail servers compromised were not well-secured; the organization of a few hundred personnel did not practice proper cyber-hygiene; the DNC has a global reputation and is a valuable target to script kiddies, hacktivists, lone-wolf cyber-threat actors, cyber-criminals, cyber-jihadists, hail-mary threats, and nation-state sponsored advanced persistent threats; and because the malware discovered on DNC systems were well-known, publicly disclosed, and variants could be purchased on Deep Web markets and forums.” [10]

Someone, or some group, operating under the pseudonym of Guccifer 2.0, claimed to be a lone actor in hacking the DNC servers. It is unclear what relation – if any – Guccifer 2.0 has to either of the two APT attacks on the DNC. In a PDF file that Guccifer 2.0 sent to Gawker.com, metadata indicated that it was it was last saved by someone having a username in Cyrillic letters. During the conversion of the file from Microsoft Word to PDF, invalid hyperlink error messages were automatically generated in the Russian language. [11]

This would seem to present rather damning evidence. But who is Guccifer 2.0? A Russian government operation? A private group? Or a lone hacktivist? In the poorly secured DNC system, there were almost certainly many infiltrators of various stripes. Nor can it be ruled out that the metadata indicators were intentionally generated in the file to misdirect attribution. The two APT attacks have been noted for their sophistication, and these mistakes – if that is what they are – seem amateurish. To change the language setting on a computer can be done in a matter of seconds, and that would be standard procedure for advanced cyber-warriors. On the other hand, sloppiness on the part of developers is not entirely unknown. However, one would expect a nation-state to enforce strict software and document handling procedures and implement rigorous review processes.

At any rate, the documents posted to the Guccifer 2.0 blog do not necessarily originate from the same source as those published by WikiLeaks. Certainly, none of the documents posted to WikiLeaks possess the same metadata issues. And one hacking operation does not preclude another, let alone an insider leak.

APT28 relied on XTunnel, repurposed from open source code that is available to anyone, to open network ports and siphon data. The interesting thing about the software is its failure to match the level of sophistication claimed for APT28. The strings in the code quite transparently indicate its intent, with no attempt at obfuscation. [12] It seems an odd oversight for a nation-state operation, in which plausible deniability would be essential, to overlook that glaring point during software development.

Command-and-control servers remotely issue malicious commands to infected machines. Oddly, for such a key component of the operation, the command-and-control IP address in both attacks was hard-coded in the malware. This seems like another inexplicable choice, given that the point of an advanced persistent threat is to operate for an extended period without detection. A more suitable approach would be to use a Domain Name System (DNS) address, which is a decentralized computer naming system. That would provide a more covert means of identifying the command-and-control server. [13] Moreover, one would expect that address to be encrypted. Using a DNS address would also allow the command-and-control operation to easily move to another server if its location is detected, without the need to modify and reinstall the code.

One of the IP addresses is claimed to be a “well-known APT 28” command-and-control address, while the second is said to be linked to Russian military intelligence. [14] The first address points to a server located in San Jose, California, and is operated by a server hosting service. [15] The second server is situated in Paris, France, and owned by another server hosting service. [16] Clearly, these are servers that have been compromised by hackers. It is customary for hackers to route their attacks through vulnerable computers. The IP addresses of compromised computers are widely available on the Deep Web, and typically a hacked server will be used by multiple threat actors. These two particular servers may or may not have been regularly utilized by Russian Intelligence, but they were not uniquely so used. Almost certainly, many other hackers would have used the same machines, and it cannot be said that these IP addresses uniquely identify an infiltrator. Indeed, the second IP address is associated with the common Trojan viruses Agent-APPR and Shunnael. [17]

“Everyone is focused on attribution, but we may be missing the bigger truth,” says Joshua Croman, Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. “[T]he level of sophistication required to do this hack was so low that nearly anyone could do it.” [18]

In answer to critics, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a joint analysis report, which presented “technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used” by Russian intelligence services “to compromise and exploit networks” associated with the U.S. election, U.S. government, political, and private sector entities. The report code-named these activities “Grizzly Steppe.” [19]

For a document that purports to offer strong evidence on behalf of U.S. government allegations of Russian culpability, it is striking how weak and sloppy the content is. Included in the report is a list of every threat group ever said to be associated with the Russian government, most of which are unrelated to the DNC hack. It appears that various governmental organizations were asked to send a list of Russian threats, and then an official lacking IT background compiled that information for the report, and the result is a mishmash of threat groups, software, and techniques. “PowerShell backdoor,” for instance, is a method used by many hackers, and in no way describes a Russian operation.

Indeed, one must take the list on faith, because nowhere in the document is any evidence provided to back up the claim of a Russian connection. Indeed, as the majority of items on the list are unrelated to the DNC hack, one wonders what the point is. But it bears repeating: even where software can be traced to Russian origination, it does not necessarily indicate exclusive usage. Jeffrey Carr explains: “Once malware is deployed, it is no longer under the control of the hacker who deployed it or the developer who created it. It can be reverse-engineered, copied, modified, shared and redeployed again and again by anyone.” Carr quotes security firm ESET in regard to the Sednit group, one of the items on the report’s list, and which is another name for APT28: “As security researchers, what we call ‘the Sednit group’ is merely a set of software and the related infrastructure, which we can hardly correlate with any specific organization.” Carr points out that X-Agent software, which is said to have been utilized in the DNC hack, was easily obtained by ESET for analysis. “If ESET could do it, so can others. It is both foolish and baseless to claim, as Crowdstrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the Russian government when the source code is there for anyone to find and use at will.” [20]

The salient impression given by the government’s report is how devoid of evidence it is. For that matter, the majority of the content is taken up by what security specialist John Hinderaker describes as “pedestrian advice to IT professionals about computer security.” As for the report’s indicators of compromise (IoC), Hinderaker characterizes these as “tools that are freely available and IP addresses that are used by hackers around the world.” [21]

In conjunction with the report, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security provided a list of IP addresses it identified with Russian intelligence services. [22] Wordfence analyzed the IP addresses as well as a PHP malware script provided by the Department of Homeland Security. In analyzing the source code, Wordfence discovered that the software used was P.A.S., version 3.1.0. It then found that the website that manufactures the malware had a site country code indicating that it is Ukrainian. The current version of the P.A.S. software is 4.1.1, which is much newer than that used in the DNC hack, and the latest version has changed “quite substantially.” Wordfence notes that not only is the software “commonly available,” but also that it would be reasonable to expect “Russian intelligence operatives to develop their own tools or at least use current malicious tools from outside sources.” To put it plainly, Wordfence concludes that the malware sample “has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence.” [23]

Wordfence also analyzed the government’s list of 876 IP addresses included as indicators of compromise. The sites are widely dispersed geographically, and of those with a known location, the United States has the largest number. A large number of the IP addresses belong to low-cost server hosting companies. “A common pattern that we see in the industry,” Wordfence states, “is that accounts at these hosts are compromised and those hacked sites are used to launch attacks around the web.” Fifteen percent of the IP addresses are currently Tor exit nodes. “These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be anonymous online, including malicious actors.” [24]

If one also takes into account the IP addresses that not only point to current Tor exits, but also those that once belonged to Tor exit nodes, then these comprise 42 percent of the government’s list. [25] “The fact that so many of the IPs are Tor addresses reveals the true sloppiness of the report,” concludes network security specialist Jerry Gamblin. [26]

Cybersecurity analyst Robert Graham was particularly blistering in his assessment of the government’s report, characterizing it as “full of garbage.” The report fails to tie the indicators of compromise to the Russian government. “It contains signatures of viruses that are publicly available, used by hackers around the world, not just Russia. It contains a long list of IP addresses from perfectly normal services, like Tor, Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, and so forth. Yes, hackers use Yahoo for phishing and maladvertising. It doesn’t mean every access of Yahoo is an ‘indicator of compromise’.” Graham compared the list of IP addresses against those accessed by his web browser, and found two matches. “No,” he continues. “This doesn’t mean I’ve been hacked. It means I just had a normal interaction with Yahoo. It means the Grizzly Steppe IoCs are garbage.” Graham goes on to point out that “what really happened” with the supposed Russian hack into the Vermont power grid “is that somebody just checked their Yahoo email, thereby accessing one of the same IP addresses I did. How they get from the facts (one person accessed Yahoo email) to the story (Russians hacked power grid)” is U.S. government “misinformation.” [27]

The indicators of compromise, in Graham’s assessment, were “published as a political tool, to prove they have evidence pointing to Russia.” As for the P.A.S. web shell, it is “used by hundreds if not thousands of hackers, mostly associated with Russia, but also throughout the rest of the world.” Relying on the government’s sample for attribution is problematic: “Just because you found P.A.S. in two different places doesn’t mean it’s the same hacker.” A web shell “is one of the most common things hackers use once they’ve broken into a server,” Graham observes. [28]

Although cybersecurity analyst Robert M. Lee is inclined to accept the government’s position on the DNC hack, he feels the joint analysis report “reads like a poorly done vendor intelligence report stringing together various aspects of attribution without evidence.” The report’s list “detracts from the confidence because of the interweaving of unrelated data.” The information presented is not sourced, he adds. “It’s a random collection of information and in that way, is mostly useless.” Indeed, the indicators of compromise have “a high rate of false positives for defenders that use them.” [29]

Among the government’s list of Russian actors are Energetic Bear and Crouching Yeti, two names for the same threat group. In its analysis, Kaspersky Lab found that most of the group’s victims “fall into the industrial/machinery building sector,” and it is “not currently possible to determine the country of origin.” Although listed in the government’s report, it is not suggested that the group played a part in the DNC hack. But it does serve as an example of the uncertainty surrounding government claims about Russian hacking operations in general. [30]

CosmicDuke is one of the software packages listed as tied to Russia. SecureList, however, finds that unlike the software’s predecessor, CosmicDuke targets those who traffic in “controlled substances, such as steroids and hormones.” One possibility is that CosmicDuke is used by law enforcement agencies, while another possibility “is that it’s simply available in the underground and purchased by various competitors in the pharmaceutical business to spy on each other.” In either case, whether or not the software is utilized by the Russian government, there is a broader base for its use. [31]

The intent of the joint analysis report was to provide evidence of Russian state responsibility for the DNC hack. But nowhere does it do so. Mere assertions are meant to persuade. How much evidence does the government have? The Democratic Party claims that the FBI never requested access to DNC servers. [32] The FBI, for its part, says it made “multiple requests” for access to the DNC servers and was repeatedly turned down. [33] Either way, it is a remarkable admission. In a case like this, the FBI would typically conduct its own investigation. Was the DNC afraid the FBI might come to a different conclusion than the DNC-hired security firm Crowdstrike? The FBI was left to rely on whatever evidence Crowdstrike chose to supply. During its analysis of DNC servers, Crowdstrike reports that it found evidence of APT28 and APT29 intrusions within two hours. Did it stop there, satisfied with what it had found? Or did it continue to explore whether additional intrusions by other actors had taken place?

In an attempt to further inflame the hysteria generated from accusations of Russian hacking, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a declassified version of a document briefed to U.S. officials. The information was supplied by the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, and was meant to cement the government’s case. Not surprisingly, the report received a warm welcome in the mainstream media, but what is notable is that it offers not a single piece of evidence to support its claim of “high confidence” in assessing that Russia hacked the DNC and released documents to WikiLeaks. Instead, the bulk of the report is an unhinged diatribe against Russian-owned RT media. The content is rife with inaccuracies and absurdities. Among the heinous actions RT is accused of are having run “anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on health issues,” airing a documentary on Occupy Wall Street, and hosting third-party candidates during the 2012 election.[34]

The report would be laughable, were it not for the fact that it is being played up for propaganda effect, bypassing logic and appealing directly to unexamined emotion. The 2016 election should have been a wake-up call for the Democratic Party. Instead, predictably enough, no self-examination has taken place, as the party doubles down on the neoliberal policies that have impoverished tens of millions, and backing military interventions that have sown so much death and chaos. Instead of thoughtful analysis, the party is lashing out and blaming Russia for its loss to an opponent that even a merely weak candidate would have beaten handily.

Mainstream media start with the premise that the Russian government was responsible, despite a lack of convincing evidence. They then leap to the fallacious conclusion that because Russia hacked the DNC, only it could have leaked the documents.

So, did the Russian government hack the DNC and feed documents to WikiLeaks? There are really two questions here: who hacked the DNC, and who released the DNC documents? These are not necessarily the same. An earlier intrusion into German parliament servers was blamed on the Russians, yet the release of documents to WikiLeaks is thought to have originated from an insider. [35] Had the Russians hacked into the DNC, it may have been to gather intelligence, while another actor released the documents. But it is far from certain that Russian intelligence services had anything to do with the intrusions. Julian Assange says that he did not receive the DNC documents from a nation-state. It has been pointed out that Russia could have used a third party to pass along the material. Fair enough, but former UK diplomat Craig Murray asserts: “I know who the source is… It’s from a Washington insider. It’s not from Russia.” [36]

There are too many inconsistencies and holes in the official story. In all likelihood, there were multiple intrusions into DNC servers, not all of which have been identified. The public ought to be wary of quick claims of attribution. It requires a long and involved process to arrive at a plausible identification, and in many cases the source can never be determined. As Jeffrey Carr explains, “It’s important to know that the process of attributing an attack by a cybersecurity company has nothing to do with the scientific method. Claims of attribution aren’t testable or repeatable because the hypothesis is never proven right or wrong.” [37]

Russia-bashing is in full swing, and there does not appear to be any letup in sight. We are plunging headlong into a new Cold War, riding on a wave of propaganda-induced hysteria. The self-serving claims fueling this campaign need to be challenged every step of the way. Surrendering to evidence-free emotional appeals would only serve those who arrogantly advocate confrontation and geopolitical domination.

Notes.

[1] Dmitri Alperovitch, “Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee,” Crowdstrike blog, June 15, 2016.

[2] Josh Pitts, “Repurposing OnionDuke: A Single Case Study Around Reusing Nation-state Malware,” Black Hat, July 21, 2015.

[3] Udi Shamir, “The Case of Gyges, the Invisible Malware,” SentinelOne, July 2014.

[4] Mark McArdle, “’Whodunnit?’ Why the Attribution of Hacks like the Recent DNC Hack is so Difficult,” Esentire, July 28, 2016.

[5] “The Usual Suspects: Faith-Based Attribution and its Effects on the Security Community,” October 21, 2016.

[6] Jeffrey Carr, “The DNC Breach and the Hijacking of Common Sense,” June 20, 2016.

[7] “APT28: A Window into Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations?” FireEye, October 27, 2014.

[8] Mark McArdle, “’Whodunnit?’ Why the Attribution of Hacks like the Recent DNC Hack is so Difficult,” Esentire, July 28, 2016.

[9] Patrick Howell O’Neill, “Obama’s Former Cybersecurity Advisor Says Only ‘Idiots’ Want to Hack Russia Back for DNC Breach,” The Daily Dot, July 29, 2016.

[10] Janes Scott, Sr., “It’s the Russians! … or is it? Cold War Rhetoric in the Digital Age,” ICIT, December 13, 2016.

[11] Sam Biddle and Gabrielle Bluestone, “This Looks like the DNC’s Hacked Trump Oppo File,” Gawker, June 15, 2016.

Dan Goodin, “’Guccifer’ Leak of DNC Trump Research Has a Russian’s Fingerprints on It,” Ars Technica, June 16, 2016.

[12] Pat Belcher, “Tunnel of Gov: DNC Hack and the Russian XTunnel,” Invincea, July 28, 2016.

[13] Seth Bromberger, “DNS as a Covert Channel within Protected Networks,” National Electric Sector Cyber Security Organization, January 25, 2011.

[14] Thomas Rid, “All Signs Point to Russia Being Behind the DNC Hack,” Motherboard, July 25, 2016.

[15] https://www.threatminer.org/host.php?q=45.32.129.185

[16] https://www.threatminer.org/host.php?q=176.31.112.10

[17] https://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/viruses-and-spyware/Troj~Agent-APPR/detailed-analysis.aspx

https://www.symantec.com/security_response/earthlink_writeup.jsp?docid=2015-062518-5557-99

[18] Paul, “Security Pros Pan US Government Report on Russian Hacking,” The Security Ledger, December 30, 2016.

[19] “Grizzly Steppe – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity,” JAR-16-20296, National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation, December 29, 2016.

[20] Jeffrey Carr, “FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report: A Fatally Flawed Effort,” Jeffrey Carr/Medium, December 30, 2016.

[21] John Hinderaker, “Is “Grizzly Steppe’ Really a Russian Operation?” Powerline, December 31, 2016.

[22] https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR-16-20296A.csv

[23] Mark Maunder, “US Govt Data Shows Russia Used Outdated Ukrainian PHP Malware,” Wordfence, December 30, 2016.

[24] Mark Maunder, “US Govt Data Shows Russia Used Outdated Ukrainian PHP Malware,” Wordfence, December 30, 2016.

[25] Micah Lee, “The U.S. Government Thinks Thousands of Russian Hackers May be Reading my Blog. They Aren’t,” The Intercept, January 4, 2017.

[26] Jerry Gamblin, “Grizzly Steppe: Here’s My IP and Hash Analysis,” A New Domain, January 2, 2017.

[27] Robert Graham, “Dear Obama, from Infosec,” Errata Security, January 3, 2017.

[28] Robert Graham, “Some Notes on IoCs,” Errata Security, December 29, 2016.

[29] Robert M. Lee, “Critiques of the DHS/FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report,” Robert M. Lee blog, December 30, 2016.

[30] “Energetic Bear – Crouching Yeti,” Kaspersky Lab Global Research and Analysis Team, July 31, 2014.

[31] “Miniduke is back: Nemesis Gemina and the Botgen Studio,” Securelist, July 3, 2014.

[32] Ali Watkins, “The FBI Never Asked for Access to Hacked Computer Servers,” Buzzfeed, January 4, 2017.

[33] “James Comey: DNC Denied FBI Direct Access to Servers During Russia Hacking Probe,” Washington Times, January 10, 2017.

[34] “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, January 6, 2017.

[35] “Quelle für Enthüllungen im Bundestag Vermutet,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 17, 2016.

[36] RT broadcast, January 7, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3DvaVrRweY

[37] Jeffrey Carr, “Faith-based Attribution,” Jeffrey Carr/Medium, July 10, 2016.

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Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute. He a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org

JANUARY 13, 2017
by GREGORY ELICH

Find this story at 13 January 2017
Copyright © CounterPunch

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

THERE ARE SOME good reasons to believe Russians had something to do with the breaches into email accounts belonging to members of the Democratic party, which proved varyingly embarrassing or disruptive for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But “good” doesn’t necessarily mean good enough to indict Russia’s head of state for sabotaging our democracy.

There’s a lot of evidence from the attack on the table, mostly detailing how the hack was perpetrated, and possibly the language of the perpetrators. It certainly remains plausible that Russians hacked the DNC, and remains possible that Russia itself ordered it. But the refrain of Russian attribution has been repeated so regularly and so emphatically that it’s become easy to forget that no one has ever truly proven the claim. There is strong evidence indicating that Democratic email accounts were breached via phishing messages, and that specific malware was spread across DNC computers. There’s even evidence that the attackers are the same group that’s been spotted attacking other targets in the past. But again: No one has actually proven that group is the Russian government (or works for it). This remains the enormous inductive leap that’s not been reckoned with, and Americans deserve better.

We should also bear in mind that private security firm CrowdStrike’s frequently cited findings of Russian responsibility were essentially paid for by the DNC, which contracted its services in June. It’s highly unusual for evidence of a crime to be assembled on the victim’s dime. If we’re going to blame the Russian government for disrupting our presidential election — easily construed as an act of war — we need to be damn sure of every single shred of evidence. Guesswork and assumption could be disastrous.

The gist of the Case Against Russia goes like this: The person or people who infiltrated the DNC’s email system and the account of John Podesta left behind clues of varying technical specificity indicating they have some connection to Russia, or at least speak Russian. Guccifer 2.0, the entity that originally distributed hacked materials from the Democratic party, is a deeply suspicious figure who has made statements and decisions that indicate some Russian connection. The website DCLeaks, which began publishing a great number of DNC emails, has some apparent ties to Guccifer and possibly Russia. And then there’s WikiLeaks, which after a long, sad slide into paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, and general internet toxicity has made no attempt to mask its affection for Vladimir Putin and its crazed contempt for Hillary Clinton. (Julian Assange has been stuck indoors for a very, very long time.) If you look at all of this and sort of squint, it looks quite strong indeed, an insurmountable heap of circumstantial evidence too great in volume to dismiss as just circumstantial or mere coincidence.

But look more closely at the above and you can’t help but notice all of the qualifying words: Possibly, appears, connects, indicates. It’s impossible (or at least dishonest) to present the evidence for Russian responsibility for hacking the Democrats without using language like this. The question, then, is this: Do we want to make major foreign policy decisions with a belligerent nuclear power based on suggestions alone, no matter how strong?

What We Know

So far, all of the evidence pointing to Russia’s involvement in the Democratic hacks (DNC, DCCC, Podesta, et al.) comes from either private security firms (like CrowdStrike or FireEye) who sell cyber-defense services to other companies, or independent researchers, some with university affiliations and serious credentials, and some who are basically just Guys on Twitter. Although some of these private firms groups had proprietary access to DNC computers or files from them, much of the evidence has been drawn from publicly available data like the hacked emails and documents.

Some of the malware found on DNC computers is believed to be the same as that used by two hacking groups believed to be Russian intelligence units, codenamed APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 28/Fancy Bear and APT 29/Cozy Bear by industry researchers who track them.

The attacker or attackers registered a deliberately misspelled domain name used for email phishing attacks against DNC employees, connected to an IP address associated with APT 28/Fancy Bear.
Malware found on the DNC computers was programmed to communicate with an IP address associated with APT 28/Fancy Bear.
Metadata in a file leaked by “Guccifer 2.0″ shows it was modified by a user called, in cyrillic, “Felix Edmundovich,” a reference to the founder of a Soviet-era secret police force. Another document contained cyrillic metadata indicating it had been edited on a document with Russian language settings.
Peculiarities in a conversation with “Guccifer 2.0″ that Motherboard published in June suggests he is not Romanian, as he originally claimed.
The DCLeaks.com domain was registered by a person using the same email service as the person who registered a misspelled domain used to send phishing emails to DNC employees.
Some of the phishing emails were sent using Yandex, a Moscow-based webmail provider.
A bit.ly link believed to have been used by APT 28/Fancy Bear in the past was also used against Podesta.
Why That Isn’t Enough

Viewed as a whole, the above evidence looks strong, and maybe even damning. But view each piece on its own, and it’s hard to feel impressed.

For one, a lot of the so-called evidence above is no such thing. CrowdStrike, whose claims of Russian responsibility are perhaps most influential throughout the media, says APT 28/Fancy Bear “is known for its technique of registering domains that closely resemble domains of legitimate organizations they plan to target.” But this isn’t a Russian technique any more than using a computer is a Russian technique — misspelled domains are a cornerstone of phishing attacks all over the world. Is Yandex — the Russian equivalent of Google — some sort of giveaway? Anyone who claimed a hacker must be a CIA agent because they used a Gmail account would be laughed off the internet. We must also acknowledge that just because Guccifer 2.0 pretended to be Romanian, we can’t conclude he works for the Russian government — it just makes him a liar.

Next, consider the fact that CrowdStrike describes APT 28 and 29 like this:

Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of “living-off-the-land” techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and “access management” tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.

Compare that description to CrowdStrike’s claim it was able to finger APT 28 and 29, described above as digital spies par excellence, because they were so incredibly sloppy. Would a group whose “tradecraft is superb” with “operational security second to none” really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic comments on these documents? Would these groups that “constantly [go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels” get caught because they precisely didn’t make sure not to use IP addresses they’d been associated before? It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.

But how do we even know these oddly named groups are Russian? CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch himself describes APT 28 as a “Russian-based threat actor” whose modus operandi “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government” and “may indicate affiliation [Russia’s] Main Intelligence Department or GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service.” Security firm SecureWorks issued a report blaming Russia with “moderate confidence.” What constitutes moderate confidence? SecureWorks said it adopted the “grading system published by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to indicate confidence in their assessments. … Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.” All of this amounts to a very educated guess, at best.

Even the claim that APT 28/Fancy Bear itself is a group working for the Kremlin is speculative, a fact that’s been completely erased from this year’s discourse. In its 2014 reveal of the group, the high-profile security firm FireEye couldn’t even blame Russia without a question mark in the headline: “APT28: A Window into Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations?” The blog post itself is remarkably similar to arguments about the DNC hack: technical but still largely speculative, presenting evidence the company “[believes] indicate a government sponsor based in Moscow.” Believe! Indicate! We should know already this is no smoking gun. FireEye’s argument that the malware used by APT 28 is connected to the Russian government is based on the belief that its “developers are Russian language speakers operating during business hours that are consistent with the time zone of Russia’s major cities.”

As security researcher Jeffrey Carr pointed out in June, FireEye’s 2014 report on APT 28 is questionable from the start:

To my surprise, the report’s authors declared that they deliberately excluded evidence that didn’t support their judgment that the Russian government was responsible for APT28’s activities:

“APT28 has targeted a variety of organizations that fall outside of the three themes we highlighted above. However, we are not profiling all of APT28’s targets with the same detail because they are not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests.” (emphasis added)

That is the very definition of confirmation bias. Had FireEye published a detailed picture of APT28’s activities including all of their known targets, other theories regarding this group could have emerged; for example, that the malware developers and the operators of that malware were not the same or even necessarily affiliated.

The notion that APT 28 has a narrow focus on American political targets is undermined in another SecureWorks paper, which shows that the hackers have a wide variety of interests: 10 percent of their targets are NGOs, 22 percent are journalists, 4 percent are aerospace researchers, and 8 percent are “government supply chain.” SecureWorks says that only 8 percent of APT 28/Fancy Bear’s targets are “government personnel” of any nationality — hardly the focused agenda described by CrowdStrike.

Truly, the argument that “Guccifer 2.0″ is a Kremlin agent or that GRU breached John Podesta’s email only works if you presume that APT 28/Fancy Bear is a unit of the Russian government, a fact that has never been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. According to Carr, “it’s an old assumption going back years to when any attack against a non-financial target was attributed to a state actor.” Without that premise, all we can truly conclude is that some email accounts at the DNC et al. appear to have been broken into by someone, and perhaps they speak Russian. Left ignored is the mammoth difference between Russians and Russia.

Security researcher Claudio Guarnieri put it this way:

[Private security firms] can’t produce anything conclusive. What they produce is speculative attribution that is pretty common to make in the threat research field. I do that same speculative attribution myself, but it is just circumstantial. At the very best it can only prove that the actor that perpetrated the attack is very likely located in Russia. As for government involvement, it can only speculate that it is plausible because of context and political motivations, as well as technical connections with previous (or following attacks) that appear to be perpetrated by the same group and that corroborate the analysis that it is a Russian state-sponsored actor (for example, hacking of institutions of other countries Russia has some geopolitical interests in).

Finally, one can’t be reminded enough that all of this evidence comes from private companies with a direct financial interest in making the internet seem as scary as possible, just as Lysol depends on making you believe your kitchen is crawling with E. Coli.

What Does the Government Know?

In October, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a joint statement blaming the Russian government for hacking the DNC. In it, they state their attribution plainly:

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.

What’s missing is any evidence at all. If this federal confidence is based on evidence that’s being withheld from the public for any reason, that’s one thing — secrecy is their game. But if the U.S. Intelligence Community is asking the American electorate to believe them, to accept as true their claim that our most important civic institution was compromised by a longtime geopolitical nemesis, we need them to show us why.

The same goes for the CIA, which is now squaring off directly against Trump, claiming (through leaks to the Washington Post and New York Times) that the Russian government conducted the hacks for the express purpose of helping defeat Clinton. Days later, Senator John McCain agreed with the assessment, deeming it “another form of warfare.” Again, it’s completely possible (and probable, really) that the CIA possesses hard evidence that could establish Russian attribution — it’s their job to have such evidence, and often to keep it secret.

But what we’re presented with isn’t just the idea that these hacks happened, and that someone is responsible, and, well, I guess it’s just a shame. Our lawmakers and intelligence agencies are asking us to react to an attack that is almost military in nature — this is, we’re being told, “warfare.” When a foreign government conducts (or supports) an act of warfare against another country, it’s entirely possible that there will be an equal response. What we’re looking at now is the distinct possibility that the United States will consider military retaliation (digital or otherwise) against Russia, based on nothing but private sector consultants and secret intelligence agency notes. If you care about the country enough to be angry at the prospect of election-meddling, you should be terrified of the prospect of military tensions with Russia based on hidden evidence. You need not look too far back in recent history to find an example of when wrongly blaming a foreign government for sponsoring an attack on the U.S. has tremendously backfired.

We Need the Real Evidence, Right Now

It must be stated plainly: The U.S. intelligence community must make its evidence against Russia public if they want us to believe their claims. The integrity of our presidential elections is vital to the country’s survival; blind trust in the CIA is not. A governmental disclosure like this is also not entirely without precedent: In 2014, the Department of Justice produced a 56-page indictment detailing their exact evidence against a team of Chinese hackers working for the People’s Liberation Army, accused of stealing American trade secrets; each member was accused by name. The 2014 trade secret theft was a crime of much lower magnitude than election meddling, but what the DOJ furnished is what we should demand today from our country’s spies.

If the CIA does show its hand, we should demand to see the evidence that matters (which, according to Edward Snowden, the government probably has, if it exists). I asked Jeffrey Carr what he would consider undeniable evidence of Russian governmental involvement: “Captured communications between a Russian government employee and the hackers,” adding that attribution “should solely be handled by government agencies because they have the legal authorization to do what it takes to get hard evidence.”

Claudio Guarnieri concurred:

All in all, technical circumstantial attribution is acceptable only so far as it is to explain an attack. It most definitely isn’t for the political repercussions that we’re observing now. For that, only documental evidence that is verifiable or intercepts of Russian officials would be convincing enough, I suspect.

Given that the U.S. routinely attempts to intercept the communications of heads of state around the world, it’s not impossible that the CIA or the NSA has exactly this kind of proof. Granted, these intelligence agencies will be loath to reveal any evidence that could compromise the method they used to gather it. But in times of extraordinary risk, with two enormous military powers placed in direct conflict over national sovereignty, we need an extraordinary disclosure. The stakes are simply too high to take anyone’s word for it.

Sam Biddle
December 14 2016, 5:30 p.m.

Find this story at 14 December 2016

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

The CIA found itself in some rough waters in the Middle East last week. On Thursday, an influential member of Iran’s parliament announced that the Islamic republic had arrested 12 “CIA agents” who had allegedly been targeting Iran’s military and its nuclear program. The lawmaker didn’t give the nationality of the agents, but the presumption is that they were Iranians recruited to spy for the CIA. The agency hasn’t yet commented, but from what I’ve heard it was a serious compromise, one which the CIA is still trying to get to the bottom of.

Even more curious was the flap in Lebanon. In June, Hizballah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah announced that the movement had arrested two of its own members as CIA spies. But it wasn’t until last week that the story got traction in Washington. The CIA confirmed that operations in Beirut had been compromised but declined to offer details. As in the case of the alleged Iranian debacle, it’s no doubt still doing a “damage assessment” — a process that can take years. Even then, it will be difficult to determine exactly what happened.

From what I’ve been able to piece together, Hizballah aggressively went after the CIA in Lebanon using telephone “link analysis.” That’s a form of electronic intelligence gathering that uses software capable of combing through trillions of gigabytes of phone-call data in search of anomalies — prepaid cell phones calling each other, series of brief calls, analysis of a cell-phone company’s GPS tracking. Geeks who do this for a living understand how it works, and I’ll take their word for it.

But it’s not the technology that’s remarkable, as much as the idea that it’s being employed by Hizballah, a militant Islamic organization better known for acts of terror than for electronic counterespionage. That’s another reminder that Hizballah has effectively supplanted the Lebanese state, taking over police and security functions that in other countries are the exclusively the domain of sovereign authority. Indeed, since Nasrallah’s announcement of catching the CIA agents, no Lebanese authority has questioned why Hizballah, rather than Lebanese intelligence, would be responsible for catching alleged spies for foreign powers in Lebanon. Nobody bothers to ask what would be a pointless question; everyone knows that when it comes to military and security functions, Hizballah might as well be the state.

(Watch a video of Hizballah’s theme park.)
Since I served in Beirut during the ’80s, I’ve been struck by the slow but inexorable shift of sovereign power to Hizballah. Not only does the movement have the largest military, with nearly 50,000 rockets pointed at Israel; it has de facto control over Lebanon’s spies, both military and civilian. It green-lights senior appointments. Hizballah also is wired into all the databases, keeping track of who enters the country, who leaves, where they stay, whom they see and call. It’s capable of monitoring every server in the country. It can even tap into broadband communications like Skype. And, of course, it doesn’t bother with such legal niceties as warrants. If foreigners are going to be caught spy in Lebanon, it will be Hizballah that catches them.

I have a feeling last week’s events bodes ill for U.S. intelligence because it suggests that anyone capable from organized crime to terrorist groups can greatly enhance their counterintelligence capability by simply buying off-the-shelf equipment and the know-how to use it. Like a lot of people, I thought it would be easy coasting at the end of the Cold War after the KGB was defanged. Instead, globalization and the rapid spread of sophisticated technologies have opened an espionage Pandora’s box.

By Robert Baer Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011
Find this story at 30 November 2011

© 2016 Time Inc.

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

In a significant failure for the United States in the Mideast, more than a dozen spies working for the CIA in Iran and Lebanon have been caught and the U.S. government fears they will be or have been executed, according to four current and former U.S. officials with connections to the intelligence community.

The spies were paid informants recruited by the CIA for two distinct espionage rings targeting Iran and the Beirut-based Hezbollah organization, considered by the U.S. to be a terror group backed by Iran.

“Espionage is a risky business,” a U.S. official briefed on the developments told ABC News, confirming the loss of the unspecified number of spies over the last six months.

“Many risks lead to wins, but some result in occasional setbacks,” the official said.

Robert Baer, a former senior CIA officer who worked against Hezbollah while stationed in Beirut in the 1980’s, said Hezbollah typically executes individuals suspected of or caught spying.

“If they were genuine spies, spying against Hezbollah, I don’t think we’ll ever see them again,” he said. “These guys are very, very vicious and unforgiving.”

Other current and former officials said the discovery of the two U.S. spy rings occurred separately, but amounted to a setback of significant proportions in efforts to track the activities of the Iranian nuclear program and the intentions of Hezbollah against Israel.

“Remember, this group was responsible for killing more Americans than any other terrorist group before 9/11,” said a U.S. official. Attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 killed more than 300 people, including almost 260 Americans.

The U.S. official, speaking for the record but without attribution, gave grudging credit to the efforts of Iran and Hezbollah to detect and expose U.S. and Israeli espionage.

“Collecting sensitive information on adversaries who are aggressively trying to uncover spies in their midst will always be fraught with risk,” said the U.S. official briefed on the spy ring bust.

But others inside the American intelligence community say sloppy “tradecraft” — the method of covert operations — by the CIA is also to blame for the disruption of the vital spy networks.

In Beirut, two Hezbollah double agents pretended to go to work for the CIA. Hezbollah then learned of the restaurant where multiple CIA officers were meeting with several agents, according to the four current and former officials briefed on the case. The CIA used the codeword “PIZZA” when discussing where to meet with the agents, according to U.S. officials. Two former officials describe the location as a Beirut Pizza Hut. A current US official denied that CIA officers met their agents at Pizza Hut.

From there, Hezbollah’s internal security arm identified at least a dozen informants, and the identities of several CIA case officers.

Hezbollah then began to “roll up” much of the CIA’s network against the terror group, the officials said.

One former senior intelligence official told ABC News that CIA officers ignored warnings that the operation could be compromised by using the same location for meetings with multiple assets.

“We were lazy and the CIA is now flying blind against Hezbollah,” the former official said.

CIA Spies Caught in Iran

At about the same time that Hezbollah was identifying the CIA network in Lebanon, Iranian intelligence agents discovered a secret internet communication method used by CIA-paid assets in Iran.

The CIA has yet to determine precisely how many of its assets were compromised in Iran, but the number could be in the dozens, according to one current and one former U.S. intelligence official.

The exposure of the two spy networks was first announced in widely ignored televised statements by Iranian and Hezbollah leaders. U.S. officials tell ABC News that much of what was broadcast was, in fact, true.

Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, announced in June of this year that two high-ranking members of Hezbollah had been exposed as CIA spies, leading U.S. officials to conclude that the entire network inside Hezbollah had been compromised.

In Iran, intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi announced in May that more than 30 U.S. and Israeli spies had been discovered and an Iranian television program, which acts as a front for Iran’s government, showed images of internet sites used by the U.S. for secret communication with the spies.

U.S. officials said the Iranian television program showed pictures of people who were not U.S. assets, but the program’s video of the websites used by the CIA was accurate.

Some former U.S. intelligence officials say the developments are the result of a lack of professionalism in the U.S. intelligence community.

“We’ve lost the tradition of espionage,” said one former official who still consults for the U.S. intelligence community. “Officers take short cuts and no one is held accountable,” he said.

But at the CIA, officials say such risks come with the territory.

“Hezbollah is an extremely complicated enemy,” said a U.S. official. “It’s a determined terrorist group, a powerful political player, a mighty military and an accomplished intelligence operation, formidable and ruthless. No one underestimates its capabilities.”

“If you lose an asset, one source, that’s normally a setback in espionage,” said Robert Baer, who was considered an expert on Hezbollah.

“But when you lose your entire station, either in Tehran or Beirut, that’s a catastrophe, that just shouldn’t be. And the only way that ever happens is when you’re mishandling sources.”

By MATTHEW COLEBRIAN ROSS Nov. 21, 2011

Find this story at 21 November 2011

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