Pakistan

Ob303 – December 21 2012
♦ 3-4 reported killed
♦ ‘Several’ injured
At least three alleged militants were reported killed in an attack on a house in the Mir Ali area, after a pause of 12 days. One source noted that unidentified ‘foreigners’ may have been among the dead. On the same day, a US drone reportedly crashed in South Waziristan.

Location: Hassokhel near Mir Ali, North Waziristan
Reference: Express Tribune, Dawn, The Nation (Pakistan), News Pakistan, Geo TV

Related article: Obama terror drones: CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals

Yemen

YEM123
December 24 2012
♦ 2-3 killed
♦ 3 reported wounded
At least two men were killed when a suspected US drone destroyed their vehicle in the southern Bayda province; local press reported the strike took place at around 5pm. It was the first strike in Yemen for 47 days. Little was known of one casualty – he was simply described as a Jordanian. There was confusion over the identity of another. AFP named him as Abdullah Hussein al Waeli from Marib province, a wanted man ‘after he escaped from prison two years ago’. Associated Press and Reuters named him as Abdel-Raouf Naseeb, a ‘mid-level al Qaeda Yemeni operative’. A Naseeb family member confirmed his death, according to both agencies. Reuters said Naseeb had fled to Bayda from neighbouring Lawdar province earlier in 2012, during a military offensive. And Associated Press and Reuters said he had previously survived the first US drone strike outside Afghanistan. On November 3 2002 (YEM001) a CIA Predator drone killed six men, among them Qa’id Salim Sinan al Harithi – alleged mastermind of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole – and US citizen Abu Ahmad al Hijazi.

Type of Action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Manaseh, Bayda province
Reference: AFP, Associated Press, Reuters, Reuters, Gulf News, Long War Journal, Yemen Post

YEM124
December 24 2012
♦ 3-5 killed
Up to five more alleged militants were killed in the second suspected US drone strike of the day. The unmanned aircraft reportedly fired three missiles on the men riding motorcycles and armed with pistols according to one source. The strike hit east of the provincial capital Mukalla. It was the first strike on the eastern Hadramout province recorded by the Bureau for 15 weeks (YEM113). Gulf News quoted an unnamed senior security official saying: ‘Four of the people died at the scene and the fifth suffered heavy injuries and died later on in hospital. We do not know whether they are members of Al Qaida or not. Shiher residents suspect that there are outsiders.’

Type of Action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Shehr, Hadramout
Reference: AFP, Reuters, Gulf News, Long War Journal

By The Bureau | Published in Bureau Stories, Drones carousel

Find this story at 25 December 2012

Dhamar, Yemen — A rickety Toyota truck packed with 14 people rumbled down a desert road from the town of Radda, which al-Qaeda militants once controlled. Suddenly a missile hurtled from the sky and flipped the vehicle over.

Chaos. Flames. Corpses. Then, a second missile struck.

Within seconds, 11 of the passengers were dead, including a woman and her 7-year-old daughter. A 12-year-old boy also perished that day, and another man later died from his wounds.

The Yemeni government initially said that those killed were al-Qaeda militants and that its Soviet-era jets had carried out the Sept. 2 attack. But tribal leaders and Yemeni officials would later say that it was an American assault and that all the victims were civilians who lived in a village near Radda, in central Yemen. U.S. officials last week acknowledged for the first time that it was an American strike.

“Their bodies were burning,” recalled Sultan Ahmed Mohammed, 27, who was riding on the hood of the truck and flew headfirst into a sandy expanse. “How could this happen? None of us were al-Qaeda.”

More than three months later, the incident offers a window into the Yemeni government’s efforts to conceal Washington’s mistakes and the unintended consequences of civilian deaths in American air assaults. In this case, the deaths have bolstered the popularity of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s Yemen affiliate, which has tried to stage attacks on U.S. soil several times.

Furious tribesmen tried to take the bodies to the gates of the presidential residence, forcing the government into the rare position of withdrawing its assertion that militants had been killed. The apparent target, Yemeni officials and tribal leaders said, was a senior regional al-Qaeda leader, Abdelrauf al-
Dahab, who was thought to be in a car traveling on the same road.

U.S. airstrikes have killed numerous civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the world, and those governments have spoken against the attacks. But in Yemen, the weak government has often tried to hide civilian casualties from the public, fearing repercussions in a nation where hostility toward U.S. policies is widespread. It continues to insist in local media reports that its own aging jets attacked the truck.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has kept silent publicly, neither confirming nor denying any involvement, a standard practice with most U.S. airstrikes in its clandestine counterterrorism fight in this strategic Middle Eastern country.

In response to questions, U.S. officials in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said it was a Defense Department aircraft, either a drone or a fixed-wing warplane, that fired on the truck. The Pentagon declined to comment on the incident, as did senior U.S. officials in Yemen and senior counterterrorism officials in Washington.

Since the attack, militants in the tribal areas surrounding Radda have gained more recruits and supporters in their war against the Yemeni government and its key backer, the United States. The two survivors and relatives of six victims, interviewed separately and speaking to a Western journalist about the incident for the first time, expressed willingness to support or even fight alongside AQAP, as the al-Qaeda group is known.

“Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,” Mohammed said. “If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.”

Public outrage is also growing as calls for accountability, transparency and compensation go unanswered amid allegations by human rights activists and lawmakers that the government is trying to cover up the attack to protect its relationship with Washington. Even senior Yemeni officials said they fear that the backlash could undermine their authority.

“If we are ignored and neglected, I would try to take my revenge. I would even hijack an army pickup, drive it back to my village and hold the soldiers in it hostages,” said Nasser Mabkhoot Mohammed al-Sabooly, the truck’s driver, 45, who suffered burns and bruises. “I would fight along al-Qaeda’s side against whoever was behind this attack.”

One airstrike among dozens

After Osama bin Laden’s death last year, Yemen emerged as a key battlefield in the Obama administration’s war on Islamist militancy. AQAP members are among those on a clandestine “kill list” created by the administration to hunt down terrorism suspects. It is a lethal campaign, mostly fueled by unmanned drones, but it also includes fixed-wing aircraft and cruise missiles fired from the sea.

This year, there have been at least 38 U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, according to the Long War Journal, a nonprofit Web site that tracks American drone attacks. That is significantly more than in any year since 2009, when President Obama is thought to have ordered the first drone strike.

The Radda attack was one of the deadliest since a U.S. cruise missile strike in December 2009 killed dozens of civilians, including women and children, in the mountainous region of al-
Majala in southern Yemen. After that attack, many tribesmen in that area became radicalized and joined AQAP.

“The people are against the indiscriminate use of the drones,” said Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubaker al-Qirbi. “They want better management of drones. And, more important, they want to have some transparency as far as what’s going on — from everybody.”

The concern over civilian casualties has grown louder since the spring, when the White House broadened its definition of militants who can be targeted in Yemen to include those who may not be well-known.

“We don’t attack in populated areas,” said an Obama administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing the U.S. airstrikes here. “We don’t go after people in dwellings where we don’t know who everyone is. We work very hard to minimize the collateral damage.

“Having said all that, like any programs managed and operated by human beings, mistakes happen. We are not perfect.”

The rise in U.S. attacks came as AQAP and other extremists seized large swaths of southern Yemen last year, taking advantage of the political chaos of the country’s populist Arab Spring revolution. Before that, AQAP orchestrated failed attempts to send parcel bombs on cargo planes to Chicago in 2010 and to bomb a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner the previous year.

In January, AQAP-linked militants briefly seized Radda, placing them only 100 miles south of the capital, Sanaa. But they left after the government, agreeing to their demands, released several extremists from prison. By the summer, the radicals had also been pushed from towns in southern Yemen after a U.S.-backed military offensive initiated by President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who took office early this year after the country’s autocratic leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, stepped down after 33 years in power.

But today, extremists linked to al-Qaeda are still in and around Radda, as well as in other parts of Yemen, staging attacks on government and military officials.

In recent months, villagers in Sabool, about 10 miles from Radda, said they have heard U.S. drones fly over the area as many as three or four times a day. Some described them as “little white planes.”

“It burns my blood every time I see or hear the airplanes,” said Ali Ali Ahmed Mukhbil, 40, a farmer. “All they have accomplished is destruction and fear among the people.”

On that September morning, his brother Masood stepped into the Toyota truck in Sabool. It was filled with villagers heading to Radda to sell khat, a leafy narcotic chewed by most Yemeni males. After they sold their produce, they headed back in the afternoon.

Nasser Ahmed Abdurabu Rubaih, a 26-year-old khat farmer, was working in the valley when he heard the explosions. He ran to the site and, like others, threw sand into the burning vehicle to douse the flames. As he sifted through the charred bodies on the road, he recognized his brother, Abdullah, from his clothes.

“I lost my mind,” Rubaih recalled.

Mukhbil’s brother Masood also was dead.

‘Trying to kill the case’

Some witnesses said that they saw three planes in the sky, two black and one white, and that the black ones were Yemeni jets. But both missiles struck the moving vehicle directly, and the terrain surrounding the truck was not scorched — hallmarks of a precision strike from a sophisticated American aircraft.

“If you say it wasn’t a U.S. drone, nobody will believe you,” said Abdel-Karim al-Iryani, a former Yemeni prime minister who is a senior adviser to Hadi. “A Yemeni pilot to be able to hit a specific vehicle that’s moving? Impossible.”

The Yemeni government publicly apologized for the attack and sent 101 guns to tribal leaders in the area as a symbolic gesture, which in Yemeni culture is an admission of guilt. But a government inquiry into the strike appears to be stalled, human rights activists and lawmakers said.

For the past three months, lawmakers have unsuccessfully demanded that senior government officials reveal who was responsible for the attack. Yemen’s defense and interior ministries, Hadi’s office, and the attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington played a crucial role in ousting Saleh and installing Hadi, a former defense minister. The United States also provides hundreds of millions of dollars to the military and security forces in counterterrorism assistance. U.S. officials regard Hadi as an even stauncher counterterrorism ally than Saleh.

“The government is trying to kill the case,” said Abdul Rahman Berman, the executive director of the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, or HOOD, a local human rights group. “The government wants to protect its relations with the U.S.”

After the 2009 strike in al-
Majala, the Yemeni government took responsibility for the assault. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was then the head of U.S. Central Command, according to a U.S. Embassy e-mail leaked by the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks.

Three weeks after the Radda attack, Hadi visited Washington and praised the accuracy of U.S. drone strikes in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, as well as publicly. “They pinpoint the target and have zero margin of error, if you know what target you’re aiming at,” he told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

‘That’s why we are fighting’

The day after the attack, tribesmen affiliated with al-
Qaeda blocked the roads around Radda and stormed government buildings. They set up a large tent and held a gathering to denounce the government and the United States. Fliers handed out around town read: “See what the government has done? That’s why we are fighting. . . . They are the agents of America and the enemy of Islam. . . . They fight whoever says ‘Allah is my God,’ according to America’s instructions.”

At the funeral, some mourners chanted “America is a killer,” said Mohammed al-Ahmadi, a human rights activist who attended.

A few days later, at a gathering, relatives of the victims urged Yemeni officials to be careful about the intelligence they provided to the Americans. “Do not rush to kill innocent people,” declared Mohammed Mukhbil al-Sabooly, a village elder, in testimony that was videotaped. “If such attacks continue, they will make us completely lose our trust in the existence of a state.”

…

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Published: December 25

Greg Miller in Washington and Ali Almujahed in Sanaa, Yemen, contributed to this report.

Find this story at 25 December 2012
© The Washington Post Company

There is a history of Yemeni officials lying to protect the US, and the Pentagon and CIA greeting queries with obfuscation

An unmanned US Predator drone takes off on a night sortie. Photograph: AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth

When news flashed of an air strike on a vehicle in the Yemeni city of Radaa on Sunday afternoon, early claims that al-Qaida militants had died soon gave way to a more grisly reality.

At least 10 civilians had been killed, among them women and children. It was the worst loss of civilian life in Yemen’s brutal internal war since May 2012. Somebody had messed up badly. But was the United States or Yemen responsible?

Local officials and eyewitnesses were clear enough. The Radaa attack was the work of a US drone – a common enough event. Since May 2011, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded up to 116 US drone strikes in Yemen, part of a broader covert war aimed at crushing Islamist militants. But of those attacks, only 39 have been confirmed by officials as the work of the US.

The attribution of dozens of further possible drone attacks – and others reportedly involving US ships and conventional aircraft – remains unclear. Both the CIA and Pentagon are fighting dirty wars in Yemen, each with a separate arsenal and kill list. Little wonder that hundreds of deaths remain in a limbo of accountability.

With anger rising at the death of civilians in Radaa, Yemen’s government stepped forward to take the blame. It claimed that its own air force had carried out the strike on moving vehicles after receiving “faulty intelligence”. Yet the Yemeni air force is barely fit for purpose.

And why believe the Yemeni defence ministry anyway? Just 48 hours earlier it had made similar claims. But when it emerged that alleged al-Qaida bomber Khaled Musalem Batis had died in a strike, anonymous officials soon admitted that a US drone had carried out that killing.

There is a long history of senior Yemeni officials lying to protect Barack Obama’s secret war on terror. When US cruise missiles decimated a tented village in December 2009, at least 41 civilians were butchered alongside a dozen alleged militants, as a parliamentary report later concluded.

As we now know, thanks to WikiLeaks, the US and Yemen sought to cover up the US role in that attack. We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” President Saleh informed US Central Command (Centcom)’s General Petraeus.

Pakistan’s own former strongman, General Pervez Musharraf, had performed a similar deed for the CIA, with the army claiming early US drones strikes as its own work. A senior Musharraf aide told the Sunday Times, “We thought it would be less damaging if we said we did it rather than the US.” Only when civilian deaths became too unbearable in 2006 did Islamabad end that charade.

Still, dictators may have been better able to rein in US covert attacks than their democratic successors. When US special forces accidentally killed Jaber al-Shabwani, the deputy governor of Yemen’s Marib province in May 2010, Saleh was able to secure a year-long pause in the US bombing campaign.

With new president Abd-Rabbuh Mansour Hadi owing his position to the US he is unlikely to enjoy similar leverage, if Pakistan’s present impotence against CIA strikes is any guide.

The odds of finding out who was really responsible for Sunday’s deaths are not good. At the height of this year’s US-backed offensive against al-Qaida in May, at least a dozen civilians died in a double air strike in Jaar. As onlookers and rescuers came forward after an initial attack, they were killed in a follow-up strike.

The event was reminiscent of CIA tactics in Pakistan, and there is circumstantial evidence that US drones carried out the attack. Times reporter Iona Craig recalls the testimony of one survivor she met in Jaar:

“He didn’t know who carried out the strike but said they didn’t hear any planes or fighter jets before either strike and they dived to the ground when they saw a ‘missile’ with a jet stream of ‘white smoke behind it’, flying through the sky towards them before the second strike happened’.”

Four months on, neither Yemen nor the US has taken responsibility for that attack. According to Haykal Bafana, a lawyer based in Sanaa, “the greatest worry for people here is not only a lack of accountability but a lack of transparency. Civilians at risk in the areas being targeted are being given no information at all about how best to protect themselves.”

There is also the issue of compensation. Yemen’s government has now ordered an inquiry into the Radaa bombing. Yet following the 2009 killing of 41 civilians relatives were compensated with just a few hundred dollars, after details of Centcom’s role were deliberately hidden from that inquiry. In contrast, US forces in Afghanistan not only admitted responsibility in a recent incident, but paid out $46,000 (£29,000) for each person killed and $10,000 for those injured.

There is a growing gulf between what Yemen’s people are experiencing and what their government claims. Bafana says Yemen’s official news agency Saba has only used the word “drone” once since February 2011. A confirmed US strike on August 29 killed not only three alleged militants but a policeman and a local anti-al-Qaida imam, according to local reports. Those civilian deaths remain absent from Saba’s coverage.

…

Chris Woods
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 September 2012 12.28 BST

Find this story at 6 September 2012
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Police to launch criminal investigation into deaths of 14 people after British paratroopers opened fire on crowd, in 1972

British troops behind a wire barricade in Derry, on Bloody Sunday, when 13 people were killed at a protest march, in 1972. Photograph: Bentley Archive/Popperfoto/Getty Images

A murder inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry is to begin in the new year.

Senior commanders from the Police Service of Northern Ireland on Thursday briefed relatives of the 14 people who died after British paratroopers opened fire on demonstrators in the city, in 1972.

Earlier this year, police signalled an intent to investigate the incident after they and prosecutors reviewed the findings of the Saville public inquiry into the controversial shootings. Until now it had been unclear when such an investigation would start.

After the 12-year inquiry, Lord Saville found that the killings were unjustified and none of the dead posed a threat when they were shot.

That contradicted the long-standing official version of events, outlined in the contentious 1972 Widgery report, which had exonerated soldiers of any blame.

…

Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 December 2012 17.31 GMT

Find this story at 20 December 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Efforts to bring Pakistan’s former spy masters before a New York court to face charges filed by relatives of American victims in the Mumbai terror attacks are getting nowhere with the US Government taking the stand that the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence and its top brass enjoy immunity under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

In response to a civil case filed on behalf of the American victims, a top official of the Department of Justice said the United States strongly condemns the 26/11 attacks and believes that Pakistan “must take steps to to dismantle Lashkar-e-Taiba and to support India’s efforts to counter this terrorist threat”.

But the ISI and its former chiefs Shuja Pasha and Nadeem Raj cannot be proceeded against in a US court because of immunity conferred under the American law, Principal Deputy Attorney General Stuart Delery informed the New York court.

In a 12-page affidavit, the official said the State Department has determined that Pasha and Taj are immune because the allegations by the plaintiffs relate to actions taken by them in their official capacities as directors of ISI, which is a fundamental part of the Government of Pakistan.

Six Americans were among the 166 people killed in the Mumbai attacks in 2008. Some, such as Linda Ragsdale of Tennessee, survived the attack. Ragsdale, who had been shot in her back at the Oberoi Trident Hotel, had filed a case in a New York court. Another lawsuit had been filed by the relatives of Rabbi Gavriel Noah Holtzberg and his pregnant wife Rivka.

Following the lawsuit, a US court did issue summons to Pasha, the ISI chief at the time and Lashkar’s top guns including founder Hafiz Saeed. But Pak moved to block the lawsuit by roping in top-notch US lawyers, who sought quashing the case on the grounds that the US had no jurisdiction in the matter. They argued that any US assertion of jurisdiction over Pakistani officials would be “an intrusion on its sovereignty, in violation of international law”.

Ragsdale, in her civil complaint, sought a compensation of a minimum of $75,000 from the ISI. The US Government’s affidavit in the case, filed on Monday, sought to emphasise that while making the immunity determination, it was not expressing any view on the merits of the claims put forth by the plaintiffs.

Besides the former ISI chiefs and Saeed, the case filed in the US court has also named other top Lashkar operatives involved in the Mumbai operation: Zaki-ur-Rahman, Sajid Mir and Azam Cheema.

…

Thursday, 20 December 2012 13:44 S Rajagopalan | Washington

Find this story at 20 December 2012

Copyright © 2011 The Pioneer. All Rights Reserved.

The United States government has argued in court that current and former officials of Pakistan’s intelligence service should be immune from prosecution in connection with the 2008 Mumbai attacks. At least 166 people, including 6 Americans, were killed and scores more were injured when members of Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba stormed downtown Mumbai, India, taking the city hostage between November 26 and 29, 2008. The Indian government has openly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) of complicity in the attack, which has been described as the most sophisticated international terrorist strike anywhere in the world during the last decade. Using evidence collected by the Indian government, several Americans who survived the bloody attacks sued the ISI in New York earlier this year for allegedly directing Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Mumbai strikes. But Stuart Delery, Principal Deputy Attorney General for the US Department of State, has told the court that the ISI and its senior officials are immune from prosecution on US soil under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. According to the 12-page ‘Statement of Interest’ delivered to the court by Delery, no foreign nationals can be prosecuted in a US court for criminal actions they allegedly carried out while working in official capacities for a foreign government. The affidavit goes on to suggest that any attempt by a US court to assert American jurisdiction over current or former Pakistani government officials would be a blatant “intrusion on [Pakistan’s] sovereignty, in violation of international law”. It appears that nobody has notified the US Department of State that the US routinely “intrudes on Pakistan’s sovereignty” several times a week by using unmanned Predator drones to bomb suspected Taliban militants operating on Pakistani soil. Washington also “intruded on Pakistan’s sovereignty” on May 2, 2011, when it clandestinely sent troops to the town of Abbottabad to kill al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. Reacting to the US position, the Indian government expressed “extreme and serious disappointment” on Thursday, arguing that “It cannot be that any organization, state or non-state, which sponsors terrorism, has immunity”. Indian media quoted Foreign Office spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin as saying that all those behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks “should be brought to justice irrespective of the jurisdiction under which they may reside or be operating”.

…

December 21, 2012 by Joseph Fitsanakis 2 Comments

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |

Find this story at 21 December 2012

The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.

The GRS, as it is known, is designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.

But a series of deadly scrapes over the past four years has illuminated the GRS’s expanding role, as well as its emerging status as one of the CIA’s most dangerous assignments.

Of the 14 CIA employees killed since 2009, five worked for the GRS, all as contractors. They include two killed at Benghazi, as well as three others who were within the blast radius on Dec. 31, 2009, when a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA compound in Khost, Afghanistan.

GRS contractors have also been involved in shootouts in which only foreign nationals were killed, including one that triggered a diplomatic crisis. While working for the CIA, Raymond Davis was jailed for weeks in Pakistan last year after killing two men in what he said was an armed robbery attempt in Lahore.

The increasingly conspicuous role of the GRS is part of a broader expansion of the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities over the past 10 years. Beyond hiring former U.S. military commandos, the agency has collaborated with U.S. Special Operations teams on missions including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and has killed thousands of Islamist militants and civilians with its fleet of armed drones.

CIA veterans said that GRS teams have become a critical component of conventional espionage, providing protection for case officers whose counterterrorism assignments carry a level of risk that rarely accompanied the cloak-and-dagger encounters of the Cold War.

Spywork used to require slipping solo through cities in Eastern Europe. Now, “clandestine human intelligence involves showing up in a Land Cruiser with some [former] Deltas or SEALs, picking up an asset and then dumping him back there when you are through,” said a former CIA officer who worked closely with the security group overseas.

Bodyguard details have become so essential to espionage that the CIA has overhauled its training program at the Farm — its case officer academy in southern Virginia — to teach spies the basics of working with GRS teams.

The security apparatus relies heavily on contractors who are drawn by relatively high pay and flexible schedules that give them several months off each year. In turn, they agree to high-risk assignments in places such as Benghazi and are largely left on their own to take basic precautions, such as finding health and life insurance.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the GRS has about 125 employees working abroad at any given time, with at least that many rotating through cycles of training and off-time in the United States.

At least half are contractors, who often earn $140,000 or more a year and typically serve 90- or 120-day assignments abroad. Full-time GRS staff officers — those who are permanent CIA employees — earn slightly less but collect benefits and are typically put in supervisory roles.

The work is lucrative enough that recruiting is done largely by word of mouth, said one former U.S. intelligence official. Candidates tend to be members of U.S. Special Forces units who have recently retired, or veterans of police department SWAT teams.

Most GRS recruits arrive with skills in handling the weapons they will carry, including Glock handguns and M4 rifles. But they undergo additional training so they do not call attention to the presence or movements of the CIA officers they are in position to protect.

Although the agency created the GRS to protect officers in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been expanded to protect secret drone bases as well as CIA facilities and officers in locations including Yemen, Lebanon and Djibouti.

In some cases, elite GRS units provide security for personnel from other agencies, including National Security Agency teams deploying sensors or eavesdropping equipment in conflict zones, a former special operator said. The most skilled security operators are informally known as “scorpions.”

“They don’t learn languages, they’re not meeting foreign nationals and they’re not writing up intelligence reports,” a former U.S. intelligence official said. Their main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down informants and provide an “envelope” of security, the former official said, all while knowing that “if push comes to shove, you’re going to have to shoot.”

The consequences in such cases can be severe. Former CIA officials who worked with the GRS still wince at the fallout from Davis’s inability to avoid capture as well as his decision to open fire in the middle of a busy street in Pakistan. The former security contractor, who did not respond to requests for comment, said he was doing basic “area familiarization” work, meaning learning his surroundings and possibly mapping routes of escape, when he was confronted by two Pakistanis traveling by motorcycle.

Davis became trapped at the scene, and his arrest provoked a diplomatic standoff between two tense allies in the fight against terrorism.

The CIA took heavy criticism for the clumsiness of the Davis episode, temporarily suspending the drone campaign in Pakistan before U.S. payments to the families of the men Davis had killed helped secure his release.

By contrast, the CIA and its security units were praised — albeit indirectly — in a report released last week that was otherwise sharply critical of the State Department security failures that contributed to the deaths of four Americans in Libya three months ago.

In Benghazi, a GRS team rushed to a burning State Department compound in an attempt to rescue U.S. diplomats, then evacuated survivors to a nearby CIA site that also came under attack. Two GRS contractors who had taken positions on the roof of the site were killed by mortar strikes.

Among those killed was Glen Doherty, a GRS contractor on his second CIA assignment in Libya who had served in about 10 other places, including Mexico City, according to his sister, Kathleen Quigley.

“Was he aware of the risks? Absolutely,” Quigley said in an interview, although she noted that “he wasn’t there to protect an embassy. He was there to recover RPGs,” meaning he was providing security for CIA teams tracking Libyan stockpiles of rocket-propelled grenades.

Doherty took the CIA job for the pay and abundant time off, as well as the chance to continue serving the U.S. government abroad, Quigley said.

…

By Greg Miller and Julie Tate, Thursday, December 27, 2:00 AM

Find this story at 27 December 2012

© The Washington Post Company

Lawyers and human rights groups say 400 settlements show ‘systemic’ abuse

British soldiers take Iraqi prisoners: human rights groups and lawyers are calling for a public inquiry into the UK’s detention and interrogation practices in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Photograph: Reuters

The Ministry of Defence has paid out £14m in compensation and costs to hundreds of Iraqis who complained that they were illegally detained and tortured by British forces during the five-year occupation of the south-east of the country.

Hundreds more claims are in the pipeline as Iraqis become aware that they are able to bring proceedings against the UK authorities in the London courts.

The MoD says it is investigating every allegation of abuse that has been made, adding that the majority of British servicemen and women deployed to Iraq conducted themselves “with the highest standards of integrity”.

However, human rights groups and lawyers representing former prisoners say that the abuse was systemic, with military interrogators and guards responsible for the mistreatment acting in accordance with both their training in the UK and orders issued in Iraq.

The campaigners are calling for a public inquiry into the UK’s detention and interrogation practices following the 2003 invasion. An inquiry would be a development the MoD would be eager to avoid.

Payments totalling £8.3m have been made to 162 Iraqis this year. There were payments to 17 individuals last year and 26 in the three years before that.

The average payment to the 205 people who have made successful claims has been almost £70,000, including costs. The MoD says it is negotiating payments concerning a further 196 individuals.

Lawyers representing former prisoners of the British military say that more than 700 further individuals are likely to make claims next year.

Most of those compensated were male civilians who said they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened before being interrogated by British servicemen and women who had detained them on suspicion of involvement in the violent insurgency against the occupation. Others said that they suffered sexual humiliation and were forced into stress positions for prolonged periods.

Many of the complaints arise out of the actions of a shadowy military intelligence unit called the Joint Forward Interrogation Team (Jfit) which operated an interrogation centre throughout the five-year occupation. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross complained about the mistreatment of detainees at Jfit not long after it was first established.

Despite this, the interrogators shot hundreds of video films in which they captured themselves threatening and abusing men who can be seen to be bruised, disoriented, complaining of starvation and sleep deprivation and, in some cases, too exhausted to stand unaided.

A former soldier who served as a guard at Jfit told the Guardian that he and others were ordered to take hold of blindfolded prisoners by their thumbs in between interrogation sessions then drag them around assault courses where they could not be filmed.

He also confirmed that the prisoners were often beaten during these runs, and that they would then be returned for interrogation in front of a video camera.

The interrogators were drawn from all three branches of the forces and included a large number of reservists.

During proceedings brought before the high court in London, lawyers representing the former Jfit prisoners suggested the interrogation centre could be regarded as “Britain’s Abu Ghraib”.

Questioned about the compensation payments, an MoD spokesperson said: “Over 120,000 British troops have served in Iraq and the vast majority have conducted themselves with the highest standards of integrity and professionalism. All allegations of abuse will always be investigated thoroughly. We will compensate victims of abuse where it is right to do so and seek to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.”

Lutz Oette, legal counsel at Redress, a London-based NGO which helps torture survivors get justice, said: “The payments provide a long overdue measure of redress. However, for the victims compensation without truth and accountability is a heavy price to pay. For justice to be done there is a need for a full independent inquiry to establish what happened and who is responsible.

“Looking at the number of claimants and scale of payments, there clearly seems to be a systemic problem. It is high time for this to be fully accounted for, first and foremost for the victims but also the British public, which has an obvious interest to know the truth behind the figures.”

Next month, the high court will hear a judicial review of the MoD’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into the abuses. Human rights groups and lawyers for the former prisoners say the UK government is obliged to hold an inquiry to meet its obligations under the European convention on human rights – and particularly under article three of the convention, which protects individuals from torture.

After a hearing, the high court highlighted matters supporting the allegations of systemic abuse. These included:

• The same techniques being used at the same places for the same purpose: to assist interrogation.

• The facilities being under the command of an officer.

• Military doctors examining each prisoner at various stages in their detention.

• Investigations by the Royal Military police that were concluded without anyone being held to account.

If the court does order a public inquiry, responsibility for any systemic abuse is likely to be traced up the military chain of command and beyond.

…

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Thursday 20 December 2012 21.00 GMT

Find this story at 20 December 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Ruling clears way for fresh inquest into 96 deaths, re-examining roles of police, Sheffield council and Sheffield Wednesday

Relatives of the 96 victims of the Hillsborough disaster have said they feel vindicated in their 23-year campaign for justice after the original inquest verdict of accidental death was quashed in the high court.

The landmark verdict clears the way for a new inquest into the deaths next year, re-examining the roles of the police and other emergency services, Sheffield council and Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, and leading to the possibility of new verdicts of unlawful killing.

The lord chief justice said it was “inevitable” that the emergence of fresh evidence about how and why the 96 victims died made it “desirable and reasonable for a fresh inquest to be heard”.

“However distressing or unpalatable, the truth will be brought to light,” Lord Judge said. “In this way, the families of those who died in the disaster will be properly respected. Our earnest wish is the new inquest will not be delayed for a moment longer than necessary.”

The decision came as a new police investigation into the disaster was announced by the home secretary, Theresa May. The former Durham chief constable Jon Stoddart will lead the new inquiry and liaise with a parallel Independent Police Complaints Commission review.

The application by the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, to quash the original verdicts was made in the wake of the publication in September of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP) report and accepted by three high court judges.

New medical evidence revealed that 58 victims “definitely or probably” had the capacity to survive beyond the 3.15pm cut-off point imposed by the original coroner, Dr Stefan Popper. In a further 12 cases, the cause of death remained unclear.

Grieve said the application was unopposed and supported by all the families and the defendants, the coroner for South Yorkshire and the coroner for West Yorkshire.

The original coroner said that no evidence gathered after 3.15pm, when the first ambulance arrived on the pitch, would be considered because he believed that by that point all 96 victims were already dead. As a result, the role of the police and the emergency services in the aftermath of the disaster was not considered.

The attorney general told the court that medical evidence from Dr Bill Kirkup and Prof Jack Crane formed “the essential basis” for his application, meaning that the premise of the original inquest was unsustainable.

“The new medical evidence presented by the panel’s report leads to the conclusion that justice has not been done,” he said.

The lord chief justice said there was “ample evidence to suggest that the 3.15pm cut-off was seriously flawed” and that was sufficient on its own to justify the quashing of the original inquest.

It raised new questions about the conduct of police and the emergency services, he said.

But he said there were other reasons for ordering a new inquest, including the 116 amendments to police statements designed to cast them in a better light, and new evidence about the safety of the stadium.

Set up to reconsider all evidence relating to the disaster, including new documents made available for the first time, the HIP report raised serious concerns about the adequacy of the original inquest in Sheffield in 1990.

The review found that the decision to impose the cut-off severely limited examination of the response of the police and emergency services to the disaster on 15 April 1989, in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death in the Leppings Lane end of the stadium, and “raised profound concerns regarding sufficiency of inquiry and examination of evidence”.

The lord chief justice agreed, saying that “in our judgment the 3.15pm cut-off point provided not only the most dramatic but also the most distressing aspect” of the new evidence.

“In short, the unchallenged evidence of pathologists at the Taylor inquiry and the subsequent inquest is no longer accepted,” he said.

…

Owen Gibson
The Guardian, Wednesday 19 December 2012 21.50 GMT

Find this story at 19 December 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

“Leden van etnische minderheden zijn oververtegenwoordigd in de criminaliteitsstatistieken. In Nederland is veel onderzoek gedaan naar verklaringen voor het criminele gedrag van leden van etnische minderheden. Er is daarentegen nauwelijks aandacht besteed aan de mogelijkheid dat de oververtegenwoordiging een weerspiegeling is van selectief politieoptreden. Ik stelde daarom de vraag welke factoren van invloed zijn op de keuzes die politiemensen maken met betrekking tot het staande houden van burgers, een praktijk waarin selectief politieoptreden het duidelijkst op te merken is, en of deze selectiviteit mogelijk een verklaring is van de oververtegenwoordiging van etnische minderheden in de criminaliteitscijfers.”

Bovenstaande passage komt uit de afstudeerscriptie “Een verdacht profiel, selectief politieoptreden in Veenendaal”. Etnisch profileren binnen het politie en justitie apparaat lijkt steeds meer aandacht te krijgen. Lijkt omdat in de jaren negentig ook al onderzoek werd gedaan naar het selectieve optreden van de politie. Hier een overzicht van de afstudeerscripties en rapporten uit binnen- en buitenland. Niet al het onderzoek is opgenomen. Veel theoretisch werk wordt niet gepresenteerd, alleen een overzichtsartikel en een literatuurstudie. De scripties en rapporten gaan over de praktijk van de politie.

Find this story at 19 June 2012

In de afgelopen twee jaar worden in de chique buurten van Haarlem tientallen zwarte schoonmaaksters en klusjesmannen opgepakt. De vreemdelingenpolitie krijgt een tip van busmaatschappij Connexxion. Die heeft last van zwartrijders. In een aantal gevallen blijkt het te gaan om illegale vreemdelingen. De politie volgt zwarte mensen op weg van de bushalte naar hun werk om ze op heterdaad te kunnen betrappen op illegale arbeid. Maar volgens de rechter mag dat niet. De politie mag mensen niet op grond van hun huidskleur volgen en om hun papieren vragen.

Lees ook het nieuwsbericht: Vreemdelingenpolitie Kennemerland negeert rechterlijke uitspraken

We krijgen eind september informatie waaruit blijkt dat politie Kennemerland toch doorgaat met de aanhoudingen. We onderzoeken of de vreemdelingenpolitie zich houdt aan de uitspraak van de rechter.

150.000 schoonmaakhulpen
In het tijdperk van de tweeverdieners, hebben steeds meer gezinnen een schoonmaakhulp. Volgens een recente schatting van de FNV zijn er daar zo’n 150 duizend van in ons land. Het merendeel van de schoonmakers is van buitenlandse afkomst. Veel van hen zijn illegaal. Ze mogen niet werken en als ze worden aangehouden worden ze het land uitgezet. Ze zijn continu bang om opgepakt te worden.

Persoonlijk relaas
In ZEMBLA vertellen twee van de in de omgeving van Haarlem opgepakte schoonmakers over hun aanhouding. Emily werd in juni 2011 aangehouden in Heemstede: ‘De politieman vertelde me dat veel zwarte mensen zonder vergunning werken. Ik zei: ‘Niet alle.’ Hij zei: ‘De meeste.’

Joseph werd in maart 2010 opgepakt in Overveen: ‘Ze zeiden: ‘Jij gaat terug naar Afrika.’ Hij was aan het lachen: ‘Jullie Afrikanen, jullie komen hier maar, betalen geen belasting, allemaal zwart werk.’

Ethnic profiling
De vreemdelingenpolitie is aan strenge regels gebonden bij het aanhouden van Illegalen. Professor van Walsum, hoogleraar migratierecht aan de VU: ‘De politie mag niet zomaar iedereen in het wilde weg aanhouden en naar hun papieren vragen. Er moet wel sprake zijn van een gerechtvaardigd vermoeden van illegaal verblijf.’ Professor Staring, bijzonder hoogleraar Mobiliteit aan de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam: ‘Je zit natuurlijk al heel snel op het terrein van racisme, discriminatie, ethnic profiling zoals dat genoemd wordt, en dus willekeur ook. Dus je kunt niet zomaar iemand aanhouden op basis van huidskleur.’

De hoogste rechter, de Raad van State, maakt in juli vorig jaar korte metten met deze methode van de vreemdelingenpolitie in de dure buurten rond Haarlem. ZEMBLA ontdekt dat ondanks de uitspraak van de Raad van State in juli vorig jaar, de vreemdelingenpolitie doorgaat.

Research: Marieke van Santen
Samenstelling en regie: Sander Rietveld
Eindredactie: Manon Blaas

Find this story & video at 21 December 2012

Petraeus was forced out of the CIA in part because his mistress read sensitive documents. Now it is alleged he granted two friends astonishing access to top secret files as he ran the Afghan surge. In a painstaking investigation, Rajiv Chandrasekaran reveals how the volunteers won big donations from defence firms – and how they pushed the army towards a far more aggressive strategy

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold for almost a year to work for General David H. Petraeus when he was the top US commander in Afghanistan.

Given desks, email accounts and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently.

Their compensation from the US government for their efforts, which often involved 18-hour work days, seven-day weeks and dangerous battlefield visits? Zero dollars.

Although Fred Kagan said he and his wife wanted no pay in part to remain “completely independent”, the extraordinary arrangement raises new questions about the access and influence Petraeus accorded to civilian friends while he was running the Afghan war.

Petraeus allowed his biographer-turned-paramour, Paula Broadwell, to read sensitive documents and accompany him on trips. But the access granted to the Kagans, whose think-tank work has been embraced by Republican politicians, went even further.

The general made the Kagans de facto senior advisers, a status that afforded them numerous private meetings in his office, priority travel across the war zone and the ability to read highly secretive transcripts of intercepted Taliban communications, according to current and former senior US military and civilian officials who served in the HQ at the time.

The Kagans used those privileges to advocate substantive changes in the US war plan, including a harder-edged approach than some officers advocated in combating the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction in eastern Afghanistan, the officials said.

The pro bono relationship, which is now being scrutinised by military lawyers, yielded valuable benefits for the general and the couple. The Kagans’ proximity to Petraeus, the country’s most famous living general, provided an incentive for defence contractors to contribute to Kim Kagan’s think tank. For Petraeus, embracing two respected national security analysts in Republican circles helped to shore up support for the war among Republican leaders on Capitol Hill.

Fred Kagan, speaking in an interview with his wife, acknowledged the arrangement was “strange and uncomfortable” at times. “We were going around speaking our minds, trying to force people to think about things in different ways and not being accountable to the heads” of various departments in the headquarters, he said.

The extent of the couple’s involvement in Petraeus’s headquarters was not known to senior White House and Pentagon officials involved in war policy, two of those officials said. More than a dozen senior military officers and civilian officials were interviewed for this article; most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. Petraeus, through a former aide, declined to comment for the piece.

As war-zone volunteers, the Kagans were not bound by the stringent rules that apply to military personnel and private contractors. They could raise concerns directly with Petraeus, instead of going through subordinate officers, and were free to speak their minds without repercussion.

Some military officers and civilian US government employees in Kabul praised the couple’s contributions — one general noted that “they did the work of 20 intelligence analysts”. Others expressed deep unease about their activities in the headquarters, particularly because of their affiliations and advocacy in Washington.

Fred Kagan, who works at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was one of the intellectual architects of President George W Bush’s troop surge in Iraq and has sided with the Republican Party on many national security issues. Kim Kagan runs the Institute for the Study of War, which favours an aggressive US foreign policy. The Kagans supported President Obama’s decision to order a surge in Afghanistan, but they later broke with the White House on the subject of troop reductions. Both argue against any significant drawdown in forces there next year.

After the couple’s most recent trip in September, they provided a briefing on the war and other foreign policy matters to the Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

The Kagans said they continued to receive salaries from their think-tanks while in Afghanistan. Kim Kagan’s institute is funded in part by large defence contractors. During Petraeus’s tenure in Kabul, she sent out a letter soliciting contributions so the organisation could continue its military work, according to two people who saw the letter.

On 8 August 2011, a month after he relinquished command in Afghanistan to take over at the CIA, Petraeus spoke at the institute’s first “President’s Circle” dinner, where he accepted an award from Kim Kagan. The private event, held at the Newseum in Washington, also drew executives from defence contractors who fund the institute.

“What the Kagans do is they grade my work on a daily basis,” Petraeus said, prompting chortles from the audience. “There’s some suspicion that there’s a hand up my back, and it makes my lips talk, and it’s operated by one of the Doctors Kagan.”

Before the Iraq war hit rock bottom, the Kagans were little-known academics with doctorates in military history from Yale University who taught at West Point. He specialised in the Soviets, she in the ancient Greeks and Romans.

In 2005, Fred Kagan jumped to the American Enterprise Institute and joined the fractious debate over the Iraq war, arguing against the Bush administration’s planned troop withdrawals. His follow-on research, conducted with his wife and retired General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army, provided the strategic underpinning for the troop surge Bush approved in January 2007. After Obama was elected, he made clear that his strategic priority was Afghanistan. In March 2009, they co-wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times that called for sending more forces to Afghanistan.

When General Stanley McChrystal assumed command of the war that summer, he invited several national security experts to help draft an assessment of the conflict for the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates. The 14-member group included experts from several Washington think-tanks. Among them were the Kagans. The Afghan assessment struck an alarming tone that helped McChrystal make his case for a troop surge, which Obama eventually authorised.

The Kagans should have been thrilled, but they soon grew concerned. They thought McChrystal’s headquarters was not providing enough information to them about the state of the war. The military began to slow-roll their requests to visit Afghanistan. In early 2010, they wrote an email to McChrystal, copied to Petraeus, that said they “were coming to the conclusion that the campaign was off track and that it was not going to be successful,” Fred Kagan said. Worried about the consequences of losing the Kagans, McChrystal authorised the trip, according to the staff members.

After their trip, which lasted about two weeks, the Kagans penned a piece for the Wall Street Journal. “Military progress is steadily improving dynamics on the ground,” they wrote.

“We obviously came away with… a more nuanced view that persuaded us that we were incorrect in the assessment that we had gone in with,” Fred Kagan said in the interview. The Defence Department permits independent analysts to observe combat operations, but the practice became far more common when Petraeus became the top commander in Iraq. He has said that conversations with outside specialists helped to shape his strategic thinking.

The take-home benefit was equally significant: when the opinion makers returned home, they inevitably wrote in newspapers, gave speeches and testified before Congress, generally imparting a favourable message about progress under Petraeus, all of which helped him sell the war effort and expand his popularity. Petraeus called them his “directed telescopes” and urged them to focus on the challenge of tackling corruption and building an effective government in Afghanistan.

When they returned in September 2010, the Kagans’ writ no longer resembled the traditional think tank visit or an assessment mission intended to inform an incoming commander.

They were given desks in the office of the Strategic Initiatives Group, the commander’s in-house think-tank, which typically is staffed with military officers and civilian government employees. The general’s staff helped upgrade their security clearances from “Secret” to “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, the highest-level of US government classification.

The new clearances allowed the Kagans to visit “the pit”, the high-security lower level of the Combined Joint Intelligence Operations Centre on the headquarters. There, they could read transcripts of Taliban phone and radio conversations monitored by the National Security Agency.

“They’d spend hours in there,” said one former senior civilian official at the headquarters. “They talked about how much they loved reading intel.”

Their immersion occurred at an opportune time. Petraeus was fond of speaking about the importance of using troops to protect Afghan communities from insurgents, but he recognised that summer that the Obama White House wanted to narrow the scope of the war. As a consequence, the general decided to emphasise attacking insurgent strongholds – and so did the Kagans. They focused on the Haqqani network, which US officials believe is supported by Pakistan’s intelligence service. Haqqani fighters have conducted numerous high-profile attacks against US and Afghan targets in Kabul and other major cities.

The Kagans believed US commanders needed to shift their focus from protecting key towns and cities to striking Haqqani encampments and smuggling routes, according to several current and former military and civilian officials familiar the issue.

In the summer of 2010, they shared their views with field officers during a trip to the east. “They implied to brigade commanders that Petraeus would prefer them to devote their resources to killing Haqqanis,” said Doug Ollivant, a former adviser to the two-star general in charge of eastern Afghanistan. But Petraeus had not yet issued new directives to his three-star subordinate or the two-star in the east. “It created huge confusion,” a senior officer said. “Everyone knew the Kagans were close to Petraeus, so everyone assumed they were speaking for the boss.”

While the Kagans refused to discuss their work in detail — they said it was privileged and confidential — Fred Kagan insisted that they were careful to note before every meeting “that we were not speaking for Petraeus”.

Fred Kagan said he and his wife wanted to facilitate conversations about vital tactical issues, exposing field commanders “to different ideas and different ways of looking at the problem.”

The Kagans are prolific contributors to debates about national security policy, cranking out a stream of opinion pieces and convening panel discussions at their respective institutions. But once they began working for Petraeus, they ceased writing and commenting in public. “When we were in Afghanistan… we were not playing the Washington game,” Fred Kagan said. “We were not thinking about anything … except how to defeat the enemy.”

Although they functioned as members of Petraeus’s staff, they said they did not want to be paid. “There are actual patriots in the world,” Fred Kagan said. “It was important to me not to be seen to be profiting from the war.” Military officials said the Defence Department travel rules permit civilian experts to provide services to the military without direct compensation. A spokesman for the US Central Command, Colonel John Robinson, said that the military was still examining to what extent Petraeus’s arrangement with the Kagans “satisfied regulations regarding civilian services to government organisations”.

The Kagans’ volunteerism was an open secret at the headquarters, and it bred suspicion. Some officers questioned whether they funnelled confidential information to Republicans – a claim the Kagans deny. Others worried that the couple was serving as in-house spies for Petraeus. A colonel who worked for Petraeus said the Kagans “did great work,” but “the situation was very, very weird. It’s not how you run an HQ.”

…

Timeline: David Petraeus

7 November 1952: Born in New York.

1972: Marries Holly Knowlton.

2006: Meets Paula Broadwell, a Harvard graduate.

October 2008: Promoted to head of US Central Command.

June 2010: Appointed head of international forces in Afghanistan.

September 2011: Takes up post as director of the CIA. November 2011: Starts affair with Ms Broadwell.

January 2012: Ms Broadwell publishes book on General David Petraeus.

June 2012: FBI establishes harrassing emails between Broadwell and Jill Kelley.

22-29 October: Petraeus admits to affair with Ms Broadwell, but denies leaking any security information.

9 November: President Obama accepts his resignation.

13 November: General John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, under internal investigation.

Washington Post

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post
Thursday, 20 December 2012

Find this story at 20 December 2012

© independent.co.uk

The enhanced interrogation techniques portrayed in the film are being decried as inaccurate.

Acting CIA Director Michael Morell critized “Zero Dark Thirty” as a “dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts” in a letter to employees released Friday.

“Zero Dark Thirty” isn’t getting five stars from the CIA.

The acting head of the agency shot down the highly-anticipated movie that chronicles the hunt for Osama bin Laden in a rare letter to employees, adding to the controversy already brewing over the flick’s factuality.

“What I want you to know is that ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is a dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts,” Michael Morell wrote in a memo posted on the CIA’s website Friday.

“CIA interacted with the filmmakers through our Office of Public Affairs but, as is true with any entertainment project with which we interact, we do not control the final product.”

Morell slammed the Oscar-contender, which he said “departs from reality,” for suggesting that “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or what some would call torture, “were the key” to locating and killing the Al Qaeda leader.

MOVIE REVIEW: ‘ZERO DARK THIRTY’

The film, which hit theaters Dec. 19, shows agents using waterboarding and other extreme techniques to force Guantanamo Bay detainees to speak.

Jonathan Olley
The film, starring Jessica Chastain, follows the hunt and May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEAL Team 6.

“That impression is false,” Morell wrote. “And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.”

The acting CIA director also blasted “Zero Dark Thirty” for taking “considerable liberties in its depiction of CIA personnel and their actions, including some who died while serving our country.”

“We cannot allow a Hollywood film to cloud our memory of them,” he added.

Morell’s note comes just two days after three senators, Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), John McCain (R-Az.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), condemned the flick for being “grossly inaccurate and misleading” in suggesting that torture led to the May 2011 killing of bin Laden by Navy SEAL Team 6.

The trio sent a letter to Sony Pictures, the film’s distributor, calling for the studio to add a disclaimer to the film.

…

By Christine Roberts / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, December 23, 2012, 12:35 PM

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Find this story at 23 December 2012

© Copyright 2012 NYDailyNews.com. All rights reserved

Upcoming film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ claims that Bin Laden might not have been found if not for a young female CIA analyst
She devoted the best part of a decade to finding the terrorist
According to colleagues, she was one of the first to advance the theory that the key to finding Bin Laden was in Al Qaeda’s courier network

CIA agents were envious of the glamorous treatment given to the real-lief tenacious operative who tracked Osama bin Laden for the better part of a decade, it was revealed today.

Hollywood starlet Jessica Chastain plays the undercover analyst known as Maya, the woman who eventually finds the location of the then al-Qaeda leader. She is portrayed in a glamorous light – with wardrobes full of designer clothes and an enviable figure.

But the real-life ‘Maya’ didn’t have it as easy as the strawberry-blonde Chastain; despite being one of the key people responsible for bin Laden’s demise, Maya was passed over for a promotion.

Jealousy? Robert Baer, left, said that the CIA was and continues to be a boy’s club, left, Valerie Plame, a former CIA officer herself said that she’d love to get a drink with the real-life ‘Maya’

Former CIA operative Bob Baer told the ‘TODAY’ show that it was unsurprising that the female CIA operative was looked over for a promotion that would have given her an additional $16,000 per annum. ‘It’s an old-boy network,’ he explained.

‘You don’t know why people are promoted, why people are held back, and often people think the worst.’

Valerie Plame, a CIA officer whose identity was leaked, told the show that she admired the operative’s moxy. ‘I’d love to have a drink with her one day,’ she said.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius told the ‘TODAY’ show that the response from the CIA was not unusual, saying that operatives are often ‘quite contrary,’

The reality of America’s battle against terrorism couldn’t have been more different to the glamorized, politically-correct fiction of Homeland, the hit TV show in which Claire Danes plays a beautiful CIA agent who spots the Al Qaeda plot which her misguided male colleagues have missed.

CIA supersleuth: A attractive young female CIA agent, played by Jessica Chastain in the film Zero Dark Thirty, spent the best part of a decade to finding Bin Laden and became the SEALs’ go-to expert on intelligence matters about their target

The world’s most dangerous terror group foiled by a killer blonde in Calvin Klein who wars with her superiors? Only in Hollywood’s dreams, surely.

But, astonishingly, it has now emerged that truth may indeed be as strange as fiction. According to Zero Dark Thirty, a forthcoming film about the hunt for Bin Laden — whose makers were given top-level access to those involved — he might never have been found if it hadn’t been for an attractive young female CIA agent every bit as troublesome as Homeland’s Carrie Mathison.

CIA insiders have confirmed claims by the film’s director Kathryn Bigelow that she is entirely justified in focusing on the role played by a junior female CIA analyst, named Maya in the film and played by Jessica Chastain. And just as in Homeland, the real agent has been snubbed by superiors and fallen out with colleagues since the Bin Laden raid in May last year.

But who is this CIA supersleuth? Although the woman is still undercover and has never been identified, Zero Dark Thirty’s emphasis on Maya’s importance tallies with the account of a U.S. Navy SEAL involved in the raid who later wrote about it in a book.

Bin Laden hunt: A very different side of the agent was seen days after Bin Laden’s body was brought back. She even started crying

Matt Bissonnette writes in No Easy Day of flying out to Afghanistan before the raid with a CIA analyst he called ‘Jen’ who was ‘wicked smart, kind of feisty’ and liked to wear expensive high heels.

She had devoted the best part of a decade to finding Bin Laden and had become the SEALs’ go-to expert on intelligence matters about their target, he said.

And while her colleagues were only 60 per cent sure their quarry was in the compound in Abbottabad, she told the SEAL she was 100 per cent certain.

‘I can’t give her enough credit, I mean, she, in my opinion, she kind of teed up this whole thing,’ Bissonnette said later.

The commando saw a very different side of her days later when they brought Bin Laden’s body back to their Afghan hangar. Having previously told Bissonnette she didn’t want to see the body, ‘Jen’ stayed at the back of the crowd as they unzipped the terrorist’s body bag.

She ‘looked pale and stressed’ and started crying. ‘A couple of the SEALs put their arms around her and walked her over to the edge of the group to look at the body,’ wrote Bissonnette. ‘She didn’t say anything . . . with tears rolling down her cheeks, I could tell it was taking a while for Jen to process.

She’d spent half a decade tracking this man. And now there he was at her feet.’

Jen’s role in the operation passed largely unremarked when Bissonnette’s book came out but now the new film — which is released in the UK in January — has confirmed his estimation of her importance.

Although she remains active as a CIA analyst, it is believed Mark Boal, Bigelow’s screenwriter, was allowed to interview her at length. It has emerged that she is in her 30s and joined the CIA after leaving college and before the 9/11 attacks turned American security upside down.

On target: The agent was one of the first to advance the theory that the key to finding Bin Laden lay in Al Qaeda’s courier network which led to his compound (pictured is the attack scene in the movie)

According to the Washington Post, she worked in the CIA’s station in Islamabad, Pakistan, as a ‘targeter’, a role which involves finding people to recruit as spies or to obliterate in drone attacks.

But CIA insiders say she worked almost solely on finding Bin Laden for a decade. She was still in Pakistan when the hunt heated up after Barack Obama became President in 2008 and ordered a renewed effort to find him.

According to colleagues, the female agent was one of the first to advance the theory — apparently against the views of other CIA staff — that the key to finding Bin Laden lay in Al Qaeda’s courier network.

The agency was convinced Bin Laden, who never used the phone, managed to communicate with his disparate organisation without revealing his whereabouts by passing hand-delivered messages to trusted couriers.

The agent spent years pursuing the courier angle, and it was a hunch that proved spectacularly correct when the U.S. uncovered a courier known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and tracked him back to a compound in the sleepy Pakistan town of Abbottabad.

Fiesty: Jessica Chastain as agent Maya in Zero Dark Thirty about the hunt for Bin Laden

It was a stunning success for the dedicated agent, though she hardly endeared herself to her colleagues in the process.

As one might expect of a woman working in the largely male world of intelligence, colleagues stress she is no shrinking violet but a prickly workaholic with a reputation for clashing with anyone — even senior intelligence chiefs — who disagreed with her.

‘She’s not Miss Congeniality, but that’s not going to find Osama Bin Laden,’ a former colleague told the Washington Post.

Another added: ‘Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks? If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.’

In the film, Maya is portrayed as a loner who has a ‘her-against-the-world’ attitude and pummels superiors into submission by sheer force of will. CIA colleagues say the film’s depiction of her is spot-on.

If this is the case, then she shows little of the feminine tenderness that serves Carrie Mathison so well in Homeland and which Hollywood usually uses to soften female protagonists like Maya.

Instead, the film shows her happily colluding in the torture by waterboarding of an Al Qaeda suspect.

And Navy SEAL Bissonnette reported how she had told him she wasn’t in favour of storming the Bin Laden compound but preferred to ‘just push the easy button and bomb it’. Given that the bombing option would almost certainly have killed the women and children the CIA knew were inside, her comment suggests a cold indifference to ‘civilian’ casualties.

But then the real female agent is hardly your archetypal film heroine. She has reportedly been passed over for promotion since the Bin Laden raid, perhaps adding to her sense of grievance.

Although she was among a handful of CIA staff rewarded over the operation with the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency’s highest honour, dozens of other colleagues were given lesser gongs.

Fellow staff say this prompted her anger to boil over: she hit ‘reply all’ to an email announcing the awards and added her own message which — according to one — effectively said: ‘You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.’

Although colleagues say the intense attention she received from the film-makers has made many of them jealous, they are shocked she was passed over for promotion and merely given a cash bonus for her Bin Laden triumph.

Glamorised fiction: The reality of America’s battle against terrorism couldn’t have been more different to the politically-correct hit TV show Homeland, in which Claire Danes plays a beautiful CIA agent who spots the Al Qaeda plot which her misguided colleagues missed

She has also been moved within the CIA, reassigned to a new counter-terrorism role.

…

By Tom Leonard

PUBLISHED: 23:54 GMT, 13 December 2012 | UPDATED: 23:54 GMT, 13 December 2012

Find this story at 13 December 2012

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She was a real-life heroine of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, a headstrong young operative whose work tracking the al-Qaeda leader serves as the dramatic core of a Hollywood film set to premiere next week.

Her CIA career has followed a more problematic script, however, since bin Laden was killed.

The operative, who remains undercover, was passed over for a promotion that many in the CIA thought would be impossible to withhold from someone who played such a key role in one of the most successful operations in agency history.

She has sparred with CIA colleagues over credit for the bin Laden mission. After being given a prestigious award for her work, she sent an e-mail to dozens of other recipients saying they didn’t deserve to share her accolades, current and former officials said.

The woman has also come under scrutiny for her contacts with filmmakers and others about the bin Laden mission, part of a broader internal inquiry into the agency’s cooperation on the new movie and other projects, former officials said.

Her defenders say the operative has been treated unfairly, and even her critics acknowledge that her contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial. But the developments have cast a cloud over a career that is about to be bathed in the sort of cinematic glow ordinarily reserved for fictional Hollywood spies.

The female officer, who is in her 30s, is the model for the main character in “Zero Dark Thirty,”a film that chronicles the decade-long hunt for the al-Qaeda chief and that critics are describing as an Academy Award front-runner even before its Dec. 19 release.

The character Maya, which is not the CIA operative’s real name, is portrayed as a gifted operative who spent years pursuing her conviction that al-Qaeda’s courier network would lead to bin Laden, a conviction that proved correct.

At one point in the film, after a female colleague is killed in an attack on a CIA compound in Afghanistan, Maya describes her purpose in near-messianic terms: “I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.”

Colleagues said the on-screen depiction captures the woman’s dedication and combative temperament.

“She’s not Miss Congeniality, but that’s not going to find Osama bin Laden,” said a former CIA associate, who added that the attention from filmmakers sent waves of envy through the agency’s ranks.

“The agency is a funny place, very insular,” the former official said. “It’s like middle-schoolers with clearances.”

The woman is not allowed to talk to journalists, and the CIA declined to answer questions about her, except to stress that the bin Laden mission involved an extensive team. “Over the course of a decade, hundreds of analysts, operators and many others played key roles in the hunt,” said agency spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood.

Friction over mission, movie

The internal frictions are an unseemly aspect of the ongoing fallout from a mission that is otherwise regarded as one of the signal successes in CIA history.

The movie has been a source of controversy since it was revealed that the filmmakers — including director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal — were given extensive access to officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA.

Members of Congress have called for investigations into whether classified information was shared. The movie’s release was delayed amid criticism that it amounted to a reelection ad for President Obama.

The film’s publicity materials say that Maya “is based on a real person,” but the filmmakers declined to elaborate. U.S. officials acknowledged that Boal met with Maya’s real-life counterpart and other CIA officers, typically in the presence of someone from the agency’s public affairs office. The character is played by Jessica Chastain.

Her real-life counterpart joined the agency before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, officials said, and served as a targeter — a position that involves finding targets to recruit as spies or for lethal drone strikes — in the CIA’s station in Islamabad, Pakistan.

She was in that country when the search for bin Laden, after years of being moribund, suddenly heated up. After Obama took office, CIA operatives reexamined several potential trails, including al-Qaeda’s use of couriers to hand-deliver messages to and from bin Laden.

“After this went right, there were a lot of people trying to take credit,” the former intelligence official said. But the female targeter “was one of the people from very early on pushing this” courier approach.

Lashing out in an e-mail

This spring, she was among a handful of employees given the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, its highest honor except for those recognizing people who have come under direct fire. But when dozens of others were given lesser awards, the female officer lashed out.

“She hit ‘reply all’ ” to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. The thrust of her message, the former official said, was: “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.”

Over the past year, she was denied a promotion that would have raised her civil service rank from GS-13 to GS-14, bringing an additional $16,000 in annual pay.

Officials said the woman was given a cash bonus for her work on the bin Laden mission and has since moved on to a new counterterrorism assignment. They declined to say why the promotion was blocked.

The move stunned the woman’s former associates, despite her reputation for clashing with colleagues.

“Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks?” the former official said. “If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.”

…

By Greg Miller, Published: December 11

Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

Find this story at 11 December 2012

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