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MI5 to track “extremists” like sex offenders

Monday, April 16th, 2007

MI5 adopts paedophile-tracking tactics for Muslim extremists

MI5 is adopting tactics used by the police to keep tabs on paedophiles and other sex offenders to monitor the activities of known or suspected Islamic extremists, The Times has learnt.

The threat from radicalised young Muslims is growing at such a rate that MI5 has realised that it needs the help of police officers on the streets to help it keep a check on extremists in their areas.

The police keep track of known paedophiles by collating sightings of them and noting whom they meet and which areas they frequent — a tactic that MI5 sees as ideal for keeping track of the movements of Islamic extremists.

Thousands of police officers on the beat in areas with large Pakistani communities — such as Birmingham, Leeds and London — will be expected to keep a lookout for young Muslims known to have become radicals.

The information gathered from day-to-day observations will be used to compile a comprehensive database of lower-level extremism. This register will help both MI5 and the police.

However, there are thousands of other radicalised young Muslims from countries such as Pakistan, North Africa and Somalia about whom there is no intelligence linking them to terrorist groups.

Because of limited resources, they are not regarded as a priority for MI5 when there are so many others who are known to be affiliated to terrorist networks in Britain and, in many cases, actually to be plotting attacks. The fear is that young Muslims who are being radicalised may be persuaded to support the cause of the terrorists.

MI5 has built up an extensive archive of extremist activities, according to security sources. But its surveillance officers have time to focus only on those posing a terrorist threat.

Security sources say that monitoring extremists is only part of the drive to deal with the growing challenge of a younger generation of Muslims, most of them of Pakistani origin, being suborned into supporting terrorism.

The security and intelligence services are relying on the Government to come up with policies and funds that will help Muslim communities, providing jobs, decent homes and social welfare support to dissuade the young from becoming extremists.

The threat from home-grown Islamic extremism and terrorism, largely emanating from British Pakistanis, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The terrorist threat in Britain before the 9/11 attacks in the US was principally viewed as coming from Algerians, Moroccans and other North Africans.

Since 2001, and particularly since the July 7 suicide bombings in 2005, MI5 has been collecting as much information as possible about Muslim radicalisation in this country.

However, security sources emphasised that the new approach — contributing towards the police’s existing “Rich Picture” project, which is aimed at uncovering young Muslims being groomed for terrorism — did not mean that MI5 was targeting the Muslim communities in Britain.

This is a highly sensitive issue, especially as Muslim leaders have accused MI5 and the police of using all their resources to spy on their communities.

Both MI5 and the police insist they want clerics and other Muslim leaders to help them to stamp out extremism and actively seek their cooperation. The security sources said that it was a matter for individual police forces to decide how to prioritise their resources in keeping track of Islamic extremists. But the aim was to enable the police in their areas to know of the whereabouts of extremists.

“This is a new approach and we hope that police officers will understand that the job of countering terrorism and extremism is not just for MI5 and the police special branch but can be carried out by traditional police methods,” one security source said.

Sensitive intelligence about terrorist suspects is shared with Special Branch and with regional intelligence cells. This level of cooperation has improved in recent months, with the setting up of eight regional MI5 offices, sharing Special Branch premises, in Scotland, the North East, North West, the East and West Midlands, South West, Wales and South East.

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A 9/11 “Smoking Gun” Hidden In Plain Sight

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Joseph Smith

Let’s face it, if the 9/11 attacks were “legitimate”, they would have been accompanied by “legitimate” statements and claims of responsibility.

You don’t pull off the most spectacular “terrorist” attack in history, especially against largely symbolic targets, and then hide.

You don’t put yourself through the expense, trouble, risk, etc., of carrying out the most daring ”terrorist” attack in world history, only to let a panel of fatuous government apologists tell the world what your ostensible motive was; e.g., “they hate us because of our ‘freedom’”, or some such puerile nonsense.

Moreover, someone totally committed to the idea of stopping U.S. imperialism/aggression against his people, country, etc., and willing to die to do it, obviously wouldn’t have to be tortured into admitting it. I mean, contrary to what the U.S. government would apparently have us believe, an ideologue doing a 9/11 would be different than, say, a greedy person doing in his rich uncle to collect the inheritance money.

Lastly, any group sophisticated and resourceful enough to have pulled off the 9/11 attack, would be sophisticated enough to get their message across, exactly as they wanted it to come across. Perhaps by sending (a few days in advance), an encrypted message, “open on 9/11″, to a few dozen newspapers and government agencies in several countries, the UN, the Red Cross, the Vatican, various internet sites, etc., and then, immediately after the attack, have an associate release the encryption key.

Let’s face it, the whole point of “terrorism” is to make a point. What good is “terrorism” to the “terrorists” if the “terrorists” don’t get to make their point? That would be like robbing a bank, and then giving the money back.

Thus, like many other aspects of the official government conspiracy theory of 9/11, it simply doesn’t make sense.

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Divided Iraq has two spy agencies

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Shiite officials wary of the CIA-funded, Sunni-led official intelligence service have set up a parallel organization.

Ned Parker

Shiite officials wary of the CIA-funded, Sunni-led official intelligence service have set up a parallel organization. Suspicious of Iraq’s CIA-funded national intelligence agency, members of the Iraqi government have erected a “shadow” secret service that critics say is driven by a Shiite Muslim agenda and has left the country with dueling spy agencies.

The minister of state for national security, a Shiite named Sherwan Waili, has built a spy service boasting an estimated 1,200 intelligence agents out of a second-tier ministry with a minimal staff and meager budget, Western officials say.

“He has representatives in every province,” a Western diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “At the moment, it’s a slightly shady parallel organization.”

Shiite officials say the minister is providing information on Al Qaeda and former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party that isn’t being supplied by the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, or INIS, Iraq’s primary spy service.

The INIS was established in the spring of 2004 by the U.S.-led provisional authority and has been under the command of Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, a Sunni Arab involved in a CIA-backed coup plot against Hussein a decade ago. For the last three years, the agency has been funded by the CIA, U.S. military and Iraqi officials say.

The service reports directly to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, but coreligionists in his government distrust the agency, which has agents from the Hussein era. For most of 2005 and the first part of 2006, Shahwani said, he was banned from Cabinet meetings.

“The general feeling is that the intelligence service is not functioning or conducting its work in the proper way,” said deputy parliament speaker Khalid Attiya, a Shiite.

The two spy agencies risk becoming open partisans in Iraq’s civil war if vying political parties do not reach an agreement on how to rule the country, one analyst warned.

“If no critical compromise is reached, the security services are going to fall apart on ethnic, sectarian and party lines,” said Joost Hiltermann, Middle East director of the International Crisis Group. “It will be a failed state situation like Somalia.”

From its conception, Shahwani’s agency has antagonized Iraq’s new Shiite elite. In September 2004, his men arrested at least 50 members of a Shiite party in southern Iraq called Hezbollah — which is not linked to the Lebanese group of that name — and detained them for several months. In the same period, Shahwani accused one of the country’s main Shiite political parties, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, of being on Iran’s payroll and blamed its militia for the deaths of 10 of his agents.

The Shiite drive to create the parallel secret service can be traced to the spring of 2005, when the United States, mindful of Shiite politicians’ close ties to Iran, fended off then-Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari’s effort to take charge of the INIS.

U.S. backing

The U.S. had invested heavily in creating a strong spy service and trusted Shahwani, who has been a crucial asset to the Americans since the fall of Hussein’s regime. Shahwani, who owns a home in the U.S., provided them access to old army officers, and formed an Iraqi special forces unit, called the “Shahwanis,” that fought in the November 2004 battle to retake Fallouja from Sunni Arab insurgents.

Shahwani’s service “is funded completely by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, not by the Iraqi government,” a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity. “U.S. funding for the INIS amounts to $3 billion over a three-year period that started in 2004.”

Asked about the funding, CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said, “The CIA does not as a rule discuss publicly the details of its relationships with the intelligence services of other countries.”

After failing to remove Shahwani in 2005, Shiite officials sought to fill the gap. Then the minister of state for national security, Abdul Karim Anizi, lobbied Jafari to turn his post into a full-fledged ministry.

“He pushed to provide a service. He was very proactive. He exerted a lot of pressure and requested to make his post a full ministry, but the proposal didn’t move an inch,” a former government official said on condition of anonymity. “He started to recruit informers and sympathizers. He couldn’t give them full salaries, but he could give them government privileges and he built up a network of informers.”

When Anizi stepped down, he was replaced by Waili. The service has expanded dramatically in the last year, Waili said, getting around its limited state budget by hiring agents on contracts.

The agency provides a hard-line Shiite view in national security meetings, observers say.

“It’s slightly reactionary in a Shiite sense,” the Western diplomat said. “If you talk about [Sunni Muslim] Anbar province, you know he is going to take a view largely uncharitable toward the Anbar tribes.”

A U.S. official suggested that certain sectarian groups were frustrated with their inability to control the INIS and use it to advance sectarian agendas, and that was fueling the emphasis on the parallel service. The official also implied that Iran had sought to undermine the INIS, in part because of its close ties to the United States and the CIA.

“There might be some friction caused by the way this service operates — it doesn’t operate on a sectarian basis,” the U.S. official said on condition of anonymity. “There appear to be people in Iraq, and perhaps in one of its neighboring countries, who do not like that fact.”

A Shiite official who deals with insurgency issues said that Waili was trying to steer his service away from a sectarian bias, but the problem was with those surrounding him.

“He is trying very hard to move away from sectarianism and say this is a government to protect the people, but some of his officers have sectarian views,” the official said.

Waili said his main goals were to crack down on Al Qaeda, Baathists, militias and criminals. But his service has no legal charter to engage in domestic spying or arrest people, and it is lobbying for a law that would formalize its surveillance activities, make it a full ministry and bring the CIA-funded INIS under its control. But the governing Shiite coalition has not made its mind up about whether to formalize Waili’s powers.

Sunni Arabs speak with deep distrust of Waili’s ministry, describing it as sectarian in nature.

“I think non-Shiites would find it difficult to be accepted in this ministry. It is a nonprofessional organization,” said independent Sunni lawmaker Mithal Alusi, who serves as an informal consultant to Maliki.

Alusi said Waili’s men had been arresting people on raids.

In their most controversial operation, Waili’s agents spied on at least one Sunni member of parliament they suspected of terrorist activities. The agents submitted evidence during the winter to the Iraqi judiciary in a campaign to strip Sheik Abdel Nasser Janabi of his parliamentary immunity.

Janabi, a fundamentalist cleric, is accused of being behind the killings of more than 150 Shiites in the so-called “triangle of death,” a region just south of Baghdad, where Sunni extremists regularly target Shiites.

Authority questioned

Parliament Speaker Mahmoud Mashadani, an ally of Janabi, said the investigation was politically motivated, and illegal.

“The information depends on an undercover officer from a ministry that doesn’t even have the [legal] right to conduct surveillance,” Mashadani said.

Waili defended his actions, saying his agents are tasked by the government to gather evidence, adding that they can participate in arrests if authorized by the prime minister. “We are doing our work according to the law and for the service of the people and so far nothing negative has been said about our security agents,” he said.

The fact remains that Waili and the rest of the Shiite-led government have not pursued any investigations of Shiite lawmakers suspected of involvement in sectarian killings.

One Shiite politician acknowledged the problem. “There are things that have happened that when we have peace, people will have to be held accountable for,” the lawmaker said on condition of anonymity.

At the same time, Shahwani’s INIS continues to run into troubles with the Shiite elite.

Shahwani’s most recent controversy involves accusations that his men kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in February in Baghdad. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said four of Shahwani’s agents were involved in the kidnapping and had been arrested.

Shahwani told The Times that the four detained men were his agents, but that they had been in the area on another mission at the time the Iranian diplomat went missing. Shahwani also accused the Iranians of inventing the story of the kidnapping so they could abduct one of his men who had been spying on their diplomat. The freed Iranian diplomat has said he was abducted by an Iraqi security force and then tortured by the CIA.

Both Shahwani and Waili’s agencies have been accused of bending the law in a country that has a legacy of military coups, authoritarian regimes and unaccountable security agencies.

“In Iraq, everybody spies on everybody, everybody kills everybody,” Mashadani said. “We are still living in a Saddam culture.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 2:54 am and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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